by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Weekly Devotional
Keith, I’ve been praying on a regular basis with a sense that God is more “real” since I made a conscious decision to turn my entire life over to God. But very recently I’ve been distracted fairly often, and I fear that the sense of closeness and intimacy may have been only short term honeymoon type feeling. Has this been something you’ve experienced?
I was nervous waiting outside the hotel room for my appointment with Dr. Benton, who was conducting a series of seminars at our church. Finally, my turn came.
“I pray regularly,” I told him, “but so much of the time I don’t feel that God hears me. Not only that, but I don’t feel anything much, even when I tell Him I love Him. To pray at times like that seems insincere.”
As we talked, I confessed that frequently I didn’t feel anything during the communion service either.
The minister leaned back in his chair and thought a minute.
“Are you married?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Do you kiss your wife as you go out the door on the way to work?”
“Yes,” I smiled. “Every day.”
“Does it give you a great feeling of love every time you kiss her at the doorway?”
“Oh no,” I said, laughing. “If it did, I’d never make it to work!”
He smiled, and I went on. “I admit that sometimes I couldn’t even remember whether I had kissed her or not by the time I got to the office.” Dr. Benton identified with my experience, but said that occasionally when he kissed his wife, he was overwhelmed by how much she meant to him as a person. All of those kisses at the door were threads, weaving the fabric of their daily lives into the kind of relationship in which great feelings of love could be experienced naturally and fully when they came. As a Christian, Dr. Benton said that he felt the same way about habits of prayer and worship. Sometimes he did not sense much substance in his feelings for God during his private prayers or at the communion rail, but at other times he was almost overcome by feelings of hope and gratitude to God for His love, acceptance, and for giving him meaning and purpose for his life.
As I was going down the elevator, I could not help smiling when I thought if his analogy about marriage. I began to recall some of the “little things” about being married: the “accidental” touching of our hands in a church pew, and laughing about all the hamburgers and tuna fish salad we had to eat when we were first married, or even the agony of worrying together about a sick child. And I saw that Dr. Benton was right: a deep, loving relationship is woven out of a good many mundane responses which do not feel like love at all . . . at the time.
. . . this fervour is especially characteristic of beginners, and its drying up should be welcomed as a sign that we are getting beyond the first stages. To try to retain it, or to long for its return in the midst of dryness, is to refuse to grow up. It is to refuse the Cross. By our steady adherence to God when the affections are dried up, and nothing is left but the naked will clinging blindly to Him, the soul is purged of self-regard and trained in pure love.
H.A. Hodges, As quoted in Unseen Warfare
Lord, help me to need You and want You so consciously and continually that I will turn to You regardless of my religious feelings. Help me to be willing to walk into the problems of today representing You . . . even though I must go without the certainty of a bag of pat answers or perhaps even without any feeling of Your being with me. But so often I am afraid to take real risks without the sense of Your presence. I guess I am praying for faith, Lord, so that I can act on the reality of Your love. . . even when I cannot “see” it with my senses.
And what is faith? Faith gives substance to our hopes, and makes us certain of realities we do not see.
Hebrews 11:1 NEB
by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Weekly Devotional
I’ve recently gotten a promotion and have been traveling and doing presentations to the executives in some of the branch offices of the company I work for, and I’ve come home very excited. But my wife pours cold water on what I’m sharing by barely even listening to me or telling me she’s in the middle of something important. I feel discounted and like she’s bored and not even interested in my succeeding. It’s like she isn’t interested in me anymore. Can you help me with this?
Years ago I came home from a speaking trip very excited about the audience’s response to what I was saying. “You don’t listen to me anymore!” I blurted out, right in the middle of a sentence I was “delivering.”
“Why, I do too,” my wife answered in what seemed like genuine surprise.
But I did not believe her. After a week of traveling on a speaking trip, I am usually a highly tuned listener to individuals with whom I have been counseling. And I can usually spot it when someone is not paying attention to what I am saying. When I had first started traveling, my wife had been anxious to hear how things had gone and had pumped me for details about each trip as soon as I got home. Often I had not felt like “replaying” the meeting, but she had wanted to hear, so I had told her about it.
But now something had happened. She still asked about the trips, but then seemed to get diverted by almost any kind of interruption, often just as I was getting into something which was very exciting to me. This really bugged me, and I would get furious. If she didn’t want to listen, then why did she ask… and then not pay attention? Maybe she was getting bored with me. After all, we had been married over fifteen years.
Anyway, I was furious when this happened one day. I had just come home from a seven-day trip. The two meetings I had attended were made up of very sharp couples. Although many of the people did not agree with some of the things I was saying and doing, they gave me the great compliment of listening to me. In counseling sessions and social visits between larger meetings, people who came to see me could not have been more attentive, and I was conscious of being very open and receptive to each of them.
