I want to take one of these posts, this one, to discuss the past and the future, hopefully spending no more than a moment of the present. It's always better to live it than it is to hash it over...unless the "hashing it over" is the kind that brings change to life. That kind is pretty OK. Apparently like everything else, it's more complicated than I thought.
I read a story once by Brother Andrew. Back in the day, Brother Andrew smuggled bibles into Communist Europe at great personal risk. He also made a point to attend some of the non-sanctioned churches there to to encourage the believers. He went to one such church and the old rector that served there invited him to their service. When Andrew showed up, he thought he had the time wrong, because even though he was directly on time, no one else was in the church. About 30 seconds after he sat down, the old rector came out and delivered his message...to Andrew only.
Andrew asked him about all this afterward. The rector said that no one had come in about 4 years or so because they were afraid of being arrested. Andrew asked him why he preached to no one. The rector said something like, "Just because no one is sitting there doesn't mean my words aren't used by God for things I don't understand." And, "God called me to preach. He didn't say I needed to have people there to hear me." I read that when I was a teenager a life time ago and both the truth and the depth of it has stuck with me.
I started writing this blog a little over a year ago. My wife had been poking at me to write for years. A friend (Todd Koonrad) who reads this from time to time used to challenge me to write stuff down after our long conversations - which are really the only kind he and I usually have. I did a couple times but that exercise somehow didn't have quite enough definition to allow me to focus much. That focus part is something I need.
Separately, his wife (Lorrie) said to me at a dinner at their house one night, "You should blog." I decided she was right and the blog format seemed to provide the focus part. Hence, Wanderin'.
I'm writing now and some people are reading what I write. I am very much amazed. It's funny, I often get the best feedback on entries that really didn't thrill me at all...and often hear nothing about entries that moved me to tears. That's OK. The entire exercise hits me like putting messages in bottles and throwing them into the ocean. You never know what's going to cross the ocean and find an audience or what's simply going to sink to the bottom. Regardless though, you still show up at the shoreline with your bottles and scraps of paper.
I've had a couple people ask me about making Wanderin' available in print media. I'm investigating that path but I promise you this: It will be a slow process. Practically speaking, it's not terribly difficult or expensive. However, a print offering would be something quite different. It is deserving of it's own form and vision...and I don't have any of that yet.
And so, on we go...whether or not you actually continue to show up, a la Brother Andrew's East European church of one. God willin' and creek don't rise (the runner up for the title to this blog entry-I'll likely use it next year), I'll be writing more of these in the coming year.
Day to day experience is the inspiration for what goes on here. We tend to chop that up as "circumstance" and "spirituality" and other things, imagining we can separate parts of our life experience out and put them in different boxes. You can give that approach a go if you want but it will all turn out to be part of the whole of your life in the end and probably sooner than that.
So...Happy New Year! I hope you and the ones you love do well in the coming 365 days. I hope and pray that you grow closer to other people and to God and that you feel the joy and truth of that. I hope this space contributes to the growing closer, even if the contribution from this corner is only by small degree. Let's do this again next year, God willin' and creek don't rise.
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Friday, December 23, 2011
God Bless Us, Every One
There's just no denying that Christmas is the official season of busy. You don't even have to talk about gratuitous shopping and buying, decorating and travel plans. Just adding the special events to the monthly calendar will make you sigh like a mountain climber who reaches a false summit, only to realize that the real summit is still a lot of distance and work away.
And of course, there are our expectations. We carry expectations of enjoying old memories, creating new ones and being with family and friends. And all this of course with the prerequisite assumption that everyone gets along. Because it's Christmas, we somehow build the expectation that everything will be as we hope and imagine, just like when we opened presents as children years ago. Somehow back then, even our mild disappointments faded pretty quickly under the avalanche of excitement and play and food.
I still remember my train set Christmas. The whole thing was a simple two track oval. It was tacked onto a piece of plywood by a neighbor, so that the whole thing could be moved in and out of our small house easily. It was a steam engine replica and the best part was that it came with a little vile of goo that you could squeeze into the engine to make the thing smoke as it ran. I watched it go around that oval for hours. I stopped it; I started it, and I made up countless stories of work being done, people traveling places and of everything on the way to everywhere. Although that was a peak in a lot of ways, I don't remember any of my Christmases from childhood through my teenage years as being very much less.
