Posts Tagged ‘thrive’

The Usefulness of Uselessness

Posted: June 6, 2020 in becoming
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Jenny Odell in her book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy makes a case for re-examine our lives and considering seeing the “usefulness of uselessness. “

That rings a bell these days as we reflect on the last few months of social isolation. What have we learned? Perhaps we have learned how to do a nothing that is a something. Perhaps we have simply learned to tolerate being quiet. Perhaps we have been taught how to do less but love ourselves the same or more. Perhaps we have learned we have value even when we don’t appear in public.

Did we just lose two months? No, we lived those. And we connected with family. And we connected with others by texting and video chatting and sending pictures and anyway we could. Maybe we learned how to reach out with sincere concern for others more. Perhaps we learned not to wait for others to make contact.

What kind of life might we return to as society opens back up?

We might jump back into rushing around from place to place. Hopefully we don’t just renter the ratty-rat-a-tat-tat race. Let’s not fail to have learned that aloneness, repose, quiet, even fear have something to teach us. What have you learned in this time?

Perhaps we have learned that we are stronger than we thought. I learned I was both weaker and stronger. Perhaps we could see that society and work and school and even church and particularly social media drives us to keep trying to project public worth or success. But we have value because we exist. Gods love for us and our love for us isn’t based on starring. When we haven’t much to brag about on Facebook, we still have value.

Odell writes, “It is the invasive logic of commercial social media and its financial incentive to keep us in a profitable state of anxiety, envy, and distraction. It is furthermore the cult of individuality and personal branding that grow out of such platforms and affect the way we think about our offline selves and the places where we actually live.”

Do we have to appear on social media to feel alive, valuable, present? Nope. Do we have to post pictures that make us look happy to be happy? No, research shows us that online “likes” — the social validation and feedback loop — actually just makes us more anxious and insecure.

What if, as we re-enter being social or working again, we carry a new sense of a resilient self forward, a new appreciation for the family we live with, a fresh value for silence, a treasuring of the value of being alone, and the sweetness of a self-affirming interiority? What if we don’t go back to trying to prove we have value. We just do.

We are not first a brand or an image to keep up by showing up. We are not a personage appearing but a person always, not an it but a thou, not alone no matter how alone we were or are.

What have we learned by sometimes doing nothing that was something these last few months?

Perhaps, producing or not, being public or not, we have learned to hold ourselves dear, and to hold others dearest.

I Will Have Myself Carried

Posted: May 20, 2020 in god
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As Christians, what can we do when we can’t do any more?

What can we say when our health problems, relational problems, money problems or situational problems overwhelm us? What words can we use then?

We might consider twisting the English language. Perhaps the shape of a pretzel will work.

Consider some aspects of ancient languages that might provide a model for this. Greek, Sanskrit and Old Norse have a grammatical middle voice, a voice between the active voice (Mother’s adore their babies) and the passive voice (Babies are adored by their mothers). The middle voice can say this in a third way, “I will have myself adored.” That’s the middle voice. English doesn’t normally use that voice, but as you see, the middle voice can be voiced in an odd, twisted way.

Rachel Winner, in her book Still, gives two examples of the middle voice as she explores her wavering spiritual experience as a Christian.

“I will have myself carried.”

“I will have myself saved.”

I love those unique expressions of “ I will have.” They contain longing, hope and confidence.

The middle voice — found in “I will have myself saved” — indicates that it is another agent than oneself that does the saving. In this case, the implied agent for the Christian — saying such a thing — is God.

We Christians might think of this as a way of saying, “I will put myself in God’s hands, and he will rescue me,” or “I will present myself to God. He will save me.”

But the mid-voiced form, “I will have myself saved” is better. It is better because it says what we want to say concisely, and because it accurately respects something about God and about oneself that is true. It respects God as savior. And it respects oneself as worthy of being saved.

Also, notice that it is spoken in this pretzeled form of the language almost as a demand. “I will have salvation!” Or, it is spoken with certainty, “I will not entertain any options or scenarios of not being saved.” Or it comes across as a foregone conclusion, “I will not, not be saved by God.” Or, we may say, it is spoken with active confidence, “I will take action to render myself present to God to save me and he will do it.” It is all of those.

