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Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Redirection

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A special report on This American Life follows the lives of several people currently living what they unequivocally call “Plan B.” Host Ira Glass expounds his thoughts on an informal poll and a seemingly universal human reality. He asked a room of hundred people to think back to the beginning of adulthood when they were first formulating a plan for their lives. He called it Plan A, “the fate you were sure fate had in store.” He then asked those who were still following this plan to raise their hands. Only one person confessed she was still living Plan A; she was 23 years old.

It seems a trend among us: There is the thing we plan on doing with our lives, and then there’s the thing we end up doing, which becomes our life. Here, Christians often have a nuanced view of Plan A: it is God’s plan they are trying to follow. But there is still very much an initial picture of what this plan, and subsequently our lives, will—or should—look like. God’s best becomes something like a divine Plan A, while any other plan leads the follower to something else.

But akin to the statistics in the room with Mr. Glass, it is likely that the number of Christians who find themselves living the plan they first imagined are also few and far between. For some, this is seen as good news. Many discover along their carefully laid out plans that they are doing far more leading than being led, and God seems to mercifully redirect them. “Many are the plans in a human heart,” the proverb reads, “but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails.” Others find the journey with God from Plan A to B to C to D an interesting part of the pilgrimage itself, maybe even the gift of following an unfathomable creator, a creator who we discover is far more creative than we! Yet there are still many others who walk away from Plan A thoroughly defeated. Regretful turns and drastic detours may now be behind us, but the deviation from the journey is writ large before us. We have failed at Plan A, the plan we believed divinely inspired; God’s best is now merely God’s backup. Wrestling with the guilt or disappointment of such a deviation can be found with or without the Christian spin.

When life turns out to be something you didn’t plan on, when missteps and unplanned detours loom with guilt, a life of alternative routes and broken roads seems certain. It is easy to wonder in despair what it means to have missed God’s best, and to believe that somehow God must now step back into the picture, disappointed, and find a secondary plan for your life. I find it equally despairing to encounter those who maintain they are living God’s Plan A and smugly insist it was their own virtue that accomplished it. How significant, then, are Christ’s words to his despairing disciples after an evening of mistakes, both to those of us who have ever felt the sting of falling off track and to those of us who want a pat on the back for getting it right. To these men who repeatedly failed to follow his instructions, Jesus simply said, “Rise, let us be going.”

A wise friend of mine says that following God is something like following the directions on a GPS system. At the beginning of the journey, the plan for arriving at the desired destination is before you. But when you accidentally turn left or are forced to take an unforeseen detour, the computer doesn’t scold you. It doesn’t force you to start over or announce that you can no longer make it to your final destination because you have ruined the route. In fact, it doesn’t even make you feel guilty. The end still in mind, it simply adjusts the plan from that point onward, as if the “wrong” turn was a part of the journey all along. The destination has not changed. Plan A may have switched to Plan B in your mind, but the outcome remains the goal, not self-invented praise for the journey.

Although Blaise Pascal was a mathematician who saw the created world as one of equations and precision, he saw the God who created this world as one who is innately personal, guiding, and accommodating. “[T]he God of the Christians is a God of love and consolation,” Pascal wrote in his Pensees, “a God who fills the soul and heart of those whom he possesses, a God who makes them inwardly aware of their wretchedness and his infinite mercy, who united himself with them in the depths of their soul…who makes them incapable of having any other end but him.“(1)

What if the God you followed is well aware that there are turns in life we can never undo, choices we cannot erase, and detours we were never expecting? Some of these turns God no doubt laments with us. But God is never deterred by our position. Plan B may be a phrase you use to punish yourself or others, but the God of Christianity is not any farther away in what you are calling Plan A than Plan A or C or D. In fact, God sees only one plan: “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD to a struggling people, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” In this, God is ever at work redirecting your steps, while the end—God alone—remains the same. Despite broken roads and secondary paths, God is forever showing that the destination is unchanging, and in the end, “God’s best” comes into our lives not because of our own careful steps toward the divine but because of divine steps toward us. The God of the Christian is one whose plans are all-encompassing, whose arm is not too short to save, who goes the extra mile, and who takes every detour without mention, that even one will not remain lost.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity writer at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Blaise Pascal, Pensees (London: Peguin Books, 1993), 141-142, emphasis mine.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Present Trouble

