homesick...

So this weird guy to the left? Yep, that's me, in all my 'playing-guitar-for-5-year-olds' glory. But this post really isn't about me - I just wanted a picture of myself on my blog (GREAT, they've already found out I'm narcessistic). Rather, it's about the name of my blog. The name of my blog is "soul's paradox". It comes from a quote by A.W. Tozer's book The Pursuit of God that reads:

To have found God and still to pursue Him is the soul's paradox of love,
scorned indeed by the too easily satisfied religionist, but justified in
happy experience by the children of the burning heart.

When I read this book for the first time, these words leaped off the page at me. Not only found in an old Newsboys song I used to like ("Beautiful Sound", Love Liberty Disco), this quote so embodied my passion, and the continuing events in my life. As we grow ever closer to God, we often find that we have infinitely farther to go. This discovery would normally depress its finder, but for the 'child of the burning heart', it is simply an invitation to continue onward into eternal joy. So many times in my life, I have been confronted by the religionist, whether in the form of the church with its cultural Christianity, judgemental attitude, and lack of urgency, or taking on the form of my own self - the one that rationalizes sin, judges anything not 2 seconds old, and digs wells, searching for satisfaction, in anything but God. This is me: "I am the angry man who came to stone the lover, and I am the woman there ashamed for all to see; I am the leper who gave thanks, and I am the 9 who never came." ("Mystery of Mercy", Caedmon's Call) Somehow, some way, I must continually discover how to live as a man who can be satisfied only by the amazing grace of my Savior, one already redeemed, but not yet home. I guess you could call me homesick.