Bridegroom Of Blood

“At a lodging place on the way the Lord met him and sought to put him to death. Then Zipporah took a flint and cut off her son’s foreskin and touched Moses’ feet with it and said, ‘Surely you are a bridegroom of blood to me!’ So he let him alone. It was then that she said, ‘A bridegroom of blood,’ because of the circumcision.” – Exodus 4:24-26

Was anyone else completely puzzled by these three verses inserted near the end of Exodus 4? The chapter seems to make more sense without them: God commissions Moses to leave Midian, Aaron meets him to help. But in between—God tries to kill Moses? What is going on?

“This episode,” writes Jeffrey Tigay, “… is extraordinarily puzzling because the motive for God’s attack is unclear, the pronouns are equivocal, and Zipporah’s remarks are enigmatic.” Indeed. Take the pronouns: it’s unclear who is being referred to in the first sentence (most think Moses, others suggest Pharaoh’s firstborn from the preceding verse), which son is referred to in the second sentence (Moses had more than one son by that point, including Gershom, his firstborn), or even whose feet it is (in Hebrew Moses is not identified; it simply says “his”). No one agrees on what Zipporah’s strange comment means; some feel it expresses her disgust or revulsion, others that is a ceremonial utterance related to Midianite rites (I find the KJV translation humorous: “a bloody husband thou art”). No one agrees on what the deadly attack was; some feel it was a theophany of some kind, or an angel, others an incapacitating illness. While most feel God’s intent here was to enforce the law of circumcision that Moses had neglected in his own family prior to his stepping out in leadership, others read it in allegory, as a spiritual landmark along the journey from desert to pagan city. 

The temptation with obscure sections of Biblical text is to either skim over them entirely, or get so caught up in them we lose the big picture. But, granted that we have a good foundation in the vast majority of clearer passages, the more confusing ones can invite us to dig deeper, to have greater humility and patience in our approach to the Word. 

St. Augustine writes about Biblical interpretation in On Christian Doctrine: “Some of the expressions are so obscure as to shroud the meaning in the thickest darkness. And I do not doubt that all this was divinely arranged for the purpose of subduing pride by toil, and of preventing a feeling of satiety in the intellect, which generally holds in small esteem what is discovered without difficulty… Accordingly the Holy Spirit has, with admirable wisdom and care for our welfare, so arranged the Holy Scriptures as by the plainer passages to satisfy our hunger, and by the more obscure to stimulate our appetite.”

Well, these verses do stimulate my intellectual appetite: because they were included here for a reason, whether or not I can make one out. One thing I find fascinating: the word for “touched” here, Hebrew naga, is next used in Exodus 12:22: “Take a bunch of hyssop and dip it in the blood that is in the basin, and touch [naga] the lintel and the two doorposts with the blood that is in the basin.” Just before Moses enters Egypt, blood touches flint to thwart divine wrath. As Moses exits Egypt, blood touches hyssop and lintel, again to escape death. The blood touching flint came from a son; the blood touching hyssop came from a lamb, but points to a Son. The exodus is framed with the touch of blood and the threat of death to say: your deliverance from slavery only happens this way. One day it will come from the true Bridegroom of blood. Is that not who Jesus is to us? I think of the first time John sees Jesus in heaven: “a Lamb standing, as though it had been slain” (Revelation 4:6). In other words, bloody. And all the creatures and elders sang, “and by your blood you ransomed people for God.” Our Bridegroom of blood.

Homesickness

“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

… I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”

- Psalm 23: 1, 6

“Men are homesick in their homes.” – G.K. Chesterton

Last night we were driving home when the particular way a man got out of his pick-up truck made me think of Virginia. In the first eighteen months after our move, this kind of thing happened all the time. Some small, unexpected thing—the time of week we usually visited my mom’s house, something my old friend would have liked—would trigger thoughts of rolling green hills, how it felt to be around my friends, how I felt being there, with a kind of nostalgic longing that was difficult to define. Once, a raindrop fell on our windshield after a dry California summer, and it made me cry, and I realized I was missing thunderstorms.

Part of the reason this is hard to share is because I realize it’s ridiculous. I hated thunderstorms in Virginia; they always kept the kids up, and once the winds tore down a tree on our lawn. My mom’s house, and my friends, weren’t always a perfect as they are in my imagination. With those rolling green hills came mosquitos and mugginess so terrible we rarely went out of doors. And while I liked how unique I felt there, I also felt misunderstood and lonely in many ways.

