Alone In The Mire

     Here is today's collect: Lord God, whose blessed Son our Savior gave his body to be whipped and his face to be spit upon: Give us grace to accept joyfully the sufferings of the present time, confident of the glory that shall be revealed; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. 

     We humans are subject to the Law of Undulation (as C.S. Lewis puts it). We have our mountaintop moments when we feel like God is sitting next to us, followed by our mire-bound moments when we cannot feel His presence at all. I believe that Lewis is correct that each of us, because we are human and God has designed us so, is subject to this seeming roller coaster of belief and doubt.

     We all react differently to our moments of mirey doubt. My reaction is to turn inward, pull up my bootstraps and fight through the mire. It's not so much that I lose my faith in the mire, but that I stop depending on God to get me out--which is just as bad. In the tricky way the Devil uses our hard-wiring to trip us up, I tell myself: "God wants to see how tough you are." Tough guys don't look to Scripture when they are in the mire. When the going get's tough, the tough get going. Movement. Action. Who cares if the action is within God's will? He left me in the mire to see how I fend for myself didn't he? No. He didn't. He withdrew from me so that I will turn evermore to Him. For only in radical dependence upon Him am I complete. Only when He truly reigns within me am I unified with Him. Today's collect helped remind me of that.