Open the doors and see all the people

We crawled out last Sunday from our confinement into the morning light after fourteen long months.  The light and the experience almost blinded us at first.  And while we had been faithful in attending church on a screen during the pandemic, and while worshiping God is always "in person," now that we are vaccinated and given the official go-ahead, it was time to go to church.

It has been so long since I have been in any kind of group of people in real life, not just on a screen, I was admittedly a bit anxious about it.  Staying home was comfortable for me.  Staying apart had become our new ordinary.   Zoom sustained us when we had nothing more, and what would we have done without it?  But it is not a substitute for the real thing.  Zoom has content and faces.  It is two-dimensional, having the appearance of length and breadth but has no depth.  It is missing a vital dimension.  Church is not just three-dimensional, being with people, but the limitless reality of the spiritual.  Zoom has not the capacity to love like "being the Body" does.  Zoom is an informational event.  Church as it was intended is a transformational experience.

We went to church.   And while people were still careful, scattered about the sanctuary, there was something very different being there.  You are able any day of the week to get a sermon on YouTube or a podcast.  But we stood not just in that physical building, but among God's people there, and worshiped. The music, even songs and hymns I could sing without words on the screen, embraced me.  Singing the ancient words of the Doxology made tears come to my eyes.  Not by an emotional reaction, but a response to the reality of church.  There is not just community there. Community is being built there.  We saw people that morning, not just faces on a screen.  We met others for the first time that we had come to know just on Zoom.  We interacted with some acquaintances we hadn't seen since the winter before last.  God invented the Church.  And the church did not just survive the pandemic, but thrived in spite of it.  I realized standing in that age-old sanctuary, how much we had missed.  And how much we need the church...and the church needs each one of us.

We have become once again the early Church.  We need each other.  We need to worship.  We are wired to worship.  If we do not worship the Almighty God, a lesser god will take His rightful place.   If I don't see the need for church, something else will infiltrate.   If we "don't have the time for that," we will live poorer for it and wonder at the emptiness.  Our own self-proclaimed "freedom" becomes another outpost of our enslavement.

 

And they devoted themselves

    to the apostles' teaching

and the fellowship,

to the breaking of bread

       and the prayers.

And awe came upon every soul...

                 Acts 2. 42-43 

 

I realized that awe on Sunday.  Until those moments, standing in that sanctuary, I didn't realize what I was homesick for.

 

And let us consider how to stir up one another

          to love and good deeds,

not neglecting to meet together,

as is the habit of some,

but encouraging one another,

and all the more as you see

       the Day drawing near.

           Hebrews 10. 24-25

And if that is not enough...

We were camping earlier this week, stepping outside my comfort zone, being a little bit vulnerable and beyond the grip of the clock or the grid of the internet.  We set up our tent on campsite 56, settling intentionally not just into the wilderness but into endangered spaces of time itself.  

In those moments, I do not require a permission slip or need an excuse to sit in those margins and think and look around me at the wonders of creation.  I can feel the cool breezes that do not come from a ventilation system.  I can sense the warm embrace of an early sun.  I can listen to the concertina of the woods, the chattering of squirrels, the chorus of birds practicing their parts, the rustle of leaves, and the groaning of ancient trees.

I was sitting in my little fold-up camp chair, just sitting there without an agenda, looking upward into a boundless blue that defies description.  And suddenly, Scripture was fleshed out before me.   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A passage I had read earlier in God's Word came to life:

For Your steadfast love is great above the heavens, 

Your faithfulness reaches to the clouds.

Be exalted, O God, above the heavens!  

Let Your glory be over all the earth!  

                                Psalm 108. 4-5 

That kind of steadfast love holds us, that kind of faithfulness we can rely, that kind of glory has no limit.  Words have not yet been invented for that hue of blueness, let alone the magnitude of God translated into language.

But then the trees waved their branches and rustled their leaves as if trying to catch my attention.  Because if the enormity of the heavens is not enough, God also provides an intricate canopy of trees.

For you shall go out with joy,

and be led forth with peace.

The mountains and the hills break forth

before you into singing,

and all the trees of the field shall

                 clap their hands.

                            Isaiah 55. 12

Tish Harrison Warren's new book Prayer in the Night spells out the wonder:

"To believe in something beyond the material world we have to take up practices that form our imagination – and hearts and minds—in light of the resurrection, in light of the possibility that, as Elizabeth Barrett Browning reminds us, “Earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God.”

And if that is not enough, surrounded visually by His glory, we can know we are loved by God more than we can realize and grasp.  Just looking up at the vastness of the heavens, we capture but a glimpse of what His steadfast love looks like.

And then go into our day under that great canopy and into that grand chorus.

 

Seeing the Forest and the Trees

Two days ago, my six-year-old granddaughter and I were headed to the public library for a curbside pick-up, on just an ordinary day -- which is never so ordinary at all.  Something sparked our conversation to talking about God and that everyone does not believe in Him.

"But what about the proof of God?" she asked.

And before I could even say anything, she said, "The proof of God is everywhere.  You just have to walk into the woods.  And see God did this."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Out of the mouths of babes, His glory shines.  The awe of God is so obvious to them.  Children are not surprised by Him at all, but recognize what is beautiful, unexpected, and inexplicable.  There is so much that we are distracted from and miss entirely, even that which is pointblank before us.