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Despite our coping mechanisms of choice, fear and weariness are often common sentiments across much of the globe, laden with a sense of uncertainty. People deal en masse with losses of all kinds and the turbulent emotions that come with losing ground. For many in the affluent West who have lived with mindsets of comfort and feasts of resources, economic downturn is a sudden and disorienting shift. For others, hard times simply get much harder, more worrisome, more lonely. Picking up the pieces of a community destroyed by a 7.8 magnitude earthquake, aid workers in Nepal note that many Napalis are afraid to go back inside their homes, fatigued from being up at night anxious and in fear.

Writing in a century with its own fears and famines, Blaise Pascal took note of the human capacity for a dangerous kind of escapism when fears loom large and hope remains distant. He saw a general disassociation with the present, a perpetual anticipation of the future or recollection of the past, which kept life itself at bay. “So imprudent are we that we wander in the times which are not ours and do not think of the only one which belongs to us,” he wrote. “And so idle are we that we dream of those times which are no more and thoughtlessly overlook that which alone exists. For the present is generally painful to us. We conceal it from our sight, because it troubles us… So we never live, but we hope to live.”(1)

Of course, whether in times of scarcity or in times of plenty, in tragic or ordinary days, the temptation to mentally dismiss ourselves from the present moment is quite real. It is always possible to live with eyes intent on something better in the future or with a nostalgic gaze on the past and all that once was. But in times of discomfort, crisis, or shortage, the choice to wander in times other than the present strikes us more as self-preservation or necessity than temptation, an essential coping mechanism in the midst of pain—and so we dismiss ourselves from the present all the more freely. Whether to daydream of better times or to look fearfully into the future, we leave the harrowing realities of the present to escape from the weariness of now, to hope for something more, to remember something better. But no matter our reason, when the future alone is our end and life is preoccupied with what once was or what might be, it is something less than living.

In a community shaped by the story of a crucified leader, opportunities to comfort a fearful world in the midst of instability and loss are filled with images of a human savior without affluence, a Son who embraced anguish, God among us without the glory and prosperity he might have had if he stayed away. The church remembers one who prayed alert through agony, not abandoning the present though he was more able than you or me to do so, while sweating drops of blood alone as his friends laid exhausted from sorrow.

The gift of a broken Christ to an anxious culture is that the brokenhearted are not alone.

Moreover, his is a bigger history marked by expressions, prophecies, stories, and assurances uttered in the very midst of famines, warfare, plagues, exile, and losses of every kind. These voices join his to remind us that the antidote to fear is love, the perfect love which casts out despair and weariness. The stories of scripture and the history of Jesus Christ from birth to death to resurrection give image after image of remnants of life in the midst of fear and trial and despair, strength to set aside self-preserving instincts to love neighbors abundantly and to risk bringing the whole of life under the lordship of Christ now. This vicariously human Son is among us today; neither death, nor life, nor things present, nor things to come, can separate us from the perfect love of God in Jesus Christ.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Blaise Pascal, Pensees (Charleston: Biblio Bazaar, 2007), 87-88.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Truly Human

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Ravi Z

“What does it mean to be human?” has been the inquiring theme of more than a few journals, conferences, and special reports. It is a question that is considered from anthropological, theological, and biological perspectives, from within medical, ethical, and spiritual circles. Yet regardless of the examiner, any plumbing of the depths of the nature of humanity is a discovery that the implications are as far-reaching as the subject itself.

Generation after generation, voices that have spoken to the question of human nature often reflect something of the paradoxical character of humanity. Plato described human life in terms of the dualistic qualities he observed. While the mind is representative of the intellectual soul, the stomach is an appetitive beast that must be tamed. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote of the human propensity for both compassion and cruelty at once. “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”(1) Speaking in the 17th century, Blaise Pascal made note of further dueling extremes present within humanity. “For after all, what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all—and infinitely far from understanding either… He is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was drawn and the infinite in which he is engulfed.”(2)

What does it mean to be human? The seeming paradoxes in and around us make the question difficult to answer. We sense at times within us contradiction and inconsistency—a desire to be a good friend beside the wherewithal to manipulate, the intention to be a good neighbor beside the tendency to walk away without helping. I find it reminiscent of Aslan’s response to the children in Prince Caspian: “‘You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve,’ said Aslan. ‘And that is both honour enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor in earth.’”

