"What don't you understand? I found the cure for the f***ing plague of
the twentieth century and now I've lost it. Haven't you ever lost
anything doctor Bronx? Your purse? Your car keys? Well, it's rather like
that: Now you have it and now you don't."- Dr. Robert Campbell (Sean Connery) in "Medicine Man"
Beats me how it happened. One day your prayers are uplifting, energizing, invigorating, the next day you can't summon the strength to complain. One day you're on top of the world (Ma!) and know exactly who you are, what you're doing here and how to go about it. The next day you couldn't find your butt with both hands and a map, with the added insult that it now looks exponentially bigger in those jeans than it did a month ago. One day you have God, and the next you seem and feel completely and utterly alone.
Kind of feels like dying doesn't it? It only feels that way because that is precisely what is happening to you. And I wouldn't be writing this if it hadn't happened to me as well.
It doesn't have to be this way. While you can never change your nature (after all, in the words of John Ortberg, "God doesn't make appliances, He makes masterpieces.") you can be assured that if Tiger Woods can summon himself into "the zone" even after the world's most expensive and embarrassing divorce then you can too. Then, in the parlance of the game, you can go back to being deliciously and successfully teed off again!
Separation from God, from our maker, from The Source is death indeed. There is perhaps as much confusion over the nature of salvation as there is over the nature of damnation. If being saved was simply an insurance policy that, once signed, allowed me to go chummily along my merry way without a care in the world then I would have been the first to sign up. Actually, I was. It sounded like a good deal but it didn't work out as the fire-breathing Baptist preacher I was named after told me it would. He may very well have pounded people from the pulpit because, in spite of following all the Biblical rules and guidelines of salvation as preached from Protestant circles, he was miserable. I have gone on for years pounding people on the internet, in chat rooms, in emails, in personal missives, in person and so on for the very same reason. In spite of heart-wrenching confessions, in spite of proclaiming with my mouth that Jesus is the risen Lord, in spite of tithing and praying and even having an attitude of gratitude (which turned out to be a platitude!) I was miserable. I'm not entirely sure that is salvation, even if I am a knock-knock-knocking on heaven's door with the assurance of gaining entry. Eternal life may be the blessed hope but who has the strength or desire to even hope when every day is a burden? Being saved in the next life yet utterly and inexpressibly unhappy in this one is not salvation.
(there is a great deal more to convey on this concept, but suffice it for now to say that it is a Kingdom concept, meaning that He, Jesus, came that we would have life and that more abundantly. In other words, God is one of the few people you can look dead in the eye and say, "Well...yeah. Thanks, I guess. But what are you going to do for me today?" and He won't take offense. In fact, like any good father the happiness, health and well-being of His children, His masterpieces, is of paramount importance to Him. You were meant to be whole and complete, in this life and the next, and you can be. You should be.)
All this begs the question, "How did I lose my salvation?". And in response to your query I might ask you right back, "Which time?" Now if you're an absolute literalist when it comes to Scripture you might be having an adverse reaction to the thought of one losing their salvation, being quick to cite such verses as "No man will pluck thee out of His hand" and so on. Well, also one must work out their salvation with fear and trembling, and one verse that fits like a glove is (paraphrased) that it's a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the Living God...especially if He's not happy with you or your choices. So if you're working up a good old-fashioned fuss then maybe it's time to take a chill pill, Phil, relax a bit and admit to yourself one very important fact: if God is all-powerful, all-knowing, all-American and altogether fourteen shades of awesome then do you really think you're going to understand everything He said in the Bible on the first read or two? I found a very effective cure for my fusses when it comes to the Word of God, and that is the great liberation of declaring "I don't know." Is Noah's Ark on Ararat or Pike's Peak? Did Job see a dinosaur or did Jonah get gobbled by a whale or a fish? Why do men have nipples and why did you make a mosquito and a flea in the first place, 'O Lord? The answer is...we don't know. If God were fussy like we often get then the answer might be formulated a bit like like, "Nunya bee's wax. I've been God for a long time and the position is filled, so relax and have some apple juice."
As for losing one's salvation, I don't know...but it sure feels like it. And while the sum total of our lives is a lot more than how we feel at any given moment, some feelings are pretty danged important. I want to feel like I'm in communion with God. I want to feel His transcendent love. I want to feel saved and not just know that I'm saved so I can nibble over potluck in a church gymnasium on a hard plastic chair expressing half-felt sympathy for all those other poor suckers who just don't get it. And when I feel like I'm not saved that's as important to me as that distant tingling sensation I get when I place my hand into a nest of angry wasps. My body, my spirit, my soul are all telling me something vital to my continued comfort and even survival, and it sounds like a pretty good idea to listen.
Life. The moral of the story, its beginning and its end and all the gooey stuff in the middle, is life. Life everlasting, life today, life tomorrow. Life for you, life for me, life for everybody. Call it whatever you like that makes you feel comfortable; losing one's joy, being bereft of stillness, down in the dumps, chronically depressed. I call it my salvation, my day-to-day experience of the greater life and reality all around me all the time...and I've lost it more times than I've lost my car keys, my wallet and the TV remote combined.
