Who Is Important?

I was recently at a large church gathering, where a designated group of volunteers were in charge of shuttling us to the campus where we would gather. When I went forward they greeted me cheerfully, checked off my name, and then said they would try to get me on the next shuttle and showed me where I could wait. After a few minutes, they came back and pointed out that there might be some people who needed to go ahead of me because “they were important.” It turned out the important people were all men and one of the women explained to me “they are pastors.” I don’t know why she assumed I wasn’t, but I can only guess it’s because I’m female. I ended up waiting two and a half hours. The next time a different person came by and asked me “Are you important?” I answered, “Well, I’m important to Jesus,” only to be met with a blank and slightly confused look. There were people who pushed to the front of the line. There were people who did not know there was a line. And the volunteers, to be fair, were doing the best they could.

It would be easy to make this about the ways that the church (perhaps unintentionally) makes people feel less. Or about the ways that women are still devalued in places of leadership. But what happened in those 2 plus hours is I ended up reconnecting with an old friend and having a heartfelt conversation for which I wouldn’t trade all the “importance” in the world. Leave me here all night, I almost said, and I’ll have a better time than if I had gotten on that first shuttle as I had planned.

But a few days later, it leaves me wondering: do we understand what it means to be less? Some of us do. And those are the ones whose names we don’t know, who show up to their children or their congregations, who show up at their jobs even when they are unappreciated and undervalued, who begin their days with a prayer even when their hearts have turned to stone because they can’t imagine a world where there is not more love than they have seen. They are the ones who have felt less their whole lives because of things other people have said or not said.  They are the ones who, whether they would have chosen it or not, have the mind of Christ.

I wish we could find ways to listen to those people. The ones who aren’t important, the ones whose names almost nobody but their families know. The ones who have something to teach all those who are so convinced of their own power and importance. The ones God loves. The ones we need if we are ever to find a way to get over the power and the fighting long enough to cross boundaries and risk loving with the kind of love that is our calling. Because, my nameless friends, you are important to Jesus. And we need your quiet faithfulness and your humility to survive.

Stay in the Stream

For Pastor Ross in Australia, who missed this blog and was kind enough to write and tell me so even though we have never met in person . . .

And for Natalie Hart, who models for me what faithfulness to the vocation of writing looks like.

As a type-A worrywart and general control freak, I am very good at doing things. I make lists, I organize responsibilities and check them off and nearly always get things done on time. I like to think I am dependable.

But there are some problems that don’t get better based on the number of actions I take to try and solve them—no matter how many nights I am awake thinking about different angles, no matter how many prayers trying to clear the path for a word from God, no matter how many lists, the problem not only does NOT go away, it may actually become worse. And then it’s all a confusing muddled mess with no obvious path forward and even more fear and anxiety than I started off with.

In the last year, I’ve started to go monthly for spiritual direction—possibly one more thing on my list to try and find some answers, but it’s turned into an exercise in receiving over and over again these two most basic bits of wisdom: I am not in control, and I have no idea how much God loves me.

Last time, my director talked to me about the value of fallow time—stopping, doing nothing to try and solve the questions but simply (as the Rilke quote goes), “living into the questions.” The other thing she told me was to “stay in the stream” this Holy Week from Good Friday to Easter and beyond and let it carry me.

That sounds nice on paper, but it drives a control freak like me crazy. And perhaps the difficulty of that suggestion is one reason that I need it so much. To recognize that of course I can’t solve anything, of course my life isn’t in my own hands, of course I am held in a story of love beyond my understanding. And all I have to do is stay in the stream; nothing more or less is required of me than that. I don’t have to churn endlessly to try and solve anything; I just have to let go and surrender to the ride. Because no matter how long I feel stuck in the suffering of Good Friday and no matter how much some part of me desires to stay there until I understand what it means, what is absolutely certain is this:  somewhere, someday, in a gift far beyond my grasp, Easter morning is waiting.

So this Holy Week, that is all I am asking: to stay in the stream that carries me (as the song says) “beyond my wants, beyond my fears, from death into life.” What a ride that will be if God helps me let go.