It’s a strange thing, to find you’re feeling homesick for a home that doesn’t really exist. Our reading from Psalm 23 came to my mind and I thought for the first time: this is talking about home. A place with no more longing, no more missing something you can’t even put really into words. The first and last lines say it all: I will not want, I will be home forever.

C.S. Lewis writes a great piece about this in The Weight Of Glory:

“In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.” 

Mercy

“Go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.’” – Matthew 9:13

“What shall I do with you, O Judah? Your love is like a morning cloud, like the dew that goes early away… For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.” – Hosea 6:4, 6

Jesus quotes Hosea 6:6 twice so far in our readings in Matthew (chapters 9, 12). The Hebrew word for “steadfast love” is checed, translated often “kindness, mercy,” but coming from a root word that literally means “desire, ardour.” Which makes a poignant kind of sense in a story like Hosea’s. I desire desire. But both times Jesus quotes this verse to the Pharisees, he chooses the word for mercy, Greek eleos.

What is mercy? It’s often compared to grace, in that grace is receiving what you don’t deserve, and mercy is not receiving what you do deserve. Lloyd-Jones contrasts the two this way: “Grace is especially associated with men in their sins; mercy is especially associated with men in their misery. In other words, while grace looks down upon sin as a whole, mercy looks especially upon the miserable consequences of sin. So that mercy really means a sense of pity plus a desire to relieve the suffering. That is the essential meaning of being merciful; it is pity plus the action… we can describe it as inward sympathy and outward acts in relation to the sorrows and sufferings of others.”

God is not just a God of grace; He is a God of mercy. Look at Ephesians 2:4: “But God, being rich in [not grace, but…] mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses…” This is the essential movement of God, the impulse of his heart, and it is so tied up with his great love for us that in Hebrew checed can be translated both ways. If you miss this, Jesus says to the Pharisees, you don’t know God at all, despite all your ceremonial laws.

How has God shown me mercy? In many small daily ways: green lights when I’m late, Dave leaving work early to help with kids’ pick-ups, the hands of a Sweet Tomatoes lettuce-chopper so I don’t have to cook. Am I too habitually entitled to see his mercies, big and small? 

How am I moved to mercy? Sometimes, when one of our kids is crying, instead of letting annoyance rise up at the interruption or irrationality of it, I try to imagine how I would feel if I was crying like that. It moves me to just hold them for a bit. I see patients in my county clinic who have little social support, who can’t speak English, who have waited so long their cataracts have become complicated cases no one wants to touch. I don’t really want to do their cases, but I do, I have to. What does it mean for you?

Seeking Solitude

“Immediately he made the disciples get into the boat and go before him to the other side, while he dismissed the crowds. And after he had dismissed the crowds, he went up on the mountain by himself to pray.” – Matthew 14:22-23

“If you don’t come apart for a while, you will come apart after a while.” – Dallas Willard

This word “made” here is Greek anagkazo, “to constrain, to compel,” from a root word that means “necessity.” For Jesus at that moment, solitude was a necessity. And some compulsion was required to gain it: tensions and feelings were running high. Herod had just beheaded John the Baptist and was likely on the lookout for Jesus. A remarkably large crowd was present, likely because it was around the time of Passover. Jesus had just finished feeding them, the only miracle recorded in all four gospels, and they wanted to make him king, a prospect his disciples probably relished. Who knows what Jesus was feeling at that moment—the temptation of earthly glory? Tides of public and political momentum? Weariness? Unprocessed grief? All of the above? 

This was a time when it would have made no natural or logistical sense to seek solitude. Yet Jesus insists on it immediately, dismissing the crowds despite the fervor of their adulation, dismissing the disciples despite the fact that it left him geographically stranded. He spent an extended portion of the night praying alone on a mountain.

When was the last time you were alone, really alone? When was the last time you went into the wilderness? David Brooks writes of the wilderness: “life is stripped of distractions. It is quiet. The topography demands discipline, simplicity, and fierce attention.” 

There were certainly times (like nine verses ago) when Jesus gave up solitude to serve others. But he also goes to great lengths to seek it. How attune am I to promptings for retreat? How intentionally do I respond to that inner invitation or impulse? 

