The Edge of Glory

Julia Cameron in The Right to Write stresses the need for writers to be honest and vulnerable. She recognizes that this is very hard to do. But she presses us to do it anyway.

I do not like being vulnerable. I do not like feeling exposed and ill at ease. I do not like being stretched beyond my comfort zone -- and I do not know how to write or live without trying to find my invulnerability in my vulnerability.

Exactly. After wrestling with what to write this week for our study group, I decided that the best thing was just to be completely vulnerable and to become a object lesson to myself.

So here it is. The truth about me which I'm afraid to print. The real reason I write, from my personal journal. My internal censor screams at me that I should not, should not ever, say it -- not like this.

My censor intones,

Just who do you think you are? It will look like you're posturing. Maybe this won't be believable. Does God really interact like this with ordinary people? Nothing you write here makes sense. It's too abstract. Be more concrete!

She has a point. But I've decided to do this anyway.

I'm sure God has a place for each of us that shines with beauty and joy and purpose. I'm sure he wants to meet personally with each one of us. The places I've been are there for you, too. If we each would make ourselves available to him without reservations, he would make of our lives a story so radiant and inspiring, it would leave us breathless where we stand.

______________________________________________

From my personal journal:

There is a place along the fringes of our fallen earth near the boundary between us and eternity. Light flows in and bathes the landscape. Visions appear. Voices are heard. The air is filled with clarity, with majesty, with a sense of the Holy. Although our feet still touch the crust of our fallen world, somehow it matters less. The light from heaven here at the edge of glory lets us see how the corners of the old world already lift and crinkle back. It's clear that for a short time, we live in a Shadowland, a mere imitation of the realness on the other side.

It's not new. Moses saw it. So did Elijah. Paul was blinded by it and then transformed. Here where heaven dips down to touch the earth and the presence of God spills over the ground like the morning sun. I have stumbled upon it, seemingly by accident, and found God waiting for me at this spot, drawing me in, and urging me to write. I feel a call, a burden, an urgency to tell from this space what I know.

I will tell you what I know. The invisible and the intangible which we have longed for is more real than all the rest we understand. The longing is what makes us most like the One who designed us. The longing, the thirst, the craving drives us to search for water. It pushes us to reach for God.

Jesus said, "Whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life."

Your thirst for something more, which catches at your throat in the middle of the night and seeps in when you have lost someone you loved -- this thirst was meant for you, meant to pull you toward the only One who can fill it. In him will you find the quenching.

The answer is a Person. He is your way, your truth, and your life.

This is hard for us because it is so simple and because it requires an absolute trust which we fear, having lived long in a Shadowland where we've learned to trust no one absolutely.

But I have not been asked to write from the shadows. I've been asked to write from the edge of glory.

_______________________________________

You can read more thoughts from this week's discussion at High Calling Blogs .

Photograph, copyright 2010 by Benjamin Frear.