If you've lived long enough past your "young" years, you've probably found that Christmas and it's denouement New Years are also bittersweet. It's the season to be particularly pained by family dysfunction, estrangement from loved ones and the more frequent bringing to mind of those who are no longer present at the table of this life and are truly missed.
Tiny Tim in Dickens' "Christmas Carol" had a couple of these Christmas complicating issues. Tim Cratchit's family was very poor and Tiny Tim's health was failing. Circumstances could have been better for the Cratchits in many ways. Even so, Tim was down right giddy at Christmas time. It seems that his vision of Christmas didn't involve regrets of summits not reached.
Seems like his family got caught up in his enthusiasm too. One portion of that was probably to humor and encourage Tim, but I think it was pretty hard to stay dour around that kid. Even an eave's dropping Scrooge couldn't help but get sucked in.
Tiny Tim is a fictional ideal but I don't think he lives too far down the street from reality. We don't meet him and his kind often because we're not willing to travel with our own Christmas ghosts. We're not willing to look honestly at our past, beyond the veneer of our present and into the possibilities of our future. Usually, we blink and say "No thank you." The Ghosts' gift to Scrooge was this: Honesty. The ghosts and all they reveal represent an invitation to Scrooge to abandon his chains...These were chains he was forging for himself in this life. They were of the same kind that Marley was doomed by his own self-deception to carry throughout eternity. All Scrooge had to do was say yes to the reality the ghosts offered and refuse to blink.
Happiness and completeness were not delivered by Scrooge's wealth nor discouraged by Tim's disease. For Tim, they existed independently of circumstance. Despite the fact that real happiness looks wonderful from the outside (and it is), it isn't easily acheived. Next time you watch or read about Tim et al, watch how many times Scrooge flinches, how much the revelation costs him. This is no self help whiz bang achieved by a mantra of activity with a dash of will power on the side. This is expensive. This is the offering unto death of Scrooge's identity, of all that he is. It is both risky and costly.
The gift that anyone can give to everyone is the gift of themselves. Note however, this gift costs everything. To give ourselves doesn't involve more doing, more buying or more busy, even if that's all undertaken in the name of doing for others. The gift is accepting who your are with all your brokenness and all your faults, honestly. The gift is offering to others the same grace that accepting yourself requires. This is the gift that Christ delivered in his person, at his birth. It's true that Christ paid the cost of the gift in full. But it's also equally true that the lives he bought must be lived through and with him or they remain forever chained and incomplete.
So...Merry Christmas. Christ's gift to us by his birth was the real and soaring truth contained in that fictional line: "God bless us, every one." We are blessed beyond all possible circumstance both now and forever. We need only the living exposure to the truth that was offered to Scrooge by the Ghosts of Christmas. In other language, the Ghosts are character metaphors for the truth and value of what Christ brought into this world with his birth and offered to us in his death and resurrection.
And of course, there are our expectations. We carry expectations of enjoying old memories, creating new ones and being with family and friends. And all this of course with the prerequisite assumption that everyone gets along. Because it's Christmas, we somehow build the expectation that everything will be as we hope and imagine, just like when we opened presents as children years ago. Somehow back then, even our mild disappointments faded pretty quickly under the avalanche of excitement and play and food.
I still remember my train set Christmas. The whole thing was a simple two track oval. It was tacked onto a piece of plywood by a neighbor, so that the whole thing could be moved in and out of our small house easily. It was a steam engine replica and the best part was that it came with a little vile of goo that you could squeeze into the engine to make the thing smoke as it ran. I watched it go around that oval for hours. I stopped it; I started it, and I made up countless stories of work being done, people traveling places and of everything on the way to everywhere. Although that was a peak in a lot of ways, I don't remember any of my Christmases from childhood through my teenage years as being very much less.
If you've lived long enough past your "young" years, you've probably found that Christmas and it's denouement New Years are also bittersweet. It's the season to be particularly pained by family dysfunction, estrangement from loved ones and the more frequent bringing to mind of those who are no longer present at the table of this life and are truly missed.
Tiny Tim in Dickens' "Christmas Carol" had a couple of these Christmas complicating issues. Tim Cratchit's family was very poor and Tiny Tim's health was failing. Circumstances could have been better for the Cratchits in many ways. Even so, Tim was down right giddy at Christmas time. It seems that his vision of Christmas didn't involve regrets of summits not reached.
