Before I start this third (&, I promise - FINAL) blog recounting my spiritual journey in 2022, I'm obligated to let you, the reader, know that *none* of the content herein will make sense if you haven't first read parts 1 & 2 of this "Gashena Mache" saga.
You can find them here:
"Gashena Mache & The Myth Of More Easily Summoned Demons" (Part 1) - https://thesweetreprieve.blogspot.com/2023/01/gashena-mache-vs-myth-of-more-easily.html
"Gashena Mache & The Follow Through" (Part 2) - https://thesweetreprieve.blogspot.com/2023/02/gashena-mache-follow-through-part-2-of-3.html
Once you've read those, lol, and are sure you're onboard with seeing this narrative through to its conclusion, I want to invite you to begin to digest the following image:
It's the Aurora Borealis as photographed by my husband, Zach, on a trip to Chena Hot Springs, Alaska that we took for his 40th birthday last September. 😊
But you've got some reading to do before it comes into play. Lol!
Starting with a captivating retelling of some church experiences from my teen years in the 1990s.
I remember the summer heading into my 14th birthday - I had not been around a long time but I had been in enough religious environments that I was developing a true "taster's palette" with regards to the subtle differences between one church and another.
I was not unlike the child versions of Frasier & Niles Crane; but instead of cultivating pride at knowing a chef's masterpiece from a Betty Crocker box meal, *I* was becoming a snob with regards to being able to detect denominational differences.
Rather, interdenominational differences (as my family was not accustomed to sampling any version of the faith outside of the Baptist discipline). Lol.
There was Pinot Grigio and there was Two Buck Chuck, after all. Lol.
So, back to the 90s.
I was an AVID fan of CCM (Contemporary Christian Music) at the time and one track -from 1995- that I remember being head over heels in love with was Margaret Becker's "Deep Calling Deep".
Remember in the prior blogs where I said the Holy Spirit (and the more charismatic expressions of faith & prayer He embodies) had sort of been stalking me? How for decades leading up to me beginning to incorporate Him more into my practice of spirituality in college He made subtle cameo appearances in my day to day life?
This song is/was an example of THAT!
It's based on the Bible verse from Psalm 42 that reads, "...From the heights of Hermon and Mount Mizar, deep calls to deep in the roar of Your waterfalls...By day the Lord directs His love. At night His song is with me - a prayer to the God of my life."
In fact, it was painfully obvious just how much so! Lol.
Around the time that I was 14, our family started going to church with my mom's brother's family near the Air Force base in Wichita.
I knew the moment I walked into the place that I didn't like it. LOL!
I was little Niles Crane as I investigated the rows of padded chairs that linked together in the sanctuary and served as substitutes for traditional wooden pews.
Plastic, single-use communion cups!
Why, they even had a temperature controlled baptistry!
"This church is a liturgical Hindenburg!"
Was this a place to interact with the Creator of the Cosmos or was it a Hyatt Regency???
I swear to you that the song leader was the living incarnation of Ned Flanders from The Simpsons.
I thought it the very first time I met him!
He came up to introduce himself and as he did so, I felt like I was meeting the Ronald McDonald of this hamburger hut masquerading as a church.
"So!" he said, at an unreasonably loud volume, "Your mom tells me you really like Christian radio!"
"Uh huh." I said, skeptical that the man in front of me was one who knew anything of radio as it existed on the FM band.
"You listen to 1380 AM??? Boy, I tell you that Steve Green has a lot of good tunes on that station!"
I knew it.
"No." I replied, deciding to quickly and concisely let the mustached music minister in front of me know exactly the type of music *I* found inspirational. "I'm more into DC Talk, the Newsboys... oh! And right now, of course, I really like Margaret Becker's new song, 'Deep Calling Deep'."
The music minister wrinkled his brow.
"Well, I don't know a lot about..." he switched to a whisper as if it were sinful to even reference the genre, "...Christian rock... but that last one sounds like it's referencing a Bible verse we sing a song about every Sunday around here to close out our services!"
"Really?" I said, suspicious that the environment I was standing in was one in which I was going to encounter any music legitimately infused with the Holy Spirit as I preferred to encounter Him.
"Yes, sir! It's a real toe tapper! You're going to be here on Sunday, aren't you? We'll be closing out the service with it then. You'll have to let me know how you like it!"
