#Lent2016
The season arrived a little earlier this year, but I always welcome the discipline of the 40 day journey. Every year I get to “restart” my routines and habits.
This year I’m giving up self-critique. Going to turn my eyes outward and SEE the love and mercy that God is always extending to me.
Heard someone say “We’re better able to love others when we let God love us.” Think I’ll give that a try for the next 40 days.
What are you giving up?
“Observed on the second Monday in February, this day is set aside to take some time out of your busy schedule to do needed care on your computers.”
I say how about a national day set aside to do needed care in your mind? Our minds, like computers, get clogged up with old files and memories that cause us to stay stuck in the past. We obsess over things we cannot change. Just like my computer, my mind holds on to unused files and programs that clog my memory and distract me.
I’m taking a few minutes today to clear out useless information and memories that are barriers in my pursuit of peace.
Although I wrote this piece 3 years ago, after the Sandy Hook tragedy, the thoughts are still salient in light of the recent outpouring of violence.
For all my friends with young children – there is no need to overwhelm your children with sadness, but it is important to engage them in some conversation. If you don’t … who will?
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Sometimes in the fall, when the afternoon sunlight is just right you can see the grain of the wood in the body on the large crucifix over the altar at church. I marvel at how the grain matches the pattern of the muscles it fills; concentric shadows and layers repeat the shape. I wonder at how the wood feels about being used for such a precious form; conveying the love of God to those who look upon the image.
My modern mind mocks me for a minute; as if wood had feelings. Then I recall the psalm that reminds me that all creation praises God and shows forth the truth of him. Nature cannot help but convey God, for it has no free-will. It does what it was created to do.
I on the other hand struggle to know what I was created for.
My free-will gets in the way. The very gift of choice has the potential to prevent me from fulfilling all that God has intended me to become. I was created to be an image bearer; bearing his image to a lost and dying world. I want people to see the grain of my wood, the inner marks that are only visible when the surface is scratched, shaped or polished.
Lord, help me be open to your shaping so that when the light hits me just right others might see the concentric layers of what is inside me. Without you I am as shapeless as I am aimless, unbounded, out of control. Give me your shape. Mold me with a firm gentleness, so that I will know and others will see the very thing that gives me shape and animates me – you.
I remember the childhood strategy to spelling a tricky word: “Why is dessert spelled with two ‘s’s’? Because you always want two servings.”
Well, I’d like to spell desert with two “s’s.”
“I want two servings of desert, please,” I ask with outstretched plate.
I want two servings of quiet.
I want two servings of reflection.
Yes, I want to be cut off from the abundance of modern life, and fully connected to the thin place the desert can offer, to enter into a double offering of closeness to God.
Double offering of stillness.
Double offering of reality.
Double offering of honesty.
How did life become so fast, so frenzied? I yearn for the stillness that the desert brings.
The air is still, the people are still, the hills are still, the vegetation is still, the dirt is still.
Quiet.
Some look at the desert and see death and stagnation.
I look at the desert and see stopping and quiet and reflection and pause and breathing.
There I hear my respiration. I feel my heart beating. In the stillness, my thoughts are free to move outside of me – outside of self. No longer preoccupied, I see creation; birds, bugs, animals. The stuff that is always going on around me without my notice. The peaceful rhythm that nature is.
The world is full of man-crafted devices, of machines – moving, whirring, spinning, moving, going, getting, gaining.
My body is a God-crafted device, made for life in a garden; a place where “green things thrive.” Where I am needed to attend and to notice. To see, and to experience the masterpiece of a flower, of the complexities of a bee, of the delicate intricacies of a butterfly.
So, will I answer the call to retreat? The call of the wilderness? Will I intentionally move into the thin space? Will I approach the veil and allow myself to be still and just breathe? Quietly? Within the beating of my own heart? My heart, a soft and fleshy 7 pounds of blob. A blob that God causes to contract as it pulses and pushes blood through my fleshy frame, my weak, easily damaged frame.
I will answer the call. I will make my bed, put my papers in order, fill my gas-efficient auto with fuel and travel to the mountains – intentionally moving away from the world. I will go further up and further in. Why? Why this counter-cultural move? Because I am called. I have set my heart to listening, osculta, listening with the ear of my heart, and so I hear, and so I must obey.
I have lived ignoring that call; years of simply listening to myself, and to the world. I should have ignored the world. I listened because expectations compelled me. Inside I knew I wasn’t smart enough to know how to lead myself – and now I rest in knowing that I am not.
I have searched and I have found the One I can trust. Rather I have been found by Him. He was calling me in my search. He is the One I can follow, He cannot disappoint, for He knows not how.
So, deep in listening, I have no other option but to follow.
He calls me to the desert.
A place with two “s’s” to my mind.
Two “s’s” because I desire a double helping of the fullness there.
The fullness of the thinness.
The world offers a fullness that is empty.
The desert offers a thinness that is full.
Full of Him – empty of me.
Thick with meaning – devoid of chaos.
Quivering with potential – but only potential, until I answer.
Will I answer?
Will I enter?
Yes
The psalmist is speaking to the “living part” of himself, his soul. The living part of his being is cast down and heavy – disquieted. I understand this.
If this “disquiet” is a part of the Psalmist’s experience, a byproduct of fears and oppression, why does the modern person become concerned when feeling this way? As though we’ve done something wrong; that we haven’t had sufficient “good thoughts” or maintained a positive attitude. Yet heaviness and disquietness are the soul’s natural reaction to life’s difficult situations.
This passage appears to be an internal discussion between the writer and himself. I benefit from the progression of thought expressed.
“Why are thou cast down, O my soul?” He is surprised at his own heaviness.
Then he encourages himself, “Hope thou in God, for I shall yet praise Him.”
As if to say, “Why are you sad, take heart, something will come of this difficulty, something worthy of praise. God has proven himself in the past, He will not absent himself this time, take courage – be still.”
This psalm speaks to me in two ways; first, that to be heavy or disquieted is a natural state of my soul in response to fears and worries. Second, that when life causes me worry and distress, I should encourage myself by remembering that God hasn’t failed me and that when the turmoil has passed I will have something to be thankful for.
Counterintuitive? Yes. But that is the point.
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