Seems like his family got caught up in his enthusiasm too. One portion of that was probably to humor and encourage Tim, but I think it was pretty hard to stay dour around that kid. Even an eave's dropping Scrooge couldn't help but get sucked in.
Tiny Tim is a fictional ideal but I don't think he lives too far down the street from reality. We don't meet him and his kind often because we're not willing to travel with our own Christmas ghosts. We're not willing to look honestly at our past, beyond the veneer of our present and into the possibilities of our future. Usually, we blink and say "No thank you." The Ghosts' gift to Scrooge was this: Honesty. The ghosts and all they reveal represent an invitation to Scrooge to abandon his chains...These were chains he was forging for himself in this life. They were of the same kind that Marley was doomed by his own self-deception to carry throughout eternity. All Scrooge had to do was say yes to the reality the ghosts offered and refuse to blink.
Happiness and completeness were not delivered by Scrooge's wealth nor discouraged by Tim's disease. For Tim, they existed independently of circumstance. Despite the fact that real happiness looks wonderful from the outside (and it is), it isn't easily acheived. Next time you watch or read about Tim et al, watch how many times Scrooge flinches, how much the revelation costs him. This is no self help whiz bang achieved by a mantra of activity with a dash of will power on the side. This is expensive. This is the offering unto death of Scrooge's identity, of all that he is. It is both risky and costly.
The gift that anyone can give to everyone is the gift of themselves. Note however, this gift costs everything. To give ourselves doesn't involve more doing, more buying or more busy, even if that's all undertaken in the name of doing for others. The gift is accepting who your are with all your brokenness and all your faults, honestly. The gift is offering to others the same grace that accepting yourself requires. This is the gift that Christ delivered in his person, at his birth. It's true that Christ paid the cost of the gift in full. But it's also equally true that the lives he bought must be lived through and with him or they remain forever chained and incomplete.
So...Merry Christmas. Christ's gift to us by his birth was the real and soaring truth contained in that fictional line: "God bless us, every one." We are blessed beyond all possible circumstance both now and forever. We need only the living exposure to the truth that was offered to Scrooge by the Ghosts of Christmas. In other language, the Ghosts are character metaphors for the truth and value of what Christ brought into this world with his birth and offered to us in his death and resurrection.
Monday, December 19, 2011
Seeing is Believing
I went walking on the trail behind our house the other night, after dark with our dog. I have a light on a head band that everyone in our family likes to laugh at. It's OK though, even though I look pretty ridiculous at least I can see where I'm going.
I came to a wide spot in the trail and shut off the light, just standing there awhile letting my eyes adjust to the darkness. I don't know that it even registered in the dog's mind that anything had changed. He was obsessively sniffing every square inch he could reach before I shut the light off. Nothing changed afterward. It was a clear moonless night and it was truly dark.
At first I was completely blind and only able to see a few stars through the trees. While I was waiting for my eyes to adjust, I started thinking. I thought about the raccoons that are everywhere this year. One of our nieces had to take her dog to the vet after a run in with a raccoon. I thought about the well dressed, semi-mysterious vagrant that I've seen around the valley of late. And I even thought of the really thrilling mountain lion tracks I've seen in the sand by the railroad tracks. Did I mention that mountain lions hunt at night?
Thankfully, about the time my thoughts turned round to the mountain lion, I started to be able to make out more detail. Still though, much of what I'd been able to see only a moment before remained obscured by the ubiquitous reality of the darkness. In the forest at night, darkness is reality. Any light we take there is limited. Our lights help us only with the steps immediately in front of us. Flashlights do not offer much help identifying land marks which are easy to see during the day.
I got stuck on the trail once without a flashlight. I know this will be a great surprise to everyone who knows me but I am fully capable of talking too much. That evening I ran into a couple people up there that I've become acquainted with over the years, as well as a stranger that started telling me about the cooking school he was attending. By the time my jaws were tired and my voice was hoarse, it was very nearly dark and I was nearly two miles from home.
