I had the strangest sensation this week. I was sitting in a coffee shop on Monday, and my mind started drifting over the conversation of the past few days and hours. There had been so much pain and confusion by people I love and cherish. Disease, loss, death of vision, the inevitable gravity of mortality… For the first time in my life I felt the physical sensation of numbness spread from the emptiness I felt inside out into my limbs. It was physical and it wasn’t. It was like my soul was disconnecting from its moorings and sliding away. It was a weird kind of melting, drifting, lethargy.
So I took a deep breath. I closed my eyes and felt the sadness. Tears weld up. The day became more gray.
In the cocoon of despair I prayed. Well, it was more like I pointed my mind to heaven and opened up my soul in pleading eyes to a God who I always tell people is always Present. I didn’t feel anything. I just hoped. And God gave the grace (the dignity) to just be there. No revelation. No rescue. It was like going on a walk with a friend where neither of you ever talks, but you know by proximity alone that they understand. Volumes of words are spoken by silence. Steady love. The commitment of being there is enough.
So I went home. The kids were having a hard day and there was a lot of parenting to do. My wife had had a really good day of encouragement from the Lord.
The next day we were doing pre-marriage counseling for a young couple. They’re excited. We’re excited. We’re all learning and exploring their relationship and building in healthy perspectives and skills for a successful future. Focusing on them for a few hours this week was good medicine.
I received a phone call from someone who had visited the church for the first time. I had overheard a conversation on Sunday where they were sharing that they had some kind of tooth problem, but no money to fix it. So, lead by the Holy Spirit, we took up an offering and then started looking for a dentist to do the work for the money we had. The man called during the week to ask if he could say “thank you” to everyone. He was very thankful, and said that he had never seen anything like that before in a church in his life. If was great to put God’s generosity on display, and to be a vessel of blessing.
Yesterday I was leading the community prayer time. In checking in with each other there were several people in the midst of struggle. My first thought was “not more, Lord.” But in the small group, sharing honestly and openly, I didn’t find the despair pilling on with the other burdens. I felt compassion and hope for these people I love. As we prayed for them and interceded I felt my own burdens ease.
Today, I stopped thinking for a while and just let the sunshine and the full-bloom of spring do it’s ministry to my soul. It was good.
People are still sick. Visions are still dying. Death is still present. Injustice and oppression and violence still seem the rule of the day.
But, at the same time, there is God, the Lord, the Only. There is his presence and his promises regardless of my experiences or mood. Sometimes these seem irrelevant. Other days they are the very breath of life itself. For a week like this one they are simply enough.
I’m telling you all of this because I don’t know what else to do with moments like this except to share them in the hope that when your time comes you’ll know that you are walking well-worn paths. That what matters is the walk, the moment, the truth of our mortality and humiliation in the face of the wild swells of the not-in-our-control-mortality that we navigate. The victory is not in the escape, but in the splinter of faith it takes to turn your eyes to heaven.
At some point we are all taken off the tourist map into the back-alley that happy-happy Christian pop-culture never talks about. Back alleys where we are reminded of our inability, our insignificance, and our mortality. It’s not all celebration and victory and joy. But it’s real. It’s true. It’s the un-medicated life of loving in a fallen world and the small, everyday, unspectacular things which anchor us and rescue us.
