"It's almost
like it's hard to breathe."
This beautiful
friend, a sister who's been pressed wiser by oppression itself, she says it in
the heavy dusk. The atmosphere sags so low that her sentence could probably
prop it up and form an all-encompassing tent above our own, so pinprick small.
And for a suspended moment, her words even pierced through cloud and the
realization weighed more than the humidity:
The unseen always
outweighs the tangible.
Because the unseen
is actually more real.
We sit straight
beneath Glory, right within His Holiness, and somehow it takes
condensation-saturated air to wake us up to the fact that our lungs might as
well collapse from the Almighty's proximity. But, instead, His Spirit moves as
wind through the weight and fills us up with breath. All that air-space above
you? The miles that a person can legally own by real estate standards?
He's holding it up
with a mighty right hand.
If you think about
it, your head starts spinning with a sort of altitude sickness.
The external
pressure that could cause our watery bodies to implode, He matches with an
equal internal pressure.
So, not only does He
hold everything together as the One who knits our fibers tight (Col. 1:17),
He
holds us together when every opposing force should altogether crush us.
Sometimes pressure
seems the only thing this world is capable of manufacturing. You can wake up
sensing the barometric rise in your own chest like a waiting for the weighing
to lift. It's so tangible you swear the thing is an anvil and you might just
cave in upon yourself, after all.
But you- dear
friend-you and I were never subjected to futile collapse and introspective,
devolving implosion.
We are subjected in
the hope of redemption, "because the creation itself also will be
delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the
children of God" (Rom. 8:21).
Can I repeat that
for my own sake? My head is spinning again.
My stomach is doing flips.
We're delivered into
a glorious liberty when we allow the pressure to deliver the hope He always
intended.
Every warring evil
that pushes gravity like bricks-- Jesus builds into the delivery room for Hope.
Jesus freed us from
darkness by way of salvation through repentance. And then He continually births
in us new Hope, because Hope is the stake with which He chooses to hold things
up.
Out from under the
canopy, you can breathe. You can take heart, and a new one at that.
Another dear friend
who's been well worn-in with pressure, she told me that, recently. She who
feels nearly as if her internal pressure might fall out of equilibrium because
of blinding pain.
She told me to take
heart.
Now, I want to tell
you.
Christ's yoke rests
light on your shoulders if you ask Him to take the iron one made by this world.
When you're bound to
Him, you don't fear stratospheric miles burdening you,
Sickness hounding
you,
Debts threatening
you,
Heartache squelching
you,
Pride trapping you.
You only become
dizzyingly aware that it's infinitely easier to breathe, being bound to Him.
That, here, you are gloriously free in the Reality of the Unseen.
"Therefore we
do not lose heart. Even though our outward man is perishing, yet the inward man
is being renewed day by day. For our light affliction, which is but for a
moment, is working for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory,
while we do not look at the things which are seen, but at the things which are
not seen...For we who are in this tent groan, being burdened, not because we
want to be unclothed, but further clothed, that mortality may be swallowed up
by life. Now He who has prepared for us this very thing is God, who also has
given us the Spirit as a guarantee" (2 Cor. 4:16-18; 5:4-5).