The first part of the walk wasn't bad. The sun was freshly set and there was still a bit of twilight. Hiking toward home, the trail follows railroad tracks for quite a ways and then morphs into a paved road, a dirt road and finally into a trail that's occasionally maintained when myself and few others choose to do so. By the time I got to the dirt road night had fallen and the beginning of the dirt road strongly resembled the entrance of a rather dark cave. In the end I got home (slowly) by using my cell phone display as though it were a really bad flashlight.
Since then, and with the addition of a flashlight, I've been hiking in the dark regularly for a while now. As a result, I've become aware of how much we don't see. The little lights we take into the darkness light our immediate area, the path we're on and our home base. Everything else though remains in darkness, indifferent to our small candles.
Turns out though, there's a great deal of beauty and life in the darkness. Full moons cast amazing shadows and create shafts of moonlight through the trees. Turkeys can be heard settling in for the night. There's a juvenile coyote that yips from time to time, trying to convince someone of something. None of this really stands out though or isn't even visible when you're busy trying to figure out what each stick is that enters your cone of light and where exactly you're going to put your next step.
Its' easy to fall prey to dependence on having to see and in so doing, miss the beauty that's all around us...because at first it all looks really dark. Instead of standing intentionally quiet and still, we point a light at something, turn it on and let it define the world around us, hoping that the little light will chase away our fear. It might accomplish that for a moment. However, if you're like me you'll start to look out to the edge of what the light reveals and try to imagine what the next shape is going to be, even before you get close enough to resolve it.
We take the light with us with the idea we can control the dark and protect ourselves. Of course, all we wind up doing is shining a light cone fifty or so feet in front of us. In the end, that small light limits and even defines everything we see. The staggering truth is that we were made for greater vision and a greater reality.
Traveling in the dark is a little scary. It gets less so over time but it will always have a level of trepidation associated with it that is unique. Even so, our fear of stumbling in the dark can become an invitation to slow down, to listen carefully, to pick out each step of the trail we're on deliberately and to learn to enjoy the night. And when all that's said and done, we'll still need a breath of faith to believe we've planted our step correctly and that the trail is as it's always been.
Darkness can be chased away or held at bay with a Maglite, headlight or even a cell phone. It can only be redeemed though when we accept it for what it is, accept ourselves for who we were spoken to be and accept that each step in darkness will require a good bit of patience, deliberateness and listening. Most of all though, it requires that we have faith both for the journey and for each step.
I came to a wide spot in the trail and shut off the light, just standing there awhile letting my eyes adjust to the darkness. I don't know that it even registered in the dog's mind that anything had changed. He was obsessively sniffing every square inch he could reach before I shut the light off. Nothing changed afterward. It was a clear moonless night and it was truly dark.
At first I was completely blind and only able to see a few stars through the trees. While I was waiting for my eyes to adjust, I started thinking. I thought about the raccoons that are everywhere this year. One of our nieces had to take her dog to the vet after a run in with a raccoon. I thought about the well dressed, semi-mysterious vagrant that I've seen around the valley of late. And I even thought of the really thrilling mountain lion tracks I've seen in the sand by the railroad tracks. Did I mention that mountain lions hunt at night?
Thankfully, about the time my thoughts turned round to the mountain lion, I started to be able to make out more detail. Still though, much of what I'd been able to see only a moment before remained obscured by the ubiquitous reality of the darkness. In the forest at night, darkness is reality. Any light we take there is limited. Our lights help us only with the steps immediately in front of us. Flashlights do not offer much help identifying land marks which are easy to see during the day.
I got stuck on the trail once without a flashlight. I know this will be a great surprise to everyone who knows me but I am fully capable of talking too much. That evening I ran into a couple people up there that I've become acquainted with over the years, as well as a stranger that started telling me about the cooking school he was attending. By the time my jaws were tired and my voice was hoarse, it was very nearly dark and I was nearly two miles from home.
The first part of the walk wasn't bad. The sun was freshly set and there was still a bit of twilight. Hiking toward home, the trail follows railroad tracks for quite a ways and then morphs into a paved road, a dirt road and finally into a trail that's occasionally maintained when myself and few others choose to do so. By the time I got to the dirt road night had fallen and the beginning of the dirt road strongly resembled the entrance of a rather dark cave. In the end I got home (slowly) by using my cell phone display as though it were a really bad flashlight.