"Ok..." I said, unenthused, but making a mental note to pay special attention to the last song sung before church dismissed the following Sunday.
A few days later I found myself sitting on the weird church lounge chairs between my cousins, Jennifer and Karin, waiting for the pastor to finish his sermon and for Ned Flanders to return to the stage to lead the congregation in the promised song he had advertised would be to my liking.
As it became apparent that the service was winding down, I heard my younger cousin Karin begin to squeal excitedly in the seat next to me. "It's almost time!!!" she said in a high pitched whisper.
Her older sister, Jennifer, to my right began to become visibly panicked - looking around to make sure there weren't any of the older teens in the church sitting behind us anywhere.
"We're not sitting far enough back!" she cried, "People are going to see you, Karin! Please just don't!!"
Karin laughed menacingly as Ned Flanders invited the congregation to rise for their traditional weekly dismissal song.
Why do I feel more convinced than ever that this song is not going to live up to what was promised? I thought to myself.
Karin jumped to her feet as Jennifer began to try to push past the adults seated on her right to make an early exit out of the sanctuary.
And then... the loudspeakers came alive with THIS song:
As I examined my younger cousin's full body response to the tune being played, it became apparent why her older sister had behaved in the horrified manner that she had.
In between the sing-songy verses, Karin had patented her very own hand motions and added sound effects that seemed to indicate that the "River of Life" flowing out of her? It had more to do with an out of control bladder than it did with any supernatural entity.
It's not that it wasn't funny, lol.
It was.
But once I was done laughing, I realized that this song was reflective of this church... and this church in no way felt like an environment where one could trust they could occupy space for a weekly *organic* encounter with God.
I was craving the spiritual equivalent of Grandma's homemade apple pie!
This church was a pre-packaged Twinkie with antidepressants crushed up and mixed into the cream filling found in the middle.
Remember how you felt during the height of the Covid pandemic when you realized that a million little everyday experiences that you used to be able to participate in without giving them a second thought had suddenly been replaced by something sterile and void of any sentimentality?
Elbow bumps instead of handshakes.
Zoom conferences instead of family get togethers.
Hearing someone's laugh without actually being able to see their smile underneath a paper mask.
That's what my first Sunday at the Ronald McDonald song leader's church near the Air Force Base in Wichita, KS felt like.
A shadow of something holy that in truth was just some sort of processed replica... not *actually* an environment where God's Spirit might make His home.
It made one wish that they'd recognized and held on tighter to the moments in life beforehand where God's Holy Spirit had been authentically (and palpably!) present.
On the drive home from church that day I remembered how in the previous congregation that my family had been a part of that there had been a different musical homage paid to the idea of a river in the service every week.
As a youth who had strongly held on to his contemporary snobbish-ness re: church and what it was supposed to look & sound like, I hadn't appreciated it when it had been there for me to appreciate every Sunday.
It wasn't until I was watching my cousin Karin do a jig inspired by an overactive bladder that I started to fondly recall the weekly event centered around another little girl in the church that we had just departed.
I've tried to hunt her down on social media but to no avail.
Her name was Linda and she used to regale the congregation at Victory Baptist in Haysville by ascending the stairs that went up to the stage and by then singing a song out of a very old hymnal; the kind that had "shaped notes", if that tells you anything!
She usually wore the same frilly little dress every week and she would take her place behind a microphone that had an orange foam topper stretched across it (that made it seem like it was the same size as her head)!
The pastor of that church? He was also their guitarist. And when the tiny, 11 year old Linda took to the stage every week to sing, there was never any doubt what song it was that the congregation was set to hear begin echoing in the body of the acoustic instrument.
The only on-line arrangement of the song that sounds anything like what I remember Linda and the pastor's weekly duet sounding like is here:
To properly insert oneself into the memory I'm referencing, you have to imagine the song slowed down a bit... being played on guitar... with a quiet hush settling in over a congregation of people sitting in wooden pews... as a tiny girl in a faded, homemade dress sings the lyrics with just a hint of twang in her quivering, little voice.
I remember asking Linda once why she always sang THAT song.
She told me.
"My mama used to sing it here a lot before she stopped coming..."
I didn't know a lot about the family's situation but it appeared as though Linda's mom and dad were no longer together and that he was raising Linda, her twin brother and another older daughter.
