The Saturday Stoke #17
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Welcome to this week’s Saturday Stoke, a short inspirational podcast designed to encourage and challenge you on the path ahead—it’s a place where, if I’m doing my job right, I’m spurring us all on toward love and good deeds.
If you were able to join us last week, I had some rather long-winded thoughts on Joy. After all, it is Christmas. Today, I want us to spend a few moments on the heights.
Listen to todays episode #17 on your podcast app!
During my doctoral studies in England, friends invited us to their home in the Lake District. I’d always wanted to visit the lake district. It’s home to some of my favorite writers, like William Wordsworth, Beatrix Potter, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Ruskin. One afternoon, just before sunset, I set out on a hike into the countryside overlooking Lake Windermere.
As I walked, I could feel the pressure from my studies and from our recent transition as a family of five moving from Atlanta, Georgia to England. I was tired and weary, but the November air refreshed me and drew me further up and further in, to use one of my favorite C.S. Lewis lines.
Further up and further in.
I followed the footpath along the stone fences, past a mountain stream and up onto a massive clearing with open views of the entire lake and surrounding villages. Sheep dotted the emerald fields and the wind, now, ripped and pulled at my coat.
Breathless, I sat upon an outcropping of moss-covered limestone boulders—the sheep carried on with their chewing and baying as if I was invisible.
As I sat, staring out over the countryside, some of my favorite Bible verses came to mind. Like:
“He gives me the agility of a deer; he enables me to negotiate the rugged terrain.”
—2 Samuel 22:34 (NET)
I’m no deer, but I was thankful to negotiate the steep terrain of the mountain. Another verse was Psalm 18:33, which says,
“He made my feet like the feet of a deer and set me secure on the heights.”
—Psalm 18:33 (ESV)
“Tim, what is this love you have for deer in high places,” you say.
“Oh, that,” I reply. “It’s really nothing. Let’s just call it a coincidence, shall we?”
I repeated this Psalm over and over in my head. I know the meaning of the metaphor teaches us about the provision and watchful care of a God who secures our footing when everything seems to be falling apart.
But there, on those boulders, the view, the wind, the sheep, the cold … I felt something more.
My hike took me high up into the mountainside. Already the sun had tucked itself behind the far western horizon. And still, I sat and listened. The elemental sound of the wind across high grass was all I could hear—aside from that there was just utter quiet. A kind of silence devoid of man-made sound.
You know the kind—it’s rare to find these days. I found myself surrounded by raw nature, by a raw God.
The wind from the mountainside spoke to me by way of comfort and refreshment. And as I sat upon the boulders I wondered more about the mystery of the heights. The sheep walked and grazed, at home in this habitat of quiet.
But it took me several moments to stop fidgeting and to listen, to still myself and abide in the moment.
There is a mysterious tremendum about the heights, unsettling and clarifying. The twentieth-century theologian Rudolf Otto used the Latin term mysterium tremendum to describe the feeling of awful majesty.
He says the feeling of the mysterium tremendum “may at times come sweeping like a gentle tide, pervading the mind with a tranquil mood of deepest worship.”
God uses heights to show us his provision and care, yes. But the heights also exude a solitude untouched by man—a holy of holies, if you will. There is much we can learn by literally walking up into the heights and worshipping God in the solitude of his creation.
I find myself, now returned from the mountains of the Lakes and beloved England, looking for “the heights” in other places: a walk down the lane, a midnight stroll with my headlamp under the stars, sitting in the quiet of a nearby cathedral. They do not compare to the actual heights at the lake, but they instill in my mind, body, and soul a reverent quiet oft forgot in this age of noise and bustle.
Find the quiet this Christmas season.
What if we tried something new this holiday season and refused to stay boxed up in houses, cars, and shops, and find your way to a place where you can experience the mysterium tremendum of God.
“But Tim,” you say, “not everything in the world can be solved by standing on a mountainside.”
“Quite right, quite right,” I reply. “But, a good many things can.”
And here’s what I mean.
Our rhythms of life can numb us and lull us into the tepid routines of shallow living. We content ourselves with the shallows, because it’s much harder to drown in the shallows.
Out there, in the deep, or in the heights, a God awaits, one with whom we might not know as well as we think we do. And that can be a frightening proposition. And so, we keep to the shallows, the familiar, the less challenging.
