“Let’s say you’re like Mother Teresa (or me, for that matter) and you don’t feel God’s presence often, if at all. What if, somehow, you knew that this would always be the case, for the rest of your life? What if you knew you’d never get the warm feelings others get, you’d never have your desire for a sense of God’s closeness fulfilled, during this lifetime? What if you knew it would always be this way, until you die? What would change?”

These challenging questions above are posed to us by Brent Hansen in Blessed Are the Misfits. Although I am unsure of how this text came to my awareness, I have absolutely no doubt about the timing of opening the title on my reader. You see, in the days preceding that Saturday on the back porch, I had been seeking God’s will about some specific issues, praying for guidance, with little discernment about resolutions to some personal issues. In fact, in the hours prior, I was deep into chapter 34 of Joel C. Rosenberg’s The Jerusalem Assassin, and if you’ve read his work, you are knowledgeable about the intrigue and intensity I was experiencing; however, I bookmarked the page, quieted my spirit, waited for the neighbor’s lawnmower to idle, and began to pray.

Pondering a common prayer of mine from the lyrics of “The More I Seek You,” which I first heard at FaithWalk, I pleaded the words, “I wanna sit at your feet, drink from the cup in your hand. Lay back against you and breathe, feel your heartbeat.” Maybe a weird prayer to you, but personally, those words represent the imagery of a close relationship with my Jesus; the same way you feel holding a sleeping infant on your chest. However, this misfit received nada, nothing, zilch. Yet, I wasn’t quite ready to return to Rosenberg…enter the next library book on my list, Misfits.

Reeling from questions I’ve been asking my entire life, laughing from Hansen’s descriptions of Christian misfits, and choosing to delve deeper, the questions from that first paragraph appeared on my screen, and I answered aloud, “Nothing.” Continuously struggling with the issue of faith over feelings, Hansen’s explanations resonate in a deep and very meaningful way with my experiences that something is missing and will continue to be missing until I “experience Him in full. There will be an end to your dark night of the soul. But…not yet.” My missing pieces, my desire for “a connection with God that’s palpable and undeniably certain,” will not likely happen this side of Heaven.

Experiencing a sense of freedom and relief from these expectations shared first in Respectfully Mystified, I was engaged to continue exploring the pages of Hansen’s book and to discover his description of producing fruit in a new light. “When one person insinuates that another must be spiritually lacking because of a dearth of feeling, it’s worthwhile pointing out this is utterly foreign to the biblical concept of bearing fruit… [Scripture says] you look at the fruit. That’s what falls out of the tree when you bump into it…So, if you happen to bump into a tree-or shake it, bother it, or threaten it-see what falls out.” Rather than focusing on a feeling, a wiser action might be to Bump the Tree and see what falls out. “Paul wrote in Galatians 5:22-23 that ‘fruit’ from God is this stuff: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”

So, whether I Bump the Lamp or Bump the Tree in serving God, the focus will remain on the fruits of the spirit such as faithfulness rather than feelings. “Bump into a tree, and see what falls. Sometimes it’s patience and kindness. Now you see what kind of tree it is…It’s easy, too, to redefine ‘fruit’ to fit our positive feelings or religious resumes instead of, you know, actually being patient and kind [or faithful]. But when someone bumps against us, when they zap us on Facebook, threaten us, throw us under the bus, or cut in front of us in line at CVS…see what falls. Here’s hoping it isn’t toxic. Let’s hope it’s the real, life-giving stuff.”

Reference:

Hansen, B. (2017). Blessed are the misfits: Great news for believers who are introverts, spiritual strugglers, or just feel like they’re missing something. Thomas Nelson.