It's Not Working for Me

Recently I heard the modern-day prophet and poet Walter Brueggemann speak about the Psalms. He said before we can receive the counter-world offered us in the Psalms, we have to speak the truth about the world we live in. And that is a world characterized by, among other things, greed, anxiety, amnesia, and despair. We have to tell the truth, Brueggemann suggests, to be willing to say it straight up: “It’s not working for me.”

This strikes a deep chord with me. Brueggemann named something I’ve been struggling to articulate as I look around me at so many people I know facing uncertain finances, exhaustion, vocational upheaval, and nearly debilitating anxiety. While a generation past could count on stable jobs for decades, it feels lucky now to have one that lasts more than five years. Even for hard-working middle-class folks, it’s becoming a less-achievable dream to own a home or put kids through college. And yet every day we wake up again, go to jobs, run around busy as anything, trying to deny these truths or ignore them because what choice do we have? No wonder despair is the end of it all.

It’s not working for me. I am tired of pretending it is.

When I reach out to that most ancient prayer book for comfort, I struggle to believe, as Brueggemann told us, we need not inhabit this world we are given, that every time we do so much as read a psalm we are engaging in a subversive action, holding on to the hope of a world of abundance where a table is spread and all are welcome, where Yahweh is every faithful in spite of change everywhere, where all the world is not on its way to hopelessness and despair but to renewal and shalom and newness of life. I reach out for that world with eagerness, with desperation; sometimes I can believe in that world, but sometimes I cannot.

It’s been a week or so since I heard Brueggemann and as I sit with his words, the thing I remember most is the palpable relief I felt deep in my soul at hearing someone say, “It’s not working. Of course it’s not. You’re not crazy for wishing it were otherwise. It’s not working.” Wherever we want to go next, I'm certain that is the point to begin.

Maybe it is truth-telling itself that holds the key. Maybe not until the truth is told does the door begin to open to the counter-world that all our hearts are longing for.

Go

Reading Genesis again I am struck by how often the Lord God says to Abram “Rise up and move your tent” or “Go.” And he goes. Later he even says “take your only son and offer him as a sacrifice.”

I can run through this in my mind several different ways, including thinking of the Hebrew scriptures as training a wayward people how to be faithful to God’s leading, or even all of it as a metaphor or allegory. But mostly it reads like God’s just messing with Abram.

A friend said to me recently that she had “transition fatigue.” There’s the sense that after a time you will have landed someplace, be doing some work that fulfills your vocation, your purpose. To be in mid-life and not have found that may be approximately the same as how Abram felt when God was forever telling him to pull up his stakes and “go” somewhere else. Again? Really? It’s exhausting and there is an emotional cost to constantly applying for new jobs, moving to a new place, starting again.

What comfort can be found in all this? Maybe that I think it’s a new story in my life but really it’s an old, old story. Uprooting and sacrifice and uncertainty. And in all of it, God going with you from place to place to place. I wonder what it takes, if it’s possible to see it in the midst of the confusion or only years afterward, to be able to see the angels going up and down, to proclaim with surprise like Jacob: “God was in this place and I did not know it”?

Certain

“The first noel, the angel did say, was to certain poor shepherds …”

The shepherds always seem to be on the edges of the nativity scene. Off to one side or another standing watch over the sheep or the donkey or maybe even the camel if the three kings aren’t up to the job. I’ve always had a soft spot for the shepherds, and I always try to edge them as close to the manger as I can in our little set. Those poor old shepherds know something. I’m sure of it.

For years when I was a kid, I misunderstood the use of the word “certain” the traditional carol “The First Noel.” I thought it was the verb. The carol wasn’t telling us which shepherds; it was telling us that the first noel happened to “certain” them—to make them sure of something. I love that. Even now, I hear it this way.

I love those shepherds in their certainty. As for me, most often I am not certain. I find myself waffling the instant I say something: “Well, I this is how I see it, but I can also see the other side.” In a postmodern age, it’s not unusual to do this, to be aware of options, to stand in the gray haze of infinite possibility rather than to stick your neck out and stand solid on one thing that makes you certain.