I wasn't quite old enough to be let in on the details but I remember that when I heard the adults at that church talk about the family that there was some notion of substance abuse... or maybe alcohol... having been a key component in the story.
Once that part of the narrative was known? Well... Linda singing about God's glory traveling every morning on the currents of a river on its way to find her in her hurt was (& still is) one of the most profound auditory experiences of the Holy Spirit I had ever encountered!
I just didn't realize how powerful it was until it wasn't accessible anymore. 😞
And leaving that church - however imperfect it might have otherwise been - and subbing out THAT experience for a new, weekly tradition of watching Ned Flanders mindlessly lead people in what was basically the Hokey Pokey for Southern Baptists; something that touched no one's soul in any way beyond inspiring them to mimic the actions that accompanied a hearty piss was... demoralizing.
It certainly seemed like, in light of what our new weekly church experience was showcasing itself to be, that there may have been a more authentic place to share encounters with God that maybe we'd parted ways with a little too soon.
Like maybe we'd released our grasp on something that, in retrospect, had most definitely been worth holding on to.
The problem that my family faced then and that multiple other families have continued to face since was that "Satan" was just too present and too crafty and too wily.
He was in your television, the books you read, the schools you sent your kids to.
He was at slumber parties and the stories you took with you from said slumber parties to Sunday school the next morning!
He was a genuine threat! He was out to destroy Christians!!
He was the reason you took on a 'better safe than sorry' attitude and bandaged up your fingers at night to make sure you didn't accidentally summon him via a makeshift ouija board (see Part 1 in this series of blogs for more on THAT, lol).
He wasn't stronger than Jesus but he was certainly more accessible and he was all but guaranteed to "get ya" if you weren't constantly making an effort to be in the places where he was NOT.
And that meant even going so far as to leave churches when necessary if too many of your fellow congregants began to demonstrate signs that they'd been seduced by him!
Again, this wasn't just MY family that felt this way and did these things - this was the Christian experience in America during the era in question.
We were Israel and the ever present threat of a destructive Satan was our Midian.
Just like an unsatisfied teenager who knew there was more to God's power than a campfire song at the end of a Sunday service, it was inevitable that during the Midian oppression of Israel similar dissatisfaction would bubble up to the surface in the hearts and minds of that generation's adherents to the faith.
Namely, in the heart and mind of a youth named Gideon.
As stated in "Part 2" of this blog saga, I recognize myself in Gideon as I read about him.
He sees that his kin and countrymen used to live alongside God out in the open; experiencing Him in ways that were demonstrative, big and expansive!
Now?
A bunch of their cousins had rode in on camels and were bullying them - to the extent that they'd retreated into a system of caves!
Gideon keeps hearing his elders in the faith acknowledge God and His dedication to them but their present, shared reality doesn't ring true to those descriptions!
In Judges 6, we hear Gideon's frustration in his words - "If God is with us, why has all that has happened to us happened? Where are all the miracles and wonders that our parents and our grandparents told us about when they said, 'Didn't God deliver us up out of Egypt?'." (Judges 6:13, The Message).
Gideon, in that moment, is expressing himself like Nick sitting on a padded church chair in a sanctuary that boasts an espresso maker in the back next to the table where you pick up your bulletin.
Imagine if Gideon were to have gone to meditate and pray somewhere in close proximity to the Ark of The Covenant and found it had been replaced with a Starbucks barista serving up frappacinos!
It's not that the Holy Spirit can't exist in this environment... it's that we've all decided that we're too timid to let Him!
Or that He's just not tame enough to let out of His cage...
Or that someone might make a "sinful" mistake in the process of inviting Him in and that inadvertently? Satan might come on the scene instead!
What if churches just let the Holy Spirit show up every week and run willy-nilly all over the sanctuary doing whatever He wanted and however He wanted?
Without any regard for decorum or Robert's rules for parliamentary procedure?
We've all collectively decided that if THAT possibility exists then it's better to choose powerlessness than to let oneself intermingle with an ungoverned, spiritual deity; one that might ask us to surrender control of our worship to Him and Who might not value the agenda we feel obligated by tradition to follow.
Ironically, Satan's greatest victory becomes robbing us of the experiences we're meant to have because we think we're letting him in the room anytime the Holy Spirit shows up to do something beautifully chaotic in our midst.