But when I got home, here was this seeming indifference. Being a neurotic, I conjured up reasons for my wife’s behavior, all of which boiled down to the facts that (1) she was not interested in that which I was doing and (2) she was not interested in me any more. After a couple of hours of unexplained resentment and cutting remarks—which had the desired effects of making us both miserable—I let my problem out in the open.
Following the initial expression of feelings back and forth, we began to talk about what had happened. And being so mad at her, I had a hard time hearing what she was saying. But one thing echoed in my mind as I drove toward the office later: “When you come home from these speaking trips you act like a spoiled king!”
That hurt! Particularly because I had the sneaking feeling it just might be true. But until she said those words, it had not occurred to me that my behavior and attitudes about myself and what I was doing had changed. I was now associating with very attractive and successful men and women about our age while she was stuck at home taking care of three little girls.
As I thought about this, I wondered how many lay speakers, ministers, doctors, bank presidents begin unconsciously to behave like spoiled kings and queens without even knowing it is happening. I wondered how many other men and women begin unconsciously to expect their mates and families to hang on their words and attend to their needs with the same speed and solicitousness their hosts at meetings or their secretaries do? I started not to write this because it is difficult for me to accept this about myself. Since I consciously want it not to be true, I would like to deny it to myself, and especially to you. But I am afraid it is true.
I realized that one of the things which makes it so bad—and I think may even exaggerate it in the eyes of a husband or wife—is the fact that important unshared experiences often separate people. That is, when I have been off to a stimulating seminar alone, I often make the mistake of coming home and very excitedly telling my wife about a “fantastic place” or person or group which has changed my life. In one sense she is glad. But in another sense, the experience she did not share separates us, because I am implying that I am “going on” away from her due to what happened to me. And since she was not present, there is an implication that I am leaving her behind—or perhaps an unconscious fear on her part that I might—even though that is not what I am saying and thinking.
But if I am really honest I must tell you that my demands for my wife’s total attention on demand has been more about my own feeling that I am not lovable. And it’s only been as I’ve decided to surrender the results of my actions to God and trust Him with my life and relationships that I have felt loved by the people close to me.
All this does not mean that I am suddenly going to quit talking about trips and conferences when I come home. That would really cause problems. But I am going to attempt to be more thoughtful concerning the way I talk about them. I hope I will not forget to find out first what has been going on at home to laugh or cry about while I have been away and to tell my wife how grateful I am for her and all she does for me. And I am going to try not to expect a busy, involved woman to suddenly stop the world in which she has been operating alone for a week to cheer at my recital of the great time I have had (away from home responsibilities) as as “honored guest” somewhere.
“There is in the human heart an inexhaustible need to be loved, and a continual fear of not being loved. Consequently, in all our relations and in all our activities we look for proof of love from the other person. …we seek others’ reassurance. Those who doubt their own worth have a particularly insatiable desire for marks of affection because they just as continually doubt that others could love them.” – Escape from Loneliness, Paul Tournier
Lord, forgive me for my self-centered blindness to my own insensitivity and to my own doubts about being lovable. Give me the insight to see the effect of my real behavior on other people and on You. And then, Lord, please give me the courage and strength to trust your love and confess my sin and change my actions. Thank You, God, that You are in the life-changing business. In Jesus’ name, amen.
You’re blessed when you care: in the moment of being ‘care-full’ you find yourself cared for.”
Matt. 5:7 THE MESSAGE
by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Weekly Devotional
Keith, over the years you have said in a number of different ways that God uses stories to change our lives in specific and deep ways. Can you give a specific example of your hearing a story told by someone you did not know that changed your life in a specific and significant way (as Jesus’ stories evidently did in his listeners lives)?
That’s a very good question.After almost 50 years of listening for the truth in stories, I am deeply touched more and more often with stories people tell about their own lives.
Here’s a recent example. On the final evening of a large conference I attended a man in his 40s spoke about how he became a Christian. He was an award winning writer from a very famous and artistic family, whose actor-father had captured the hearts of America with roles he had played on two of the most watched TV series of all time.
The young man had wonderful memories of his early childhood—especially about his father. When his father came home he would spend a lot of time talking to him, being silly with him, and giving him lots of hugs and kisses. The man speaking to us said, “My dad meant everything to me. Everyone loved him. In fact looking back, I can see that he was my god.”
Then one day when the boy ran in from school, his red-eyed uncle met him at the door, saying, “Something terrible has happened. Your dad has left, and your mother’s upstairs crying. She needs you.”
He went into his mother’s room to find a weeping, broken woman.