This isn’t all bad. I think it’s important to be aware of how power structures influence narratives, how we are necessarily limited when we speak by our own points of view. I also think it’s a very good thing that the church is growing in its acceptance of doubt, becoming more honest about the mysteries and paradoxes of the life of faith. We need to hear those things.

But we also need to hear that sometimes, on the edges of the action, are people who might have had an experience—as fleeting or inexplicable as it may be—when they were sure of something, when God’s love was real to them, when it all made sense. This coming year, those are the stories I want to hear—starting with the shepherds, and coming back to you. Because in those stories is life. I’m certain of it.

Advent: Finding the Way Home

There is a stretch of country I drive on my way to work where the sky blends so seamlessly into the land that it’s hard to tell where the horizon is. When the sky is overcast, it’s even more difficult.

I wonder how I’d find my way if I were out in one of those fields in a snowstorm, blinded by the monotony of white. What anchors would I search out to help me find my way? a bit of fence or some dried brown grass on the crest of a hill? The fewer things there are in a landscape, the more desperately each one matters to show you where you are.

During times of tragedy we are stripped to essentials. The familiar anchors of belief seem far away and we are left numb, lost, with few signs to help us find our way home. We wander in the far country of despair, unsure of anything solid we can hold on to.

And this is Advent: the world waiting in quiet blindness, familiar anchors fading into white. It’s the moment before. What happens next changes the story forever, when into that nothingness, something solid, wrapped in flesh, is born. But for now, we wait. And the sky grows heavy with our longing.

A Holy Pause: Remembering 9/11

Ten years later and the news, to borrow a phrase from Wordsworth, is “too much with us.” Bombarded with images of burning towers, stories of heartbreak and recovery, and endless analysis, I find myself desperate for a little more quiet, a little more space to reflect and remember, to sit with nothing but the clear blue sky and images and memories that are already too vivid in my mind.

Ten years later and when I look at the familiar skyline of my childhood, I still see only absence: the place where the towers used to be. And instead of filling that space with anything else, I would like to sit in silence. There is a different way to do this than what we see in the news.

In his post-9/11 reflection, Writing in the Dust, Archbishop Rowan Williams tells the story from John 8 of the woman caught in adultery. The tragedy seemed to have only two movements: guilt and death. It was an overdetermined narrative—with one way the story could be told, one way it could end. She was guilty and she should die for it, and the teachers of the law were waiting because there was no way Jesus could get out of this one.

So much of the news around 9/11 has had the same feel for the last decade. There are sweeping words used, black-and-white analysis with “good guys” and “bad guys,” and seemingly only one way for the story to end. The political scene has grown increasingly polarized, and there is more rigidity than ever in our debate. Is there a different way to do this? Is there another way to talk about tragic events that leaves room for the presence of the word? We might take a cue from what happens next in John 8.

Instead of playing out that moment the way everyone expected it to go, Jesus bends down and writes in the dust. Williams writes, “He hesitates. He does not draw a line, fix an interpretation, tell the woman who she is and what her fate should be. He allows a moment, a longish moment, in which people are given time to see themselves differently” (78). The story ends the way no one could have imagined: the accusers a little less self-righteous, the woman, freed in love, given the gift of a new life if she will take it.

This anniversary date, I wish for the same thing—for a moment of hesitation, a longish moment with space to tell this story differently, a holy pause to make our debate more compassionate, a chance to write in the dust of so many lives lost the promise of love arising still, new life out of ruins, hope from impossibility.

This 9/11 you won’t find me watching the special reports or reading the newspaper or listening to endless analysis on the radio. You will find me sitting outside someplace under a wide blue sky, taking a holy pause, letting the emptiness speak in sighs too deep for words.

Being Present

Recently I went on a retreat. One question from my spiritual director has stuck with me. She asked: “Is there a different way to be present to an issue other than getting tangled up in it or ignoring it?”

