Soul Revival February

From Elijah’s answer to God’s question, he must have been feeling pretty lonely. Some of it was his own fault; I mean he is the one who left his servant behind (1 Kings 19:3). The other part of his loneliness was a misconception that he was the only Israelite left who had not bowed down to another god or been killed. I can’t imagine walking for forty days and nights just thinking about how lonely I was and how miserable my life had become. However, I can relate with Elijah in some ways. I often feel alone, and it is also my own fault. I am horrible at relationships. I would have asked my servant to stay behind too, mostly because I wouldn’t have wanted to try to think of what to talk to him about for forty days and nights.


Crazy enough, God has been challenging me in this area of my life recently as well. I told Katie that I was deeming this month “Soul Revival February.” I have been getting into my Bible, praying, reading Streams in the Dessert each day and digging into to the book Reaching Out, by Henri Nouwen. To say God has been changing the way I look at the relationships I have with the people around me is an understatement. He has been creating major shifts in thinking that have rattled my entire framework of interacting with people. He has been working to break down barriers to meaningful relationships that I have had in my mind longer than I can remember.

I am anti-social. I have never really been able to put my finger on why I am anti-social, but I know that I am. The awkwardness of meeting new people scares me like airplane bathrooms scare a person with claustrophobia. This fear comes from my desire to find some easy overlap between my life and the person I am meeting. When this overlap does not come easy, I lose all ability to relate.

Let me try to make this clearer than the thoughts in my head. I am not that in to sports, I don’t really like the outdoors all that much and, for all of you John Eldredge fans, I am not “wild at heart.” So, I fear conversations with men because according to Eldredge, and most of the church, I may be living in sin if I don’t want to climb mountains and kill animals. Without this immediate connection, I fear being unable to build a meaningful relationship.

For all of my life I have placed the blame for me being bad at making friends on everyone else. Nouwen said, “Hey Jordan, maybe you are the problem.” I said, “No way…but since it Soul Revival February I will hear you out.”

Reaching Out discusses three spiritual movements, but I have really seen the book so far as a guide to relationships. The first epiphany is that I have no right to expect anybody to be anybody but themselves. We claim to be a very individualistic society, but at the same time expect others to be very similar to ourselves. At least I do. When I find out they are different, I don’t know how to relate and I leave them behind like the servant. Nouwen says,

“We can strengthen each other by mutual respect, by careful consideration of each other’s individuality, by an obedient distance from each other’s privacy and by a reverent understanding of the sacredness of the human heart.”

Wow, so Nouwen is saying that the beauty of relationships is not the overlap of our lives. The beauty is in the differences, that vast space between us, that we must cross to be in relationships. That gap that I run from in fear is the space where God is present, and I have been avoiding it all my life. Try to imagine a sphere of water, like earth. On the sphere is a bunch of floating islands, all unique besides that fact that they are all floating in the same water. The water represents God’s presence and the islands represent us. In order to build relationship we have to cross this huge expanse of water that is frightening. There are crashing waves, and who-knows-what kind of creatures lurking in the deep waters, but when we reach the other island we understand ourselves, God and each other in ways that can change our lives.

When I can begin to see others as wholly separate from myself, but basking in the same presence of God, I can no longer run in fear. I have to run in faith towards God’s presence, and towards relationship with others. Elijah feared that he was the last person to be in the presence of God, but God showed him that there were still Israelites who were faithful to Him. The thing about Jesus is that His life abolished the fear of no one else being in His presence. Being in relationship with Him is no longer set aside for the Israelites, but is open to us all.

Being in relationship with others is so important to our walk with God. Nouwen asks the question, how would life have been different if the widow would have refused a relationship with Elijah (1 Kings 17:7-24)? I mean, no one would have faulted her. He probably looked like a scary homeless man, and he was asking for the last of her food and water. However, if she wouldn’t have entered that relationship in faith, her and her son may have starved to death, and even if they had survived, her son would have died from illness. How much easier should it be for me to enter in to a relationship with someone who I just feel like I wouldn’t relate to very well? How much easier should it be for me to have faith that God can do His best work through relationships with people who are completely different from me? There may be rough waters, people may still annoy me most of the time, but when we meet in the presence of God there is only room for growth.