As a Christian, I see my own inconsistencies in the merciful hope of Christ as mediator. The Christian story presents Christ as the truly human Son of God in whom and for whom all creation was made. Stepping into creation, Christ has come to restore the image of true humanity, drying the tears of a broken world, reviving the image of God within us, overcoming the enemies of sin and death.

In the company of Pascal and Solzhenitsyn, I find Christ to provide the only grounding that offers hope for the contradictions within us. Far more than a hope merely for the future or an escape vehicle from present reality, Christ redeems the tension within us, the tension between my identity as a child of God and a daughter of humanity. We are assured that the promise is ours: “Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image of the man of heaven.” For Christ is not only at work redeeming a fallen humanity, resuscitating our nature with his own, standing as the mediator who lifts us to God. Christ came to unite humanity with God so that we can be truly human as he is human.

This is far more hopeful news than other worldviews or self-help plans impart. For if true humanity is a humanity fully united to its creator, then the possibility is ours. Acting on our own power and authority, independent of God, we merely expose our alienation from God and from our true selves. We fail to know what it means to be fully human. But united to Christ through faith we are united to another nature entirely. Writes one disciple, “[God] has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature and escape the corruption in the world caused by evil desires” (2 Peter 1:4).

While Christ is the one who makes our resuscitation possible, the one who restores in us the image of God, the process of reviving is also something we actively take hold of as human beings united to the Son. In other words, to live as children made in God’s image and united to Christ is not a static hope, but an active calling made possible by the one who mediates the very hope of what it means to be human. “So then,” in the words of Paul, “just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live in him, rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness” (Colossians 2:6-7).

What does it mean to be human? Perhaps we only begin to answer this immense inquiry when we turn to the one who shows us the very meaning of the word.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956 (New York: Harper Collins, 2002), 75.

(2) Blaise Pascal, Pensess (New York: Penguin, 1995), 61.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Mortal Thoughts

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Ravi Z

“Being unable to cure death, wretchedness, and ignorance men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things.”(1)

It is a rare gift, in this age of distractions, to have five minutes to rest and reflect. Recently, I had the opportunity to take an entire afternoon and do nothing. I was in the desert Southwest of the United States surrounded by brown, barren mountains, desert scrub and cacti, and a variety of small birds. As I looked out over the contrasting horizon of azure sky and brown earth, I was struck by my own insignificance—something I rarely allow myself to think about as I routinely fill my days with busyness. That topography of sky and soil, bird and flower had been there long before I arrived and would surely remain long after I had departed—both from my visit and upon my departure from this world.

Despite this more sobering thought, the gift of undistracted space nourished me. I could revel in the symphony of songbirds all around me, marvel at the cataclysmic forces of nature that formed the mountains and valleys around me. I could wonder at my place in the vastness of the creation and feel my smallness and my transience. Having this kind of time to sit and to reflect is a rarity, and is just as fleeting as the birds that flew around me.

Though writing hundreds of years ago, Blaise Pascal spoke prophetically about the spirit of our age. With the transience of life and the specter of death facing all, most seek lives of distraction. Whether or not we recognize that the fear of death is an underlying, albeit unconscious motivation, we nevertheless recognize how often we fill our lives in order to obscure these realities. Whether it is in the juggling endless priorities, the relentless busyness of our age, or perpetual media noise, our lives are so full that we rarely find the space or time to reflect honestly about anything. Particularly in Western societies, mindless consumption numbs us to the eventuality of our mortal condition and our finitude. The advertising industry is not unaware of our propensity to consumptive distraction.  Marketers spent over 295 billion dollars in total media advertising in 2007.(2) Perhaps they know that humans mistakenly equate vitality with the ability to consume.