I didn’t know at first how that could be possible—to be present to a concern without trying to solve it somehow or getting trapped in the intricacy of its emotional cords. More often I am guilty of thinking too much about things rather than not enough. More often I spend my time trying to solve or understand a situation. But to simply be present to it without doing that? It felt too much like laziness or neglect to me, failing to do the hard work needed to move forward. Yet as I have sat with the insights from the retreat, that is the one I keep coming back to, which must mean there is some truth there for me.

I remember the chair in the middle of the woods I sat in for a long time at the retreat. And then I look at a chair in my living room. I wonder how I can invite these questions and unresolved issues in, have them sit in the room with me in one of those chairs, even offer them a cup of tea, but not feel obliged to pull them apart or get sucked into their pull. Just to be present with them in a new way that is neither neglectful nor anxious but aware, calm, and hospitable.

I think it may be possible to do that; I also think it may be important for me to try. Not forever, because sometimes you do have to just dig in and work at something. But given my make-up as a person, it’s less likely that I would ignore something forever than it is I would simply sit with it in silence, like an old friend, and wait quietly for what is going to happen next, with our without my worrying it into being. To simply be present. And be still.

Resurrection in the Dark

“Until we discover a new vision of the Savior, a savior who has risen out of our disappointments, we’ll never understand Easter.”
—Craig Barnes, Christian Century, March 13-20, 2002

After seeing the snow start to melt, the people coming outdoors on bikes, with dogs, walking together after the long season of indoors, I find this time of year it’s not hard to believe in resurrection.

It’s much, much harder in the dead of winter. In the dead of anything. How do we believe in resurrection there? But it is the places we are least able to hear the news of resurrection that we most need to hear it.

I am come to think that resurrection takes place not with a blast of trumpets shouting “Christ the Lord is risen today” amid the joyous songs of the faithful, but more the way it happens in the gospel of John: with a whole lot of running around, weeping beside a grave, and terrified people locking doors because they don’t have a blessed clue what is going on. That is how Easter begins. In the dark.

And that is how Easter still begins today—in our disappointments, in the death of dreams, in the exhausted depression that too much grief can bring. In those places, we are not surprised to find ourselves worried, confused, weeping in the dark. We are surprised to find every now and then that we are capable of hope, able to love others deeply enough to forget ourselves, able to experience comfort we-know-not-how, and able to go on living in spite of it. Resurrection hope may come as inconspicuously as the first shoot of green after a long gray-brown, but it is no less worth celebrating for its subtlety.

That's Not Snow

Today in the supermarket a mom was naming things for her toddler. “That’s a lobster. See the lobsters? Say ‘Hi, lobsters!'” And the toddler obediently waved a greeting and tried to say “lobster.” We learn the properties of things as we learn their names: in this case, lobsters are crab-like things with big rubber bands around their claws stuck in a fish tank in the seafood section. And some of that is true about lobsters and some is not. But when you are less than two-years-old, you go with what you know and there is little room for ambiguity.

The other day I had a similar experience. I was out for lunch with my friend’s preschool-age son, who looked out the window at the piles of dirt-covered snow. This is snow that has completely lost its pure, ground-covering pristine beauty and has, after five or six months of being around, become old snow. “Look at that snow,” I said with a sigh.

“That’s not snow,” he said to me with absolute certainty. “That’s garbage. A garbage truck must have dumped that there.”

I look into my soul and wonder how to name the person I am becoming. There are times I’d like someone to give me that same kind of clear-cut reminder: “That’s not snow.” Or, “That’s not who you are—you are better than that.” Better than the pile of petty insecurities and resentments that often haunt me. Better than the selfish, inward-curving weariness that keeps me from the joys of knowing others. “That’s not who you are.”

And then I could remember once again what snow and I were made to be.

