For those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God – Romans 8:14

According to Thomas Merton¹ (1915-1968), humanity’s purpose in life is to discover meaning and live according to it. We’re each wrestling with the dissonance between what our lives project, and what our inner longings tell us are true.

“The first responsibility of a person of faith is to make their faith really a part of their life, not by rationalizing it but by living it” (1978, XIV). This living into our faith, materializing it in the world, is a participatory experience within God’s own Trinitarian Personhood. The Father, Son, and Spirit united perfectly in holy, divesting love, have created us for fellowship. In this way, says Merton, “We do not exist for ourselves alone”… and by understanding this reality, we can love ourselves and others properly.

Love, as a grand theme, is the key to resolving our inner conflicts. To experience God’s inner realities of perfect acceptance and affirmation invites us into God’s reality, a reality that supersedes the present. “Infinite sharing is the law of god’s inner life,” he says. But he challenges our concepts of love by insisting that the giving of God’s kind of love, is where true liberty and humanity’s contentment are found.

“Happiness that is sought for ourselves alone can never be found: for a happiness that is diminished by being shared is not big enough to make us happy…. true happiness is found in unselfish love, a love which increases as it’s shared.“

In sharing in God’s love, we ultimately satisfy our deepest longings. Many of us love for the results of love, the effects of love that reverberate back to us. This, according to Merton, is a kind of “hidden moral tyranny” and an ultimately self-centered act. This sort of charity for the sake of the giver is far from God’s love. It may look like we’ve performed a loving act, and even be characterized as a loving person, but if we are seeking the effects of the love we’ve given rather than simply expressing the beauty of love from which we have been loved, according to Merton, we’ve failed to participate in God’s inner life.

“In disinterested activity, we best fulfill our capacities to act and be.”

To be disinterested is to have no alternative motives for loving rather than the beautiful expression of love itself. This is the love that God has experienced from all of eternity within His own Personhood and conveyed on Calvary two millennia ago.

God’s love is intended to awaken the recipient’s capacity to think and be. Sometimes people don’t receive God’s love, and therefore can’t truly receive ours. If the reaction toward God’s love isn’t met with an open reception to God’s love, that doesn’t mean the love was a waste, but that the reciprocating nature of God’s inner loving life has been stopped short of its intended purpose.

We love because God has first loved us in Christ, through the Spirit. As we experience this eternal, enduring, and present reality, we, by faith move out into the world of our neighbor and enter the suffering love of God. A love that is often rejected, but doesn’t give up. A love that knocks on the dormant, cold heart of humanity and smiles with an invitation to gather ’round the warm hearth of fellowship. If accepted, if received, the invited are forever changed and begin sharing in the love of God, through the Spirit.

In this way, love is perfected, and the world is healed, one heart, one soul at a time. We are filled with God’s Spirit to participate in God’s love and inner Life.

If you enjoyed this devotion, visit https://sacredformation.com/blog/ for more

When I first started writing about our journey, I would post about the most random things. Everything was new, strange to us, and worthy of posting! Slowly, over the years, and now into year 16, I’m looking back and seeing our posts slowly became a random mix of personal updates, evolving theology, and a definite bent towards spiritual formation.

Life is, well, a mix of everything isn’t it? I used to try and think and live categorically. This no longer seems relevant, or useful. We’re building a new Lighthouse platform, and doing it with some new, and old friends. Our family continues to adapt and grow alongside our missional efforts… or rather, I should say, our missional efforts continue adapting alongside the lives that are being lived.

We are excited to see things come together. I love making beauty out of chaos, order where dysfunction has once dominated. Ugly concrete, uneven flooring is now natural, straight wood. An interior building that was falling apart, the residue of an old dingy bar, now a clean, restored and homey place of welcome. Like a farmer that pulls up the weeds to ensure something live-giving can emerge, I think this is deep within humanity; to renew things in the likeness of our own internal experience in Jesus.

Bricks, mortar, and wood, can be fashioned in ways that promote an eternal reality, where peace and goodness reign. Atmosphere matters, we know this because we breath it. I think the church has more to offer this world than inviting it ‘in’. Our super, other-wordly power lies also in our capacity to introduce our world to the love and goodness of our Creator. We do this ‘out there’, in the world that Jesus loves, not only ‘in here’ in places of gathered community.

Anyway, there I go again. Missiology meets construction, our family and friends integrates with the nature of theology and culture. It’s a wild mess, and a joy to see things come together. This new venture in Romania began with a step of faith, we didn’t have the finances to take this over, or to pay the rent, but God has provided and continues to encourage us forward to trust him for each step.

This August we will host a group of mostly Ukrainian youth for our first project at Lighthouse, called Filtered Hope. We’re also hoping that through area like-minded partners, we can bring in some revenue to pay the bills by renting out the space for various events. We want to hold space for international community, and also be an example for the area local churches how we can together put the kingdom of Jesus first, and unite around shining kingdom values in the center of culture without allowing the slippery political slopes of power and jealousy snuff out the light we are called to shine. Too often, it’s not our unity and love toward one another that defines us before watching world, but our disagreements and divisions. May Lighthouse surprise us in the ways the Spirit broadcasts good things here in Cluj!

Last night we hosted a little goodbye grill on our terrace here in Cluj. Our friend Olena and her daughter Yasya are moving to the US. They, like us, found themselves in Romania at the onset of the war. They, like us, never thought that after two years, they would still be here. It was interesting to process the emotions of more goodbyes, that old familiar pattern of ongoing transition.

