…and it’s 40 years ago in Switzerland.
I’ve been meandering through Edith Schaeffer’s L’Abri all year, picking it up now and then. At the start she gives the stated purpose of L’Abri this way:
“To show forth by demonstration, in our life and work, the existence of God.” We have in other words decided to live on the basis of prayer in several realms, so that we might demonstrate to any who care to look the existence of God. We have set forth to live by prayer in these four specific realms:
- We pray that God will send the workers of His choice to us, rather than pleading for workers in the usual channels.
Now that’s radical! No “strategizing.” No capital campaigns. No advertising.
Even as I write this, however, I have to admit that I’m personally pretty conflicted on the subject of radical faith. These days I feel like we’re living at the edge of a steep cliff, not knowing what the next step will bring. I’m sick of uncertainty, and want some light to break through the clouds! At the same time this is more like the kind of life Thoreau describes - which I’ve always thought was a fitting description of the true Christian life:
I wanted to live deep and suck all the marrow out of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it.
“I feel like life is a giant boulder we’re pushing uphill,” I complained to my husband last night. “Nothing at all is coming easily.” I’m sick of this. Sick of that. I pounded the table. It felt good. “I’m looking at you, but I’m talking to God,” I told him.
“That’s how it’s supposed to be,” he reminded me. “Don’t we want something more than comfort? Aren’t we looking for the abundant living the gospel describes?”
No fair, tying my deepest desire to my deepest frustration like that!
Flight requires resistance. It’s a spiritual principle as much as a physical one or an intellectual one - or more accurately, it’s a physical and intellectual principle because it’s a spiritual one. So maybe the story of Rebekah applies here, in my discomfort with life and discomfort with churchasusual. Rebekah watered all those camels for Isaac’s servant because it was in her nature; it wasn’t an aberrant act, it was something she did because that’s what kind of person she was. As I grow thankful for edge-of-the-precipice living, maybe I’ll/we’ll be drawn through that means to a church or ministry that functions in the way Edith Schaeffer describes.