Windrows

The dictionary says a windrow is a “row of hay raked up to dry before being baled,” and right now I can almost imagine the smell of new hay and the warm summer sun. Almost, but not quite. Because outside it’s February, which seems to go on forever. And everywhere on the roads I see another type of windrow: piles of snow shoved the side by giant graders clearing the streets.
This week in the newspaper, a number of people were complaining about the increasingly large windrows, with due cause. The streets get so narrow you can’t pass two cars side by side, you have to pull far into the intersection when you are making a turn to see if it’s clear, and there is not the smallest hope of parking on the road.

Windrows are a great image for the way my career has gone—an increasingly large pile of “stuff” that has been pushed to the side, at times violently by a sharp blade. It’s hard not to stare at those piles, to pick through them and relive the disappointments and confusion of each successive loss and change, to try to make sense of it all. Yet spending my energy picking through those piles feels like a waste; I should be looking instead at the path that has been cleared ahead of me.

That’s a nice metaphor, but it isn’t really working for me. Because where the path is cleared is only empty space, and there are times I have no idea how to fill it. As a woman I’m forced in so many different ways to be creative, to fit things in depending on what my family needs, or what others need, and it’s hard to think about that empty space as something I can fill entirely on my own. There are too many other competing demands to consider. And I know whatever I put into that space is just as likely to change yet again, to move in another direction. I am weary of change and the older I get, the more I just want some things to stay the same.

It takes a certain amount of courage to walk into empty space, to suck back the disappointments and self-doubt and keep being available for whatever life puts in front of you. So I try to keep forgiving myself, forgiving the snowplows, forgiving the narrowed spaces and the long cold of winter, and trust that all the courage it takes to keep walking will make me the kind of person that can come alive again in spring.

The Problem of Snow

Like many places in North America, we have had record amounts of snowfall lately. And I always get a kick out of seeing the big dump trucks full of snow. Because there comes a point when there is simply nowhere else to put it, when the streets have become so narrow because of leftover snow piles that it’s no longer possible to drive on them. So the snow becomes a problem and they have to cart it away.

The same day as we saw the truck carting away snow, we saw this giant pile in a parking lot. And while I thought bitter things about how much winter can a person really take, my kids both said (almost in unison): “Wow, wouldn’t it be great to climb that?”

And there is the difference. Is snow a problem to be solved or is it a gift?

Too often I see my life as a problem to be solved. Snow to scrape off, roads to manage, strategies to think through and implement. But what would it take, what does it take every day to get back that sense of life as a gift, as a giant snow pile just waiting to be touched, climbed, and laughed over in the fading winter sun?

Bear Eyes

The family story goes like this: I had a teddy bear that my brother threw in the mud. For some reason (and to this day I’m not sure what that is), it was impossible to simply throw it in the wash; it was beyond repair. My parents wanted to offer some kind of replacement, so I got a wise-looking stuffed mouse, which I proceeded to name “bear eyes.” In whatever way my two-year-old mind could process, I knew that this mouse, no matter how lovely, would never replace the bear I had lost. She might be a mouse, but there was clearly bear in her eyes.

Every holiday season when I see what’s going on around me—exhaustion, despair, busy-ness, greed, and worry—I wish again for the ability to simply rename them. To take all that turmoil and sadness and call them “Advent peace.” And find that somehow the words alone could make it true.

Naming something so clearly in opposition to reality is the province of children, with endless circular arguments of “it is too” and “it is not.” But the ability to remember is the true gift of childhood. To know that no matter how many things the world takes away, no matter how deep the losses, there will always be the memory of peace, joy, wholeness, the certainty of being loved beyond what we imagine. And those memories are continually calling us back home, to eyes that we’ve definitely seen before and never forgot how to love.

Holding Back Chaos

If my husband stays up much later than I do, a predictable thing happens: I inevitably drift over to his side of the bed. So when he gets in, he has to make his body into a kind of battering ram that pushes me back to my side of the bed. And while he may think of this as an example of me being a bed hog, I think it has much to say about the theology of creation.

There are so many parts of the Genesis 1 story that involve setting boundaries and limits: the light is separated from the darkness, the vault of the sky is defined over the chaos of the water, the sea is held back from the land, the day and night are named as distinct.