That's the extent to which modern Christianity equates emotive worship with something devious.
How very, very sad.
But eventually a generation rises up who gets tired of playing it safe! Because playing it safe inevitably means living a compromised and watered down existence.
Eventually, there's a Gideon willing to hear God and when God sees that? He becomes willing to interact again. 😊
And I love that even in the story of Gideon, God stays consistently on-theme.
He tells Gideon to gather up an army and go... to a nearby river.
I'm not much of a cartographer. Lol.
But as I've dug through the maps in the back of my Bible and looked at some various visual aids I've encountered online, I can find no reason to believe that the river God tells Gideon to take his troops to couldn't be the same one referenced in Psalm 42 (that Margaret Becker went on to sing about in the 1990s).
As the Psalm that Margaret references in her song states, there is a region that Old Testament characters would have been familiar with where "deep calls unto deep" via the roar of water.
Said region is specified to be somewhere in close proximity to Mount Hermon and Mount Mizar; a place called the Harod Spring.
If you look at Israel on Google Maps, there's a geographical hotspot where these landmarks still exist today and it appears to be the setting for a LOT of Bible stories with a shared theme of communication occurring between mortals and the Divine.
To the west of Mount Hermon (approximately 40 minutes) you have a church built on the alleged site where Mary was told by the angel Gabriel that God was going to impregnate her with Jesus.
To the northeast of that site (approximately 15 minutes BACK towards Mount Hermon), you have a church built on the alleged site where Jesus summoned the deceased Moses and Elijah for a chat during the Transfiguration!
Could this "hot zone" have also been the setting for Gideon's conversation with his angel when God called him to initiate a military advance against the Midianites in the foothills near the Harod Spring?
More importantly, was the river that God instructed Gideon to take his troops to (in order to thin them out) one at which an additional, underrated miracle happened?
An event that would've been talked about in lore passed down to future generations?
One that would've inspired the author of Psalm 42 to describe a method of communication between God and men reliant on sounds audible in nature?
Is this perhaps a historically under-reported channel through which the Holy Spirit used to "baptize" God's chosen people prior to their completion of God ordained tasks and assignments in the Old Testament?
Did it set the stage for a more intimate "baptism" (in the Spirit!) promised and facilitated by the resurrected Christ in the New Testament; one that is still available to us today but that has been largely forgotten and under-used?
My theory? 100 percent, yes. To all of it.
Consistent with Christianity as practiced in America since this country's inception, we have let go of something very much worth having tried to hold on to... and its absence means we suffer the very defeats we so passionately try to avoid in our never-ending quest to *not* encounter Satan; a Satan who we treat as being much more omnipresent than the Christ Who conquered him.
Present day faith has trained us to expect Satan to RSVP to the parties that we invite Jesus to attend.
Why wouldn't Lucifer show up to your shin dig? I mean, "...the world's just getting worse and worse all the time", right?
Doesn't that mean Satan is the party clown on the roster to make an appearance?
And most of the time, don't we sit back and assume the role of punching bag as he storms in, eats all the cake and pops all the balloons?
Absolutely, we do.
And do you know what?
I believe God LETS this happen... over and over... ad nauseum... until we decide we're FED up.
The way I did in 2022 processing my mom's kidney cancer diagnosis and the long wait for the surgery we all hoped would result in its permanent eradication.
The way Gideon did as he processed a cancer-like oppression afflicting his people.
The stories mirror each other in that we both decided God was going to have to come on the scene in a way we hadn't let him before; with His chaotic Holy Spirit playing the part of coordinator - delivering each of our respective miracles on His terms.
Gideon had had an actual angel show up and tell him to begin the process of building an army to conquer Israel's foes.
Me?
I had (somewhat secretly) maintained a practice for a decade or more of praying in an unknown language in order to give the Holy Spirit permission to ask God for things on my behalf that I -in my mere human condition- was not wise enough to know that I was even in need of.
And the result had been that I eventually found my way to a set of circumstances in life - my mom's kidney cancer diagnosis - that made me desperate to know if there was something more I was supposed to seek out from that experience; something that would be of aid to us as a family in bringing about a miracle God might desire to impart to us.
