Singing

A tragedy happened on our campus this week. One of our students died Thursday from injuries sustained in a car accident. The day we found out, we gathered as a campus community to pray, to cry together, to speak words of lament and words of promise, and to sing together.

There is something about the sound of singing that is so gentle, and that gentleness stood in stark contrast to the raw and open wound of grief we felt at the same time. On the one hand, there are all the questions, not understanding why one so young had to die, why such random things happen at all, why God in his love could not have stopped this. On the other hand, there are the promises of God, which we were reminded, are for times exactly like this. Times when, despite all evidence to the contrary, we continue to believe, continue to hold on to hope, continue to trust that the one who promises to preserve our lives will do so even in the face of death.

Though it is complicated in ways I don’t understand, I find that it is only in the Christian faith I am able to hold such opposites together. In A Grace Disguised, Gerald Sittser talks about the loss of his wife, his mother, and four-year-old daughter in an accident. He says,

“Sorrow enlarges the soul until it is capable of mourning and rejoicing simultaneously, of feeling the world’s pain and hoping for the world’s healing at the same time” (p. 63).

In moments like this, we feel the world’s pain keenly. And as we walk through the darkness of grief, I pray that God would allow us the grace of holding alongside that grief the hope for healing at the same time. Hope for the day when the sound of singing will at last and forever drown out the sounds of crying and every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth will be together united in joy before the throne of the Lamb who is worthy, whose death forever makes us live.

True Religion

“True religion is this: to look after widows and orphans in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.”
—James 1:27

Seeing the picture above had the same kind of jarring effect I imagine the parables of Jesus had on those who heard them. “This is your true religion,” says the picture, and right away I recognize with shock that it is true. This is so far from the stories I want to name me, and yet this is where I have come. Maybe I’m not a jean hound or a shop-a-holic, but in so many other ways I have forsaken care of others in favor of my own faulty sense of what I need.

I slip into habits in my Christian walk as easily as I slip into a pair of jeans. I need a faith that is insistent, that cracks and crashes through the dullness of my self-centered living with a call to be more and better who Christ calls me to be. In Mystery and Manners, Flannery O’Connor says: “To the hard of hearing, you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”

So what is the job of the preacher, the writer, the theologian today? To shout, to draw large and startling figures in the hopes that people will at last understand, that with practice we will all learn to hear and to see … that one day, with the practiced discipline of sincerity, there is a grace that may become so much a part of us it seeps into our every action almost without thought. A grace that fits with the comfort and familiarity of an old pair of jeans.

Dancing

“You have turned my mourning into joyful dancing.”
—Psalm 30:11 (NLT)

I asked God for joy this week. And he answered me with dancing.

I have a long history with dancing, and the saddest thing to me is how rarely I do it anymore. I definitely went through the ballerina phase as a young girl, and very often my sister and I would choreograph dramatic dance sequences (complete with costumes and props) in our living room. I know for a fact I danced in high school (I have a picture to prove it), and I still enjoyed letting loose every now and then at social dances during college.

At some point the dancing stopped, or at least got a lot less. There were so many reasons not to dance. I think it’s interesting that Psalm 30 does not say: “You turned my mourning into happiness.” The opposite of sadness is happiness. The opposite of the deep and endless dark of mourning has to be more than happiness, has to be something as wild and unpredictable as the journey of grief, has to be something like dancing.

This week, we got a dance game where you stomp a mat on the floor in time to music and the sequence of steps on the TV. I did it with my kids and I have not laughed so much in a long time. And I remember in the midst of sadness, there is always within me the potential for wildness. And I am so very glad that God wants me not to subdue that or be embarrassed by it or drown myself in self-consciousness, but to take that wildness and use it to put as much passion into celebration as I do to mourning. For now, I still dance in my living room. But maybe someday …

Sinking

Make a careful exploration of who you are and the work you have been given, and then sink yourself into that. Don't be impressed with yourself. Don't compare yourself with others. Each of you must take responsibility for doing the creative best you can with your own life.
—Galatians 6:4–5

It has not gone the way I pictured it and at times has not been anything close to what I imagined. But whether my life bewilders me or causes me joy, the word today is “sink yourself into that.” Know who I am and how God made me and do my creative best to live life—this life, here, now.

There are so many things that still call to me from my old life in Grand Rapids—family and dear friends, successes, even something as simple as knowing what road goes to where. But I am no longer living there. And I realize there is no new life without great loss. Two dreams I’ve had recently involving dead or dying babies remind me the pain involved in shifting your attention from the life you expected to the life that is before you. At some point there has to be a letting go, there has to be an open and honest journey through sadness before there is a chance of starting again. And sometimes the biggest hurdle in getting through that sadness is anger and the persistent refrain: this isn’t what I wanted.

Sinking into the place and work I’ve been given will mean having to chop through layers of ice, thawing parts of my heart I’ve held back in reserve “just in case.” It also might mean deciding to stop using the reactions of others as a yardstick by which I measure my self-esteem. But to live creatively and responsibly means there will almost surely be beauty. Beauty and joy to outlast the loss, melt my sorrow and bring me home again to the life God has waiting, to the path right in front of my feet.