The man at the podium before us was obviously recalling that moment, and the surprise on his face was still present. Since his parents had never fought in front of him, he had no idea their marriage was in trouble.
He then described how he slipped into the drug and alcohol life of many of the children of wealthy families in Hollywood. Finally, one night he totaled a fine car his father had bought him when he was old enough to drive. To console him for wrecking his own car, his father gave him his Lamborghini sports car—evidently an example of the way the father dealt with the vacuum in the boy’s life.
Then that young man told us with unforgettable sadness that his daddy had died, and they had never been reconciled.
The story continued, but my heart was suddenly torn in two. It was no longer the heart-break in the speaker’s life that was so agonizing to me. A door had quietly swung open in the basement of my own heart as he told us that his recurring memory still was of when he was very young, and his dad held his hand and laughed as they went to the studio. He shook his head and said something to the effect of, “He just didn’t get it that the extravagant gifts were not even in the same playing field as the grief I was experiencing, as I disappeared into the world of alcohol and addiction for several years.”
The speaker moved on to tell about a woman who worked for his mother. She kept urging his mother to go to church, and eventually she had gone. And much later he had more reluctantly gotten talked into going with them, and finally got converted.
But I can’t tell you the details of how that happened, because from the moment he spoke of walking proudly down the street with his father when he was a small child I had begun to cry, struggling to hold in deeper sobs. I was caught completely by surprise. I guess I was surprised because my children were almost grown when I left home and got a divorce, over thirty years ago. And I hadn’t realized how theirchildhood memories would be affected. For years I had tried to apologize and make amends to them, but I could tell that they knew something was still terribly wrong with me.
That night God used that simple story to break through my entrenched defenses. And I understood for the first time in the thirty-plus years something more about what had happened in our family. I had forgotten that hundreds of people who read my books responded to my writing and speaking with love and gratitude as if I were some sort of movie star or great athlete. And I realized in agony that in my children’s eyes I had been as much of a celebrity as the speaker’s father had been to his audience. But it was that picture of father and son holding hands that got through my defenses and denial, and broke my heart.
I saw that it was not that what I had done was unforgiveable to grown daughters—many people get divorces that are horrible. I saw that my leaving had shattered the memories of the only childhood life they had, memories of a father who had loved them. It wasn’t that I had been an awful father when my children were young; it was that when I left, the memories of the life we had known together were damaged irreparably.
Later that night, away from the crowd, I could not stop crying as gut-wrenching grief enveloped me, and I sat again in agony on the edge of despair. I realized to the bottom of my heart the enormity of my Sin, and that there was nothing I could ever do to “make it right” for my own daughters. But after a while I was filled with a deep gratitude, that even if I could not change the past, I had been given the gift of experiencing the reality and depth of my Sin and self-centeredness, and could turn to God as I had heard that night’s speaker tell about the pain that had driven him into the arms of a loving Father—who will never desert him.
I realized that my Sin had done the same thing for me that his grief had done for him, and I prayed that my children’s grief and anger had done it for them too.
What is that worth? What is the truth worth—that our sins and failures can lead us beyond our irreparable pasts to a new and deeper life with God?
I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ve learned that not all Christian stories that have changed my life—and helped me grow up and be more responsible—are happy ending stories in the usual sense. But even though I will never get over the effects of my actions, and I cannot undo the harm I have done, I do believe that God can forgive me. And I know that God can use simple stories like this one to give me a far deeper and more transforming resolve to live the rest of my days as a more honest and loyal child of God… and father to my own children.
“…I tell stories to create readiness, to nudge people toward receptive insight. In their present state they can stare till doomsday and not see it, listen till they’re blue in the face and not get it.
(Matt. 13:13,The Message)
“It is through the pain of confronting and resolving problems that we learn. As Benjamin Franklin said, ‘Those things that hurt, instruct.’”
(The Road Less Traveledby M. Scott Peck, p.16)
“What we need to know…is that there is a God right here in the thick of our day-by-day lives who may not be writing messages about himself in the stars, but who in one way or another is trying to get messages through our blindness as we move around down here knee deep in the fragrant muck and misery and marvel of the world.”
(The Magnificent Defeatby Frederich Buechner, p. 47)
Dear Lord: Thank you that you continue to give us direction, insight and hope—even through our worst failures and sins. Thank you that you have set up ways that we can confess our sins to one another and pray for each other, so that we can live together more whole and healthy, become more honest and loving, and grow closer to you and the other members of your family. In Jesus’ name, amen.
by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Weekly Devotional
Keith, I am dancing around the decision of committing as much of my life as I can to as much of God in Christ as I can understand. I’ve been told that this is an intellectually honest way to move into a life with God in the center. But my question is: does that mean I’m putting on intellectual blinders or castrating the investigation of new aspects of reality as these come to my attention?