The Absence Of God

“During those many days the king of Egypt died, and the people of Israel groaned because of their slavery and cried out for help.” – Exodus 2:23

“The story in which God does his saving work arises among a people whose primary experience of God is his absence.”- Eugene Peterson

When I go through piano pieces with the kids, I often say, “you have to play the rests.” The spaces of silence are as important as the notes. The musical score of the book of Exodus begins with one startling, long rest. Do you hear it? God’s people have been in slavery for 430 years. That’s a long time. What happened to the covenant He made with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? Did His providence through Joseph count for anything?  

The experience of God as absent is a normal part of the salvation story, of our spiritual lives. We see this from the lips of the Psalmist and Jesus alike: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Psalm 22, Matthew 27). We need to recognize this, and see the necessity of it. In our consumeristic society, it teaches us that God is not a God who answers to our beck and call. He does not need to account for himself to us. It keeps us alert and attentive to a mysterious Other. It allows us to identify with Christ. It draws us to reach for salvation and spiritual transformation beyond our comfort zones.

It’s good to look for these biblical blanks, to not rush to fill them in, to realize they are a normal part of the story that God tells. Good companions in these spaces are songs like Andrew Peterson’s “The Silence Of God,” or poems like this one from R. S. Thomas:

            Why no! I never thought other than

            That God is that great absence

            In our lives, the empty silence

            Within, the place where we go

            Seeking, not in hope to

            Arrive or find. He keeps the interstices

            In our knowledge, the darkness

            Between stars. His are the echoes

            We follow, the footprints he has just

            Left. We put our hands in

            His side hoping to find

            It warm. We look at people

            And places as though he had looked

            At them, too: but miss the reflection.

How Many Loaves?

“And Jesus said to them, ‘How many loaves do you have?’” – Matthew 15:34

It’s interesting to look at the questions Jesus asks, because often they make no sense. Often they’re in response to a question. Jesus here presents his disciples with a situational challenge: big four-thousand-plus crowd, three days without food, don’t want to send them off to find it (reminiscent of the last chapter). The disciples ask, where are we going to get bread in the middle of nowhere? Not unreasonable. And this is Jesus’ response. First of all, it seems irrelevant. Unless they have thousands of loaves, and it seems clear they don’t, what does it matter how many they have? It still wouldn’t be enough. Secondly, Jesus certainly already knows the answer to his question. Why make them count?

I hear Jesus asking me this question. Instead of trying to problem-solve my life alone, he wants me to account for his presence and power in the situation. Instead of seeing improbabilities, he wants me to give him everything I have, insufficient though it may seem. The Jesus through  whom the world was created could certainly have spun bread out of thin air: but he wants to use what I have to do his work of transformation. The loaves represent some amount of preparation: whoever brought them had presumably been nibbling throughout the three days, but still had some left. My preparation matters. But in the end, it is trust that counts. For giving up the loaves is an act of yielding trust. It would have made more sense for the owners to keep them. Maybe just tell Jesus there were six loaves, and split the seventh up among themselves, to make sure at least their kids got enough. 

I hear Jesus saying, how many loaves do you have, Esther? Count them, so you can see my miraculous work. Are you willing to give them all to me? Are you willing, like the bread, to be broken? Are you willing to let go? Can you give thanks before the outcome, in faith that God will provide? Will you come hungry, so you can leave satisfied? 

In the Bible, seven is the number of perfection and completeness. Seven loaves, seven baskets left over. These people followed Jesus up a mountain: a difficult journey, bringing the crippled, lame and blind. They were hungry for healing, and Jesus healed. They were hungry for bread, and Jesus gave it. They left the mountain satisfied. But they would become hungry for food again; their bodies would break down and eventually die. The only truly perfect person on that mountain was Jesus, the bread of life, manna from heaven, through whom we can have eternal, resurrected bodies that will never die. This is of course what Jesus is really saying. His question is an invitation. How many loaves do you have? Give them to me; believe, and come one day to a feast that will satisfy you forever.

