Life is a journey. As we move through one end to another, we encounter different events with different experiences. We move from scary place to a place of comfort and from unholy living to holy living. We move from dryness into wetness. We are going to a place of awareness; a place that knows God is with us; there, at the moment, even when we do not realize it. We move to a place where we plant and we set out not just to walk pass but to stop over and experience shocking revelation of newness. Also we experience “mini-resurrection of being alive everyday, of making our rounds with the sun, up the hill till noon and down the hill till sleep.” Through the stages of holiness, we are constrained to move when we are willing; we get stuck on our way and don’t know what to do or where to obtain help. We are forced to look around and eventually looked up. This journey brings us to a place we don’t want to stay, with the body we don’t want to live in and dwell with people we had wished they don’t exist or live or get rid of in a blink.
In Genesis Chapter 28, Isaac sent his son, Jacob to Paddam Aram, the home of Bethuel his mother’s father and to fetch for himself, a wife there from the daughters of his uncle, Laban. He had cautioned his son not to marry any of the Canaanite women. Jacob left Beersheba and traveled to Haran. He came to a certain place and decided to pass the night there because it was dark. He took one of the stones from that place and put it under his head and lay down there. That night he had a dream that changed his life, opened his awareness and realization. In that dream, he saw a stairway set up on the earth with its top reaching up to heaven. He saw the angels of God going up and coming down on it. He also saw the Lord, standing above it and confirming the promises, He had earlier made to Abraham.
Jacob found out he had come to a holist place. That holist place had brought to him uncommon experiences and revelations. He found out that he was not alone in his trip. When he lay down and fell asleep God was with him. Even when he walked alone, he was not alone. That same applies to us. I n verse 15, the Lord assured him, “Remember I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go. I will also bring you back to this land because I will not leave you until I do what I’ve promised you.” When we feel like throwing in the towel and dare to quit; when we feel like committing suicide or living has no meaning remember God is with us in our restlessness. That restlessness is holy ground, where we meet God, one to one. Being raised to holiness or not is neither incidental nor incremental but tension-filled. “Holist knows that God is near – in the normal, the excruciating, the simple and the complex. Holist knows the presence of God, knowing that surely God is in this place.”
In a holier Church, we are dream-driven and most times do more than we can. We push, we pull and we struggle as well as we overtake. We micromanage our dreams, we strategize and move midway to complain to our friends about the resistance we face. In a holier Church, holier people are in tension and halfway up the hill. In that holist place, a ladder is let down, we can get to God and God can reach out to us, There are angels all over the place and we see them in some of our members and some of our clergies look like them. We may not know that we are in partnership with these angelic beings that makes us wonder why we ever worried about anything at all. On our way to the Promised Land, we experience spring in our steps and in our hearts. We are excited despite all we go through because God is with us; we are not alone and we know it. You know and now being reassured that this ecstasy, the holiest of holiness is open to us and available 24 hours a day, seven days a week and fifty two weeks a year. God is always with us yet we forget, misconstrue or turn our eyes the other way thereby missing the ladders that are set out all over the place. This resulting in our missing the encounters availed to us.
In the holist moments and in the holist places, we do not doubt that God is with us. And taking that doubt out of our bags make us light enough to climb the ladder. This is not because we do not know. Rather it can be because of the knowledge that we are out alone. Not just head knowledge but heart knowledge. Our eyes are lifted up to the hills. Jesus Christ, the Son of Most High is the perfect example of the lightness it takes to climb ladders to be as holy as can be. He was so much a person of the spirit that His every move challenged the religious and political leaders of His time. He believed that He is a Son of God and could do uncommon things as God who sent Him gave Him the grace to do. He never doubted the person and power of this great and awesome God. Jesus always stood on the holist ground and practiced God’s presence. He proclaimed fearlessly that God was with Him as His Father and one who sent Him. He never occurred to Jesus that He feels alone, even after the family and society failed to comprehend and understood Him.
After Jesus had risen, He ordered His disciples, “All (not some) authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me…And you can be sure that I am always with you, to the end” (Matt 28:18-20). “Jesus never set foot one off holy ground…. The ground on which He lived was holy and so is ours. The difference between Jesus and us is that Jesus didn’t forget….what will raise us from our death is to stop forgetting and start remembering….. Calmly plotting the resurrection by Donna E. Schaper. God is always with us whether we know it or not; even when we forget it, but we need to always remember it.