The Isolation Tank

“He loves Thee too little who loves anything together with Thee which he loves not for Thy sake.” St. Augustine

You may be wondering about the title…I’ll come back to that. Let me just start by saying that things are going very well here. Between work and friendships and washing clothes by hand, I keep pretty busy and have a lot of fun while I’m doing it. Sometimes though, difficulties come along even while times are good and the circumstances we find ourselves in can either push us closer to God or distract us from Him.

Question for you—is there such a thing as a forced fast? I’m not talking about someone depriving you of food or a situation like famine or poverty preventing you from eating. A fast is not only from food, and if you look at the purpose behind Christian fasting, you realize that there are many things other than food which should be fasted from. According to John Piper in A Hunger for God, “If you don’t feel strong desires for the manifestation of the glory of God, it is not because you have drunk deeply and are satisfied. It is because you have nibbled so long at the table of the world. Your soul is stuffed with small things, and there is no room for the great.” (Emphasis mine) Recently I started to see something going on in my own life that I feel relates to this question. For the past few weeks, I’ve felt in some ways isolated from certain people that I know. People who are normally very good about keeping in touch suddenly seem nowhere to be found. E-mails, phone calls and text messages go apparently unacknowledged and no response is sent. Usually, this situation would really get under my skin—why aren’t they replying? Can’t they at least let me know that they received the text/email/phone call? But this time around I started to wonder whether this was a great opportunity to rely on God more than I do on people for companionship, friendship, fellowship whatever you want to call it. I could see from my dependence on people responding to my messages that my soul has been stuffed—so to speak—with human relationships and communion, when I should be turning to God more. Just as I was beginning to consider this, I was praying with one of the school leaders on the YWAM base here, and he started to talk about times of isolation from family and friends, and how they’re times we can use for building our relationships with God. Needless to say, I was surprised, here I was just thinking about this and he was speaking my thoughts right out to me (although with more and better counsel to go along with them than I could have come up with), and I found myself once again wondering at God’s provision and guidance when we ask for it. So, back to the earlier question—is there such a thing as a forced fast? I think that sometimes we find ourselves in situations which can be amazing opportunities for us to learn and grow in our relationships with God, if only we’ll turn our attention away from what we lack and focus on Him. For me I can see that human relationship can be a huge distraction from my relationship with God. Unfortunately, I think most of the time, we’re not paying enough attention to see the dry times in our lies for what they are—chances to deepen our faith. We notice that people don’t respond to us in the same way they normally do, and instead of turning to God we rather push harder to get a response from our friends. We’re experiencing a dry spell financially, but instead of turning to God for his provision, we pick up extra hours to scrape together enough money. Time that we normally devote to other things suddenly becomes free, but instead of using that time for fellowship with God, we just look for something else to fill the minutes and hours.

I don’t want this to seem like a rant against the people who weren’t returning phone calls, etc. That is not my intention at all, I realize that life and circumstances prevent us from responding at times. But life and circumstances aside, if anything I should be thanking them for their role in one more lesson that God is teaching me. So if you haven’t been able to reply, Thank you! I appreciate it :)

At the same time, don’t feel like you shouldn’t talk/email/text me just because I’m trying to draw closer to God, I still want to hear from you too!

More later

~R~

P.S. I've added more pictures to my photobucket account, you can see them by following the link to the right.