Sacred Spaces

“So Israel took his journey with all that he had and came to Beersheba.” – Genesis 46:1

“You and I haven’t much time with our many responsibilities, but creating a small ‘sacred space’ somewhere in our home and giving ourselves ten minutes in the morning to be with the One who loves us so as to put the coming day into loving hands, changes the way we will live it. And returning to this sacred space for ten minutes at night to recall the day’s encounters, to give thanks, to ask pardon, and to put the night into the hands of Love, changes the way we sleep. This daily relationship with the loving Source of our true identity moves us towards peacefulness and joy in our lives.” – Henri Nouwen, A Spirituality of Caregiving

Did the last word in that phrase from Genesis surprise you? Israel had just heard that a beloved child he thought dead was alive, but he doesn’t go straight to Egypt. After getting over the shock, he began to feel afraid. Perhaps he remembered a foretold four hundred years of affliction (Genesis 15:3). This wasn’t how it was supposed to go, moving out of the promised land so near the end of his life. 

And so he stops along the way at Beersheba. This was the same place his grandfather Abraham swore an oath and planted a tree and called on God (Gen 21:33), the same place his father Isaac met with God in the night when he was afraid (Gen 26:25). Israel stops, makes sacrifices, and God speaks to him. God calls him by name, and God tells him His names: “I am El, the Elohim of your father” (verse 3). El is a general word for God that literally means “mighty one,” from a root word ayil that means mighty tree. Elohim is the plural version, the word that describes God as creator. I am the God of your father. A God mighty like these trees your grandfather planted that are all around you. Do not be afraid.

Makes me think about sacred spaces, places where we sense God’s presence, stretching generations past, or perhaps times past in our own lives. We are people of place, and in the wanderings and fillings-up of our lives, sometimes it helps to have a space set aside for God. This could be a place we go to for regular retreats, which I am increasingly convinced is a healthy habit of the spiritual life (I highly recommend Highway’s prayer retreats as a place to start). This could be a space in our homes: a closet, a corner of a room where we light a candle, in Susanna Wesley’s case, an apron thrown over her head. It could be a space in our offices, as simple as turning our chairs to face a wall. It could be a space in our minds, when we meditate on the Bible or center our thoughts. It can be writing, which opens up new spaces as we explore what lives inside us. 

A good definition I’ve heard of spiritual disciplines recently is one by Henri Nouwen: “In the spiritual life, the word ‘discipline’ means ‘the effort to create some space in which God can act.’ Discipline means to prevent everything in your life from being filled up. Discipline means that somewhere you’re not occupied, and certainly not preoccupied. In the spiritual life, discipline means to create that space in which something can happen that you hadn’t planned or counted on.” Israel could have journeyed on in fear. He could have been preoccupied with the needs of the group of seventy traveling with him. But he stops at Beersheba. Perhaps he sees the tree, the well, and remembers. What are your sacred spaces? What markers of them will you leave for yourself, and for those who come after you?

Defining Success

“Let not steadfast love and faithfulness forsake you; bind them around your neck; write them on the tablet of your heart. So you will find favor and good success in the sight of God and man.”

- Proverbs 3:3-4

A bunch of us from Highway went to a seminar called “Kids Under Pressure” at Stanford last week that highlighted our area’s narrow definition of success. Lisa Damour, the main speaker, pointed out that parents basically want their kids to be happy. They correlate happiness with professional or economic success. They then do some backwards-engineering and assume their kids must get into a good college; therefore grades now matter. The actual studies do not bear this out. Once above the poverty line, increased income is not associated with additional benefits to well-being. There is no correlation between attending a prestigious college and career success. Rather, she said, studies suggest that well-being is correlated to four things: having high-quality relationships, doing work one finds meaningful, feeling you’re good at your job, and physical health. Thus, rather than obsessing about our kids’ grades, we should emphasize high standards of ethical behavior. We should articulate our values and model them. We should resist society’s narrow definition of success and embrace our child’s unique interests and strengths.

Sounds good, but doesn’t seem to go far enough. It made me ask the question, what is success? How do we define it for our kids? I asked that once to our community group and the consensus was, “success is success”—you know it when you see it, but you can’t quite define it. Perhaps it’s money, power, influence, a sense of happiness, educational pedigree. How would the Bible define success?

