Breezy Trees, Summer Sky, and Jesus

There’s a certain amount of pressure for all of us, I think, to be endlessly productive, to create content around the clock, to say big things every day.....

Let’s resist that. It’s not how nature works. It’s not how seasons work. There’s planting and reaping and harvesting, and there’s the practice of letting a field lay fallow for a while, allowing it to prepare again to produce. For the first time in a long time, I’m practicing silence, laying fallow, trusting that the world will keep spinning quite happily without quite so many words from me.

I’m going to listen more than I speak, rest more than I produce, read more than I write, say“no, thank you” more than I say “yes, please, and quick, and more!”

I didn't write this.  Shauna Niequist did.   But I started there because until today, it's how I felt exactly.  

 

Right now is beautiful in so many ways, and since 'switching' into summer practices, I've faced again the deep need for quiet.  It's always there in a job which serves many and requires a sea of talk.  Teachers get snatches of introversion after all of the classes have been taught, and all the needs of others have been met.  And then the bell rings, and the buses pull away, and it's quiet in the halls.  But you wait for introversion still because grading papers brings out the voices of students.  How can it not, if you are really listening to them?   Hence, schools are busy and loud, loud and busy, and summer must call out the introvert in us all.  

I used to think my teachers' preferences were lame when they told me that they spent the whole summer gardening and reading.  Now I know exactly what the heck they were talking about.  It's necessary for healing. 

My summer has consisted of a different schedule every day, so relieving after living life around the dinging of bells.  I have looked at the trees and I've barely thought about history and progress and America and the whole entire world and the potential of people and making copies of things.   Right now, I can not, will not, must not care.   

As of late, I've found again the friends who I missed so incredibly in the spring. Once again I got to know their lives.  (Disconnect is the worst.)  I went to Portland with JTB and his family.  (Coffee and books and beer and rafting and conversation and road trips and them....all of this was lovely.)  I celebrated my sister, the bride, and jumped into the intensity of helping with the upcoming wedding.  (Surreal and good.  She is marrying Levi, who is wonderful.)   I cleaned like I never cleaned in May.  (All of my teacher friends did.)  I grew into another part of life I didn't know was there waiting for me, for this season, this time.  I felt my age and felt good about it.  Everybody looks at summer differently, but thus far, this has been mine.   

And yet last week, the book I organically and subconsciously chose to read was one of collected speeches written to teachers.  I didn't even realize it, but I laughed when I began reading.  And so it is that despite intensity, weariness, and bewildered disillusionment at the end of the longest days, I still believe deeply in the potential of young people.  And I want to tell them about the fascinating things of this world.

Your calling follows you and stays with you, even at the library.  

The little quote this year that always got me out of the aforementioned disillusionment was about something far beyond my Miss Christians life...'One day I would like to teach a few people many wonderful and beautiful things that will help them when they one day teach a few people....'

Another year, over and over and over, I read, 'The great opportunity is where you are' before I taught. Still another year, it was simply, 'God's help is nearer than the door.' 

What do you do though with this intensity in the summer? You happily leave it until late August or the fall. 

Taking a break to breathe and get quiet and listen to the breeze makes me see too that more than anything else, I want to write about God.  It's a thousand times more interesting than anything else I can think of, and it takes storms and makes them quiet.   God is so big, so good, so fascinating, so not what we think He is.  I've been reading books by Brennan Manning and C.S. Lewis and many other people who didn't end up becoming theologians or evangelists, or even Christians at all, and seeing 'every common bush afire with God' in all of it.   God is everywhere, most often and obviously to me in the sky and in His people.  

Don't you love the sky?  I love that in the morning it is still and fresh and quiet.  I love how the clouds linger over the world on summer days like this one.  I love that a sunset brings out stars and tucks people in to their homes, especially in the moment when lights inside houses come on.  Because everything is purple.  Because it's twilight.  

And the stars?  Brilliant.  Brilliant.  Amazing. Wow.  Last week my dad and I drove out to a country road to get a better view of the moon and the stars.  We took binoculars, and there were night sounds and farms.  It was happy and still there, like my childhood.

I think of God as an Author.  I love to think of Him as the best teller of stories, not just in my life, but for all people in all times.  I believe in a story which is good news for people, not cynicism about the church or the wasteland of despair.  Sometimes people talk about God like that, and I know it well because I've staunchly lived there there too.  But there is  Good News which points to Jesus.  

What I love about Jesus is that he is more, more, more than we could ever dream of.  He died and gave back life.  And his story, one of hope for all people, is one of being taken care of and accepted and loved because you're redeemed and taken back.  It's a thing you never could get a hold of on your own. This summer I've had a thousand very real opportunities to remember and savor that this is God's message to His people.  

I've also let it get to me again.  It has changed me.  Being changed deep down by God is this beautiful thing that wrecks you for other things you tend to carry that are selfish and singular and vile inside. Do you know what I mean?  Everyone at some point in life can see that broken side of who they are.  They know it, and they spend a lot of time protecting it, but that's exhausting.  The glory of the Christian life is that you don't have to spend your life protecting what you never controlled anyway.  You gave it up and received new life. 

You're free.   

One thing that is still really hard for me is when Christians pretend that things aren't broken or don't struggle.  It can be so offensive, especially in a place of pain.  Why the heck anyway?  The hard reality is that we are in broken places.  There is chaos.   It's not right.  You can turn on the news and hear one story and your heart can ache for a day.  You can get right to this brokenness I'm talking about. 

There was a season of my life when I stopped right here, and felt the despair clear through my entire being.  I held despair in my hands and became a cynic, which shocked my people and  made me lose sight of the joy you can feel when you live in a rhythm of grace.  I was in a pit, and being pulled out of it meant looking at Jesus.  And no one and nothing else.  Not 'Jesus', the Sunday School answer, but Jesus, who is alive and loves overwhelmingly, without labels. 

And God dwells among His people. 

This is the thing I want to talk more about.  For all of my life, because this is the thing which informs the rest of me.  Words at school, words in books, when to speak, when to be quiet, why I can still feel free in a broken world, why I am no longer such a cynic.....what wrecked me but made it all good, what feels hopeful, why I can pray past despair, why I can revel in being human....

My story.  And maybe yours too.

I am back to these pages and there is more to come.  But in the meantime, it is time for enjoying summer, which comes tonight in the form of barbecue, the porch, and kindred spirit friends.