Pursuit of the High Places

One of my most cherished books is Hannah Hunnard's Hinds Feet on High Places. It's an allegorical tale of a woman named Much Afraid and her journey to the High Places - a place of freedom and of depth of knowledge of the Shepherd Jesus' great love for her. The journey is fraught with uncertainty, detours, suffering, confusion and yet also great peace, hope, freedom and truer perspective and understanding of Jesus than ever before. Over the years, I've probably read it about 15 times...and every time, I find myself square in the middle of one of Much Afraid's struggles or challenges...and every time, I am reminded of how deeply and truly and fully Jesus loves me and of how His ways and thoughts are definitely different than mine...and yet are ultimately much better and richer and truer.

Last night I opened this precious book and read the following in the preface. Though it was underlined by my own hand years ago, it felt like I was reading them for the first time:

"How deeply we who love the Lord of Love and desire to follow him long for the power to surmount all difficulties and tests and conflicts in life in the same exultant and triumphant way. To learn the secret of victorious living has been the heart's desire of those who love the Lord, in every generation.

"We feel we would give anything if only we could, in actual experience, live on the High Places of love and victory here on this earth and during this life - able always to react to evil, tribulation, sorrow, pain and every wrong thing in such a way that we would be overcome and transformed into something to the praise and glory of God forever. As Christians we know, in theory at least, that in the life of a child of God there are no second causes, that even the most unjust and cruel things, as well as all the seemingly pointless and undeserved sufferings, have been permitted by God as a glorious opportunity for us to react to them in such a way that our Lord and Savior is able to produce in us, little by little, his own lovely character.

"But the High Places of victory and union with Christ cannot be reached by any mental reckoning of self to be dead to sin, or by seeking to devise some way or discipline by which the will can be crucified. The only way is learning to accept, day by day, the actual conditions and tests permitted by God, by a continually repeated laying down of our own will and acceptance of his as it is presented to us in the form of the people with whom we have to live and work, and in the things which happen to us. Every acceptance of his will becomes an altar of sacrifice, and every such surrender and abandonment of ourselves to his will is a means of furthering us on the way to the High Places to which he desires to bring every child of his while they are still living on earth."

I am undone. And find myself terrified of the further "conditions and tests permitted by God" that I am experiencing/will experience and yet desperate to live in those "High Places of victory and union" with Him.