Moving Day

It was surreal watching the room dissolve around us. There we sat in my dear friend’s living room, casually chatting about ministry and the church, about our lives and relationships, as movers plucked vases from shelves and lamps from tables and walked out of the room. The careful arrangement of pictures and furniture that formed the fabric of what my friend and his wife called “home” unraveled, the movers gently pulling the dangling string. All the threads were being gathered that they would be woven into another home in another state.

Think of your own home and how it is decorated: shreds of memory behind glass frames, sofas and Laz-E-boys positioned just so, specific paint colors slapped here and curtains hung there, all to transform wood, walls and windows into something more than the timbers, metal and nails. It’s the moment that a house (a lifeless structure) turns into a home (a dwelling of living people). We carefully arrange all these things to optimize our comfort and security or rearrange them periodically to get a sense of newness. Then there are the piles of letters/laundry/tools/boxes that clutter countertops, floors and basements but we don’t mind too much because we’re used to it. It’s all part of the system. The end-result reflects our personalities and tastes: sloppy or tidy, bold solid colors or mismatched. But more importantly, it is a safe place; our place that we daydream about at work, where we feel at rest.

I think about those who are suffering from the floods in the Midwest, or wildfires in California, or the big quake in China, and wonder about their homes (or what’s left of them). I wonder what they call home now or if they have any place to retreat for safety.

“Security” has become the household catchphrase in the months since 9/11 (which left many houses emptier than before). If you’ve traveled by plane in the last several months, you’ve certainly endured the tedious delay of long lines and the time it takes to swab your luggage’s zippers and test it for explosive chemicals. While I can’t imagine it doesn’t do some good, are we really more “secure” from the dozens of other threats to our lives that (unlike the photo we want to hang in the living room) we have absolutely no control over?

One of the hard realities of life on this planet is that any of our carefully arranged bits of our lives that prop us up and protect us from sadness and grief can be yanked away at any moment. Our houses and expensive stuff. Our memory, health and hobbies. Or most scary, our loved ones.

How then can we do anything else but learn how to lean solely on Jesus, the Rock, which can never be taken? Doing so means we cannot put our faith in the lives we’ve made for ourselves but for the one that Christ alone can give us. We have but to lean on Him, like a child wailing into his mother’s lap, like a soldier with a wounded leg, like weeping in a friend’s solid hug. Then we’ll find that our home is not really in anything we can touch but woven entirely in the fabric of unmovable presence of God; a home build with the wood and nails of Christ’s tree and founded on the undefeatable power of the resurrection.

“The LORD is my rock, my fortress, and my deliverer, my God, my rock in whom I take refuge,
my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.” ~Psalm 18:2

Broken Mountains and Bows

“Change is the one thing in life that is certain…” – Anonymous

Ask this of one of the dozens of families from the Midwest who’ve lost everything in one of the many tornadoes in the last weeks, or one of the 5 million Chinese people left homeless by the earthquake, whether or not this statement is true, and you will probably get a disillusioned nod.

There is real security in a predictable life. It’s never the things you plan for that shrinks your savings account but the water heater going out during your shower, the unavoidable car crash, the emergency surgery, that comes from left field and catches you and your wallet off-guard. Divorce would certainly happen less if people didn’t change as they grow up.

But it always happens: change. Reality on our globe never sits still. Things that were there one moment are gone the next; jobs, health, love and loved ones. The landscape is always…changing.

And yet our instinct clinches down on these fleeting anchors anyway, desperately looking for purchase and security. Because anchors can hold us fast in life-threatening storms. But then when the anchor breaks away, we flail in the tempest, on the verge of drowning. Certainties are ripped away, leaving us soaked and lost.

But our God doesn’t play by those rules.

“God is our refuge and strength,
an ever present help in trouble.
Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way
and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea…”

Unaffected by our storms, both great and small, our God is unchanging in His utter dependability.

“The LORD Almighty is with us;
the God of Jacob is our fortress.”

