I recently started with a new small group-spiritual growth pathway Pastor Brian oversees called the Ignatian Exercises (I’ll call it IX for short). I am excited about my IX group, and what I really like is that for once, I am just a member. I think my IX leader is great, and I’m looking forward to the journey that awaits me and the other members.

The focus of our time involves an intense, vigorous reflection of our inner life – the stuff below the waterline. Using some of the methods and reflections of Ignatius of Loyola, our aim is to plumb the depths of our soul and seek a closer, more transparent and transforming walk with Jesus Christ in the process. By identifying the competing desires and habits of the heart, and gazing into the great love of God, we hope to experience a changed focus, changed heart, and a changed life.

But the process is not for the faint of heart. While it is tempting to have “safe” discussions about Christians in general, glossy ideas from scripture, or vague allusions to “unspoken requests or need”—these are not what we are going to do. Instead, our aim is to be brutally honest with ourselves and our group members, and undergo the awkward moments of personal exposure and disclosure to discover a God at work behind the scenes.

Our first exercise over last week was to take stock of our soul—identify the condition of our “condition.” Mine came with sobering scrutiny. Some of my journaled words included disconcerting adjectives like: disconnected, fragmented, discouraged, undisciplined, preoccupied, and distracted. But that was just the beginning.

As I reflected, I sensed a variety of sentiments swirling around the darker recesses of my consciousness: a wanting of more; an unsettled sense on some directional issues; a knowing that God is good and in charge—but not seeing that translated into personal experience; a wanting to do more and be more – but not seeing what it is, and not knowing the cost involved to make it so.

In the Matrix, Neo is asked if he’d like to take the blue pill or the red pill. Take the blue pill, he is told, and all will be forgotten, and he will blissfully go back from whence he came into a state of continuing mental anaesthesia. Take the red pill, and his life will unalterably be different. He will be awake and alive, full of both the thrills and pain of an animated existence. But he can escape the trappings of a vegetative state that he exists in now.

I think I just swallowed the red pill.

I reflected on what I want in my relationship with Christ, the thing(s) I desired most with Him. That was not such a difficult exercise. I thought about that for a while, made my list and wrote a few things down, then stared at it.

The problem came when I realized what I was asking, and what I brought to the table. I had nothing to offer to make that list anywhere closer to reality than where it was now – notes on a page. I was the proverbial cowboy, surrounded by Indians, and out of ammo.

It’s as if I was a man staring at blueprints of a gorgeous spacious mansion with only a $1.50 in my pocket to pay for it. It seemed like the impossible desire.

But then that’s what faith is – look at the most impossible thing, and head that way. Faith tells me that I am incapable, but with God, all things are possible. Faith says that the thing my heart most wants, intimacy and connection with Christ, I can have—but that I will need to let go of all that I clutch that stands in the way. Faith says that I cannot embark on this voyage with any possibility of success—only by entrusting myself to God in more thorough and comprehensive ways will I find what I seek. But faith says that God is excited and delighted for me to travel this road, and He will empower me to make it to my destination.

As I embark on this journey into the depths of my soul, as well as into the heart of God, I am hopeful that as I come across and am confronted by the varying temptations and distractions of my heart, they will be moments to encounter Jesus, and undergoing his fiery crucible of love to make me more of a man than I am today.