Things That Don't Go Together

“… that they would seek God, perhaps grope for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us.” —Acts 17:27

This past week I saw two things that didn’t seem to go together. One was a dusting of snow on our newly unfurled tree leaves. The other was a ridiculously active sloth at the zoo. Frozen spring leaves. A fast-moving sloth. Things that don’t go together. This got me thinking about other things that don’t go together, words that should never be in the same sentence like “child” and “cancer.” All of us, if we have our eyes open, will be called at some point to hold grace in one hand and pain in the other and wonder how we’re supposed to put them together.

The life of Christ perhaps best exemplified this holding of opposites, putting together things like “blessed” and “mourn,” “death” and “resurrection.” To ignore the places where these words clash together is to miss something fundamentally important about faith. And yet there are people who resolve the tension by choosing one side and ignoring the other; whose placid smiles choose grace and can’t really get their hands dirty on the pain side. The world needs more people who are willing to stand in that place of tension and be honest about pain, even the pain of holding on to faith in the midst of loss.

There are times we seek God with our minds and our rational beings and there are times when, failing everything else, we are left to grope in the dark. Times when there are no easy answers, when there are no answers at all. But we who are compelled to ask the questions stand there, hands open, looking now at grace and now at pain, and raising our hands in surrender to the one who reconciled opposites, who reconciled us, with his blood.

I'm Just Asking a Question

“Jim, what are you doing?”
“I’m asking a question.”
—Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, on meeting “God”

“God may well slay me; I may have no hope. Yet I will argue my case before God.”
—Job 13:15

I’ve heard two people recently point to something good in their lives and give God thanks for it, along the lines of “God knew I needed this.” And while I am happy for their good fortune, I wonder if they have taken time to go the next step: if God knew they needed it, what does mean when someone else, someone equally loved and valued by God, does not receive the thing that is needed? God knew you needed it. Does God not know that she needs it too?

Even though I wish it were otherwise, a large part of me still believes the lie that God’s love is equal to God’s provision for me. God loves me, therefore good things happen to me. Bad things happen and I am thrown into doubt. God has not provided. I know the key to what we are promised is God’s presence with us, not abundance or smooth sailing or anything of the sort. “In this world you will have trouble.” That is what we are told.

But I want to ask God a question. I want to know how we are supposed to believe he is with us, trust that he has not forgotten us when all the evidence points to the contrary. I want to ask God: “Where are you? Where are you for all the voices that even this night are crying out for relief from sickness, sorrow, and suffering? Where are you? And why don’t you do something?”

I’m just asking a question. I am made bold by biblical companions like Job, the Talmudic tradition of arguing with God, and even the modern-day example of Captain Kirk. What am I doing? I am asking God a question. I don’t expect an answer. Just, for a while, to burn with the words I need to ask. And to hope, as a friend reminded me with a quote from Rainer Maria Rilke, that I am able to “love the questions themselves” and trust that one day I will “gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

The Cross, The Grave, The Skies

Every Easter the song “Christ the Lord is Risen Today” gets me in some deep gut place and almost always causes me to cry. I’ve sung it after the deaths of people I love with triumphant expectation, I’ve sung it in the midst of sadness as a prayer for newness of life, and I’ve heard it sung by a child with enough heartache in his life to make his unabashed alleluia’s humble me into hope.

But this Easter what struck me most was the part that says “ours the cross, the grave, the skies.” We want the resurrection, the skies, the triumphal alleluia’s. But ours is also the cross and the grave. There are times for the hopeful ascension of the skies and there are times to identify with the sufferings of Christ and say, yes, there is a cross that is mine also. There are times for feeling the pain of the women who could not stay away, who needed to lay their hands on cold stone and do something to mark the place where their beloved died, times for feeling their pain and saying yes, in the grief of my heart this day, mine is also the grave.

I am praying for courage to embrace not only the alleluia’s but also the time for bearing crosses and the unflinching death of dreams. And to realize that even in those blackest of times, the disciples were not alone. They had each other as they walked to the stone and its finality; they had each other to listen and cry and hear the story as they asked for the thousandth time “Is he really gone?” They were not alone.