Since then, and with the addition of a flashlight, I've been hiking in the dark regularly for a while now. As a result, I've become aware of how much we don't see. The little lights we take into the darkness light our immediate area, the path we're on and our home base. Everything else though remains in darkness, indifferent to our small candles.
Turns out though, there's a great deal of beauty and life in the darkness. Full moons cast amazing shadows and create shafts of moonlight through the trees. Turkeys can be heard settling in for the night. There's a juvenile coyote that yips from time to time, trying to convince someone of something. None of this really stands out though or isn't even visible when you're busy trying to figure out what each stick is that enters your cone of light and where exactly you're going to put your next step.
Its' easy to fall prey to dependence on having to see and in so doing, miss the beauty that's all around us...because at first it all looks really dark. Instead of standing intentionally quiet and still, we point a light at something, turn it on and let it define the world around us, hoping that the little light will chase away our fear. It might accomplish that for a moment. However, if you're like me you'll start to look out to the edge of what the light reveals and try to imagine what the next shape is going to be, even before you get close enough to resolve it.
We take the light with us with the idea we can control the dark and protect ourselves. Of course, all we wind up doing is shining a light cone fifty or so feet in front of us. In the end, that small light limits and even defines everything we see. The staggering truth is that we were made for greater vision and a greater reality.
Traveling in the dark is a little scary. It gets less so over time but it will always have a level of trepidation associated with it that is unique. Even so, our fear of stumbling in the dark can become an invitation to slow down, to listen carefully, to pick out each step of the trail we're on deliberately and to learn to enjoy the night. And when all that's said and done, we'll still need a breath of faith to believe we've planted our step correctly and that the trail is as it's always been.
Darkness can be chased away or held at bay with a Maglite, headlight or even a cell phone. It can only be redeemed though when we accept it for what it is, accept ourselves for who we were spoken to be and accept that each step in darkness will require a good bit of patience, deliberateness and listening. Most of all though, it requires that we have faith both for the journey and for each step.
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
The Thing That's Bigger
"The Thing That's Bigger" is an awkward title. Melville had a better title for his book on the same subject. He called his story "Moby Dick."
In "Moby Dick," Melville writes about a great white whale that is both malevolent and irresistible. The central character, Ahab, is as driven a man as Melville could find words to express and he knew where to look for words. In the book, Ahab spends his life trying to destroy the thing that took his leg, the thing that gave offense. In the end though, the great whale takes Ahab and his determination and extinguishes him in a great, wild ocean without ever expressing the barest hint of even having been in a fight. Although the great beast carries scars and wounds, it swims on as it always had.
I'm writing this during Advent. It's maybe an odd subject for Advent but I think this season is really the season of "The Thing That's Bigger." The miracle of Christmas, the love of our friends and family stacked on one side, often in stark contrast with our unmet expectations and disappointments and maybe even loneliness on the other. These two polar opposites can leave us at the bottom of a valley of our own making. On each side of rise things that are truly bigger than we are.
The New Testament Joseph faced things bigger than he was. When he found out Mary (his fiancee at the time) was pregnant with someone else's baby, he decided to break up with her quietly rather than subject her to some of the punishments that were in play at the time. Then an angel came to Joseph. The angel said an interesting thing to Joseph. He said this: "...do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife..." That's always hit me as interesting because of the things the angel didn't say. He didn't say, don't be jealous or don't be angry. Joseph was afraid. Whether or not Joseph understood that he was afraid, the angel did. The angel knew that Joseph was facing The Thing That's Bigger.
It's easy to imagine that seeing an angel would make you brave and help you understand the ins and outs of the problem(s) facing you. The truth is though that it will be only a brief time until you're distracted, scared by some new facet of the situation or start to doubt that "the thing with angel" happened at all. Too often our forgetfulness causes us to be afraid. We think we're mad, hurt, discouraged or even at wits end. Really though, we're just afraid.
I could probably take pretty good guesses at our common fears because "such is common to man." None of them really matter though. What matters is Joseph's decision. Joseph with the help of the angel decided to not be afraid.
The thing that Joseph understood before most of the rest of us is that the fact and person of Christ makes fear irrelevant. We still trip over it and even embrace it. We dress it up all different ways and get confused about what we're feeling but it's hold on us, it's relevance in our lives is dead.
White whales come in many flavors. It might be cancer, unemployment, kids behaving badly or any number of other things. We all face them multiple times during our lifetimes. When an angel or even Christ himself shows up in whatever form to tell us to not be afraid, he reminds us that we have a different path we can choose. There's no fear on the path at all unless we bring it with us...and he'll even help us put our fear down. Remember that the "valley of the shadow of death" isn't the valley of death; it's the valley of the shadow. The white whales are real but as Joseph learned, they don't matter any more.
In "Moby Dick," Melville writes about a great white whale that is both malevolent and irresistible. The central character, Ahab, is as driven a man as Melville could find words to express and he knew where to look for words. In the book, Ahab spends his life trying to destroy the thing that took his leg, the thing that gave offense. In the end though, the great whale takes Ahab and his determination and extinguishes him in a great, wild ocean without ever expressing the barest hint of even having been in a fight. Although the great beast carries scars and wounds, it swims on as it always had.
I'm writing this during Advent. It's maybe an odd subject for Advent but I think this season is really the season of "The Thing That's Bigger." The miracle of Christmas, the love of our friends and family stacked on one side, often in stark contrast with our unmet expectations and disappointments and maybe even loneliness on the other. These two polar opposites can leave us at the bottom of a valley of our own making. On each side of rise things that are truly bigger than we are.
The New Testament Joseph faced things bigger than he was. When he found out Mary (his fiancee at the time) was pregnant with someone else's baby, he decided to break up with her quietly rather than subject her to some of the punishments that were in play at the time. Then an angel came to Joseph. The angel said an interesting thing to Joseph. He said this: "...do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife..." That's always hit me as interesting because of the things the angel didn't say. He didn't say, don't be jealous or don't be angry. Joseph was afraid. Whether or not Joseph understood that he was afraid, the angel did. The angel knew that Joseph was facing The Thing That's Bigger.
It's easy to imagine that seeing an angel would make you brave and help you understand the ins and outs of the problem(s) facing you. The truth is though that it will be only a brief time until you're distracted, scared by some new facet of the situation or start to doubt that "the thing with angel" happened at all. Too often our forgetfulness causes us to be afraid. We think we're mad, hurt, discouraged or even at wits end. Really though, we're just afraid.
I could probably take pretty good guesses at our common fears because "such is common to man." None of them really matter though. What matters is Joseph's decision. Joseph with the help of the angel decided to not be afraid.
The thing that Joseph understood before most of the rest of us is that the fact and person of Christ makes fear irrelevant. We still trip over it and even embrace it. We dress it up all different ways and get confused about what we're feeling but it's hold on us, it's relevance in our lives is dead.
White whales come in many flavors. It might be cancer, unemployment, kids behaving badly or any number of other things. We all face them multiple times during our lifetimes. When an angel or even Christ himself shows up in whatever form to tell us to not be afraid, he reminds us that we have a different path we can choose. There's no fear on the path at all unless we bring it with us...and he'll even help us put our fear down. Remember that the "valley of the shadow of death" isn't the valley of death; it's the valley of the shadow. The white whales are real but as Joseph learned, they don't matter any more.
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Storms
My wife and I share among other things, a mutual love of storms. We were at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon once in mid summer while a front was passing through. The storms were pretty small but impressive in terms of their thunder and lightning. We went out on a point below the lodge to see one of the mini-storms make it's way up the canyon toward us. The front of the storm was a lightning fireworks show accompanied by explosive thunder. We watched for a bit as the kids played in a wide place on the point we occupied. Suddenly the same thought hit us both at the same moment, "We really need to get out of here NOW." We corralled the kids and hurried back to the lodge.
In literature, storms are quite often used to foreshadow major change of some sort. Generally it's not happy change. One of our neighbors became familiar with this concept the other night when a storm carrying high winds blew Redwood branch through one of their skylights. That changed their night in a significant way and gave them a vent where their skylight used to be.
The bible contains a good many storms. I can't think of any recorded there that describe scared, storm watching couples that should know better. Still though, there are storms that get people thrown overboard, storms that wreck ships, storms that pass by without doing anything at all and even a storm that Jesus tells to be still.
Storms of one sort or another will find you wherever you are; it's the nature of who we are and where we live. It's sometimes possible to the pick the kind of storm you want but avoiding them simply isn't possible. Life has seasons and life has storms. Life even has seasons of storms. And sometimes we either wait in place too long, can't get out of the way fast enough or are just completely surprised and overcome by the onrushing fury.
