A Travelogue of the Interior: Finding Your Voice and God's Heart in the Psalms

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FURTHER UP AND FURTHER IN

Bozeman, Montana, is the coldest place I have been in a long while. It is also one of the most beautiful, a vibrant town surrounded on three sides by mountains. It’s the week after Christmas, and the entire town glows. Storefronts display festively decorated windows, and strings of brightly colored lights float, as if by magic, over Main Street, their light bouncing off the ubiquitous snow to create the illusion that the ground is lit from within. I stare, mouth agape, at the teenage boys who walk by me wearing nothing more than jeans, hoodies, and tennis shoes, while I am bundled up in layers of Smart Wool™ and Gortex™ and still shivering in the cold.

My family has traveled from northern California for a week of skiing and playing in the snow. That’s the official story. The unofficial story is that I need to get away. Away from the breakneck pace of the Silicon Valley. Away from the routines that allow my children to thrive but constantly threaten to reduce my world down to a never-ending to-do list, like Santa’s scroll of toy requests puddling at his feet. Away from the problems that perniciously resist resolution. I need a change of venue to give my soul a chance to catch its breath.

So my adventurous husband, David, and two naive children have gamely agreed to venture, sight unseen, to Big Sky country in the dead of winter to ski and throw snowballs and give Mom a chance to get a grip. Bozeman was the place where I first had an inkling God was on the move, and with God’s unique sense of humor, it involved climbing a mountain. Not the rabbi’s metaphorical one. An actual one.

The brutal truth is had I known that fateful day that following God further up and further in would require a graduate-level course in learning to lament, in looking God square in the eye and telling God in gory, honest detail about the wounds I had suffered at the hands of other people and even at God’s hands, I would have politely declined. Lament—the ancient practice of articulating grief that is unapologetically prevalent in the Psalms—would be the first destination of my interior journey. But first God had to get my attention, and I was, at that very moment, gloriously oblivious and minding my own business. With my girls happily ensconced in ski lessons and David attempting to connect to Wi-Fi in the ski lodge, I was hightailing it up to the top of the slope in search of the deepest powder and the biggest moguls.

Vista

Grab pen and paper, get away from your chores, gadgets, and other people. Just listen. What do you hear? Wind laughing with trees? The ebb and flow of traffic? The metronome tick of a wall clock? Listen to yourself—your feelings, your fidgetings, your doodles. If anything occurs to you, write it down. Practice solitude.

On the second of three ski lifts to the top, God asked me a question. There I was, alone on the chairlift, scraping snow off the tops of my skis and listening to the sound of the mountain, and a fully formed question popped into my mind about a person whom I hadn’t thought of in years. The question was, Are you willing to extend the right hand of fellowship to Sam?¹

Cue backstory.

Sam was an ex. Do I really need to say more?

Fine. Sam was an old boyfriend, and as boyfriends go, he had been extraordinarily important to me. Ours was a complicated tale that doesn’t need retelling. The important thing to know is that from my perspective it was colossally unhealthy and fed off a lethal dose of legalistic theology that had begun to rot our church and me from the inside out. By the time our relationship imploded, and for the ensuing decade, I was completely shut down emotionally and spiritually. I could not feel anything. I could not cry. I could not develop meaningful friendships. I was hopelessly codependent. I could not read the Bible. I was deeply distrustful of God and Christians, especially those whose outward expressions of devotion were what I considered churchy. Going to church took grim determination and ninety minutes of cinema-worthy self-control to keep from bolting out the back door.

During my exile, by God’s grace I was not left without fellow travelers. My parents and older brother journeyed right along with me, carrying me much of the way. They, along with a few dedicated friends, listened and loved me despite my blathering self-pity and disheartening doubt. In those years, I discovered Philip Yancey, Eugene Peterson, Henri Nouwen, Kathleen Norris, and many others. I listened to hours and hours of U2. Together they were the body of Christ to me, people I could converse with, who had big questions and even bigger doubts about God, people who struggled as I did to relate to Infinite God as flawed, wanting human beings.