For a long time the notion of making a “total commitment to Christ” seemed like a kind of intellectual suicide to me. In some vague way I had gotten the idea that such a commitment would lead to a narrow, fragmented intellectual life made up of “religious” thoughts, books, and conversations on one hand, and “non-religious” ones on the other. I guess my sense of loyalty made me feel that once I “joined” Christ, I could never again question his existence or his way of life. Since I felt that I would be obligated to think “Christian thoughts,” I believed that my mind could not roam in new fields and seek new truths with the freedom to examine anything—a freedom which is very important to me.
However, in the act of offering as much of my life as I could at a particular time to as much of Christ as I could grasp at that moment, I began to learn some fascinating things about the intellectual effects of trying to make a serious surrender of one’s future to God.
I am discovering that in trying to find God’s will and the shape of the Christian life I have begun an adventure so great that its total completion will always be ahead. And this has had a unifying effect on my intellectual life that I had not counted on at all. Years ago the Harvard psychologist Gordon Allport pointed out that the striving for a goal beyond one’s reach is thought by many psychologists to be the greatest power for unifying the diverse elements in a personality structure(1). Certainly this has seemed to be true in many of the developmental stages of my life.
As an adolescent, for instance, the overriding purpose of playing basketball affected every part of my living: what I ate, what I drank, how much I slept, and how I did my studies.
My whole life was ordered by my desire to play basketball well during high school. I did many other things, but having a single dominant incentive gave me a way to establish my priorities and unify my life during a period that could have been very fragmented. As it turned out, the goal of being a great “all American” player was beyond my reach. But this only made the unifying effect continue as I played. Because, as Allport pointed out, the achieving of a goal is often not nearly as unifying as the pilgrimage in search of it. For instance, the Allies were much more unified in fighting the Second World War than when we had won it and should truly have had unity.
In trying to commit my life to finding and participating in some of the purposes of Christ, as I can determine them, my energies and abilities are gradually being focused and are working together. I have a point of reference for my learning: what does a book or a new experience in a different field have to say about the world and life as Christ presented them? I have a hypothesis which I can test in all areas of thought and relationship. And I sometimes experience a freedom to experiment with and challenge old methods and patterns of teaching the Christian message.
But at other times I push away from God and want to be rich or famous. On such days I have two or more different dominant goals. And I gradually begin to feel split and torn in my attempts to focus all my energies on one or the other. Many times I want to be God’s person but want more to be a famous writer someday. And I get caught in a real conflict of motives . . . until I begin again and make a primary commitment of my whole future happiness to Christ—whatever the outcome may be with regard to my other dominant goals. Often following such a commitment, I find that paradoxically I am free to work at my secondary purposes more honestly and creatively, because my ultimate happiness does not depend on succeeding there anymore.
It seems that so many young people today are feeling disintegrated in their lives. They appear to be searching for something, a unifying adventure that will bring into a single focus all of their abilities and energies. I guess I am projecting my own experience on them, because that is what I was looking for all my life: an adventure with a meaning and purpose beyond my grasp—a hypothesis with which to integrate all truths. I guess if I were a professor, I would go and tell them what a relief it is to have found such a unifying adventure in the Christian life . . . because it is.
The staking of a [overall] goal compels the unity of the personality in that it draws the stream of all spiritual activity into its definite direction.
Alfred Adler
Psychologies of 1930 (2)
Of course education never is complete, and the process of integration extends throughout life; but that is its fundamental purpose—that out of the chaos which we are at birth order may be fashioned, and from being many we may become one.
William Temple
Nature, Man and God (3)
Lord, help me to realize fully the paradoxical freedom that is found through trying to commit all of life to you. Sometimes I am amazed that this commitment has issued in creativity and a freedom to look in all areas for truth, when I had thought it would mean a narrower, restricted intellectual life. Sometimes at first as I read philosophy and psychology, I was afraid I might find out that you are not real. But I thank you that it is through the strength which comes in this relationship with you that I find the courage to examine even the evidence which might destroy my faith. I find that as I continue to pray,
read the scriptures and join Jesus in loving the Father and his other children—on the adventure of learning about God in all aspects of Reality.
“Jesus then said to the Jews who had believed in him, ‘If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.’”
Jesus
1 Gordon Allport, Pattern and Growth in Personality
2 Alfred Adler, Psychologies of 1930, ed. Carl Murchison (Worcester, MA: Clark University Press, 1930); see chapter 21, “Individual Psychology.”
3 William Temple, Nature, Man and god (New York: The Macmillan company, 1956), 233.