I don't want to lose it again. I want to be back in the zone, back in communion and as Duane Dyer says it, "back in the spirit". This is about the return journey, the road home. It's a how-to piece on salvaging one's salvation. Most of it is pretty simple and straightforward, except for the hard parts. I'll skip those to make it easier, because that's what I've historically done whenever life gets hard: just skip a bit, brother.
First and foremost, know that since God is everywhere He really can't go anywhere. And if He's still there then why aren't you with Him? He never moved. Where's He going to go? It's not like He has to go to work because unlike a great many of us He loves His job and pretty much lives at His desk. The bad news is, you turned. We all have. You turned like a saucer of mayonnaise getting a sun tan, like one of those fancy lawn mowers that big companies use for their big company lawns. You were moseying right along, happy as a half-baked clam, then zip! Off you went in the other direction without so much as a "C-ya" wave over your shoulder to the mightiest being in the universe. You left, He stayed. Then you got unhappy about it. That's Human Existence: 101 and nothing to be ashamed about. In fact, 9 out of 10 patriarchs in the Bible recommend acting like an idiot in order to figure out some of life's most basic principles. The burned hand teaches best, but when it comes to walking away from one's Creator, one's Source, it might be best to just dip one pinky toe in the pool to test the waters instead of cannon balling off the diving board only to find that the pool is filled with liquid nitrogen. Or worse, that there's nothing in it at all.
Having established the obvious, mainly that He rules and is slicker than sliced bread while we struggle with basic motor skills and personal hygiene, we can move on a bit. It is important however to take responsibility for this, and it only stings for a moment and the only thing injured is our pride, an overrated human attribute if ever there was one. That's the bad news. The good news is this: much like those fancy zero degree turn lawn movers that make gigantic lawns such a breeze, you can zip right back towards God without so much as running over a sprinkler head. And best of all, He'll have you back.
How do I know this? Easy, because I've done it a gazillion times. The only reason I'm writing about it now is because the stakes are a little higher, I'm a little older and there is a winding debris-ridden trail of wrecked human relationships zig-zagging behind me as if I were a garbage scow with a leaky cargo hold. He will take you back. He has too. It's in His contract (ie. the Bible) and He never breaks His word. But that's not why He takes us back. The why is likewise simple: because He loves us, and love is everything. Why does the Earth orbit the sun and the moon orbit the earth? Why does the grass grow towards the sky and the electron circle the nucleus? For the same reason I go to Dairy Queen and get a double chocolate Blizzard (that's chocolate ice cream with hot fudge poured on it) and extra candy of the Butterfinger variety. Because I love to. Love overcomes all without raising a voice or lifting a finger. Love determines all without getting fussy or bossy or even writing a memo. Love...in the immortal words of my favorite green sock puppet, Yoda...surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we indeed, and not just this crude matter.
There's another great movie out there, one of Bill Murray's more serious roles which I think he pulled off quite nicely, called "The Razor's Edge" based upon the book by Somerset Maugham. In it our hero, Larry, is a spiritual seeker and winds up in India, probably not just for the vindaloo. He travels high into the mountains and goes to work in a Tibetan monastery, then travels even higher up to the snow-covered peaks of the Himalayas where he reads his books in a hut with no walls and slowly begins to freeze to death. He takes one of his last remaining matches...and uses the holy books for fire fuel, then saunters off to the enjoy the breath taking view all around him with eagles soaring and dancing amidst clouds that are beneath his very feet. Larry travels back down to bid the monks good bye, having completed this particular essay in the school of life, and tells the holy man, "Isn't it true? It's easy to be a holy man when you're sitting on top of a mountain?"
The monk responds enigmatically, "You're closer than you think. The path to salvation is narrow, and as difficult to walk as a razor's edge."
Hooray! We have a title. But allow me to quote another great movie in response, this time Al Pacino in "Scent of a Woman". What a crock of sh*t!
It's not narrow. It's not difficult. And it's certainly not a razor's edge. It's easy-peasy lemon squeezy. All you have to do is turn. You don't even have to understand love or manifest unfailing love for others or walk around with a little love in your heart. You just have to accept love, just be on the receiving end. Turn and catch.
Ah, but you've screwed up ROYAL, haven't you? Yeah, me too. Don't sweat it, just turn and be loved. And much like I told my beloved wife, best friend and love of my life, when she was heading to get me something to drink: "Don't screw it up." (charming, eh?) But it's sound advice for oneself, though something of a relationship killer I now see with 20/20 hindsight. Don't be saddled with guilt and shame about being "God's loser", about screwing things up royal, about all the mistakes you've made. Just turn and be loved. God absolutely goes ga-ga over prodigal sons and daughters making their way back. He's weird like that. I think of Charlie Brown and Lucy, the lovely girl who happily holds the football that Charlie never successfully kicks, but instead pulls it away at the last moment again and again. God's love is kind of like Charlie's foot swinging away trustfully over and over, ever flailing never connecting.
It doesn't have to be like that. To sum up with one of my all-time favorite verses, "Be still and know that I am God." That's right, it's a 3-part plan but they're pretty simple parts. Turn, be loved and then be still. And rest assured that the loving, cleated foot of God will finally connect and boot your buns right between the goal posts if only you'll let Him. May seem like a funny way to get one's salvation back, but much like a certain writer made in His image, God's a funny guy.
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