As I investigated, I discovered that "deep calling to deep" was more than just the hookline to a song that had been a CCM favorite of mine growing up.
I began to pay attention to patterns and phrases in my time spent praying in my prayer language and identified one that had become a regular utterance.
"Gashena Mache".
You can refer back to Part 2 of these blogs for the scientific justifications I found to corroborate my theory, but the bottom line is that I became convinced that I had a part to play in responding to my mom's diagnosis.
First and foremost, I was to continue giving the Holy Spirit permission to pray over the matter using me and my faculties in whatever language He desired to do so and secondly? I needed to order my mom some herbal supplements heavy on catnip. Lol.
"God uses the foolish things of the world to shame the wise."
And, yes, I felt more than a little foolish... but every story I had ever heard about anyone receiving a substantive miracle from the Creator had ALSO had an element of people having to risk making themselves look foolish before said miracle was imparted!
David probably looked pretty foolish gathering stones to slay a giant.
Daniel probably looked pretty foolish insisting he wasn't afraid to spend a night in a lion's den.
And Gideon probably looked foolish taking 300 men into battle against the Midianites.
**You knew we were going to make our way back to Gideon eventually, lol**
Here's what I love about the Gideon story.
(I'm sure that this theme is able to be unearthed in other Biblical accounts of miracles being performed on the behalf of entire people groups, as well.)
It becomes apparent as you read through Judges chapter 6 that God isn't letting EVERYBODY in on all of the details.
Just Gideon.
His angel visitation.
His experiments with sheep fleece.
All of that was intimate interplay between the guy who wanted to be the conduit through which a miracle would come to his loved ones and the Supplier of said miracle.
Deep calling to deep.
When it finally comes time for Israel to secure their military victory against Midian, the majority of the folks Gideon is leading into battle are **still** pretty much in the dark about everything.
They are 300 brave souls who Gideon selects from a potential army of 10,000(!) and their only qualification is that they passed a litmus test that they didn't even know was being administered!
God had told Gideon to take all the men desiring to go into battle against Midian and have them line up along the shores of a river; the one we speculated earlier was the same one that the Psalms describe as being a place where God vocalizes things via the sound of rushing water.
Gideon instructs the men to drink from this water.
The ones that scoop the water up with their hands? God says to send them home.
The ones that get down on their stomachs and lap it up with their tongues? God tells Gideon to consider those soldiers the ones he is to lead into battle against Midian. 😊
It strikes me that without the concept of this river being somehow directly affiliated with God and His ACTUAL stream of consciousness that this litmus test is entirely random.
You see, I think that I believe God selected His warriors in this story based on who was willing to demonstrate enough humbleness to immerse as much of themselves as possible in what was actually His running stream of consciousness.
I know that that's intense... but it's an Old Testament miracle story! It's kind of *supposed* to be! Lol.
It's not dignified to get down in the dirt and do a faceplant into river water.
But the immersiveness of the experience? It would be unparalleled!
Meanwhile, those that lack conviction who are barely approaching the water's edge; wishing to remain in control of how much of this water they let themselves sample?
Well.
Those guys are going to experience God in a way comparable to how we used to experience Him week in and week out at the church by the air force base.
In such a small, meaningless & "sing-songy" doses that you may as well not have even bothered.
But here's the good news.
The victory that those 300 men go on to achieve with Gideon leading them?
Everybody gets to benefit from it!
All of Israel is rid of Midian's oppression by the time the story ends. Not just Gideon. Not just his army of 300. But also the rest of the 10,000 who didn't want to get dirty on the banks of the river... and their families! And the people who weren't even there or maybe didn't even know that there was a battle happening that day!
As long as SOMEONE is seeking out a way to immerse themselves in God's Holy Spirit, the miraculous things that come to pass as a result? They get to be shared by every person inside of that individual's clan.
That was something I began to contemplate more as Mom's surgery day approached and as I realized that the seal on the cap of supplements I'd ordered for her likely hadn't even been broken.
Will there still get to be a victory for everyone in the clan, God, even if I fail to get anyone to actually even GO to the damned river?
My internal dialogue that I maintained with God had begun to gravitate back towards lots of prayers prayed in English... and in frustration. Lol.
What was the point of all this, God, if Mom isn't even able to intuit that these supplements are something that would/might benefit her to be taking?
I was Gideon on the banks of the Harod Springs but instead of 10,000 warriors at my disposal (some of whom might be led to put their faces to the water's surface even if others didn't) I had just my mom. Lol.
It's not like there were 299 OTHER renal cell carcinoma patients who might take the supplements if she didn't.
She had to be the one to take them if this was going to work. Right?
"Go on, Mother Dear... face in the water! Drink up!" Lol.
But she hadn't. And it didn't appear that she was going to. And as I mulled it over in my mind and considered telling her the full story behind why I'd ordered these supplements for her to begin taking ahead of her surgery, I was at odds within myself because instinctively I knew that Gideon hadn't told anyone about a mandate to drink from the stream.
In fact, some of the people in Gideon's potential army were eliminated from the roster to go to war before the stream even entered the story!
Often overlooked are verses 1-3 of Judges chapter 7.
Before they even get to the "drinking test", God tells Gideon that "...anyone who is afraid or has any qualms at all may leave and go home."
I don't know a lot about my mom's frame of mind leading up to her surgery to have the carcinoma removed from her kidney but I think it'd be fair to say that she was likely afraid and had her qualms... even while trusting that God had complete authority to handle the situation however He saw fit.
But I wanted her so badly to just instinctively *sense* what was happening with me and the journey I had been on... and yet at the same time? I didn't want to highjack the miracle I felt like God was trying to do!
Nor did I want her to feel pressured to be the vehicle through which I got to lay claim to any big spiritual epiphanies while she was actively trying to conserve energy to fight cancer, lol.
I couldn't help but think - she and I had always been so in sync with one another! Why wasn't that proving to be the case now?!?
It began to feel to me like her qualms may be the precursor to God dismissing her from going to battle... His way of saying she didn't need to concern herself with securing the much sought after freedom from the oppressor in question; the same way He'd dismissed the troops who expressed hesitation in the Gideon story.
And if that happened? Well... then what?!?
It was approximately about a month and a half before Mom's surgery that my partner Zach and I took a trip to Alaska for his 40th birthday.
And it was on that trip that I learned that God's commitment to perform the miracles He promises is sustained even when the instruments you expect Him to use to perform them... or the people you feel convinced have a part to play... aren't anywhere to be found prior to the battle. 😊
I was in bad need of a getaway when the day came for us to board our flight to Fairbanks.
Zach & I were both approximately 3 years into working full time as health care professionals during a global pandemic.
Do you know what that feels like? Lol.
It felt like we'd been just pummeled repeatedly by a thousand or more days worth of some of the highest stress situations either of us had ever seen in our professional working lives (him more so than me!).
I was beginning to get so frustrated both with the never-ending wait for my mom's surgery day and also with the anxiety induced by not knowing if the tumor on her kidney was actually growing in size!
I dreaded the possibility that it was spreading elsewhere in her body as we waited for it to be removed!
I would sooner have just gone through it myself than to have had to wait helplessly like that.
Add to that my frustration with God over the whole thing!
It truly felt like He was content to abstain from impressing upon my mom the potential for a miracle the way He had taken the time to impress it upon me!
I continued to imagine Gideon and what would've happened if he'd led his 10,000 troops to the banks of the river and instructed them to drink; having decided in his heart to go into battle with ONLY the men who laid down flat to put their face directly into the river water.
What if not a single one of them had?
I wonder if that would have had the same impact on Gideon's faith that it was having on mine?
Would Gideon have felt "led on by God" the same way I was feeling led on by Him?
Would He have felt like God had merely been TEASING him with the possibility of a miracle?
Every passing day mom's tumor arguably was growing in size and the thing that very might well be the key to sustaining her until surgery day sat in an unopened bottle on their dining room table!
Did God find that humorous?
To put me through that particular sort of existential crisis...
To make me literally have questioned my sanity, lol, over having hoped for an Old Testament style miracle?
Could there have been a victory for Gideon to secure over Midian if none of the men had drank from the stream where deep called to deep?
And could there be a positive outcome where my mom's health was concerned if she never took the supplements that I was *so* certain I'd been repeatedly saying the name of in a previously untranslated prayer?
Both Zach and I had been through so much since the end of 2019... and we'd both seen so much reality untethered from anything that resembled beauty or redemption.
