Searching For the Sound of Silence

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Fill me with love.
Like a firestorm to fall and burn,
Like a switchblade snap, pierce and turn.
When all I feel is cold and dull,
Spin your clipper south to kill my fall.
And as I writhe within the flames
As I burst and bleed,
Claim.
All of me–the new, the old
The living fire, the hungry cold
And everything caught in between
That all of you would fill the heart of me.

The velocity of life is apparent when we’re stilled by either cold tragedy or immense beauty. Our sojourning through this world is laden with mile markers where we look back and reflect upon the twisting road that has carried us to where we are.

This past Thursday I led a blue-eyed beauty down a quiet path to a familiar place: our weeping willow tree.

I shook before Jessica as I lowered my frame down to the dirt, lifted my eyes to meet her’s, and held a modest symbol of love between us.

“I want to love you the rest of my life, Jessie. Will you be my bride?”

Thankfully, without hesitation, she responded, “Of course!”

As I ponder our future together–this airy ambiguity called “marriage”–I find myself spinning questions in my mind:

“Do I have what it takes to love this beautiful woman well…forever?”

“What does love even mean?”

“What’s different about Jessica and I that provides hope amid the cultural regularity of marital failure: something like 55%?”

I look back at my past amid this beautiful moment in time and wonder whether the scars and sins I’ve inflicted on others can truly be overwhelmed and ultimately dissolved by grace.

Honestly, I don’t have a high enough view of myself to simply shrug these questions off and carelessly skip down the aisle. I’ve seen cold marriages , infidelity, and the pain of friends who after offering vows to women in white, have been forced to relent, retreat and start all over again.

The concept of marriage (probably for a whole host of reasons) injects my heart with a heavy dose of fear and trepidation. And ironically, I’m learning (slowly) that the very thing I’ve feared most about love is what fills my heart with hope when I look deeply into Jessica’s eyes: Love aims to kill me.

For the first time in my life, I’m looking forward to burying my beating heart beneath the dust, handing the reigns over to a girl and a God. And I believe that God is teaching me a new way to be human, drawing me into a metaphor (marriage) that will both wreck me and restore me–for the sake of not only Jessica and I, but His Kingdom.

Author Mike Mason says it this way,

marriage inevitably is a trap, a very cunning trap in which two people are caught in the absolute necessity of loving one another. In the taking of vows, it is as if they have agreed to an actual ultimatum: love or else. This a curious and frustrating and often excruciatingly painful trap to be in, but the plain fact is that if a couple do not love one another first, as they do themselves, then they cannot really love themselves or anyone else. But when they do love, that love becomes a fire that has the power to enkindle all around them.

So I’m learning to love. Truly love, for the first time. I’m scared that I don’t have what it takes, which is certainly the case. And yet, the existence of grace–the unmerited force of love reverberating off the cross, through the heart of the resurrected Jesus, Father and Spirit–is my hope. Sweet grace, come.

I’m trusting that where I (and we) fall short in this beautiful adventure called marriage, this death row march toward sanctification, God will establish his cross, and empower us to, again and again, do the impossible. Love.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the trials of life, the situations we so often find ourselves in which require a response: run away or face into the pain. Looking back over the course of my life, I can see many points at which I’ve tucked my tail between my legs and found some secret hideaway. I’m slowly learning that, however thick the darkness is that surrounds us, God promises His presence as we stare into the black, and continually redeems us as we posture ourselves, empty-handed, before His love.

Clouds gather,
Breathing words to wind
Their taunts ride as I stare
Into the storm
And clutch my heart to slow its pace

There are shallow ditches
And faded leaning structures
That beacon me onto shifting sand
But I’m older now
With scars and lines atop dusty canvas
With feet bound tight to bedrock

And I don’t blink anymore
Brevity, tears and wild skies
Are better known than scattered by

The Old City, Jerusalem

The life of faith is an experiment of trust on two levels.

First, we trust that our identity no longer lies in the burned out homes and crumbling boulevards that comprise our fractured familiarities. We’ve been kidnapped from those places; shattered and mended for an altogether different sort of Kingdom.

He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. (Colossians 1:13)

Sometimes trust is difficult. Often the shadows of our past veil our shining eyes and we’re temporarily blinded to the reality that has been set like a burning, eternal lamp before us.

Trust is a deep-seated resolve God pours into us, a tenacity whereby we (while veiled) shrug our shoulders and squint joyously into promise.

Love is a force meant to split our ribs and shock our hearts:

Trembling between the shoulders of familiar roads
Homes burned out, torn down
Drown in the disparaging night,
Like velvet curtains atop the heavy black,
And send my shuffling gaze arching back
Mumbling at heaven’s whispering light
Still light years away, still silent songs for flight
I stumble, skid before finally unveiling knees
To the frozen black river that for so long pulled me under
I am Eustace.
Flat on my back.
Love’s current–a knife between my ribs
Light, speaking, cracking,
Burning through the night.

But faith demands a response aimed at carrying us beyond ourselves.

Reading the book of Acts is an exercise in humility. As my eyes scan the pages I find myself involuntarily asking questions like, “How did something that was apparently so normative for the early church (the disciples selling all their possessions and surrendering them to the needs to the poor) something that would today cause many Christians to consider whether one ought to be hospitalized? Is this really a radical way of living? Perhaps, in the economy of heaven it’s…well…expected?”

Truth is…I’m bored. I wish I could say that my desire to live sacrificially (to trust God with the resources He’s loaned out to me) is primarily rooted in a desire to see the lives of people who need them more than I do impacted for the sake of Jesus. In truth, however, I’m beginning to yawn in the direction of a Christianity that doesn’t really need Jesus, a faith that isn’t really willing to trust, when trust is inconvenient. I’m beginning to see the danger in a “faith” publicized by million dollar words like: faith, hope, and love. Words about spirituality that fail to collide with a genuine praxis are, as Job says, words for the wind (6:26).

I’ve been convicted, and thus, starting to walk in a different direction. Because I believe that Jesus Christ is worthy of our trust…and I’m tired of just talking about Christianity.

It is very naive to think that our individual giftedness can be directly translated into a call. To say, I can write well, so God wants me to be a writer; I can teach well, so God wants me to be a teacher; I can play the piano well, so God wants me to be a pianist, makes us forget that our own self-understanding is not necessarily God’s understanding of us. There was a time in which a one-sided view of humility led to the negation or denial of individual gifts. Hopefully, that time is gone. But to think that individual gifts are the manifestation of God’s will reveals a one-sided vied of calling and obscures the fact that our talents can be as much the way to God as in the way of God.”  (Clowning in Rome, 20)

A few thoughts on the trajectory of the Christian life…

Last night I returned from a week-long journey with 58 others to the Mazahua Valley of Central Mexico to partner with our friends at Mazahua Valley Ministries. We had hoped to spend our time abroad ministering to churches and families throughout the valley; however, as is the cast with most trips of this nature, our experience was more or less the reverse–as we did our best to humbly serve, we slowly realized that we were profoundly more blessed by the people we served than they were by our presence.

As we sat on our return flight home, I spend a few hours reading from a couple of Henri Nouwen’s classics: Reaching Out and The Wounded Healer. We began our initial descent into Minneapolis/St. