A Lonely Desk and Small Hopes

The photo wasn't where I'd left it.

It was a picture of myself and two good friends that I do not get to see often enough. He, a professional, licensed, and rather skilled Christian psychologist. She, beautiful and extremely gifted with young children with a quick wit that lays quietly and then pounces out of the brush like a patient lioness springs after her prey. The psychologist and I are in ties and dress shirts; she in a stunning evening gown as we playfully hold her horizontal across our arms, all of us smiling for the camera. It's a fun memory of a friend's wedding. I'd left the photo in my desk drawer intentionally so I would bump into it often in my hunt for pencils or ibuprofen. But now, it was lying on top of the desk.

Someone else had moved it, just as they'd discarded the tall, slender lamp that usually stood sentry on the end of my desk onto the floor, oddly underneath it, looking like a wounded soldier lying on the field in too much pain to move. Those same hands that displaced these fixtures yanked the neatly tucked bottles of communion wine from cozy sleeves in their box, disemboweled several filing cabinets, helped themselves to some lemon pound cake in the refrigerator and whose sticky fingers are perhaps typing across my laptop keyboard as I peck away on this unfamiliar one.

"I'm sorry you had a rough day," several people shared. I was grateful for their loving and genuine concern. But "rough" wasn't the word I would have used. While certainly I wasn't happy that someone (or "ones") chose to take from me the peaceful morning routine of reading, communiques and sermon preparation I was looking forward to (to play CSI with police investigators, complete with dusting and pictures) or that they thoughtlessly imposed the inconvenience of calling repairmen to restore the broken window in the fellowship hall and filing insurance claims (ironically, the agent had just been robbed too), I wouldn't say I felt "rough" or harried or panicked. I didn't even feel stressed-out about it (although I was certainly tired at the end of the day). I was even a little curious why I didn't feel "violated" or "unsafe" as many testimonies after a theft confess.

As I sat in my chair, picturing some flannel-and-jean clad young men anxiously rifling through my space, heard their dull-witted delight at finding the stash of wine, mused on why they moved the baptismal font off the chancel to the front doors of the sanctuary, imagined them sprinting down the hall of the church with their loot, I found myself feeling sadness; sadness for the small hope that looks forward to nothing bigger than $30 in cash, a tablecloth full of wine bottles and a laptop after the prime of its life. If indeed, the glory of God is a life well-lived (as Irenaeus said), I grieve their loss that comes with such little gains.

I don't miss the laptop. But I do miss everything it represented: connectivity to friends and years of meaningful correspondence, its long memory of class notes and papers, sermons and Sunday school lessons; how it was a launch pad for new words and ideas and a vehicle for entertainment through games and movies. Of course pastors and friends have been functioning well for centuries without them. Nothing replaces face-to-face or even voice-to-voice, not even (most especially!) e-mail. But perhaps for my generation, there is some shadow of community; some small awareness that through these plastic boxes, at the other end of thousands of miles of fiber optic cable, are real breathing human beings that mean something to

Post-Script: I discovered a dear friend's church also fell prey to hungry hands. His reflection offers profound illumination into our church's activity. Check it out here.