Soul Care

The question was posed - What does ‘soul-care’ mean to you?

I don’t even have to pause to think about it. 

Ask and ye shall receive isn’t referring to things. It’s about desiring wisdom, not just knowledge. Wisdom is the food my soul needs.  Gaining wisdom is not an easy quest.  You can ask for wisdom but you can’t receive it until you are empty. Emptying out preconceived ideas and notions, beliefs and tenets long held can be scary and makes you feel vulnerable. Nevertheless, you have to be an empty vessel. And you have to be willing to accept that you will have to walk alone going forward. There will be little or no fellowship with like-minded souls. 

The preacher said, with much wisdom comes much sorrow. Nothing has ever been truer. If you desire the truth of God’s mysteries, the big view, not a detailed description of the tail of the elephant, you have to be prepared to walk alone.

It’s a process and a solitary journey because the more you know, the more you find there is to know. And then, once you step through the threshold, there’s no going back to unknowing. When you commit to being able to understand that the tail is not even close to the whole of the elephant, you find fewer and fewer people who also understand. You may as well speak an alien language that no one can interpret. If you dare try you either get the sound of crickets or you are dismissed as a looney tune. Because, it is quite human to cluster to a concept that is accepted by the majority. 

Unfortunately, the wisdom of God is rarely the wisdom of the majority. 

Regardless you might choose to hang on to that which is anathema to the masses because deep inside, you believe there are others who need their souls fed with the wisdom that is not acceptable here on this plane and therefore not speakable, or sharable. You imagine they know even more than you and you want to talk about it but you have to keep what you have to yourself thus following the unwritten rule you know others must do the same as well. This dynamic of believing there are others makes it just a tad less lonely, even if you can’t talk to or share with them. So you read your Bible and a Scripture you’ve read fifty times and something new, unseen before, is added to your soul. And like Mary you ponder it and keep it to yourself.

Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t be better to be a dear-heart who lives the simple faith. Who depends solely on the love of Christ and the promise. That ought to be enough and it is actually. It is enough. Our salvation does not depend on our seeking wisdom. We are only mandated to live and share the simple truth of the gospel. Christ told His disciples there were things He could tell them but they weren’t ready. 

But it must be noted that once you have been exposed to quantum physics, freshman math is not quite as soul-filling. Milk or meat.

A.W. Tozer knew this and wrote about it in his essay The Loneliness of the Christian. 

I so get it. 

For Him,

Meema

“The loneliness of the Christian results from his walk with God in an ungodly world, a walk that must often take him away from the fellowship of good Christians as well as from that of the unregenerate world. His God-given instincts cry out for companionship with others of his kind, others who can understand his longings, his aspirations, his absorption in the love of Christ; and because within his circle of friends there are so few who share his inner experiences he is forced to walk alone.

The unsatisfied longings of the prophets for human understanding caused them to cry out in their complaint, and even our Lord Himself suffered in the same way.

The man [or woman] who has passed on into the divine Presence in actual inner experience will not find many who understand him. He finds few who care to talk about that which is the supreme object of his interest, so he is often silent and preoccupied in the midst of noisy religious shoptalk. For this he earns the reputation of being dull and over-serious, so he is avoided and the gulf between him and society widens.

He searches for friends upon whose garments he can detect the smell of myrrh and aloes and cassia out of the ivory palaces, and finding few or none he, like Mary of old, keeps these things in his heart.

It is this very loneliness that throws him back upon God. His inability to find human companionship drives him to seek in God what he can find nowhere else."