About God it implies, “I know that when I present myself to God, he will carry and rescue me.” It reminds me of Job’s famous, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him: but I will maintain mine own ways before him.” Job 13:15

This passage from Job is often misread. It is not an expression of the ultimate form of passivity. Job is presenting himself as both active and worthy. In maintaining his innocence, his ways, he is declaring himself worthy of salvation no matter what happens to him.

The NIV renders Job’s words as, “Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him; I will surely defend my ways to his face.”

The Message renders this as, “even if he killed me, I’d keep on hoping. I’d defend my innocence to the very end.”

We must not miss Job’s defense of himself in this scripture. Job is saying, “I will, no matter what I experience ahead, even if it is death, put myself in God’s hands to be carried and saved, and he will save me because I am worthy of this,” or to pretzel it in English into the middle tense, “I will have myself saved.” What we have here is an affirmation of grace, both original grace (we have worth because we were made in the image of God) and redemptive grace (we are made worthy by the sacrifice of Christ). Job unknowingly but rightly puts himself within Christ, within redemption when he trusts God to save him.

Try it on. See if it fits, the pretzeled, middle-voiced, grace-affirming, self-affirming cri de coeur. Use it to help yourself adopt the correct posture toward yourself when difficulty overwhelms you. Christians, you are not guilty. You are not being punished or condemned. You are loved; you are worthy; you are forgiven. It is okay, even encouraged by scripture, to be confident before God because God is more than willing to carry and save us. He has already saved us! It is ours to claim and receive, and he is pleased when we do.

“Since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus … let us draw near to God with a sincere heart and with the full assurance that faith brings, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience.”

Hebrews 10:22

Say it with me:

“I will have myself carried.”

“I will have myself saved.”

Almost

Posted: May 16, 2020 in beautiful
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I ordered flowers for my wife last week. They almost made up for all the demands I have put on her for about — one day, but it was my utmost for the moment considering the limits of the pandemic. While living in extremis, giving what we can is still satisfying.

Almost is often the beautiful and satisfying result of utmost.

I used to workout at the gym. I can’t do that now so I use my stretchy bands at home. It’s an incomplete form of exercise, and yet it still successfully competes with what I did before.

Incomplete can still compete.

I look to God as the foremost beings in the universe, and I pray to him, but I know my prayers aren’t perfect. Too much asking. Not enough gratitude I’d say. I even think sometimes I could even be accused of acedia, spiritual sloth. I can’t seem to pray like I used to, but it’s almost as good.

My almost for His foremost.

I built four stonewalls last year in my gardens. I overdid it. I do that, sometimes, and sometimes the amount of work I do in a day is just right.

Sometimes is more honest than always.

The last couple of months I’ve spent mostly prone. Sick. Yuck. Laid low. Vulnerable. Blinkered. But I did orchestrate new financial arrangements for my family that brought about gains for my wife and I and both of my daughters. I had to work on accepting my limits and find successes where I could.

A partial victory is the satisfying reward given to acceptance.

Yesterday, I almost made the quintessential cup of espresso. I missed because the milk didn’t foam quite right. Great! Shoot!

Almost is a kind of first — and last.

My wife retired from her career as an archivist and a library loan specialist and then the pandemic hit. She had plans to volunteer at the zoo and exercise at the gym, but both of those are put on hold. Loss. Now she shops for groceries in a mask and supports me in the rough patch that I’ve been going through with my body. She makes huge, valiant and heroic efforts to normalize our lives.

Effort is often heroic and exists as a kind of loss steeped in kettle of valiant.

I’ve had careers as a teacher, a writer and a pastor. I was fairly satisfied with those, but careers are always in process and always present new challenges and new decisions to advance new initiatives. The goal never looked like one peak; it was more like making an constinuous approach march to many different high places.

Life is not summiting; it’s trailblazing.

Now I blog. And you my dear reader, you read. Thanks for that. It bonds us. Through this we come to some degree of connected wisdom, but wisdom is always something we practice on the next new challenge, and we often almost get it right. That’s the way it works. It’s kind of like playing a song on the piano and then trying it again, trying to interpret it and put the emotion and meaning it deserves into it. Practicing always invites us to another try.

Almost is a routine part of discipline.

A few weeks ago, before dawn, I took my telescope outside and looked at Jupiter and Saturn. I could see the moons of Jupiter orbiting the great planet, and the gorgeous ring of Saturn almost resolved, but I noted that the telescope was slightly out of alignment and so the mirrors weren’t quite up to the task. I gave it my total effort and so did the scope. I almost saw the fine detail in beautiful things, and as I look back on it I did see something beautiful in the try.

Almost is one of the most beautiful and coveted outcomes of total.

By now you must be getting the point. Almost — it is as common as a potato on a dinner plate. Almost, is good, like strawberries when they are almost but not quite perfectly sweet and not quite deliciously ripe. They are still good, especially if you top them with whipped cream.

Life is full of “almost,” the almost perfect relationship, the almost beautiful garden, the almost but not quite completed persona, and accepting that in one area of the fight can act as a halo effect, giving us contentment in other areas that don’t live up to perfectly perfect. To be satisfied with life — the limits it imposes, the yet unsung song it sings, the way things don’t always work out perfectly, we do well to come to a deep acceptance of an essential and ever-present ingredient of it. We do extremely well to value and love the je ne sais quoi that makes us mature, the hard to accept, the challenge to embrace — the amazing “almost.”

……..

If you like short, pithy, aphoristic expressions of insight, you can find more of my thought-proverbs, aphorisms and epigrams at www.modernproverbs.net

Named By Love

Posted: May 8, 2020 in beautiful
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“Our determinations need constant reorientation. When labels start coming into our heads (loathsome, ugly, loser, winner), we should question them—recognize a label as the insubstantial thing it is, and let it go. It’s not helpful. It’s going to undermine our imaginations. Love something unusual. Kittens and lilies are fine, but maybe try the vulture or the dandelion …”

Debbie Blue

Love the dandelion. I like that. But vultures? I’m still working on the loveliness of vultures. Reorient your “determinations.” That’s sage advice.

Rather than “loser,” lover would be the healthy way to see ourselves. We are not ugly or ordinary or loathsome, even if our bodies or personalities don’t check all the beauty boxes society creates for being “hot” or “smart” or “handsome” or “attractive.”

Where do we get our sense of the beautiful or good looking? In many instances the fictions surrounding our concepts of beauty are crafted by culture. ”Beauty” is put on display by the power elite, by businesses, by media, advertisers, celebrities and influencers. They put “beauty” in front of us to sell things, to win attention, to manipulate public opinion — for gain.

And while there might be some innate sense of beauty based on size, morphology, proportion or symmetry, beauty is deeply subjective and as we commonly say, “in the eye of the beholder.”

An old man says his old wife, “To me you are the most beautiful person in the world “ and she is. A child says to her scruffy cat sitting on her lap, “I love you my cute kitty,” and the kitty is cute — named by love. These have gone beyond societies iron hoops of stigma and laurel.

One generation sees skinny and shiny as beautiful. Ours. Check out the ads. Another sees more flesh as beautiful. Look at the paintings of Rubens. Peter Paul Rubens (1577 -1640) was a seventeenth-century Flemish Baroque painter. He as a proponent of an exuberant Baroque style that emphasized color and sensuality. His nude paintings? Loads of fat! Layers of fat. Opulent, corpulent, rippling folds of fat — puffy knees and massive, bulging butts everywhere! Fleshy folds meant health, wealth, order and stability. A hilly, human landscape was in. Lean flesh and bones were for the poor and sick.

Things have changed. Plump is now déclassé. Or things haven’t changed. Manufactured images still rule our minds. Airbrushed and photoshopped pictures both reflect and rule our tastes. You know you are watching TV these days when everybody on the screen is freakishly beautiful by modern standards, ripped and royal, cartoonishly thin, perfectly plasticish, measuredly boobish and buttish with an amazing amount of thick, glossy hair and perfect skin.

Do this. Don’t buy that, an anemic, reductive, age-limited sense of the beautiful. Name yourself out of love for yourself. See your own worth to yourself and others. Engage in meta-consciousness. See yourself from above.

Here is the deal, a real deal. Be vatic; be self-prophetic. Be retromod. Look back on yourself with modern eyes. You are beautiful in ways that you can see and name. You are all you have ever been or done. Loyalty is beautiful. Servanthood, beautiful. Brave suffering is beautiful. Self-care is beautiful. Pregnant is beautiful. Old age is beautiful. Vultures are beautiful. They eat death, just as Christ eats death. Dandelions are beautiful. They feed bees. The more you know about something or someone often the more beautiful they become to you. Arachnologists think spiders are wonderful, even beautiful. They are.