In a simple way, my husband’s presence in bed is a limit that says, “You will go no further.” When he is not there, I wonder if the night went on long enough whether I’d simply drop off the other side of the bed. But when he is there, I know where the bed ends and that I am safe from the drop on the far side. My own side of the bed I know instinctively; it’s that other, far-off edge that represents the unknown, the fearful limits of what I don’t understand.

Oftentimes I wish for some dramatic re-creation moment in my life: for new ground to appear out of endless seas, for light to push back a long darkness, for the naming of order out of chaos. But time and time again, those order-making moments don’t happen, even when they are needed most.

What I have instead is a kind of wall that keeps me from going over the edge—a tenuous wall made by intangible things such as the faithful constancy of a communion of friends, the perfect resonance of songs sung into the night, and the quiet certitude of the sun setting to end each day. It’s not much to hold on to when you add those things up, but somehow it’s enough to keep the chaos at bay and hold me back from going over the edge.

... And

For Krista
... and for you.

There is a prayer in the daily office that pleads “that I may not fall into sin nor be overcome by adversity.” There is something about that word overcome that falls from the tongue like a full stop, a period at the end of a word or a sentence that gives a note of finality. Overcome. And so often with adversity—things like unemployment, loneliness, despair, it is hard to find much more to say, much hope beyond that closed-off sense of ending.

And yet, as Scott Bader-Saye said at the King’s Interdisciplinary Studies conference last week, people of faith are the ones who are able to always say “and.” So it’s unemployment … and. Loneliness … and. Despair … and. There is so much grace in that one word, to be able to say, after even death, there is an “and” in the hope of resurrection.

Whatever the adversity you find yourself overcome by today, there is, even now, an “and.” May it find you as quickly and as certainly as the grace of God, in which we live, and move, and have our being.

Burning

“At that time the kingdom of heaven will be like ten virgins who took their lamps and went out to meet the bridegroom. Five of them were foolish and five were wise. The foolish ones took their lamps but did not take any oil with them. The wise, however, took oil in jars along with their lamps.”

—Matthew 25:1-4

There is something about the song “Give me oil in my lamp, keep me burning, burning, burning” that makes me tired. Not just because I often hear its peppy tune on still-sleepy Sunday mornings, but also because I’m not so sure it would be a good thing to just keep burning all the time without a break.

It’s not that I don’t prepare; like the wise girls I am always over-prepared with everything I might possibly need for my trips. So I’m sure I would have enough oil in my backpack, ready to go even through a long night of waiting. But even with enough oil, I imagine myself getting angrier by the minute as that oil is used up, wondering what the delay was about and silently scorning those who didn’t think ahead as well as I did. With every second that went by, with every lick of oil on that flame, I would grow slightly less loving, slightly less gracious, slightly less alive.

Today I heard something on the pray-as-you-go podcast that encouraged me to think symbolically about the passage: what might the lighted lamp represent in my life? And what is the oil that will keep it burning?

Because of course the story isn’t about being prepared; it’s not about greed or getting high marks from the bridegroom for planning ahead. It’s about a different kind of oil, one that keeps you alive instead of consuming you.

What is the oil that keeps me going, that keeps my lamp alive, that keeps my soul from growing dark and dead and tired? Because whatever it is, this kind of oil—oil that flows down the beard of Aaron, oil that anoints my head, oil that brings gladness instead of morning—is not about scarcity at all, but abundance. And maybe with enough of that kind of oil, I can keep my heart alive and full of grace, burning, burning, burning till the break of day.

Possible

“Everything is possible for one who believes.” —Mark 9:23

We have friends a newborn baby, and last time we visited, my husband leaned close and smiled at the baby, talking in a voice I haven’t heard him use in years. As I watched him, I thought to myself with a pang, This is impossible. How am I supposed to look at him doing that and NOT want another baby? And yet, that, too, is impossible. I’m too old; there would be too much space between our now eleven- and thirteen-year-olds; we don’t have any baby stuff any more; we couldn’t adjust our lives to a baby schedule again.