And I have learned that the promise of those who are with me in suffering is enough. It is enough to let me survive till that lovely “early in the morning” time and the whisper I’ve waited my whole life to hear from the one who holds it all—cross, grave, and skies—who knows my name, and says to me cutting through a thousand deaths with these words of promise:

 “Woman, why are you weeping?” 

Enchanted

“The world is enchanted.

Lean closer to see it.”
—Aaron Niequist, “Enchanted”

I have been thinking a lot about imagination, and in particular finding extraordinary moments in the ordinary things of everyday life. I want to believe that just below the surface of things there is a glory, an enchanted beauty that sparks and flames if only I have eyes to see. Sometimes in the midst of routines, doing dishes, picking up laundry, and driving through the eternal mud of an Edmonton spring, I wonder about that. But if I can’t believe in that kind of everyday beauty, how can I believe in grace, in hope, in new life, in all the things that make my faith live?

So I decided to do a little experiment. To walk not more than 10 feet from my house and see if I could, by looking closer, find something glorious in the everyday sights of my front yard. And here are the results.

Tree with Berries

Muddy Road

Pine Tree

I think the world is enchanted. And if I lean closer to see it, I find God is everywhere. Even in the winter same-ness of my own front yard.

Saving Light

I know that daylight savings has to do with getting as many hours of light possible during our waking hours. Originally it had something to do with farmers, I think. Today I watch the sun just beginning to set at 7pm and it feels wrong. It shouldn’t be this late yet. My body clock has not clued in to the new number on the time clock.

There are times my Christian life is the same: though I know in my head and my heart what the “time” is supposed to be, it just feels wrong somehow. And I am at odds with God, debating, suspicious, fighting hard to act obediently in spite of it all.

But there are other times when things seem to click; when the words match the inner sense of wholeness, when the light comes and goes with the right kind of regularity, and when I am most able to see the rhythms and patterns of God’s kingdom around me. And for those times, while I seem to have less to write about (!), I also have a deep and settled sense of gratitude and a desire to save that light against the next time I am out of sync with the things of the Spirit.

For now, I close my eyes and soak in the sun. And I say “thank you” in as many ways as I can. “In him was life, and that life was the light of all people.” (John 1:4)

In Praise of Boredom

Sometimes it takes going away to get a new perspective on what you have. The very same house that might have seemed like the walls were closing in a week earlier suddenly is familiar and comforting after a brief absence.

My kids told me yesterday they are bored by church. And while part of me worries over this, wondering how to engage them authentically in things of faith, another part of me thinks boredom is okay. Because every week they hear the same words again, it’s like solid ground is growing beneath their feet, solid in the reliability of words that outlast the ages.

One day they will be away, and some great need will drive them to their knees. Their hands will reach to that ground and find that words that floated past them so many times, words like redemption and hope and sacrifice, will have grown heavy in their hands, with comfort and weight enough to sustain them through even the darkest night. And if that means now, for a time, they are bored? I’m willing to live with that.

Underneath It All

My prayer life is nothing like it used to be. Whether that’s a function of our move and a total change in community or some move in my own spirit to a place of wilderness, the fact is I pray way less now than I used to. Sometimes I miss God, or miss the intensity of how I used to pray. I was sure of God listening and sure of him speaking to me. That was a green and growing time, one that I miss in the long dark dull of winter that I seem to be in now.

But today I am reminded that though all the world is covered with snow, there is still a certainty: I know where the ground is. And underneath it all is God. No matter if I pray for hours, minutes, or seconds. Underneath it all is God and his love for me goes on and his reaching to me does not depend on the duration or quality of my reaching to him.

Underneath it all is God and in the absence of so much else, I see in the endless blanket of white that there are dips and ridges and a thousand tiny intricacies. Though my mouth is silent, I could spend a lifetime uncovering the mysteries of one square foot of snow, running my hands along each gully and listening for the almost imperceptible sound of my hand brushing across. I thought because I had words to name that endless white of snow, I understood it. But in the silence there is so much mystery. And what surprises me most is there is also so much certainty: underneath it all is God. This much I know. Underneath it all is God.