Jean-Henri Casimir Fabre, a French naturalist, entomologist, and author known for the lively style of his popular books on the lives of insects, is proof in the entomology pudding. I love his love of the tiny creatures, his appetency for Pine Caterpillars, peacock moths and the unsung burying beetles. I love this poet of insects. He once wrote, “What matters in learning is not to be taught, but to wake up.” …

Advice from the trenches: Wake up to unsung beauty. See what others have missed. Move beyond subjective, cultural aesthetics and labels. Be meta-cultural. Run beyond beauty stereotypes. Such thinking is apotropaic. An accurate and affirmative sense of self has the power to avert evil influences, particularly the evils of self-condemnation.

Awake to yourself. Name yourself. Name something of or in yourself beautiful today. Name something that is different beautiful today.

Lessons From Doves

Posted: April 24, 2020 in god, recovery
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Yesterday I sat outside my house on the side patio. After a while I noticed that two mourning doves had landed in the corner of my yard on the wall surrounding my small decorative pond and fountain. They arrived as if from nature’s chef, an amuse-bouche, free, surprising, desirable. The tiny pond is a cool oasis full of water lilies, duck weed and water Hawthorne and around the edges grow nasturtiums and coreopsis and alyssum. It’s a lovely cool spot covered with a trellis full of passion vines.

One of the doves wandered over to the rocks around the pond to drink and began to splash around. Then leaving the pond, it walked along the bricks at the top of the stucco wall in front of it and sat down beside its mate in the shade of an orange blooming cape honeysuckle. It was a warm day here in San Diego, high 70’s, but there in the shade the doves sat side-by-side and settled into a mid-day repose, a luxuriating sloth, a robust calm, ataraxia, robust tranquility. Their legs disappeared. They sank into the cool bricks and widened. They so settled that when I moved my chair out of the sun, only 25 feet away, they didn’t move a feather to fly.

During the coronavirus pandemic, as we social isolate, for many of us there’s less to do than we are used to. In such a limiting milieu as this, I find myself flitting between uncomfortable feelings. What is it? Boredom? Lethargy? Anxiety? Malnoia, that vague feeling of mental discomfort. Unlike the doves, I don’t settle well in the shade.

Caralyn Collar, a blogger I follow at beautybeyondbones puts it well in saying, “we’re grappling with … restlessness.”

Yup! Nailed it! Caralyn is restless. I’m restless. The world is restless. Our children are restless. My cat is restless. Early the other morning while it was still dark, I stepped out to look at the rings of Saturn and the moons of Jupiter through my telescope. Unbeknownst to me the cat came out with me, at 5 AM! When I went back in, she was locked out.. When we got up we were like, “Where is the cat?” We found her huddled under a bush in the side yard. She was glad to come back in. She was lucky one of the local coyotes that roam our master-planned community didn’t eat her.

We all want to escape, run out the door, get out again. We want to get out to malls, coffee shops, stores, restaurants, breweries, the gym, parks, the beach, church, friend’s homes, work, parties, hangouts — and get food — anything but grocery store food — and hugs.

The restless don’t rest that well. I confess I’m addicted to movement. We all are. We are addicted to motion, ambulation, talking, meeting, driving, projects, errands, shopping! We’ve had a lifetime of consumerism. Sure we can still buy online but buying things on Amazon is getting old! I want to touch stuff! I want to hobnob with the checker.

What to do?

Sitting the other day watching the two doves in the shade under the honeysuckle on the cool bricks, I found myself admiring their equanimity, their composure, their even disposition, their ability to just be there, to rest.

The dove is a symbol of the Holy Spirit of God. I think we like the Holy Spirit just like we like our consumer culture. We like the Holy Spirit to be in motion, to come to us frenetic, with brio, with verve, with spunk, with clangorous tongues of fire, agentic, shedding gifts, flying lead bird to the next wonder-venture. And while all that is fine and good, my resting doves, by the pond, reminded me that the Holy Spirit is also a Spirit of comfort and of rest, and that our God is a spirit of rest, and invites us to enter his rest.

The doves came and sat with me. Sometimes God comes that way, just to sit with us, in silence, to sit with us in our uncomfortable feelings, to sit with us in our anxiety and to sit with us in our restlessness. He knows we are restless, and he knows the true rest is found in him, in sitting with him, in silence. Seeing that he isn’t all on edge to jump up and fly and fidget and fume and fix, seeing that he knows how to sink his legs and feathers into the everyday-shady-brick-mundane gives us permission to be content, at times, with doing nothing. God our quiet feathered flâneur.

I think I could take lessons from my neighborhood doves! To rest some of the day away with no shame attached — that’s progress. That’s progress in moving away from addictive motion and persistent restlessness. They’ll be time again for all that; perhaps this is the time to get better at resting.

This evening as I take my walk I hear a dove cooing gently, roosted, retired, settled for the night, signaling its intrinsic restful contentment.

The Weakness Door

Posted: April 20, 2020 in god
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At such a time as this we may feel weak and vulnerable. Living in a world pandemic has this affect.

We are helping some by social distancing, but it is a very small part to play. Few of us have a leading role, and even those who do are not masters of the universe. They too must wait; none of us has the power to say, “Stop,” and the virus stops.

And so we wait, and so we are weaker than we want to be. And so we hurt for those who are afraid, for those economically devastated and for those who are sick and for those who have died and for their families.

We may wonder how to experience God in such a time as this, a time when we can’t go to church, a time when our relationship with God is more up to each of us.

I have thoughts. Jesus did not come in power and authority over everything that happen in his time. He healed, but he didn’t heal everything. He influenced, but he didn’t influence everyone. The truth is he allowed himself to come in human form and to be weak and vulnerable like us. His moment of greatest weakness, the one he said he didn’t want, this is what saved us.

Debbie Blue writes, “Our response to smallness, weakness, being out of control, vulnerability, eventual decomposing is usually not very accepting. We don’t usually love what is small and weak and vulnerable in ourselves. Nor do we generally feel that loving toward what is small and weak and vulnerable in other adults. We feel threatened by our finitude and mortality.”

Debbie has us rightly identified here but it is unfortunate that we think like this because in our smallness and in our weakness and in our pain we actually have an opportunity to experience God.

Perhaps we have limited our awareness of God’s presence to big moments of joy in communal worship or big gushes of gratitude in times when things are going our way. But what if God is also known to us in our helplessness and weakness and smallness?

The unvarnished truth is that God in Christ himself became weak so as to enter into our weakness; therefore, we can experience him in our own weakness. This will take some getting used to, this truth that uncomfortable feelings also contain the presence of God.

Debbie Blue writes, “Maybe people wanted a mighty, fancy, elite sort of God. God gave them Jesus, who consorted with the commoners, died with thieves. And still we’ve (sometimes) tried to make him out to be a superhuman.”

Of course Jesus was and is super, truly God, and yet he chose to become human, like us, which in part means powerless, wounded, subject to death.

This is true and provides us with a unique opportunity in this season of weakness to come into connection and solidarity with God and other people through the mystic revelation that weakness is something that God is present in.

This is a time in world history to accept and even embrace our limits, to embrace the spiritual sensation of weakness as a way to experience God and be one with God. Our sensations of weakness, helplessness and smallness are actually doors that open onto the awareness that God is present with us.

How will we know if and when we are really experiencing God in weakness? I’m not completely sure. We will have to try on theses new feelings to know, but not like when we try on new shoes. The idea is not that we have found God, the right God, when we feel good, when it feels like we have a comfy fit with the divine. The idea might be that we will know that we are connecting with God when we notice that we have more compassion and love for weakness in ourselves and others.

Muck

Posted: April 17, 2020 in god
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Debbie Blue, creative theologian, cofounder of House of Mercy and author of Birds of the Bible writes, “Tertullian insists on maintaining the belief that God became fully human in Jesus, though he is clearly disgusted by some of the implications. ‘Start with the birth itself,’ he says, ‘an aversion, the filth within the womb of the bodily fluid and blood, the loathsome curdled lump of flesh which has to be fed for nine months of this same muck.’

“The womb. Somehow I get the feeling that the Spirit (like a dove) hovering over the deep, hovering over Mary’s womb, didn’t feel quite the same way about “the muck.’”

