2023-08-19 A Meditation on Haunting

“5 For to which of the angels did God ever say, “You are my Son, today I have begotten you”? Or again, “I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son”? 6 And again, when he brings the firstborn into the world, he says, “Let all God’s angels worship him.” 7 Of the angels he says, “He makes his angels winds, and his ministers a flame of fire.” 8 But of the Son he says, “Your throne, O God, is forever and ever, the scepter of uprightness is the scepter of your kingdom. 9 You have loved righteousness and hated wickedness; therefore God, your God, has anointed you with the oil of gladness beyond your companions.” 10 And, “You, Lord, laid the foundation of the earth in the beginning, and the heavens are the work of your hands; 11 they will perish, but you remain; they will all wear out like a garment, 12 like a robe you will roll them up, like a garment they will be changed. But you are the same, and your years will have no end.” 13 And to which of the angels has he ever said, “Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet”? 14 Are they not all ministering spirits sent out to serve for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation?” (Heb 1:5–14 ESV)

Certain measures are in place to give the soldier a taste or experience or encounter with success. For we languish. We are haunted, hearing that here and no farther shall you go. We scurry from the winsome next step. We are by our own acknowledgment a little too broken truly to Rise Up. Yet, rise up we do, a necessity meeting an impossibility. It may be impossible for us to turn said legendary corner of despair or of defeat, but if not us then some atheistic hateful enemy; we rise up, and we occupy this perch of success despite the hauntings and the self-doubts and the simple bondage.

To stay reasoned and focused on the Gospel, is to allow that it is on Christ’s countenance and balance that we pass the check. He pays the bill. We know not whether we are too compromised by past hate to succeed today, only this we know: that Christ has called us to His side, to be the amazed and yes grateful cohort this V-day.

This day, on the other side of an enemy who taunts and thinks it a joking matter to take a mythical other side. They think it is a matter of dishing out “fairness”, ignoring that we live in a free market society and do each of us accomplish as much as God’s balance sheet and Love does enable us to accomplish.

Thus we pray this day through the torment, through those hours of plain self-honesty: I am haunted, I was once possessed of a demon, I languish and worry and am just in all honesty too broken to go any further. Yet further we go. Yet dear soul we fight on. Yet the benign or plain-spoken, unhaunted digs of our enemy, these we know to be false comfort, perhaps less scarred from the upbringing yet less informed as well, less knowledgeable of how the world spins on its course, less helpful, with less to contribute to the gathered community. All this we turn over unto a Good God who does make possible, who does Love, who does give crutches and mobility aids, mental group-think, help in the depressive or panic-stricken hour, certainty that today’s is a cause for thanksgiving, for service at once, towards helping and healing the family unit or the military cohort. Our bunker is abuzz with the Good News: God is for us, through all haunted self-doubt, through all compromised self-awareness, through all relics of a traumatic course that got us here.

More than that, He copes with all regrets, those painful thoughts which we hasten away from, unwilling even to ask the Spirit of prayer how fellow witnesses judged the time or the matter. We are ashamed. We had growing pains. We made simple errors or faults of judgment. Yet by our side is God who is Lord of our Whole Life, Whole Picture. We can begin to ask, and the response is: humor. With love. With loving laughter. That is how our lovers and our patrons, our teachers and our folk, did accompany us through the haunting hour. Again, we also preach to ourselves: such terror and trial is not just my plight in life, rather be assured O soul, it is a mark of a battle underway. We are tried by the battle, not because we are failures, but because we have success on our front doorstep. We self-hate, not because that is a reasoned objective perch to stand on, but because of just how much healing we have the capability to minister. To a hurting world. To a broken family dynamic. To those we’ve let down, and to those we’ve name-called or used as outlet for our own frustrations.

All this is par and Meaning for the course, that God loves us, that we are gifted with that mettle that leads, that is honorific of the saints while also patient with the haunted Man, Woman, within. No longer haunted, it is Christ the Victor who prevails and leads us into climes never before even considered by our own agency within. We never before could have grasped that such was even possible. Yet this day our neighborhood is titanium, strong for the course, winsome and exemplar over and against the less traumatized—perhaps—but brutish Enemy. Who thinks it a joking matter to pick sides birthed in conflict rather than in joint sides yearning for love to prevail. Not because we are “all right”, “all in the know”, but because we are those haunted and fragile souls who overcame through our Victor on the Cross. Yes, at times gauche or strange, we are still carried through the hour of trial with a loving disposition and eagerness to help others. Even if our visage is less than beautiful or perfect. Even if our body type is indicative of pain and struggle. Even if we sometimes say the wrong thing. We are lovable and beloved, and therefore do reach out for any who might find themselves in a place of need, a compromised place, a losing perch.

For, we forgive the former enmities. Notwithstanding the hate and impossibility, the frustration, the angst, the inability as it then felt to go on. Today, we go on. As soldiers. As those Called, and as those conscripted unto goodness, good outlay, correct service, helpful fight. One day, all shall be judged, and many shall be saved from their bad deeds past. One day, they shall dwell near us, all whom we see on the horizon somehow modeled in our meager minds and time of prayer, as receptive and capable of Gospel hearing this day. If we can hear, they can hear. All shall be treated as grown up and capable of decision-making. All shall thrive in a love that forgives and discovers the end of the haunting.

The Message, then, is to fight boldly into the night, into the morrow, into the leap-frog reality wherein many are on or behind enemy lines, and tomorrow shall somehow bring so many to Trust and to Faith, even as we today are exasperated and militant to oppose the Sin and the Warring petulance, the immaturity that gets people killed or maimed, spiritually. We fight, and we do it because of a heart of service not a clear path to obvious victory. Perhaps a battle we shall lose, but our hearts are in the right place for a war we shall win. And that is a reality, a backdrop, of war that many in God’s army get used to, that a broader populace shall benefit from via their salvation. Today, hearing His voice, we see the battle waged and the opportunity gleaming atop a high hill of Tomorrow.