THE BROOK CHERITH

As I drove home after I dropped my son off at school the other morning, I had the deep sensation of grief, of isolation and things passing away. My thought was, “I don’t recognize this place anymore.” The sky was the same clear sky as it was yesterday, the cows grazing in the fields were the same cows, the morning commuters driving down the same two lane stretch of country road were the same ones I pass each morning.

A deep and weighty feeling of death and an echo of things that once were good and decent that I had come to know I no longer recognized. It was as if all I was familiar with had like paper on the wind been caught up and blown away. A year ago, I had a profound sense of grief like this that had lain me low. It was an increase in an already divisive time in our nation and so it is with this current increase pulling us like quicksand deeper into the mire.

I had been feeling a growing sense of change within my heart. Within a few years He had given me a strong sense of justice and has moved me into the prophetic. This writing venture of mine which started a little more than a year ago was born of a passion that He birthed in me. It was born from the death of an opportunity and shifted into writing about what the joy and the pain of the authentic Christian life is. I named it All Things Unsaid, because it felt like all the things I wish I could say but never had the courage to say.

I lived with this passion and this drive and late at night, I shaped and crafted posts that I hoped might encourage or challenge those of faith and even those who don’t claim the same faith as myself.

Years before after a long desert experience on the run from God I finally stopped fighting. I had the deep, internal knowledge that He was done with my double mindedness and He was asking of me to come and give up everything. If I said yes to Him this time it was to be all or nothing. It was to be my full body, my full heart and every fiber of my soul given over to Him. He was calling me to live with a heart of fire and with a renewed passion and a zeal and a sense of fidelity to Him and only Him.

I have been thinking a lot recently about the story of the prophet Elijah who through the unction of God had been called to stand before the corrupted king, Ahab. Elijah stood and made his pronouncement of judgement of drought before this king, and both he and his wife wanted the blood of Elijah.

But the Lord had told Elijah to flee to a place east of the Jordan called Cherith which translated means,“cutting” or “separation”, it was a place set apart for Elijah to hide and it was here where Elijah would trust in provision from the hand of God for sustenance. The symbolic meaning behind this was a place of divine separation, isolation and preparation, a place of development for a specific purpose.

But this brook was a source that was already in the process of drying up. It was drying because it was not a place meant to become comfortable in. It wasn’t a place intended to last and set up and make your home in. It was a place of passing through, a way station meant for nourishment before the next leg of the journey.

Cherith means, “a cutting away”. It is a cutting away of all the things we’ve learned and relied upon, the things of ourselves that we tend to latch onto and those things we make idols of or make into our identities. It’s the things that we hold and that we lean on that says this will always be. When we become self-comfortable in our Cherith we cease to grow in His development, never moving beyond the place God has set us. We become shadows of who were supposed to be and our reliance upon His temporary becomes a comfortable crutch that we lean on for all our days.

That death I was feeling was His way of telling me that I have stayed in my own Cherith far too long, the brook has run dry and it is time to move on to the next stage. My Cherith was in the comfort of my own surroundings. God had given me this small ministry of writing and I shared all I did on my personal social media. I posted extensively in hopes of challenging and encouraging to a better way. But I edited myself quite a lot so as not to offend any of my own. I chose my words often holding back the full messages that He had given me so that my words were acceptable and not offensive. But that grief and death I felt was Him saying it was time to let go. It was time to be who He had formed me to be and to stop worrying about offending other believers. I worked and labored over everything I wrote and often came away puzzled and felt low when met with indifference from my own to everything I shared from my heart.

And this too is what it was for many of the Words I have been given. They are considered too much and divisive. And so, my sense was that He is telling me to pull up stakes and follow and trust Him. His words are His words and the writings He’s given my heart matter but perhaps those things are to be held prayerfully to myself for now. Perhaps for a later date, or perhaps the soil where I am is too hard packed and stony and my messages are meant for elsewhere.

So, the brook which I have relied on and taken comfort in has no more water, no life in it any longer, my heart is heavy but I understand that He has said, “get up, pack your things and follow me.” Where that is, I don’t know yet. But what I do know that this is freeing to me. I am free to express myself now how I wish too, this is not shared real estate where other voices are free to bring their offenses into. Social media burns on our outrage. And I daily see good men and women taking the bait of algorithms designed to foment tribalized anger. Raging about the “woke” or demonically altered vaccines, or the outrage over logo changes to a restaurant chain. None of these things are true or they don’t matter, they are distractions set by dark things that only seek to bring death and division and pain. I will play no part in that, He has set me apart from that death. My heart is to bring life, not anger, peace not warring, allegiance and freedom not chained obeisance to political machinations which seek to corrupt and divide.

But I also hold the spirit of a prophet, one who is called to speak to injustice. And this, especially today means a lonely path that I will have to walk alone.

And I do so for my peace of mind because so much insularity and divisiveness wears thin on my heart. Here though, it is a safe place, here these things will not be allowed. I now write for myself, 2, 3 maybe 4 at best will follow along with me. I gladly welcome those but I will not press or lay my weight on any person to cajole them to read or listen to anything of mine any longer, I will not beg or worry about what someone thinks because this is my space, and in that there is great freedom indeed. I hear and I follow.