It is easy to understand how the fear of death and suffering would compel human beings to live lives of distraction. Yet, the cost of that distraction is a pervasive and deadening apathy—apathy not simply as the inability to care about anything deeply, but the diminishment for engagement that comes from caring about the wrong things. Kathleen Norris laments:

“It is indeed apathy’s world when we have so many choices that we grow indifferent to them even as we hunger for still more novelty. We discard real relationships in favor of virtual ones and scarcely notice that being overly concerned with the thread count of cotton sheets and the exotic ingredients of gourmet meals can render us less able to care about those who scrounge for food and have no bed but the streets.”(3)

The ancient Hebrew poets, while meditating on the brevity of life, prayed, “So teach us to number our days that we may present to you a heart of wisdom” (Psalm 90:12). It was the inevitability of death that motivated this prayer for wisdom. This was a wisdom that didn’t try to hide from the realities of life—be they joys or sorrows—but rather sought to keep finitude ever before it. Indeed the poem ends with a cry for God to “confirm the work of our hands.” Numbering life’s days led to meaningful engagement in the world and in human work—and this was the mark of wisdom.

As I pondered the landscape around me, I thought of dear loved ones, both family and friends, who will not look on this earthly horizon any more. I was gripped by the pain of their loss and shaken by the fact that one day my own eyes will cease to behold earthly beauty. Yet rather than disengaging or distracting myself from the pain of these thoughts, I desire to number my own days. In dealing with significant loss and pain it is certainly understandable how one would long for escape, but facing the pain and attending to it is the way to develop a heart of wisdom and a life full of meaning and confirmation.

Sadly, the reminders of our own mortality lead some to distraction. Yet it can lead others to wise engagement.  Jesus, himself, faced his own death with intention and purpose. “I am the Good Shepherd…and I lay down my life for the sheep… No one has taken it away from me, but I lay it down on my own initiative” (John 10:14a-18). The way of wisdom demonstrated in the life of Jesus gives flesh to the ancient psalmist’s exhortation. As he numbered his days, he calls those who would follow to engage mortality as a catalyst for purposeful living. While following Jesus insists on our laying down our lives in his service, it can be done in the hope that abundant life is truly possible even in the darkest of places. For the one who laid his life down is the one who was raised. He is the one who declared, “I am the resurrection and the life; the one who believes in me will live even though he dies.”

 

Margaret Manning is a member of the writing and speaking team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Seattle, Washington.

(1) Blaise Pascal, Pensees, (Penguin Books: New York, 1966), 37.

(2) As referenced by Allan Sloan in “Fuzzy Bush Math” CNN Money, September 4, 2007.

(3) Kathleen Norris, Acedia and Me: A Marriage, Monks, and A Writer’s Life, (Riverhead Books: New York, 2008), 125.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Truly Human

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Ravi Z

“What does it mean to be human?” has been the inquiring theme of more than a few journals, conferences, and special reports. It is a question that is considered from anthropological, theological, and biological perspectives, from within medical, ethical, and spiritual circles. Yet regardless of the examiner, any plumbing of the depths of the nature of humanity is a discovery that the implications are as far-reaching as the subject itself.

Generation after generation, voices that have spoken to the question of human nature often reflect something of the paradoxical character of humanity. Plato described human life in terms of the dualistic qualities he observed. While the mind is representative of the intellectual soul, the stomach is an appetitive beast that must be tamed. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote of the human propensity for both compassion and cruelty at once. “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”(1) Speaking in the 17th century, Blaise Pascal made note of further dueling extremes present within humanity. “For after all, what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all—and infinitely far from understanding either… He is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was drawn and the infinite in which he is engulfed.”(2)

What does it mean to be human? The seeming paradoxes in and around us make the question difficult to answer. Don’t we sense at times within us contradiction and inconsistency—a desire to be a good friend beside the wherewithal to manipulate or exploit, the intention to be a good neighbor beside the tendency to walk away without helping? It is reminiscent of Aslan’s response to the children in Prince Caspian: “‘You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve,’ said Aslan. ‘And that is both honour enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor in earth.’”

