Daily Reading
Being Heros
January 5, 2025
Besides these false comforters that we abide in, there are also the less-wild lovers that are intertwined with our heart because they give us an identity. Whether it be accumulating wealth, being seen as profound due to our knowledge and cleverness of speech, being physically attractive, or any of the hundreds of other small stories we have learned to abide in, we live in fear that we will sooner or later be exposed and our identities will be stripped from us. We redouble our efforts at “doing” to prevent this calamity, and again, in our ontological lightness, our lack of being anchored in anything substantive, we experience the spiritual life as burdensome and exhausting. We are unable to walk the meadows of the spiritual life.
We all want to be someone’s hero or someone’s beauty, to be in a relationship of heroic proportions. We need to feel free to admit this without embarrassment. It is a core longing God himself placed within us and a deep part of our identity as men and women. It is in how we go about being heroes and beauties that is the issue. For each of us, the enemy has convinced us that we need our less-wild lovers and smaller stories to have an identity, indeed to even survive. Once we start depending on them for life, he sabotages our smaller stories so that we are exposed in our ontological lightness. Then he mocks us for our foolishness. He literally runs us into the ground with envy, anxiety, shame, discouragement, renewed efforts to rewrite our small stories so they work, and finally, depression and despair. Many of us are spiritually and emotionally ill from the process I’ve just described. What theologians have called “ontological lightness,” Freud referred to as “hysteria.” We are more familiar with it being called “neurosis.” Jesus simply calls it the symptoms of our adultery.
“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest,” says Jesus. Most of us think of spiritual progress as requiring us to do more, even as our heart cries out to us to lay our burdens down. We renew our efforts at Bible study, Scripture memory, and Christian service, fearing that we will be discovered in our weakness and need. We try to use whatever small story we have been living in—competence, gifted speaking, service to others, and so on—to cross the chasm between living in the flesh and living spiritually, when only Christ can carry us to rest. The kinds of “doing” we have learned are not weighty enough to allow us to walk in the spiritual fields of the kingdom of God.
Want More? Order your copy of The Sacred Romance today
We all want to be someone’s hero or someone’s beauty, to be in a relationship of heroic proportions. We need to feel free to admit this without embarrassment. It is a core longing God himself placed within us and a deep part of our identity as men and women. It is in how we go about being heroes and beauties that is the issue. For each of us, the enemy has convinced us that we need our less-wild lovers and smaller stories to have an identity, indeed to even survive. Once we start depending on them for life, he sabotages our smaller stories so that we are exposed in our ontological lightness. Then he mocks us for our foolishness. He literally runs us into the ground with envy, anxiety, shame, discouragement, renewed efforts to rewrite our small stories so they work, and finally, depression and despair. Many of us are spiritually and emotionally ill from the process I’ve just described. What theologians have called “ontological lightness,” Freud referred to as “hysteria.” We are more familiar with it being called “neurosis.” Jesus simply calls it the symptoms of our adultery.
“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest,” says Jesus. Most of us think of spiritual progress as requiring us to do more, even as our heart cries out to us to lay our burdens down. We renew our efforts at Bible study, Scripture memory, and Christian service, fearing that we will be discovered in our weakness and need. We try to use whatever small story we have been living in—competence, gifted speaking, service to others, and so on—to cross the chasm between living in the flesh and living spiritually, when only Christ can carry us to rest. The kinds of “doing” we have learned are not weighty enough to allow us to walk in the spiritual fields of the kingdom of God.
Want More? Order your copy of The Sacred Romance today