I arrived at Peninsula Bible Church in Cupertino (PBCC) toward the end of that period and slowly started to see a new way of reading the Bible and encountering God. Grace, the new covenant, community. This wasn’t just propositional theology; it was the grandest, most epic story I had ever heard, and I was irresistibly drawn in. Week after week the Bible was taught in ways that I had never heard, despite having sat in church my entire life. Week after week regular people told their stories honestly, not as polished narratives of the victorious Christian life but as flesh-and-blood snapshots of God’s chesed, His unstoppable covenantal love at work. At the gentle insistence of the rabbi, with gritted teeth and tear-stained faces they read personal lament poems, which the rest of us received in profound gratitude and humility.

In the Old Testament, chesed usually gets translated as lovingkindness or compassion or mercy, and those are certainly great words to describe God’s love toward us. But chesed goes deeper—it speaks of loyalty, mutuality, and complex emotions. It reminds me of one of my favorite scenes from the 1998 movie Shakespeare in Love, where the heroine, Viola De Lesseps, waxes poetic about the love she wants in her life: Not the artful postures of love, but love that overthrows life. Unbiddable, ungovernable, like a riot in the heart, and nothing to be done, come ruin or rapture.²

That begins to get at chesed: it is wild, passionate, irresistible, formidable, decimating platitudes and boundaries and proper grammar. Chesed is how God loves me. How God loves you, too. At PBCC, small acts of love and service—hints and reflections of God’s chesed—crossed every boundary of class, age, ethnicity, and gender. In this place I began to heal, to be included by this unlikely community, where to this day we aren’t so much organized religion as disorganized religion. We are a motley, weepy bunch.

Vista

David’s psalms are drenched in chesed—God’s covenant love—and David’s confidence that God’s commitment to him is unassailable. How we travel through the Psalms will depend on our answer to this central question: What do we most deeply believe about God’s love for us?

After a long time of working through the spiritual and emotional damage wrought during my Sam years, and after reconstructing from the ashes a theology that could cope with what sort of God would lead me down such a destructive path, I had finally made sense of the journey, owned my portion of responsibility for the fiasco, forgiven Sam for his, and placed this burden down—never again to be hoisted to my shoulders. I told my story to about fifty men and women who were in the rabbi’s adult Sunday school class, and I read my own lament poem out loud, and this time it was me with the gritted teeth and the tears running down my face. I healed that day, not fully, but for the first time in almost twenty years, I was at peace—shalom as my Old Testament friends would say.

You can imagine my surprise when, after living for years in this shalom, God asked me this question … in such an unlikely place as Montana … ascending a mountain … in the freezing cold. Like the boy Samuel, I started looking around, wondering, Where did that come from?

Hinnēnî! Here am I, LORD. Was that You?

We all have different ways of hearing God’s voice, and I’m not here to decide whether your way is real nor to convince you that I’m not a complete loon. Moreover, I am not so far gone as to know that there might very well be a physiological explanation for this encounter—neurons firing, smell and sound engaging long-dormant memories, etc. It is entirely plausible to think that I invented the entire encounter in my head for reasons that lie buried in a roiling morass of subconscious need. If you decide this is likely, you might want to put this book in your trash can now, because the entire thing hinges on the idea that God is speaking today, wants to speak to us, in the same ways that God spoke millennia ago to Noah and Abraham, Moses and Hannah, Mary and Paul. We do ourselves a grave disservice when we relegate the experiences of the patriarchs and prophets and apostles to some time and place where God behaved in mystical, supernatural ways; it leads us to believe that God used to speak in ways that didn’t require faith, but now God is silent, having said His piece.

We live as if faith means merely trusting that God still means what God said a long time ago, words that some clever folks managed to write down and preserve across the ages. Plus, God spoke the final word in Jesus, you might say, and indeed Jesus is everything God wants to say. But bear in mind that if you are a professing Christian, you believe this is the same Jesus who is alive and well. I’d just like you to consider that Jesus also has a voice, is on the move, and invites us to follow Him just as His first disciples surely did—a bit lost and unsure of ourselves, doubting every step of the way if we are honest, but hungry for living bread and water to quench an eternal