An Excerpt: Veneer: Living Deeply in a Surface Society

I've recently finished a book by Timothy D. Willard and Jason Locy called, Veneer: Living Deeply in a Surface Society. It's all about real, real relationships, both with other people, and with God. It's been challenging; it's been fun. I'd recommend it. 

Here's a little (or slightly long) snippet for you to check out. I really enjoyed this bit because it's such an accurate depiction of the way my life feels right now---enjoy! 

"There's a great camping spot in George Washington National Forest called Panther Falls. It's tucked deep in the woods, but if you can borrow a friend's Land Rover, you can make it. The waterfalls, flowing beneath the tall deciduous canopy, tier down the side of the mountains. 

At the top of the falls, to the right of the massive boulders jutting from the ground, rests the perfect campsite. Below, the water collects in a deep pool, deep enough to jump into from atop the falls. If you make it to Panther Falls, build your bonfire at dusk and enjoy some hot dogs, cold beverages, and s'mores, then, wait until dark, take off your clothes, and jump from the top of the falls into the dark, freezing-cold pool below. It's not a huge drop, maybe twenty feet. But you will scream like a little girl. You will freeze your eyelids off. And you'll do it over and over. 

Becoming intimate with God feels a lot like jumping from Panther Falls at night, naked. We stand there contemplating the whole thing. Making sure we jump in the right place so we don't hit the rocks below. A sense of nervous excitement fills our bellies. But if we don't take the first step toward the edge, we miss the point of the trip. We have to jump. 

But it's not just the jump that is so invigorating. It's the falling from the cliff in the pitch of night, screaming with fright and glee until we hit the water, plummeting from the familiar to the unknown. The cold, the impact, the immediate change to the underwater world--there, time freezes as the exhilaration of the jump courses through our veins. For a moment, the darkness of the underwater world holds us. 

People often say that faith is like stepping into the unknown, stepping off a cliff. And for those of us who do jump, we experience significant change. We surface, gasping for air, and then tread silently in the dark water. We are reborn, again--children playing under the watchful eye of the God who whispers to us, "Do it again." And we do; we climb in the darkness, up the cliff, freezing, wet, and fully alive. We go through the same steps, and though we've done it before, a tinge of fear remains and we can't wait for it to overwhelm us. This time we don't step off the cliff; we leap. 

There is darkness. There is the fall. There is the hard impact with the water. But there is now, also, a knowing. Not a knowing in the sense that we fully understand the water or the darkness or the fall but rather a knowing that unfolds. We anticipate the healthy fear of the leap, the excitement of falling into what we can't fully see, and the joy of a new underwater world. 

With God, the deeper we plunge, the more he expands. Believing in him is merely the jumping off point, the first step. Intimacy with him feels more like screaming all the way down during the cliff jump and lingering extra long in the underwater world, afraid, yet quickened, revealing, yet mysterious. We would jump off a thousand cliffs just to feel that sense of aliveness in God! And when we realize that his heart burns for us, we can, for that briefest of moments, touch eternity--fully known, expectant to one day fully know."