But before you know it, our legs and hearts become weak. Sure, once or twice we venture out into the foothills, but we lost our breath, and our legs burned, so we turned back and sat on the couch and scrolled through a few hundred shows.
And then something hard happened in life. We lost a job, or a loved one, or succumb to dark thoughts of despair. And when the hard time came, we discovered we hadn’t the heart to go into the heights and be with God. And we crumbled.
The prophet Habakkuk wrote:
I hear, and my body trembles;
my lips quiver at the sound;
rottenness enters into my bones;
my legs tremble beneath me.
Yet I will quietly wait for the day of trouble
to come upon people who invade us.
Though the fig tree should not blossom,
nor fruit be on the vines,
the produce of the olive fail
and the fields yield no food,
the flock be cut off from the fold
and there be no herd in the stalls,
I will rejoice in the LORD;
I will take joy in the God of my salvation.
GOD, the Lord, is my strength;
he makes my feet like the deer’s;
he makes me tread on the high places. Amen.
—Habakkuk 3:16-19 (ESV)
The beauty in the prophet’s words stem from his own certainty. How incredible that though the visible things of the world upon which we rely fail, the prophet lifts up praise.
And how quick we are to crumble when we fail to gain acceptance into a certain college, or our career skids or our relationships falter, or our marriages fall to pieces.
How much import do you and I place on the things we see in this life—the things by which we maintain our healthy and rich lives?
The big word in this passage is “Though.” The preceding verses reveal a world of expectations falling apart, the glory of God invoking fear, and yet when the sources of sustenance wither, faith abounds.
Is your vine withering? Is your faith along with it?
Now consider these words from Habakkuk, which come a bit earlier in the chapter.
“His splendor covered the heavens,
and the earth was full of his praise.
His brightness was like the light;
rays flashed from his hand; and there he veiled his power.”
—Habakkuk 3:3-4 (ESV)
Consider the grandeur of God.
Let’s take a moment and consider our God.
He is called YHWH—a name the Hebrews would not even say because of its sheer holiness. Consider his splendor, how the prophet describes it covering the sky.
The earth resounds with sounds of praise for him; think of the birds, the whales, the ocean crashing into the shore—all praise, all for him.
Consider his way. It is the way of light. If we walk in him, we walk in heavenly light. If we walk in heavenly light, we live within his might and power. He is so great, he shields us from seeing his fullness, lest we die.
This, dear friends, is a snapshot of our God: wonderful, mighty, awful, terrible, beautiful, holy.
And yet, we linger in the betweenness. We tolerate the dimness of decay, preferring shadows to light, and shallows to the deep. Soren Kierkegaard says every human being if seen through the metaphorical lens of a house, has a basement, a first floor, and a second floor.
But strangely, every human being remains contented to live in the basement. “This is the building,” writes the Danish philosopher, “but he prefers living in the basement, that is, in the categories of sensation. … He not only prefers living in the basement—no, he loves it so much that he is indignant if anyone suggests he occupy the fine suite lying vacant for him.”
And so friends, ask yourself: Do you and I sit making mud pies, as C.S. Lewis like to put it, in mud puddles unaware of the glory just over the hill?
I believe we hobble our own faith by basement living. We make and eat mud pies when a shimmering way of life extends before us.
We haven’t the heart to get up out of the mud and so we live lazy lives. Just over the hill is much too far. The heights? You cannot be serious? They are, well, they are too high—and what does one do up there in the wind and the quiet anyway?
Have we truly exchanged God and his glory for the basement mud?
Here’s a quick hack for getting out of the basement and out in the heights with God.
And this hack is but a simple prayer:
Lord Jesus, I need thee, O I need thee. Take me to your heights and feed me your quiet and your reverence. You set my feet upon the heights—yes to secure me. But Lord, there you are, massive and comforting. Keep me in your presence today my Savior.
Lord, I confess, I do not live on the heights. In fact, I would rather you not set me upon the heights most days. Forgive me for this attitude and strengthen my faith that I may, indeed, live with you—on the heights. Strengthen the legs and lungs of my faith.
Sweep over me with your mysterium tremendum, that I may worship you in all your glory. Amen.
Stay stoked my friends.
Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash
