“There’s Not a Thing You Can Do About It”

Last Thursday, I flew to San Antonio to meet up with the editorial staff of The High Calling. We gathered in Kerrville (about an hour west) and then had dinner in the town of Hunt, Texas, before going on to Laity Lodge.

We had meetings (more on that tomorrow), and then joined with a group from Westlake Presbyterian Church in Austin for a series of devotions, messages, music and a Eucharist service. The speaker for the weekend was Robert Mulholland, a retired professor from Asbury Theological Seminary in Maine. Through a series of four messages, he spoke quietly and forcefully about “the false self.”

I paid close attention to what he had to say, because I was livetweeting it for The High Calling. (If you want to see the stream of tweets, search for the #THCretreat hashtag on Twitter.) At several points, I was both tweeting and taking notes, and once I simply stopped to listen and concentrate.

And this is what I wrote:

“God loves you,” Mulholland said, “and there’s not a thing you can do about it.” The issue is always, always God’s steadfast love, he said; God maintains relationship even when we break it.

I wrote that statement, and then wrote this short poem next to it:

I carried a stone, rubbing

its rough edges smooth,

chipping away all points

of sharpness until it fit

in my palm with no abrasion,

no roughness,

heart-shaped.

In The Pursuit of God, A.W. Tozer says this: “God was our original habitat and our hearts cannot but feel at home when they enter again that ancient and beautiful abode.”

Listening to Mulholland in a place like Laity Lodge evokes a sense of “coming home,” of finding that home again.

I think I am that stone in my poem.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading Tozer’s The Pursuit of God. Today we finish our discussion of chapter 8, “Restoring the Creator-creature relation.” To see more posts on this chapter, please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact.