Oh Help! This is Me!
In Chapter 5 of Holiness Truth and the Presence of God, Francis writes about how some people are overwhelmed when they grasp a bite of God’s truth and want to run away or push Him away. On the other hand, some people react like me,
Barely do we glimpse the truth before we are boasting to others of what we now know, as though knowing a truth were the same as living it! …But the Holy Spirit reveals Christ to neither overwhelm us nor to inflate our egos. The ultimate purpose behind most revelation is that what we behold, we are to become. For as we behold the glory of the Lord, it is mirrored onto our hearts and, in Pauls words, we are “transformed into the same image” (2Cor. 3:18)
He explains,
To possess the Kingdom, therefore, requires attitudes that are uncommon to most Christians. We must not allow ourselves the false comfort that comes with a new layer of religious information. Let us grasp that the revelation of Christ, once seen, is the swinging open of a door God calls us to enter.
So hello, Patsy, it’s just the beginning of the next step verses thinking that I have arrived at a new spot and can celebrate. It’s been like someone showing me a map of a wonderful, and probably difficult trip that I’m going to take and instead of packing and heading out, I start jumping up and down, rejoicing (even boasting), “Yay! I did it! I did it! And,” (what’s even worse) “you should do it, too!”
In another place he sums up the journey the best way I’ve heard yet,
Our salvation begins with seeing the Kingdom and expands to entering it (emphasis mine).
He leaves me with these words of exhortation,
…the price to actually travel to that country, to taste its water and breathe its air, far exceeds the price of merely reading of its beauty in a book…
No kidding. Aye, aye, aye, Lord, please help my modern soul…