The reality of God’s power and love (greater than our broken earthly one) always wins in the end. The Psalmists are so good at reminding us that we can face any tragedy of human life (full of the kinds of grief and loss that words cannot capture) only if we let God be the Stronghold that He is. If we would simply

“Be still and know that He is God…

“Be still and know that He is…

Be still and know…

Be still…

Be

From Psalm 46

Help us, Isaiah....

Hope is a frightening thing.

It opens the door to the things we want most. It pulls back the bits of carefully-placed armor that shields our deepest and most sacred longings and exposes them to injury.

Skepticism is a far more practical approach to life:
Fewer disappointments and shattered dreams to clean up. It keeps you in touch with the needs of survival and reality. It's an all-around safer way to live.

Smoldering

"So you open the Good Book
you thumb to the common lection
and you sit down to read
your expectations minimal - what with your busy week
a few half baked prayers for illumination
waft to heaven like smoke from a smoldered fire."

~ excerpt from a Sermon by the Rev. Ralph
"Preaching - Impossible, Indispensable"

The excerpt is from a sermon that had preachers lined up in its sights. But I found its words penetrated deeper than my own practice of sermon writing.

I can't get this image out of my head. And I'm learning to pay attention when that happens. Just like I'm learning to pay attention to unexpected tears. Frederick Buechner talked about those tears that ambush us, unbidden, entirely un-manufactured or conjured. The moments when a word or image snags us to a jarring halt, like how fish must feel when the irresistible morsel suddenly becomes a lethal hook, and life turns upside down as it's yanked out of the normal world and into something that steals its breath away.

The thing about the images that leap into our hands, flailing like a trout, or the tears that crash like waves upon our cheeks, is that they penetrate with surgical precision deep into our lives, to the stuff in our souls that lives underground; our secret-est hopes and most essential needs that we mostly don't have words to articulate or even know about ourselves. But suddenly, a word or a hope that is uttered by another becomes that shaft of light into the bottom of the well, our eyes (so accustom to darkness) stung and dazzled when our expectations are sliced cleanly in two.

"...everything exposed by the light becomes visible,
for everything that becomes visible is light.
Therefore it says,

"Sleeper, awake! Rise from the dead,
and Christ will shine on you."
~Ephesians 5:13-14

"Wake me up inside, Wake me up inside
Call my name and save me from the dark.
Bid my blood to run, before I come undone,
Save me from the nothing I've become."
~'Bring Me to Life' Evanescence

So what is smoldering deep down that such an image would tear me asunder? I don't despair becoming "nothing" (as the lyrics state). But the melodic rock music that cries out with such psalmic vigor stirs something deep in me as well; the longing for more; a faith deeply in tune with the fiercely joyful melody of the Spirit; a life electrified into action, playfully daring for the sake of the Song. So the fear is not in being "nothing", but "nothing much."

I've been told that Augustine says (somewhere) that hungering after God is itself a gift. Whoever might have said it, there is truth there that I feel in my bones. It's like the way that faith in Christ is also a gift, the way that Christ is both High Priest and Flawless Lamb.

"So, surrender the hunger to say you must know.
Have the courage to say, 'I believe.'
And the power of paradox opens your eye
and blinds those who say they can see."
~'God's Own Fool' Michael Card

I hope I'm aware enough of my generation's (and my personal) longing for existential truth: to actually experience the praise and joy of God as a thrilling rush of gratitude (did King David not dance like a wild man?). But where is the peace in pursuing it? Or more importantly, where does it become not about me? Is being known enough? Shouldn't it be? What is the place where the surreal shoulders-up against our "real"?

O God, you are my God, I seek you,
my soul thirsts for you;
my flesh faints for you,
as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.

So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary,
beholding your power and glory.

Because your steadfast love is better than life,
my lips will praise you.
~Psalm 63:1-3

If the psalmists, both in Scripture and today, can long for this, can't we dare to engage the dangerous business of hope for it too?