Deb and I were talking after everyone left. There have been distinguishable waves of people coming through Cluj from Ukraine during this ongoing destabilization and occupation effort in Ukraine. First, the emergency evacuations from fleeing young people, many families, moms with their one or two kids, a few of the elderly sprinkled in. Then, a few months later, waves of the elderly, those with health issues, the vulnerable, and more moms with kids. The third wave of transition noticeable after about a year, were folks returning to Ukraine at the same pace as those exiting. Visiting family, and loved ones, or just tired of waiting in a foreign country for the war to end, choosing instead a life of continued threat of physical harm over the anguish of continued emotional anxiety.

Over two years now, there’s another transitional period it seems. Individuals and families moving once again from their original landing space to more intentional, purposeful locations. For many, like being repotted as a plant, the initial relocation was essential and pragmatic, they found a place to root for a while and wait for the war to end, they started building networks, and found work, and rhythms, but life just wasn’t feeling permanent enough to commit. This week we’re hosting Ukrainian friends from our hometown who landed in Italy, and another friend who was in Bali of all places! They began exploring new places to reconnect and build a life together in the same place outside of Ukraine, reforging lost friendships that were placed on pause. For others, engagements, marriages, and lifelong commitments of that nature are emerging and forcing new geographical pathways.

I liken what is happening to those under refugee status around the world to the snow globe. The war shook us all from a settled, peaceful, and rather static reality. At least it felt static, predictable, and cozy. The flurry of change as Russia entered Ukraine sent us snowflakes into disarray and chaos. Slowly, over months, and now years, there is less movement within the globe, but there are still some gently finding their way, settling mercifully into new spaces and places.

Anyway, saying goodbye to Olena, and being surrounded simultaneously by new incoming Ukrainian friends was an interesting moment for me. Life is a series of transitions, isn’t it? I look back and recognize seasons that seemed quite stable, and unchanging, but change is a permanent characteristic of this life. We are growing, changing, and dying, continually on a physical level. We are emotionally and spiritually in a formational process throughout our entire life. As my heart longs for the settledness of the snowglobe resting on the mantle, I wonder if that desire represents more of an ideal than a reality.

Thank God for the seasons of rest, of peace, and settledness. These past two years have been the most difficult, distressing and formative moments of our life. I haven’t written in my blog as much, because there’s been too much to unpack inwardly through this season, not too little to write about! I’m also wrestling with the nature of writing, its usefulness, and its purpose in my life. For now, we are grateful for this settled moment, taking deep breaths, and excited to see another Lighthouse space emerge in the center of the beautiful city of Cluj. A place we call home, for now, and hopefully longer. Yet, we continue to trust God, who holds our life and guides us into good places and spaces through each transition.

It was around 11pm, so I walked outside to the lake’s edge, looked up, and wasn’t too impressed with the Aurora Borealis. I recalled, however, that to really see it, you needed to look through the lens of your camera. Something about ions, soft particular lights the human eye doesn’t pick up.. Once I flicked on my iPhone, there it was indeed. Something out of an alien movie. The familiar night sky, transformed into an array of color that my tired brain struggled to make sense of.

It was beautiful, but it was strange.

Coming home to Canada to spend a week with my mom. My mom is familiar, but life has shifted off-kilter for her as well. Cancer, throughout her aging body, her mind adjusting to a new reality, one riddled with medications, side effects, hair loss. A reality that we all push aside, and dare not peer too closely at lest we lose our footing.

It was a surreal and rooting week. Home, for the first time in 30 yrs without my wife, and not a kid in sight. I was the kid, walking on the dirt that raised me, driving the roads that are littered with childhood memories. We spent mornings talking, pondering, crying, and embracing the fragility and beauty of the present. Each word, a gift, time increases in value when we consider the hour glass. For the week, I was a son again. Not a husband, nor a father, not a missionary and thankfully not even a foreigner. A son, that familiar place and yet, like looking up at the Northern Lights, things have shifted, altered. Like the camera lens, we’re growing into new appreciation, new embrace, new unfolding realities.

This temporal, it gives way to the eternal. This mortality, the scriptures say, gives way to the immortal, swallowed up by the resurrection of the God who became flesh. If Christ rose, we will rise, this is our hope, and it tweaks the fabric of our physical existence, our perception and our capacity to discern what is authentic and true.

I’m thankful for the week with my mom. She’s doing well, her mind is sharp and she isn’t experiencing any pain. She’s just tired, and learning how to prioritize her own health more than she’s used to.

We returned to PA for a few days, Noah passed his learner’s test, Brent got a job, we hugged Clark a few times. The poor dude has been working 5 weeks consecutively with overtime (required) on his first industrial job.. trial by fire. Tucker, Clark and Brent are all at our house in PA, thank you Jesus for leading us to buy a place, without ever seeing it in person just 2 months before Russia invaded Ukraine. This is mercy for our family. We saw Bronner & Logan for a hot minute, quick lunch, hug, bye again!

We are back in Romania. We’re now back chasing visa options, we have 90 days. We’re now needing to see this Lighthouse project launch – who will God send us, how will this all come together? For now, it’s jetlag time, that all too familiar week of dragging through the days and nights, adjusting our tired bodies as they wonder what has happened.

Praying about transition, about the many remaining pieces, friends, ministry and resources we need to see cared for in Ukraine, now in Romania, and the US. We are ready for stability, for a measure of permanence, of routine.