As a Christian, I understand my own inconsistencies by the explanation given in the Christian story. Humans are bearers of God’s image, made with the intention and care of a good Creator. But it is a reflection that has become blurred. The image of God in humanity is an image tarnished. We have been made in God’s image, but it is an image that needs restoration, reviving, resuscitation.

In the company of Pascal and Solzhenitsyn, I find Christian doctrine to provide the only framework that makes sense of the contradictions within us. But far more than this, it is also the only framework that redeems the tension within us, the tension between my identity as a child of God and a daughter of humanity. New Testament writers have assured the promise is ours: “Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image of the man of heaven.” For Christ is not only at work redeeming a fallen humanity, cleansing us from the sin that corrupts our nature. Christ came to unite humanity with God so that we can be truly human.

This is far more hopeful news than other worldviews or self-help plans impart. For if true humanity is a humanity fully united to its creator, then the possibility is ours. Acting on our own power and authority, independent of God, we merely expose our alienation from God and from our true selves. We fail to know what it means to be fully human. But united to Christ through faith we are united to another nature entirely. Writes one disciple, “[God] has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature and escape the corruption in the world caused by evil desires” (2 Peter 1:4).

While Christ is the one who makes our resuscitation possible, the one who restores in us the image of God, the process of reviving is also something we actively take hold of as human beings united to the Son. In other words, to live as children made in God’s image and united to Christ is not a static hope, but an active calling. “So then,” in the words of Paul, “just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live in him, rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness” (Colossians 2:6-7).

What does it mean to be human? Perhaps we only begin to answer this immense inquiry when we turn to the one who shows us the very meaning of the word.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956 (New York: Harper Collins, 2002), 75.

(2) Blaise Pascal, Pensess (New York: Penguin, 1995), 61.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Seizing the Present

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Ravi Z

Poets and prophets, ancient and modern, declare that we are profoundly unaware of the present. The here and now, the place that we always are, they duly note, is the place that we are least likely to see for what it fully is. Blaise Pascal, a mathematician living four centuries before multi-tasking was praised and apps helped manage time, keenly diagnosed this peculiar human condition. In his master work, the Pensees, he articulates our seeming lack of interest in the present:

“Let each one examine his thoughts, and he will find them all occupied with the past and the future. We scarcely ever think of the present; and if we think of it, it is only to take light from it to arrange the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means; the future alone is our end. So we never live, but we hope to live; and, as we are always preparing to be happy, it is inevitable we should never be so.”

The present is never our end. Living behind cameras and gadgets that record my present, often out of the fear of forgetting it in the future, the thought strikes me as one I ought to consider. Though we hope and toil for life, though I may have captured the moment or smile on camera, I never fully saw it. And moreover, looking back most of us can readily recall a particularly squandered time in our lives, a time we now wish we were more fully attentive, more fully present. Truly, the now of life is far more significant and subtly hidden than we often realize.

In the play Our Town, Thornton Wilder brilliantly depicts the magnitude of the present, the fullness of each moment amidst the fleeting nature of time in our lives. Emily, a young mother who died in childbirth, is given the opportunity to go back and observe a single day in her life. She is advised to choose an “ordinary” day—for even the least important day will be important enough—the dead remind her. True enough, Emily makes her choice and quickly finds herself overwhelmed by it. Her ensuing lines are Wilder’s caution:

“I can’t go on. It goes too fast… I didn’t realize. All that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back—up the hill—to my grave. But first: Wait! One more look.

Goodbye, Goodbye, world… Mama and Papa. Goodbye clocks ticking…and Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths…and sleeping and waking up. Oh earth, you are too wonderful for anybody to realize you.”

Upon returning, Emily wonders if anyone ever realizes life while they actually live it—life as it is, “every, every minute.” The response she receives is grim. “No. The saints and poets, maybe they do some.”(1)

Where this may all easily be couched as a saccharine moralism to seize the day and live life to the fullest, carpe diem or yolo, we might inquire why the present brims with significance, lest it lead us merely to the Epicurean’s philosophy, observed by King Solomon, cautioned against by Jesus, noted by cultural prophets, and largely embraced, though we still seem to miss the thing in front of us: “Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die.”(2) While Epicurus did not have in mind the self-indulgence that this idea would come to bear, the materialist’s call for happiness in the present is heightened only by the sobering impermanence of life that is only material. Or perhaps the present holds much more still.

