The Sacred and the Profane, Part 1

Author’s note: This blog is to be a two or three parter.  Part one will be today.  Part two tomorrow.  Let’s see if it will go into a part three.  But there’s something I want to ask of you first.  Here it is…

Rich Mullins died, and I’ve been heartbroken ever since.  His song and his life was more than just inspirational.  It’s who I became.  I remember I first found his cassette tape during a hard emotional time as a teenager on the mission field.  All summer I listened, and I listened and I listened, and I became what I heard, and what I heard was broken man in love with a Living God.  

Then he died.  His questions are answered, but some of mine remain.  Last year I came across a recording he made of a song he would never professionally record… but the tape copy remains.   It’s called “Hard to Get”.  You can find it on Youtube.  I found it, and it broke me apart.   His questions are mine.  His sorrow is mine.  And that’s what this writing is about.  So if you wish to dive in, let me ask you first to take a listen.  I’ll post the link.  Maybe you never knew him, but trust me… he knew about both the sacred and the profane.

– “Hard to Get” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2STr5qPlIM

Sometimes I daydream.  Sometimes I imagine what it must have been like for the first man in the days following his creation.  Sometimes I imagine I’m him, living in a paradise; fresh, young and stupid.  I imagine his focus on the early days before God made his companion.  Not to be crass, but I can only imagine his attentions changed after a perfect woman started running naked around a garden paradise!  But in the days before he would take walks with his God through the garden in the cool of the day.  His God was a God of love and nothing separated Him from His creation.

What was that like?

Sometimes I daydream.

When I was 16, I had been away from my family for the last two months, on the other side of the world with people I hadn’t known 3 months earlier.  We had come home from a baking day under the Aussie sun and I had sweat stains everywhere, and my mime makeup was caked and dripping.  That day was spent on the streets of a city, telling people about how their God was a God of love and He wanted nothing to separate Him from His creation.   Somebody had punched me in face because of that.  Or maybe because I was wearing makeup.  Who knows.  I had been physically pushed and yelled at.  When I got back to the mission base, as a young, naive 16 year old boy I made a serious decision…. THIS IS WHAT I WANT TO DO FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE!!!!   It was decided then and there.  I was ALL in.  Jumping with both feet.  Not looking down.  I had found my place in life.

It was here, thousands of miles away from any place I considered home, where my new friends had become my new family, and my God met me in the dark watches of a foreign night sky that I knew who I was… right down to the core.

Right down to the core.

So I began the work of becoming a missionary.   I focused on finishing High School and worked on my skills to help me tell the story of a God of love that wanted nothing to separate Him for His creation.  I worked in my church.  I traveled to do mime ministry.  I performed and shared and worked in every church, hall, assembly, street corner, open air market, school, gutter, alley way that I could find.  I was complimented and criticized, and loved, and hated and spat at, and had stones thrown and yelled at and thanked and lived in a constant state of amazement.

Upon graduation I went to Bible School so I could be ready for the mission field.  When that was done, I went to Graduate school, so I could have my way open up to travel to any country God called on the mission field.  And I broke up with girlfriends that weren’t willing to imagine a life in a far away land.  And I married a girl that could.  And I went to film school, and traveled and prepared because I knew who I was and I knew what I was to do and I knew what made me truly live!  Right down to the core.

Right down to the core.

Until the day God let me know, in no uncertain terms, that I was not called to go to the mission field.

And it wasn’t subtle.   There was little room for differing interpretation.  I was destroyed.

That night I stumbled out into the dark night as a man who was shattered into a million pieces.  I wept and was broken.  I walked into a dark woods that was near my house and there, alone with a God who just told him he worked all these years for a dream that was not to be, I broke down at the base of a large tree.

I sat there for what seemed like hours at the base of that tree, broken and destitute.

And then I had a vision.

I have had dreams before and after, but never like this and never since.

In the vision I saw an axe held up by an unseen hand.  Before the axe stood a tree; young and strong seeking to grow up into the warm sunshine in a glorious field.

As I watched, the unseen hand pulled back the sharp blade of the cutting tool, and swung it to bite deep into the trunk of the tree.  The entire tree shuddered.

Again, the unseen hand with a devastating accuracy pulled back the mighty axe, and swung it to bite deep into the injured tree.  And again and again until a deep wedge was cut out into the base that went right into the core of the tree.  Then it was left in it’s injured and possibly dying state.

“Lord”, I asked, “Will this tree live?”

“The tree has been cut deeply and to the core”, came the response. “It believes it will not survive it’s injury, but it shall.   Look into the tree.”

So I looked.  I could see the limited amount of layers that made up it’s young age, and I could see the seasons of it’s life displayed in it rings, as it continued to shudder and drip sap from it’s injury.  And I looked and could see it right to its core.  It was strong, and untouched and true.

“Am I this tree?”

Heaven was silent.

“I am this tree, aren’t I?  I am this tree and you are the hand that wield the axe.  But you didn’t do it to destroy me.  Why DID you do it?”

My question was answered with a question.

“Kevin, who do you believe you are to me?  Do you believe you are someone I’ve just called to do my work?  Are you a missionary?  What happens if you cannot be one?  Are you willing to give up everything you believe you are, and worked for and are owed to just simply… be… my… child?”

“I am, Lord.  I am” I said looking into the injured center of that tree.

“And now you know it…” came His response…

Right down to the core.”

*** to be continued