"Beauty. Redemption. Miracles. Wholeness. Healing. Renewal. Friendship. Conversation. Prayer. Worship. Work. Music. Art. Justice. Jubilee. Mercy. Love. Sex. Aging. All redeemed.
I want to see the light and I want to see the trees. I want to learn to see them both, moving quickly, stirring with the wind of the Spirit. I think the Kingdom is more poetry to bear and live into throughout our life, than dictionary definitions to memorize or boundaries to place. Go for a drive, go for a walk, look up and fill your eyes with the Kingdom already come."
This comes from Sarah Bessey who is current inspiration in my life. When I read Sarah Bessey, it feels like the things I think about (and wanted to say) magically floated through space and time and landed somewhere else far away. I like Sarah Bessey's words because she is refreshing in the age of reason in which we currently find ourselves. I become reminded to inhabit my life, to breathe the words I speak fully, and to let the Spirit of God inhabit my life too.
I'm filled to the brim with writer's block, but that's an uninteresting element of the writing life. Something to be forged through. My best defense against being stuck in it is to drag words to the page, whether they like it or not, and put them somewhere and see how they look.
So that's right now. That's what I'm doing.
I do not feel like I am anything eloquent these days, in the end of the year chaos of teaching, but that is where I am. Spring for me is always humbling and good, where life can feel heart achey deep. Other times in spring, I'm worn out and completely depleted and I'm not good at all. And Jesus meets me here.
I'd much rather talk about Jesus than writer's block. Do you want to know what makes the most sense to me? When I look around at my crazy feeling, chaotic life right now, I can still see that Jesus is looking at and meeting with....me.
I think that in history, Jesus has been pegged as being many things he's really just not. We people, so dusty and frail and vile and vaporous in so much of what we do, are also loved creation.
Ragamuffins. Glorious ruins. Furiously loved....all words I love from Brennan Manning's heart. That's you. That's me.
It's surprising to be loved like this, so much so that sometimes I think we feel we need to reject it. Too good to be true, right, being loved by the God of the universe. Being special and sought out by the very Creator that made you. We are told there is no free lunch, and it's almost like in America we are proud of it. If we have pulled ourselves up by our own bootstraps, we are decidedly American.
But if we only see this as a method to the madness, we miss the sharp intake of the breath that could be experienced when we see and understand the story of Jesus.
Do you know that love I'm talking about? I'll bet if you don't, and looked it squarely in the face, you'd want it too. You'd ache for it. That's the loving Jesus I know.
This Jesus is not just historical, though I see him in history.
He's not just a teacher, though I relate to that in my own chosen work.
He's not just Jewish, though that's his background on earth. Through that lens he fulfills all of those long ago promises.
In the last few years of my life, I have intellectualized Jesus. He's interesting that way, but it's something more cold. Something you can keep at arms length. It gets you cold about people too. I didn't intend for it to become this way, but for a time that's what it was.
Jesus is not just historical for me because I have felt the ache of being loved by him. And so ensues the radically different conversation in light of such a self-absorbed culture. Jesus is compelling. He hems you in, behind and before, and makes you die to things that always brought you death anyway. You knew, deep down anyway, that the things you sought really did make an emptiness instead.
So Jesus to me in the spring is more glorious than ever. Here I sit, this teacher at a desk. I feel more ruined than ever by my own tired mind. With papers to grade and students to love and loose ends to tie up in this scattered time. Gosh, so scattered.
And I am not thinking of the historical Jesus at all. I'm making it through a season that is only described as tired and cloudy because of faith in Jesus. He is enough.
Lately all kinds of good, authentic expressions of faith have been shown to me, and they are reviving my spirit. They think like I do. Or I think like them. Or....something. These are The Liturgists, who are creative and authentic and also kind of new. The other day, while we drove back to parts of my old life in Stillwater, Jordan and I listened to them speak and sing and pray. It was beautiful and quiet and somehow the clouds in the sky matched the way the words felt. I loved this part best...about people and crossing paths and humanity before God....
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'You are a fascinating endless mystery...and then you move about this world, and there is cement and taxes and there is your insurance agent and there is the person that you buy bread from....and you have people that you love, and people who are like human sandpaper, they annoy you to no end, there are people that you embrace on a regular day and there are people that you pass by once on a city street on the other side of the world and you will never be close to them again as long as you live.
You live in this body with this breath that comes and goes and then in this body you experience this world with wind and waves and trees and rocks and deserts and mountains. it's all part of what you call your life and in these experiences with this breath coming and going and in this body with these people that you know and this set of circumstances that is called your life you have these experiences and some of these things fill you with hope and with life and sometimes it's a beautiful song, sometimes it's holding the hand of your young daughter, sometimes it's sitting by the bed as your grandfather takes his last breath...sometimes it's that moment at work where you get that sense that what you're doing matters.....
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The Liturgists are reminding me again of the gaze of Jesus because they're calling back many differnet kinds of faith expression into the emphasis of the Gospel story. That we have fallen short, that God has not, and therefore the life and death of Jesus is a gift. It is where we can return to redeemed places where we can truly live. To a wholeness we have always longed to see and know about. And be.
I used to be really brittle about the church. And thankfully now I'm soft again. Being brittle felt justified. It felt like hard, rocky terrain. I looked around and saw the brokenness and the heavy despair of what people mine through, especially in the church, and for a time my shoulders were bent to it.
Division is not what Jesus came to talk about in this broken, tangled, messed up world. He came instead to show this aching kind of love that we are desperate for and need in our breath and our bones.
Even when we feel most laterally loved by people we know best. For a time, I was both frenetic and worn about these things because I was looking at things from far away. I was not looking outside of the historical Jesus.
And so, the difference. When I remember that Jesus, in his kindness and creativity and love, looks at me this way first, I am ok. Even when I'm worn and kind of overwhelmed and both heavy and frail, I am ok.
I invite you to look at Jesus in this way. Completely kind, the most expression of love you could ever dream of, gazing at you. Patient, not shamed and shameful, personally inviting.
God made you after all. He sees you best. And in spite of the sometimes common broken place, there is finished work before us. The gaze of Jesus is pure, unadulterated love. And God is enough.
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