C.S. Lewis once asked, “Where, except in the present, can the Eternal be met?” This, he argues, is why the present is so profoundly important. God is always nearest to us “now.”  Where Jesus says, “Follow me,” where he pleads, “Come to me,” where he insists the kingdom is present among us, and bids us to come, take, and eat, there is an urgency in his voice that ushers us into time with him now. Now is where he asks us to draw near; now is when we decide again to follow or not to follow; now is where we rejoice in this day he made. So indeed, seize the day, you only live once, and the promises of the one who came in the fullness of time are boldly written upon this very moment.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) As quoted by Barry Morrow in Heaven Observed (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2001), 321.

(2) Cf. Ecclesiastes 8:15, Luke 12:13-21.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Now My Eyes See

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Ravi Z

A friend of mine lost his father twice. The first time, he was lost through divorce when my friend was just a young child. He grew up without the loving presence of his father. The second time, he lost his father through death, just as his relationship with his father experienced a renaissance. Given just a few opportunities to spend time with his father, my friend has lived the majority of his life in the presence of absence.

In suffering the absence of his earthly father, not by any choice of his own, my friend struggles to understand God’s presence in his life. It is often a struggle not to view God as one views parents and caregivers. And so, even though my friend persistently seeks after God, his experience of God has largely felt like the absence of God. Locked in a cosmic game of hide and seek, he is constantly searching, but feels he rarely finds.

This experience of absence, sadly, is not unique to my friend, but is often a struggle for those who claim faith, and even for those who do not. Blaise Pascal, one of the greatest Christian apologists, described his own experience with the perceived absence of God as a pitiable mystery:

“This is what I see and what troubles me. I look on all sides, and I see only darkness everywhere. Nature presents to me nothing which is not a matter of doubt and concern.  If I saw nothing there which revealed Divinity, I would come to a negative conclusion, if I saw everywhere the signs of a Creator, I would remain peacefully in faith.  But, seeing too much to deny and too little to be sure, I am in a state to be pitied.”(1)

Those who live in the midst of absence often experience a cruel vacancy; an empty throne room with an empty throne. Feeling as if one is far from the presence or oversight of God is indeed a pitiable state.

The words of Job, ancient in origin, speak the same language of absence experienced by many today:

Behold, I go forward, but He is not there,

And backward, but I cannot perceive Him;

When He acts on the left, I cannot behold Him;

He turns on the right, I cannot see Him.(2)

The story of Job is at least in part a story of God’s absence. While the narrator of the story and the readers of the story know the beginning and the end, Job finds himself in the silent middle struck down by tragedy. His story painfully reminds us of the mystery that in our moments of great need, God seems to go missing. Job’s cry is our cry, “Oh that I knew where I might find Him that I might come to his seat” (Job 23:3). Job clings tenaciously to the hope that he would find God, and find a just God in his case.  “I am not silenced by the darkness,” Job proclaims, “nor deep gloom which covers me” (23:17).

Called to “light the light of those in darkness on earth,” Mother Teresa wrote that if she ever became a saint, “I will surely be one of darkness.”(3) The paradoxical and unsuspected reality of her mission to the poorest of the poor in this world would be that she herself would experience the terrible darkness of God’s perceived absence. In the middle of her ministry, she wrote to one of her spiritual directors, “[T]his untold darkness, this loneliness, this continual longing for God which gives me that pain deep down in my heart…is such that I really do not see….[T]he place of God in my soul is blank…I just long for God and then it is that I feel—He does not want me, He is not there….I hear my own heart cry out, ‘My God’ and nothing else comes. The torture and the pain I cannot explain.”(4)

Like my fatherless friend, the pitiable Pascal, and the anguished Job, Mother Teresa experienced the profound pain of the absence of God in her life as she ministered to those largely missing from the radar of compassion and care. She herself was a light, but she experienced little light in her own heart and life. She was indeed a light in the darkness, but she experienced little of the illumination of God’s comforting presence in her own dark existence.