Surprisingly, I don’t think “success” is much of a Biblical concept. I remember doing a word study and being surprised at how infrequently the word even appears. The more I think about it, the more I feel the whole idea is a construct of our society: it is something inherently comparative and external. Neither of those are values in the kingdom of God. The people who would have been deemed “successful” in Jesus’ day would have been the Romans, or the Pharisees. It seems to me the Bible talks more about faithfulness. The master says, “well done, good and faithful servant” (Matthew 25), not “well done, successful individual!” It’s an essential shift in worldview: our purpose is not to establish our individual selves in the eyes of the world, but to be faithful to what we have been entrusted with in the eyes of God. Being wealthy, commercially successful, academically acclaimed, is not bad (see Joseph of Arimathea, Lydia, Paul), but only as it relates to our ability to leverage those things in our faithfulness.

Asking “how do I raise successful children?” is only helpful insofar as we define success as meeting a predetermined goal, insofar as it prompts us to be intentional in our parenting. One answer I heard is that success is raising kids who love God and love others with all their heart, soul and strength—their heart, soul and strength, which means through their unique vocation, giftings, abilities. In that framework, achievement is not bad, but it is seen not as an essential determinant of well-being or worth, but as a vessel for faithfulness. We support our children’s achievements as an act of stewardship, a being faithful to how God has positioned us, but never as an ends unto itself. Because we care about their ability to have steadfast love and faithfulness, we care about their strength of character, emotional health, ability to handle conflict and stress, and many other inner and unseen things just as much, if not more, than anything that goes on a resume. 

Living as part of the world, but not of the world, in the area of academic achievement feels like a landmine. Environmental cues and pressures are strong. Situations are complex. We are biased by our own experiences. Remember what you are about, Solomon urges. Steadfast love, never fear; faithfulness, never success for its own sake: bind them close, write them on your heart, and true favor will follow.

Gratitude Is For Adoration

“For who is God, but the Lord?” – Psalm 18:31

“Gratitude exclaims, very properly: 'How good of God to give me this.' Adoration says, 'What must be the quality of that Being whose far-off and momentary coruscations are like this!' One's mind runs back up the sunbeam to the sun.” – C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly On Prayer

One could view Psalm 18 as David’s gratitude log: God delivered him his enemy, Saul. Pretty good thing to log for the day. But he goes well beyond thanksgiving, well beyond a kind of self-interested gratitude, doesn’t he? This is a song of adoration, not only about what he is thankful for, but what it reveals to him about God. Reminds me of a story C.S. Lewis tells in one of his letters:

“I was standing in the dark toolshed. The sun was shining outside and through the crack at the top of the door there came a sunbeam. From where I stood that beam of light, with the specks of dust floating in it, was the most striking thing in the place. Everything else was almost pitch-black. I was seeing the beam, not seeing things by it. Then I moved so that the beam fell on my eyes. Instantly the whole previous picture vanished. I saw no toolshed, and (above all) no beam. Instead I saw, framed in the irregular cranny at the top of the door, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, 90 odd million miles away, the sun. Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam are two very different experiences.”

Psalm 18 is David standing in the sunbeam, looking 90 million miles away, seeing a God before whom the earth reels, who breathes smoke, who rides on the wind, who speaks like thunder, who also lifts him up with gentleness, who makes his feet like the deer. What seems like hyperbole to us dust-viewers is merely the difference between looking at the beam and looking into it. 

Moving from entitlement or habitual inattentiveness to gratitude is only the first step: the next is moving from gratitude to adoration. From “what am I thankful for?” to “what does this show me about God that I admire?” It is to take a step into the sunbeam and gaze up into it. To recognize the divine source of all pleasure. To see that they speak of some far country we long for: that they are not only the hope of that place, but an exposition of it. “This heavenly fruit is instantly redolent of the orchard where it grew,” Lewis writes. “This sweet air whispers of the country from whence it blows. It is a message. We know we are being touched by a finger of that right hand at which there are pleasures for evermore. There need be no question of thanks or praise as a separate event, something done afterwards. To experience the tiny theophany is itself to adore.”

Eventually, yes, we learn to experience the pleasure and the adoration it evokes as a single event, just as we cannot hear a bird’s song without thinking of the bird, or see the marks of letters on a page without thinking of the word they make. It is good to begin with small, ordinary pleasures: to adore not from high, cerebral theology, but from the everyday things we feel and see. A child’s soft cheek, the refreshing chill in the air as fall arrives, the smell of a new journal. For who is God, but you, O Lord?