Often, our first response to a storm is denial. That's a bit like the child that stands in front of you shivering, telling you they aren't cold because they don't want to stop playing long enough to come in and put on a jacket. Or maybe like imagining that the lightning storm shaking the ground, ionizing the air and almost blinding you would never actually hit you. Another common reaction is to hide the fact of the storm from others...like when our children with literally droopy eyes and slurred speech would tell us they weren't tired, bare seconds before they passed out.
The truth is, we all live through and even with storms. There's a theological word for acknowledging storms. The word is this: confession. Confession is not just a list of right and wrong, naughty and nice. Neither is confession limited to only speaking the positive. It's an invitation by the living God who spoke us to be utterly transparent with him and with each other. It covers everything, finds us where we are and invites us into the reality of who he is and who we were spoken to be.
The best we can do really in response to a storm is to believe in God. By that I don't mean believe that he exists, believe that he pre-, post-, a- millennial or believe that he's a list of attributes, or study how he's omni this or that or even memorize the Old and New Testament in the original languages. I mean instead that the very best we can do is believe and accept that God is who he says he is, "I AM WHO I AM." Because, if that's true, then we are who he spoke us to be, and the storm is what he says it is.
We've had so many people help us through our storms over the last five years it's literally impossible to call them all to mind...not to mention the people who have chosen to help us anonymously. In part, they helped us because at one point, we just laid down in imperfect part at least, our pretense that everything was OK and that we weren't scared, hurt and vulnerable. It's one of the hardest things Christy and I have done in either of our lives. We didn't know it at the moment, but in that moment we turned and started running toward safety, toward the lodge, toward the stuffed chairs and the hearth fire.
In literature, storms are quite often used to foreshadow major change of some sort. Generally it's not happy change. One of our neighbors became familiar with this concept the other night when a storm carrying high winds blew Redwood branch through one of their skylights. That changed their night in a significant way and gave them a vent where their skylight used to be.
The bible contains a good many storms. I can't think of any recorded there that describe scared, storm watching couples that should know better. Still though, there are storms that get people thrown overboard, storms that wreck ships, storms that pass by without doing anything at all and even a storm that Jesus tells to be still.
Storms of one sort or another will find you wherever you are; it's the nature of who we are and where we live. It's sometimes possible to the pick the kind of storm you want but avoiding them simply isn't possible. Life has seasons and life has storms. Life even has seasons of storms. And sometimes we either wait in place too long, can't get out of the way fast enough or are just completely surprised and overcome by the onrushing fury.
Often, our first response to a storm is denial. That's a bit like the child that stands in front of you shivering, telling you they aren't cold because they don't want to stop playing long enough to come in and put on a jacket. Or maybe like imagining that the lightning storm shaking the ground, ionizing the air and almost blinding you would never actually hit you. Another common reaction is to hide the fact of the storm from others...like when our children with literally droopy eyes and slurred speech would tell us they weren't tired, bare seconds before they passed out.
The truth is, we all live through and even with storms. There's a theological word for acknowledging storms. The word is this: confession. Confession is not just a list of right and wrong, naughty and nice. Neither is confession limited to only speaking the positive. It's an invitation by the living God who spoke us to be utterly transparent with him and with each other. It covers everything, finds us where we are and invites us into the reality of who he is and who we were spoken to be.
The best we can do really in response to a storm is to believe in God. By that I don't mean believe that he exists, believe that he pre-, post-, a- millennial or believe that he's a list of attributes, or study how he's omni this or that or even memorize the Old and New Testament in the original languages. I mean instead that the very best we can do is believe and accept that God is who he says he is, "I AM WHO I AM." Because, if that's true, then we are who he spoke us to be, and the storm is what he says it is.
We've had so many people help us through our storms over the last five years it's literally impossible to call them all to mind...not to mention the people who have chosen to help us anonymously. In part, they helped us because at one point, we just laid down in imperfect part at least, our pretense that everything was OK and that we weren't scared, hurt and vulnerable. It's one of the hardest things Christy and I have done in either of our lives. We didn't know it at the moment, but in that moment we turned and started running toward safety, toward the lodge, toward the stuffed chairs and the hearth fire.
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