97: Steps towards grace: it's not that bad, is it?

I'm not one of those Christians who frequently says "God spoke to me" or "God told me...". I can't distinguish God's voice from the other voices in my head, so I'm cautious about attributing any of them to God. But there are a handful of occurences in my life in which a thought entered my mind and filled me with such joyful tenderness that I am even more cautious about attributing it to anyone other than God.

It was 2000, and I'd had a very frustrating year and a half since finishing University. I had moved from Canada to Germany and from Germany to Ecuador, for the time being. My friend Bryan came to visit from Canada and we decided to take some time and travel through Patagonia.

I felt a little bit like I was doing something sinful. I expected that God would want me to do something useful, to get involved in missionary work or something like that. I felt like I couldn't even go and enjoy a trip like this without justifying it in some way, such as making a commitment that I would preach to people I met or something like that.

So I felt that I was going under God's radar, as it were. I felt a bit like Jonah running away from God.

How great was my surprise, then, that it was by taking a trip like this that I would have the deepest spiritual experience in my life up to that point.

It doesn't sound like much to describe it: I was sitting on the waterfront at Punta Arenas, looking out over the Strait of Magellan, when I felt as if God was saying, "come on now, Marco. It's not that bad, is it?"

Like I say, I'm cautious about attributing the thoughts I encounter to God. But something very strange happened: for the next few days and weeks I couldn't embrace the cynical, life-negating view I'd usually held up to that point. I was -- almost against my will, almost somewhat grudgingly, if that were possible -- glad to be alive. The whole trip had been a wonderful experience, and for the first time it didn't feel like something with which I tried to counterbalance the bad things in life. It felt like something simply good, simply to be enjoyed, simply to "taste and see that the Lord is good."

Of course, I managed to regain my Weltschmerz soon enough. A few months later I was working in a warehouse in England and hating my life just like in the good old days. But two things had been altered irreversibly in my grooves of thinking:

For one thing, I learned that I was capable of seeing life as something positive. This was sometimes comforting, but sometimes really alarming.

For another, I learned that I can go for decades as a Christian and still not know anything about the voice of God. I had always assumed that the voice of God was the voice that told me to be useful, to do things I don't like, to take on more responsibility and make more sacrifices and try harder. I had assumed that the part of me that wanted to escape, to travel and be a vagabond and an anonymous free spirit unconcerned with the usefulness of any of his actions, was the bad part -- the voice of temptation that I had to resist. But now I had to re-evaluate my life. The experience was too clear to have been an illusion. The result -- going from hating life to loving it -- far too positive to have come from an evil source. Maybe it had been the voice of God all along, calling me to Patagonia, calling me to be useless for once and to taste and see that the Lord is good. Maybe it was the other voice that was the false god, oppressing me with religiosity. Maybe I was finally understanding what grace means. I had been telling myself all my life that I had understood grace (Protestants can tend to flatter themselves with this compliment), while all the time I had been oppressed by the Protestant work ethic of "repayment by works". (We do not call it "Salvation by works" but it amounts to the same thing.)

This possibility grew slowly within me over the course of the next few years.