I was ready to go on this trip with him, permit myself to forget about all of it for a week and just see some unadulterated magnificence courtesy of Mother Nature in one of her most famed galleries... Alaska.
But when we got there?
More disappointment.
Did you know that it's highly unusual to be able to see even a HINT of the Aurora Borealis with the naked eye?
Most of the time when it's on full display, it appears as only a barely visible, milky colored fog high up in the sky.
All the greens and pinks and purples that a person normally associates with the Aurora? Yeah.
Those hues are most typically the result of camera equipment able to capture electromagnetic particles exploding so quickly in the atmosphere that your naked eye can't perceive it.
Every National Geographic cover photo you've ever seen of those neon lights shining in the sky is an elaborate misrepresentation of the experience itself when you're actually there on the ground.
So that picture that I posted as the introductory image in this blog?
Zach and I saw absolutely NONE of that with our own two eyes.
It wasn't something that he even realized we'd captured on film until we had spent an hour or so outside in the cold taking endless photos of black nothingness along with other "Aurora Hunters" in the hours after midnight at our resort.
I wanted to find some humor in it but after traveling all the way to Alaska to see something miraculous and beautiful and being met instead with a let down?
It made me bitter.
It felt like a metaphor for what might be about to happen with my mom!
It made me feel like nothing in life could be trusted to be as advertised anymore.
It made me feel like disappointment was always going to be inevitable no matter how much I hoped otherwise... and no matter how hard I tried to offer myself up as a person who could be counted on to conjure up faith that something good was in store.
Maybe no matter how faithful you are to bandage up your fingers, modern day Christianity was RIGHT in its approach!
Maybe contemporary Christianity was nothing more than mass producing punching bags for Satan.
Maybe the world really WAS "getting worse and worse all the time" and there was no such thing as a happy ending to participate in until Jesus returned to rapture us all away to heaven.
Maybe all the beauty and all the miracles belonged to eras already gone by and there were none left for me; no matter how hard I had worked at trying to believe both had inserted themselves in a situation where I desperately needed them to be of impact.
Maybe I ought to just let go of the things I had let myself become convinced were "worth holding onto" from some other era of Christian history.
Just take whatever lumps the devil had in store.
No pretty colors in the sky... no men prostrating themselves to drink from God's stream... no hidden meanings to prayers prayed in other languages.
Just defeat. Over and over again. Forever.
In another few weeks, on April 9th, we're going to be celebrating what is, unequivocally, the cornerstone holiday for adherents to the Christian faith.
Easter.
🐇
I can't help but smile as I realize that during that trip to Alaska - even though we hadn't even celebrated Thanksgiving yet! - the God Who performed the Easter miracle 2000-some odd years ago was about to remind me that He was the indisputed master of back up plans. 😊
Zach and I were trying to get the most out of our trip to Alaska as possible.
We did some caretaking of a couple of reindeer at a wilderness collective, drove to Denali National Park, soaked in some natural hot springs and even got to do a wagon ride incorporating some actual sled dogs!
And we also visited the Museum of The North.
I was in a frame of mind during that museum visit that I'd definitely describe as a "funk". Lol
I had kind of let myself wander off on my own as I tend to do at museums when I visit them.
Whereas Zach likes to take his time and look at each exhibit in depth as he encounters it, I like to almost rush through and do a preliminary inspection of everything and then go back and revisit the stuff I think is worth spending additional time looking at.
So I was wandering rather aimlessly and made my way onto an elevator going up to the museum's second floor.
Upon exiting, I walked almost smack dab into this sign posted outside of a room housing the next exhibit.
If you can't make out all the words, I'll do my best to try to explain.
The sign was advertising an immersive experience that was serving as one of the museum's signature exhibits; something called The Place Where You Go To Listen.
Remember how I had said we'd been disappointed to discover that the brilliant colors produced by the Aurora Borealis were often only visible in photographs?
And how the reason was because the Aurora itself was something that happened so fast that it couldn't be detected by the human eye?
Well, this exhibit at The Museum Of The North had been curated by a musical composer named John Luther Adams who had had a realization about the Aurora.
Adams had theorized that if electromagnetic particles could cause beautiful VISUAL stimuli to occur as they exploded in the atmosphere, that they could likely also produce beautiful AUDIO stimuli!
