“10 I rejoiced in the Lord greatly that now at length you have revived your concern for me. You were indeed concerned for me, but you had no opportunity. 11 Not that I am speaking of being in need, for I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. 12 I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. 13 I can do all things through him who strengthens me.” (Php 4:10-13 ESV)

Progress and regress, the heights of prayer deconstruct or collapse unto the depths of plainness. What was special… scarcely can it carry the day, except: “I will never leave you nor forsake you”; “The gifts and the callings of God are irrevocable”; “What eye hath not seen nor ear heard, what God has prepared for those who love Him”. More, we wrestle against the “boredom factor” of any religion: if God “tells us what to do”, if all life is “submission to Him”, if our building blocks are this same old tired litany around the Cross, around the Virgin Birth, around the Gifts of the Spirit, then wouldn’t we get bored?

God’s doctrine of Intervention means what we above called “submission to Him”: He acts in our lives independently of our own readiness or ability to Invite Him in. He is an intrusion into the World Order. He builds up, whispers in our ear, in some Divine Dance all the more respectable because of its outlandish Truth Claims. God Equips and God Manages, Handles deftly our human frame, Invites us to a childlike Faith that does not deny us our Play, our Actionable Items, our Joy in Serving.

We Serve the Cross because it goes deep, far, and wide, into unbored and reassured Aspects of the Human Condition. It helps us to proliferate, for the Cross’s agenda does percolate and proliferate. When we despair or come under the banner called Tired, God feeds us with morsels simple and healthsome, the grains and proteins of a healthsome Trust in Him who intervened. Stunned, we hasten to Welcome Him in as well, after all: He is already front and Center in our urgent Prayer for Relevance and for Newness, for unbored Discovery and hearty help to our hearth of pain, of remorse, of heartbreak, of long lost friendships, of sickly “getting by”.

Having walked this Route, we have walked by His side sufficiently and evocatively enough to Appreciate His ministry of the Cross. No, nothing is off limits. No doctrine is too “Holy” or “Special” for us to manhandle and form to our urgent need. Our need is urgent around some notion of Forgiveness, of excitable Intervention into our heartstruck zones, of plain workmanship around our places under construction. God constructs. God has a ten-year plan. God educates, familiarizes, inducts. Where we rebelled against His agents of Grace, He gives us our own would-be supplicants who stand in rebellion and… if we’re Honest, there is no small miracle or feat called for, if we intend for them to be today inducted. Look at our own track record! Of rebellion. Of hasty escapist fantasies. Of running.

The tent holds us, the beams of steel bear weight, the foundation does not crumble. We have this unbored reaction to His teaching tools of Cross, Birth, Miracle, Spirit, and Healing. Because they tailor-make themselves for Us. Because they come alongside us, as career coach, as Discipleship Cohort, as “Go broad, go wide, young man! Young woman!” The longing to indulge, the abstinent one’s blinking desire for that ennui-avoiding Escapism, unto drink, unto high, unto corporal indulgences generally: this Calls on us in our embraced and humbled work zones, to be peace and Receptive, of His message, of His entertaining all-sufficiency, of His discovered Anatomies of Spirit so fulsome and well made. We anatomize the Spirit into our own bodies offloaded and entrusted, so that we can be New Creations minus the weighty or hoisted pain, or boredom, or blase nothingness. Indeed, the words are elusive that describe boredom and nothingness. But they include banal, terrifyingly numbing, oxygenless submersion. Our baptismal vows, these precluded the painful lifelong decisions taken, this way or that, one being free and evocative, the other submerged and hastening to find air. Yet in this “Baptism” we are learning to breathe under water, and to soar above the land uninhibited. Our drink, our dope, our lust, is to speak zany and wild Truths, so radical as to soothe the angsty Spirit Within. That is all we wanted: to rediscover a bedrock called submission unto completion. Submission unto Discovery of the errant and unheard Doctrines so sublime. That Christ did miracles, and rose from the Dead. That He loved on the demons out there, on those possessed. That we can shout and pontificate “under the influence” minus anything besides God’s own counsel: trust the Spirit, Receive the Spirit, Breathe, O man, O woman.