“The Spirit called the muck into being, so the story goes—God shaped it with God’s hands. God reveals Godself most fully, the Christian church professes, not as a rational system or a set of ethics or an unchanging principle, not as some magisterial deity or a pure white light, but as a living, breathing, bodily being. This is admittedly weird, but continually beautiful.”

I like this! This fits my experience. We’re in the muck these days, coronavirus, economic mess, social isolation. And we each have our own internal muck, anxiety, pain, uncertainty, identity confusion. It is good for us to resonate with the idea that God is willing to enter our mess, our muck, and be with us in it.

We want hide the filth of life. We may want to hide from our muck. We may think it keeps us from God. Not so. Not from God. In the beginning God created the muck. In the middle he entered it. In the end he redeems it.

We can help. We can be honest about our weaknesses. We can stop shaming ourselves for our muck. We can see God close to it, in it, with us, loving, understanding, caring.

He is!

The Loss-Gain Narrative of Easter

Posted: April 12, 2020 in god
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Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.

John 12:24

Jesus said this predicting his death, but even further he was laying out the loss-gain narrative of the universe.

Loss becomes gain. One becomes many. A kind of ongoing death becomes a new kind of ongoing life. The loss-gain narrative in Christ is paralleled in nature.

The acorn enters a dark place of transformation in the soil so a new oak may live. It waits. It waits for a unique trigger-combination of temperature-moisture-light. It waits for the right time. In the scientific sense of the word, the seed doesn’t “die” — but its shell protects, its nutrients feed, its form sacrifices itself for the new embryonic oak it engenders. The seed is used up in this process for the success and survival of the new tree it propagates. Jesus refers to this metaphorically as a type of death, one He would experience.

Jesus was used up to nurture, feed and birth a new, fresh embryonic us. Scripture says at the right time – the kairos— he literally emptied himself — the kenosis — in a real sense into us. He literally poured life into us at Easter in the same way the acorn pours life into the new tree.

And then perhaps the most radical thing of all: He asked us to lose our lives for others as well. To follow the loss-gain model, we like Christ are to protect, feed and nurture others by pouring ourselves into them. This seems particularly relevant to Easter 2020. The world is sheltered in place, waiting, giving up freedoms, mobility, connections, resources in order to save lives. We are currently living Easter! We are letting go of life to give and save lives.

And we are waiting, for what’s next! What’s next?

It is a beginning that will be the end of a waiting, a loss that will birth a gain.

Abandonment Issues

Posted: April 4, 2020 in god
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In His darkest hour, Jesus felt abandoned by God. He cried, “My God, My God! Why have You forsaken Me?”

Most of us can identify. We too have felt abandon at times by family and friends and even God. Perhaps during the global pandemic many feel this as they lose loved ones, lose their own health, lose jobs, businesses or resources.

Recently, I’ve suffered months of nonstop pain, and in this gorgon’s grip I have sometimes felt abandon by God, or if not abandoned then at least neglected. I have known and believed he was there, but for long periods God has not communicated with me in the personal and intimate ways he has in the past.

Abandonment anger, loneliness, depression, sadness and fear — I know these feelings. Most of the world does too.

I’ve asked: Why has God allowed me to go through so much unrelenting pain? Why allow this throughout our world?

The answer: I don’t know. I may never know. I’m not settling for quick, familiar or facile answers to tout to the faithful or faithless. I’ve been told by my wisest friends to wait, to defer judgement, to not rush toward fake fixes or trite truths.

I resonate with their counsel. It’s okay to not know. It’s honest. And I have also come to a good place of not shaming myself for being ignorant and fragile and unconnected. I am, in this season, both weak and strong, but I refuse to pretend I am always strong.

D.A. Carson wrote, “I find hope in the fact that there is no attempt in Scripture to whitewash the anguish of God’s people when they undergo suffering. They argue with God, they complain to God, they weep before God. Theirs is not a faith that leads to dry-eyed stoicism, but a faith so robust it wrestles with God.”

Psalms 13

Listen to David.

“How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? 2 How long must I take counsel in my souland have sorrow in my heart all the day? How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?”

Moses humbled by his own failure in Egypt, lived in Midian 40 years.

Times of loss, abandonment, isolation sadness and fear were common to the heroes of the Bible. We just don’t tend toward those remembrances. We tell the story with the end in mind but lost in trial they knew nothing of redemptive ends.