And yet, the paradox of her life reminds us that the experience of God’s absence need not lead us to the darkness of despair, but can propel us to embody God’s presence to others who grope for God in the darkness. As we do, we may experience just what Job did: “I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear; but now my eye sees Thee.”(4)

Margaret Manning is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Seattle, Washington.

(1) Blaise Pascal, Pensees, as cited in Kelly James Clark, When Faith is Not Enough (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 38.

(2) Job 23:8-9.

(3) Come Be My Light: The Private Writings of the “Saint of Calcutta,” Brian Kolodiejchuk, ed. (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 1.

(4) Ibid., 1-2.

(5) Job 42:5.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Night of Fire

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Shortly after the death of Blaise Pascal in 1662, a housekeeper was sorting through closets and clothing and happened to notice something sewn into Pascal’s coat. Beneath the cloth was a parchment and inside this was another faded piece of paper. In Pascal’s handwriting, on both the parchment and the paper were nearly the same words. Beside hand-drawn crosses, Pascal had carefully written:

The year of grace 1654.

Monday, 23 November, feast of St. Clement…

From about half-past ten in the evening

until about half-past midnight.

Fire.

The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob…

The God of Jesus Christ…

Your God will be my God.

More than 30 descriptive lines tell the story (unbeknownst to friends and family) of Pascal’s conversion to Christ. He is said to have been reading of the crucifixion when he was suddenly overwhelmed with the nearness of Christ. Pascal then meticulously transcribed the night of his conversion, his “night of fire,” as he called it thereafter, sewing it into his jacket where it would remain beside him until his death eight years later. Though the details of the story and the parchment were unknown to those around him, the change in his life could have scarcely gone unnoticed. Whatever else it marked, November 23, 1654 marked both death and life for Pascal. He reoriented all his activities (including his unparalleled work in the field of mathematics) to further serve a life of worship and service to God. He retired to the monastery at Port Royal and set to writing his Pensees, a collection of thoughts on life and theology.

 

There are many who house similar awakenings to faith before the person of Christ, if not kept in coat linings, then perhaps tucked protectively somewhere else. Whether, like Pascal, there is a specific night of “fire” that can be cited, conversion is not always easy to put into words. How does one explain what it is like to come out of a deep sleep, to rise from a night of fire, or to find oneself somehow newly born? The blind man could not articulate every detail of his encounter with Christ, but neither could he deny the startling evidence of his presence: “One thing I do know. I was blind but now I see,” he said in John 9:25. Nicodemus, too, had trouble getting his mind around the language and the metaphor of new life. “How can a man be born when he is old?” His question voices a reluctance common of all newborns, even as it harbors a resistance reflective of the sort of change Jesus implies with his invitation.

Whatever else Nicodemus and Pascal have in common in their nighttime encounters with Christ, one thing is certain. Whether a dramatic encounter or a subtle introduction, Christ has in mind more than an evening or an instance. A beloved professor of mine spoke of Christian conversion as a verb that arrives in several tenses. We have been justified, we are being sanctified, and we will be glorified. That is to say, on the Cross, Christ became our sacrifice, and the work is finished for all. God has declared his children righteous because we are united to his Son. But Christ is also our moral influence, the message of the gospel is transformational, and the believer is continually being sanctified through the Holy Spirit. To the one who has been united with the Son, the daily indwelling of Christ is a gift and a sign of the message that is presently being worked within us. Furthermore, what a person will be in Christ through the process of sanctification and the promise of justification has not yet been fully revealed, but there are signs all around of the hope and glory that is to come in Christ Jesus.

The Incarnation boldly assures us that Christ is always near. The Cross assures that he can come nearer still and forgive you completely and instantaneously. He will also walk with you over a lifetime, transforming and shaping you according to the will of God. Whether by fire, water, or Spirit, in an instance of spiritual certainty or a lifetime of wordless mystery, Christ comes near not to beckon better children but to make his creations entirely new.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.