So we ended our visit with the baby, and I came home and stared at my daughter’s teenage feet, which it seems just yesterday could fit entirely in my hand when she herself was a baby. And those lanky, impossibly large teenage feet hit me like a wave of sadness: some things are no longer possible.

It’s not possible to get back the days that are gone. Long summer days when entertainment was as simple as a popsicle and a wading pool and “making it better” as easy as a band-aid and kiss. Evenings with newly bathed kids in blanket sleepers snuggled beside me to read a story for the one hundredth time. Days that seemed impossibly long at the time, but now seem impossibly far away.

Even as I am grieving what I miss, I see in those big feet other things that are still possible. It’s possible to talk to my children about things in the world like floods and forest fires and poverty and wonder with them about why they happen. It’s possible to sit on the edge of their beds and night and hear their ideas and questions about the world without knowing, as I used to, how I can answer easily in response. It’s possible to love what someone else has without needing to possess it for yourself.

And this is the art of living by faith: finding what is still possible in a world that shuts us down from a delightful sense of openness. This is one reason I have joined the High Calling Blogs Network—to see, in the voices of others who struggle to walk the life of faith, what is still possible. And in hearing their stories, to trust the words of truth that everything is still possible for one who believes.

Under Wide-Open Skies

“We live under wide open skies and know where we stand.”

—1 Thessalonians 5:4, The Message

These days I have been driving more often through farmland, and I am entranced with the way the clouds make patterns on the pastureland below. You could be standing in one spot, thinking it is a dark and gray day, when not 10 yards away is a place outside the shadow of the cloud in full sun. And I understand something now that I have not understood before: without that kind of wide-open space, it’s impossible to know where you are standing.

As someone who grew up in the city, I am not used to seeing so far around me, miles of open space rolling into the horizon. Time and experience come in small packages. If the sky is gray when you look up, dark is all there is; dark is everything. You don’t have the perspective to see that maybe a short hop away it is already getting lighter.

There is healing in the wideness of creation. There is a grace in seeing the big picture, in knowing how the story ends a short skip across the rolling farmland, in seeing a moment in the shadow of the clouds is only one small drop of dark in a wind-swept land of light, in a world of grace, in a universe of blessedness.

Why? Yes.

Recently I watched the classic movie Out of Africa again and was moved by many things I hadn’t noticed the first time I watched it as a teenager. One exchange in the movie has really stuck with me. After Karen and Denys spend a night together she is full of questions the next day about what this means for their relationship and for her future. The short dialogue goes something like this:

Karen: I need to know what this means.
Denys: Why?

And that’s it. As someone who spends probably way too much time asking “what does this mean?” I love the simplicity of his response. Why do you need to know what it means? Maybe you don’t need to know at all. Some things may not need such close examination. They just are.

This past Sunday, we went on a hike on a beautiful sunny day. There were tufts of dandelion fluff in the air, the sky was liquid blue, the green leaves were filling out the trees, and my son caught a frog in his bare hands just before falling into the creek. It was a day of laughing, a day of slowing down and living in the moment. It was a day that in all ways seemed to be God’s “yes” to a question I never asked.

Why? I don’t know. But yes. Definitely yes, and amen, and yes again.

Spring Snow

Spring in Edmonton is a tease. You get several warm days—enough to make you dig out the t-shirts and want to run to the garden store—but then you are slammed once again with cold and possibly even snow. So we sometimes see two things that don’t often go together: new green leaves and cold white snow.

I wonder why the leaves don’t just figure out by now that they need to wait a little longer. But there is no caution in spring. It will not wait for a better time. It just is. Is now. So very green and new.

Once it’s begun, growth is never straightforward. We step ahead and we fall back. We step ahead and we are slammed with snow. Why are we surprised? After all, we were told: “In this world you will have trouble.” You will, you will have trouble. We’re also told to “take heart” because Christ has overcome the world.

Overcoming is as long and hard to pin down as anything I know. But if snow and new leaves can survive each other, maybe we will survive too.