Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mark Buchanan is a pastor and bestselling author who lives with his wife, Cheryl, and their three children on the west coast of Canada. Educated at the University of British Columbia and Regent College, he has been published in numerous periodicals, including Christianity Today and Books and Culture.

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The Holy Wild

Multnomah Publishers

Chapter One

The summer I wrote this, we discovered a nest of snakes living in our house. It was a hotspell, and often we retreated to the basement to escape the worst of it.

We weren't the only ones, it turned out.

A mother snake, at some point, had found her way into our house (we left most ofour doors open that summer to create airflow). She had slithered into the back corner ofthe coolest, most interior room, and there hatched a brood of baby snakes: tiny blackserpents, with slender, tapered bodies and teardrop-shaped heads and little, red flickeringtongues.

I hate snakes. I once heard about a man who, digging in his garden, hacked hisshin apart with his spade when a garter snake slithered up his pant leg. I understood this:the panic, the wildness, the madness, the willingness to maim yourself to protect yourself.If it had been me and not Adam and Eve in Eden, we wouldn't be in the trouble we're in,but not because I have greater virtue; simply because it was a serpent who seduced them.I'd have killed it first.

One evening I came home from a deacons meeting (was this itself a sign?) andCheryl, wide-eyed and pale, met me at the door. "We have snakes," she said, hissing andwrithing, snakelike, herself. She and my son had already managed to capture in a jar twoof the babies. It was my job, I was told, to track down the mother. I began with stiffcaution, jabbing sticks under furniture then leaping back, expecting Medusa's head tocome shaking out at me. Everything I rousted out-a wisp of dust, a stray hairpin, a snipof thread-startled me. Every sensation of something touching me-the edge of a quiltbrushing my shin, the corner of a desk biting my hip, a strand of cobweb trailing acrossmy neck, the frays of cut cloth tickling my arm-sent me into a spasm of thrashing. Aftera while, I got more bold, more determined, especially since I had looked everywhere andfound nothing.

"She's gone," I said. "Must have got out somehow. She's a bad mother.Abandoned the little ones to their fate. Imagine that."

Cheryl wasn't buying it. "Check again," she said. "Take a better look under thehide-a-bed. Mark, I spend hours in this room every week. My parents are coming onMonday to sleep in this room. I won't rest until I know it's safe."

So I pulled the mattress off the hide-a-bed and poked my head under the frame.

Bingo.

There she was, curled up on the back ledge of the bed frame. She was only aboutfourteen inches long and no thicker than my baby finger. But in my phobic, manicalertness, she may as well have been a Burmese python, smugly swallowing the dog, justgetting started.

What followed was ten minutes of slapstick comedy-a burlesque of blundering,scrambling antics, a wild pantomime of overreaction. I chased that snake around, tryingto pinch its thin, wriggling body between two blunt-end four-foot sticks and drop it in asmall-mouthed jar. It kept getting free, to the accompaniment of our shrieks and hollers,and would scoot off to another corner and pile its body into dense coils. After severaltries, it was glaringly obvious this approach was futile. I asked my son to fetch my gardengloves. I would have to pick it up.

I did it. There was no heroism or elegance in it. I held the snake away from melike I might a dead fish that had been left out in the sun. But I did it.

Over the next few days, as we found more snakes, we discovered that our nine-year-old daughter Sarah was fearless with them. She would simply pick each snake upwith her bare hands, hold it near her face, scold it as though it were a naughty dog whochewed up the hose, then set it loose in the garden, telling it to go find its mother.

Here's the thing. Ever since, it's been hard for me to rest in that room. Walkinginto it, I slow, halt, turn, look now this way, now that. I even look up, as though I'mdealing with a fat, hungry tree snake, its body languidly draped along the curtain rod, itshead undulating downward. Every nerve in me is heightened, every muscle taut andtrembling, and the little hairs on my arms stand up.

I may never sleep in that bed again. After we found the snakes, we had a string ofstifling hot nights-nights like huge furnaces, roaring and devouring, the surface ofthings glazed with heat. Nights that skewered and roasted you like a pig on a spit, turningslow, dripping, shriveling. On nights like those, we used to escape to the coolness of thebasement to sleep.

But no more.

Instead, we now suffer upstairs, suffer all night long. There we lie, listless andrestless, prickly and sweaty, longing for relief. On the worst of these nights I almost givein, slip downstairs, open the hide-a-bed, and crawl in. But I know it's no good. Everytime I shut my eyes, I would see them, thousands of them, every length and thickness ofthem, twining, coiling, darting, hissing, squirming. I know that if I ever got to sleep'sthreshold, to that blissful, hypnotic place where your body hovers over oblivion and startsto ease down, something would graze the nape of my neck or tickle the hollow in mycollarbone, and I would leap up, wild with panic, punching the air and slapping myself.

I don't trust that bed.

[Dingbat divider here]

The funny thing is, the bed hasn't changed at all. It's just as sturdy, just as comfortable. Itcan hold my weight, soothe my soreness. What has changed is my experience. I nowharbor a suspicion that dread things lurk beneath. And so I approach the bed with aguardedness that I won't let drop.

This book is about resting in the character of God. I take it to be that resting andtrusting are near synonyms: I rest where I can trust. I rest on the bed that I'm assuredwon't buckle beneath my weight, in the room where I'm confident I won't be leftvulnerable to enemies or predators, in the house where I'm certain I won't be exposed totoxins or contagions. If I doubt any of these things, if I lack trust, I may sleep in the houseor the room or the bed-but I won't really rest there. I'll do it out of sheer exhaustion,maybe, but not out of trust. I'll be fitful and anxious, always checking my back, tense andclenching, a hair trigger on my reflexes.

My point: How I think about the bed determines whether or not I rest in it. Thebed, as I said, hasn't changed. But I have.

Sometimes our faith in God is like that: snake-infested. God doesn't change, buthow we think about Him does. Dread things, we suspect, lurk in the basement. It is hardfor us to rest in God, because it is hard for us to trust.

[Dingbat divider here]

My first book was called Your God Is Too Safe. In it, I invited us to be done with the godof our own invention, the god who resembles a museum curator, pale, quibbling,fastidious; or a group therapist, vague, earnest, doting; but not the Lion of Judah, fierceand wild and good. I diagnosed our inner stuckness as a mostly theological sickness, animpaired vision of God as God. For various reasons, we would rather contrive a god whois perfectly content to make his bed in the servants' quarters than worship the God who ison the loose, ruling from the heights, slipping in among the ranks, skulking about indisguise, equally absent and present in most disruptive ways. Then I prescribed a wayout: the practice of holy habits. These are disciplines that, like well-treasured and well-guardedfamily recipes, have been passed along from generation to generation amongChristians. They are simple, adaptable, workable, and they train us in...