Don't read this

Unless you want to be shaken up, that is.

The ordinary pablum of popular religion caters to the idealistic, perfectionistic, and neurotic self who fixates on graceless getting worthy for union, while allowing the prostitutes and tax gougers to dance in to the kingdom. Our strategies of self-deception persuade us that abiding restful union with Jesus is too costly, leaving no room for money, ambition, success, fame, sex, power, control, and pride of place or the fatal trap of self-rejection, thus prohibiting mediocre, disaffected dingbats and dirtballs, like myself, from intimacy with Jesus.

Until we learn to live peacefully with what Andre Louf calls “our amazing degree of weakness,” until we learn to live gracefully with what Alan Jones calls “ our own extreme psychic frailty,” until we let the Christ who consorted with hookers and crooks to be our truth, the false, fraudulent self motivated by cowardice and fear will continue to distance us from abiding restful union...

There are no palliatives for raw faith. In living out our union with Jesus one day at a time, the most decisive issue is believing. In contrast to the domesticated, feel-good Jesus of TV evangelism, who is committed to our financial prosperity, the Christ of John's gospel who has made His home in us invites us to walk with Him daily in humble service even unto death. We may have acquired graduate degrees; we may have mstered biblical principles, we may hold roles of secular and spiritual leadership; and we may have authored books on Christian maturity, and our wits may have been sharpened on the carborundum wheel of the world. So much the better if they have elicited raw faith, so much the worse for those on the inside track who dismiss union, fusion, and symbiosis as merely sophisticated metaphors not to be taken literally.

Believing is living as though John 15:4 [Remain in me, and I will remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me.] is true.— The Furious Longing of God, pages 68-70

<idle musing>
Don't say I didn't warn you! Rest/remain/stay/abide (μενω) is the “secret” to the Christian life, and Christ is able to make it happen.
</idle musing>