Walk into this day like a six-year-old.  Capture the wonders of His faithfulness all around you.  It is not that God will show up.  He is already here and continues to reveal Himself.   We are the ones who need to show up.

And see the forest and the trees.

 

For you shall go out in joy

and be led forth in peace;

the mountains and the hills before you

shall break forth into singing,

and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.

                          Isaiah 55. 12

That Which Lingers

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the early fall of 1929, a beloved aunt dug up some bulbs of her majestic purple and gold irises, and transplanted them in my grandmother's tiny yard in Fort Worth, Texas.  My mother was just ten years old.

People did things like that, back then.  They shared the practical cup of sugar with a needy neighbor, but they also shared beauty and joy.

Just weeks after those beautiful perennials were welcomed into the small garden, the stock market crashed, and the entire country was thrown into the throes of the Great Depression.  But all through those desperate years the irises continued to grow, blooming like a flag of hope every spring, gradually taking over that small plot of dirt.  And of course, without saying, in turn, the irises were divided again and again, and passed on to others as a defiant act of restoration, despite the hardships no one expected: the withering economy, the desperation of no work, the long sickness that took my grandfather's life when my mom was still a teenager, and then, the shocking jolt of another world war. 

In 1951, my widowed grandmother uprooted her own life -- and the irises-- and moved cross-country to help care for our family.  And then, par to course, every time we moved, some of the irises were left behind, and others were dug up and transplanted in our new location.

When my parents finally moved to Florida in the 1990s, my husband and I dug up a box or two of the iris bulbs, out of their overgrown yard. Despite our own many moves, we planted them wherever we lived, left some behind at the house and with neighbors when we transferred to yet another city, and brought along some of the beauty.  God uses us for more than practical purposes, but also, and maybe even more importantly through our actions, to bring beauty, hope and restoration.  God invented beauty, because He knew how much we needed it in this broken world.  And He knew perennials grow without ceasing.

And so, this morning, I spotted the first irises of this season, blooming with all abandon, their deep royal purple flowers calling attention to spring.  I feel like we are coming out of the dark tunnel of the pandemic, as if spring never happened last year.  We have no idea what is ahead in the months to come, but God does.  And He provides the beauty to sustain us, glimpses of Himself, day after day, season after season.

That aunt, so long ago we don't remember her name, had no idea what joy she was sowing and what beauty still beheld now almost a hundred years later.  We are so caught up in what we think matters, we miss that which lingers far beyond our lifetimes, even that which proclaims the faithfulness of God to those yet unborn.  And keeps on growing.

What am I planting today?  What will linger?

Not Just a Dead End

 

It was not where I intended to run, several weeks ago, but tick-tock my time was scarce, and I had to cut out part of my usual running route to get back in time.  In an effort to shorten my course, instead of going around the big hill, I turned right at the fork and down the other side. A thousand shades of spring green greeted me. And then, when a gravel side path appeared, a sign designated my choice of a scenic loop or a dead end.  On this side of the park, blocked by heavily traveled roads, I surmised the dead end gravel path could not go far.  I still had time to explore a bit.  I always hope to make time to explore a bit.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A dead end, even with its morbid label, still goes somewhere and back again. And unlike a loop, it provides two chances to observe what is there and what was missed the first time passing by.  A terminus point is already embedded, a time to turn around, like an ending to a chapter.  There and back again was the first title of Tolkien’s epic novel The Hobbit.  As with Bilbo, we can never predict the adventure that will happen, nor foresee what was not visible to us before.

A dead end road provides time to unravel tightly knotted thoughts, to find new connections,  sometimes just to think and pray and enjoy without having to be so practical.  Sometimes even the familiar breaks way to what is completely new and astonishing.

A dead end is just as scenic as a scenic path.  Yet we argue, “But it doesn’t go anywhere!”

No, it goes through.

And that is what matters.  The starting point is the ending place, but we are changed by the journey.

The greatest inventions in the world began with a whole list of dead ends.  We live with such limitations, always needing purpose or reason to our efforts, and subsequently losing the wonder and beauty of it all.

At times when least anticipated, I have discovered an unexpected trail through the expanse, that which finally gives me a sense of where I actually am, not lost after all.  Things I never knew connected, things I never realized before.  Where did that thought come from?  Perhaps giving God a little margin to get a word in edgewise.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The pursuit reveals hidden sacred tunnels that open up what we didn’t know.  And God's faithfulness ties it all together. 

“All who wander are not lost,” once said  J. R. R. Tolkien, who first invented another language and then wrote a story to go along with it, which we know as The Lord of the Rings trilogy.  He had no idea at the time how epic a story he was pursuing, nor even if it was a dead end.

Wander a bit.

How does that manifest itself today?  Ask God, and He will show one step, and then another.  Not necessarily a new path, but a new vision of the commonplace and immensity of Himself.

And find not just a dead end after all.

 

And I will lead the blind

in a way that they do not know,

in paths that they have not known,

I will guide them.

I will turn the darkness before them into light,

the rough places into level ground.

These are the things I do,

and I do not forsake them.

                   Isaiah 42. 16