Joseph endured a lengthy betrayal by his brothers, slavery and prison. Thirteen years passed from the time Joseph was sold by his brothers to the time he left prison. Some of that time, Joseph was in Potiphar’s service. None of it was easy. Think of how he must have felt during those hidden years.

Daniel was brought to Babylon a captive. Under Nebuchadnezzar’s orders, he was forced to serve in the king’s government. Think of how he must have wondered why his great wisdom was closeted. And then the lion’s den.

Esther was an orphan.

Jeremiah had his life’s work destroyed in the fire.

The disciples lost their teacher and savior.

They felt terrible.

What to say?

We all feel alone at times.

And although it’s not always something we can feel or see or even hear very well, yet God tells us that he never leaves us.

Isaiah 49:15-16, “Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you! See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands…”

We may feel abandoned. That’s okay. We may feel forgotten. That’s understandable. We may feel neglected. That’s normal.

It is just that God says we aren’t.

What to do?

Don’t deny your feelings. They are real. They are valid. Most other human beings have felt as you do at some point in life. Jesus himself was unashamed — even when he knew the plan— to declare his feelings of abandonment openly.

We say what at we feel so that we are authentic and honest and real. We walk in the light, which means we let our thoughts and feelings be exposed to our selves and others.

Instead of running to quick fixes that involve suppression or denial or flip answers, instead we wait, as so many have waited, in solidarity with each other we wait, weak we wait, hopeful we wait, hanging on his character and judgments we wait, coming to us in his time and his way — we wait.

In the path of your judgments, O LORD, we wait for you; your name and remembrance are the desire of our soul.

Isaiah 26:8

Two Things Haven’t Changed

Posted: April 3, 2020 in becoming, love
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Yesterday was a good day! I gardened, mowed the grass, and changed the oil in the lawnmower, something I haven’t done in ages. I painted a door, and I made dinner. In between I read and wrote a little. I drove our census over to the post office and then took a nice drive through the neighborhood. In the evening I watched TV with my wife. I am at my best, busy!

Today is different. It’s a beautiful day here in sunny California and the sun is shining, but I woke up in pain and haven’t been able to get away from it. It’s a beautiful day but I’m having trouble enjoying it. I’m taking medication and lying down. Life is up, and then life is down.

Yesterday on the phone with a friend we talked about wanting to live in the bubble. I want to live in the middle-class bubble, life safe, life resourced, life on vacation, life fun, life the way I like it, life that I control.

And I have. Many Americans have. We have gotten a good deal of that. But not every day, and not every season. Right now, during the coronavirus isolation, struggling with pain, life is up-and-down for us.

Sometimes the bubble pops. Dysbiosis. What do we do with that? We live it. We live it all. We live what we can control, and we live we can’t control. Welcome to reality! This is pretty much everybody’s reality. We don’t get everything we want. Some people hardly get anything they want.

We are headed into a season where many people are and will experience losses, the loss of loved ones, the loss of health, the loss of finances, the loss of careers, the loss of homes.

I don’t like this. No one does. So what still stands when all around things are lost? What still stands in all the world is full of fear? Despite our difficulties, two things haven’t changed. Two salient callings come to mind today: Love the Lord your God with all your heart soul and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. Neither a virus, nor the status of my body changes those two great ethical commandments for me. Discomfort doesn’t change those wisest of priorities.

Question: do we still love when we don’t get what we want? Do we love God? Do we love our neighbor? Do we maintain entente? These questions challenge me. Sometimes I fail in love — for God and my neighbor.

But yesterday my wife shipped my daughter and her husband two masks. My daughter is pregnant. We want her safe. Love.

And yesterday and today I worked on forming an online reading group to better connect with friends as we practice social distancing. Love.

Today so far I am holding my tongue and guarding my heart. It’s hard to hurt. I want to be healed, but I’m working on not being offended when I’m not. I’m not okay with pain, but I am working on not blaming anyone for it. This is life, part of life, and even compromised I am not off the hook to love. That’s hard. That’s love. Love doesn’t insist upon its own way. Love exists outside the bubble of what I want.

Last night at dinner we prayed for everyone who is suffering loss right now. We thanked God for the good things in our lives. Love.

Whether we’re on the mountaintop or in the ditch, in the bubble or watching it pop, the highest calling on our lives hasn’t changed.

Yet love.

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