Adams had programmed what was basically a highly sophisticated synthesizer to use sonic listening equipment to detect sounds produced by the Aurora outside of our ability to hear... The synthesizer then filtered them through it's instrument panel and played them over loudspeakers inside of the exhibit.
Additionally, Adams (in his brilliance!) had also been able to make other sounds occurring in the Alaskan ecosystem audible using the same methodology... the sounds of light penetrating through the atmosphere both during the day and night and also of tectonic plate shifts.
Noises that no ear but God's had ever been able to perceive before!
I was flabbergasted by the awesomeness of it... and humbled to be in the presence of something so beautiful!
And as I lingered there in The Place Where You Go To Listen, I realized that this may not be Israel but it was without a doubt someplace where deep called unto deep.
In fact, I felt my knees practically buckle as I remembered the rest of the verse from Psalms that talked about what I had come to regard as an invitation to immerse oneself in God's running stream of consciousness.
It wasn't an experience that was entirely dependent on finding water and drinking of it in a way that indicated readiness to go to battle against your foes!
Communing with God in prep for a miracle?
It had a second component!
Because as the Psalmist had noted (& as I had overlooked until just now!) not only does deep call to deep inside the roar of water but also, "...At night His song is with me - a prayer to the God of my life."
Night songs and night prayers were a medium through which a powerful, spiritual reality could be embraced too...
And here I was alone in this room where the Aurora from the night before was not only playing me a melody(!) but inviting me to add my prayers in my own, unique prayer language as accompaniment to the symphony.
And so I did.
Zach had caught up to me by this point and had been in the room marveling with me at the ingenuity that had gone into creating such an experience!
We had started to exit as I was just finishing putting all of this together mentally and connecting the dots and we were no sooner on the other side of the door than I realized... I needed Zach to stand guard outside the exhibit while I went back in to "lap from the stream" ahead of Mom's kidney surgery. 😊
She may not have realized the potential for a miracle by taking some supplements I'd been praying about in Bulgarian, lol, but here in this bizarre and beautiful sanctuary inside an Alaskan museum? I was realizing the potential for an alternate route for that miracle to come to us! And I planned on making the most of it.
I had no idea that I was going to be sharing this footage in this blog post the day that I recorded it.
In fact, lol, it took a big infusion of courage to even share it with Zach after it happened but I figured he deserved to know what it was that had happened inside the room that he had been posted outside to play guard for me. Lol.
I have no idea what the words I was singing in this clip meant and I haven't bothered to investigate it.
Just like I'd done so many other times, I entered into a time of prayer in an unknown language merely content and trusting that what the Holy Spirit was talking to God about while using my mouth and my voice was in my best interest and beyond that? None of my business.
Will the day ever come where I attempt to find out if the words of this prayer actually meant anything relevant to the situation I was wanting them to apply themselves towards?
Maybe.
I'm not ruling it out.
But for now I'm just sharing it as documentation that all this really did happen and that I believe my mom coming through surgery to have what the surgeon described as a "100% removal of all cancerous tissue" might have (at least in some small way!) had something to do with what transpired here.
I felt like I had my answer.
If no one had applied the proper, God-ordained technique to drink from the Harod Spring when Gideon was trying to select soldiers?
That wouldn't have meant the chance for a miracle had been missed.
And if *I* couldn't send my mom into surgery to remove renal cell carcinoma having realized the significance of taking some random, herbal supplement I'd become convinced was of importance?
That wouldn't be a missed chance for a miracle either.
The miracle, as it turns out, was realizing that my faith moving forward was supposed to be about ME accepting the invitation to participate in whatever weird and beautiful thing God extended an invitation to me to participate in.
It was about learning to consent to that river of life springing up inside of you... "within your soul, making you whole..." as the sing-songy church anthem from my days at the Ned Flanders church near the air force base had referenced.
You need to be acquainted with how to tap into those experiences for those times in life where your soul needs a drink, as it turns out.
I remember the first words mom said to me after she came out of surgery a few days before Thanksgiving 2022.
She was groggy and in a daze as I asked her, "Mom, how are you doing? Do you need anything?"
"I'm thirsty," she said.
And I almost had to laugh!
"I'll bring you some water," I told her.
Gashena Mache.
I had learned how to access the stuff that could be counted on to quench. 😊
