From
Hebrews 11:1-16
H,
These days I vacillate
between hope and despair. It is mostly a matter of waking up and how I start
the day. I read bad omens like mood and good omens like getting the tea-milk
balance just right or a good day of writing against a bad day of trying. It is
all hopeless at ten pages of dust or bright and hopeful at five minutes of
inspiration. You see the problem with all that? I have reached the limits of
mere hope. Faith is what is needed now.
It is faith that allows us
to see the opportunity for change in every stumbling block. It is the thing we
need now in the presence of this dark mould of absolute buffoonery that leads
our country. That is high talk. What about our own day to day encounters with
the limits of our control? Those brushes with our own weakness and bumbling
acts of failure that we are more forgiving of because we know the full story. Well,
put that in the bag too and let us trudge up this hill to try and make sense of
things.
Lately, I have had the sense
that I am completely alone. I do not mean this in any metaphoric sense but in
real terms. I meet and talk and share but my heart is hardly in it. I always
want to be somewhere else. So, of course, I never want to be anywhere. It is
too easy a thing to get caught up in the faults around you, in the high jinks
of governance and the low rustles of work and career. It is a necessary escape
from the absolute questions of character and truth. If we do enough and make
enough progress it is easy to not handle who we are and the way we treat
others. The only signal we have of falling is that we do not have those necessary
acts of love in the way we live. We can change a government but we cannot
change ourselves. We can provide for all things but we cannot elevate anything
into wonder.
I am reminded of those patriarchs
we study in the bible and their incredible journeys of faith. The stories
become so familiar that we lose the miracle in each of them. We lose the epic
nature of Abram becoming Abraham by seeing a nation when he did not have a
child or Moses seeing deliverance for this nation when all they and he knew was
the reality of slavery and the safety of the slaver. Or us, right now,
believing in perfection when all we see is fault or in good when all around is
the evil dark. We give up on ourselves, on others, on our nation and on the
idea of the regeneration to come because we do not know that the journey is not
a story in the living but only in the telling. It is more about the character
it will breed than the things it will do. This is not an empire of walls and gates
but a coming glory built on love, truth, kindness and a clean heart that sees
only forever.
In that sense, we are always
in the walk of faith. We might not like the lack of a movie score or the dirt
and grime of coming awake to our lack of and need of God in a real, communing
sense. We do not want to think we have made no progress all these years. Our minds
are still results driven and we are counting years and seeking milestones of
greatness. It is a time for heroes but the best of them come from the worst of
vulnerability. It always starts with a call to kneel and ends with a lesson in worship.
We are not that light that we once were but we were never that. We had flashes
and thought we had reached the peak. The ascent is just beginning.
No comments:
Post a Comment