Invitation To Hiddenness

“‘The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his field. It is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is larger than all the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.’ He told them another parable, ‘The kingdom of heaven is like leaven that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, till it was all leavened.’” – Matthew 13:31-33

“Even when I don't see it, You're working

Even when I can't feel it, You're working

You never stop, You never stop working

You never stop, You never stop working”

- ‘Waymaker,’ Sinach

The kingdom of God is told here by story, a kingdom radically unlike how Jesus’ followers conceived of kingdom. Rather than an external, manifest, militaristic, materialistic reign, Jesus’ kingdom arrives small, and hidden.

A single mustard seed is 1-2 millimeters in diameter; a yeast cell even less. Entirely unremarkable. The seed is sown, the yeast is mixed, and essentially, at that point, they both disappear. But given time, enough time, change happens. One day there is an enormous tree that provides shelter; risen dough that provides nourishment. 

The invitation to allow God to govern more of our hearts and minds is not a clarion call to raise the standard and storm the castle. There are spiritual battles, of course, but at heart the invitation to God’s kingdom is an invitation to hiddenness. It is not so much an outward striving as an inward posturing, placing ourselves in the hands of the gardener and bread-maker, allowing ourselves to receive. It is not about controlling the process in ourselves or others as much as an exercise in faith, in trust that transformation will occur in due time. That growth is happening even when we cannot see or measure it. It takes time for seeds to break open as life emerges, for trees to grow up, slow and strong, for the yeast to spread cell by cell through the dough. 

Henri Nouwen writes in his book The Inner Voice of Love: “As you come to realize that God is beckoning you to a greater hiddenness, do not be afraid of that invitation. Over the years you have allowed the voices that call you to action and great visibility to dominate your life. You still think, even against your own best intuitions, that you need to do things and be seen in order to follow your vocation. But you are now discovering that God’s voice is saying, ‘Stay home, and trust that your life will be fruitful even when hidden.’”

Lessons In The Dark

“In the night also my heart instructs me.” – Psalm 16:7

“Your religion is what you do with your solitude.” – Archbishop William Temple

David doesn’t actually write “my heart” here. He writes, “my kidneys,” Hebrew kilyah. According to an article in the American Journal of Nephrology, “While the Syrians and the Arabs viewed the liver as the center of life, the kidneys, in contrast, held a primary place of importance in Israel. In Hebrew tradition, they were considered to be the most important internal organs along with the heart. In the Old Testament most frequently the kidneys are associated with the most inner stirrings of emotional life. But they are also viewed as the seat of the secret thoughts of the human... the kidneys thus are primarily used as a metaphor for the core of the person, for the area of greatest vulnerability.”

Sounds a bit strange, but perhaps not unlike the way we use the word “heart”; after all, the translators merely substituted one organ for another. Internal organs that function in involuntary darkness. Have you marveled at the recesses of your body, the things it does where no light ever shines? Your atrial valves opening, the ventricles contracting, millions of nephrons filtering a hundred milliliters a minute? In college, while every else partied on a Friday night, I would slip into a dark lab, anesthetize rats, and filet them open to find their kidneys. I saw my first live human kidney during a laparoscopic case my third year of medical school. I remember the first time I slipped my gloved hand into the recesses of a patient’s open abdomen, slippery organs parting before my fingers. 

Makes me think about mental laparotomies in the dark. In the moments stripped of distractions and prompts, lying there at night, where do our minds wander? What do we habitually think about when we don’t have to think about anything? What do we most like daydreaming about? What fantasies give us most comfort? What unprompted feelings surface in the dark? What involuntary longings rise?

Perhaps we think about a romantic figure or storyline, a dream house, a fantasy vacation, a job promotion, an object to acquire. Perhaps we feel anxiety, anger, boredom, despair, anticipation. These things, David says, teach us something valuable. Those feelings may be our truest ones; those longings a window into the deepest parts of ourselves. The things we think about, as Temple suggests, may be what we truly adore, what we worship. They are our gods. To consume them without regard, Keller suggests, is like popping pieces of candy between meals: these habitual comforts can blunt our hunger for God.

At times my thoughts in the night have illuminated lifelong addictions or idols that I have needed to work through. At times they relate to aspects of myself I have been unable to exercise in this stage of life, and for which I am thankful. At times they are sheer escapism, and I need to face what I fear. What do your thoughts and feelings tend towards in the dark, and what do they teach you?