Weeks ago I was in Baghdad: a city of my dreams, my blood, my hope. As often happens after great success, there is a gentle tapering, a daily walking, a calm thinking: from this place where and when – upward and onward: what does it now look like?

I am waiting for the timing to return to Iraq. I am choosing to enter God’s rest. I have zillions of thoughts, like Styrofoam peanuts charged with static-electricity, they awkwardly seem to go everywhere and yet, nowhere simultaneously. I am fireworks on a boat in a bay, waiting for the next great sea voyage. The voyage is what I was born for, made for, prepared for. Ships are “safe” in harbor, but not designed for staying.

The tension hurts. The waiting, at times, feels horrible. Romans 5 tells me perseverance produces character and character produces hope; but the excruciating pain of the development of this particular brand of fortitude challenges me to decide how much I truly believe this truth. It REALLY challenges me. In many moments I feel so far from seeing the answers it is laughable, yet I feel those answers like I feel God: for they are in Him. Today I was driving through the mountains of Yosemite with my family. I pictured myself as God’s lung: filled with Him, filled with Him to the degree I would allow Him to breathe deeply of me.

I sometimes think about inhaling Him less deeply. Then I realize, yet again, I am lovesick. I can’t stop. He’s got my heart: hook, line, and sinker. So, I keep letting Him be breath to me, invisible life to my physical life. The collision of the unseen and the seen smarts almost daily: it cuts against me like icy wind on cheekbones down a ski slope. Intimacy can be downright gut-wrenching, especially with consummate lovers like God.

So, I keep on keeping on. And in my resting the fire gathers fresh color. Jeremiah’s notion about God as a fire in one’s bones both terrifies and liberates me, because I know I would do anything for His capital “L” Love.

I am too much like Him to let Him go. And He is also too much like Himself to let me go.

He’s radical. (I laugh.) His radical-ness is what got me into this situation: His character has rubbed off on me quite irrevocably.

<Oh, God. GOD! Your creativity has left us undone. For Your Name’s sake we remain thus. For the sake of the world we live thus. Well done, God. You have made us well. We are like you. And revolution is here; and coming.>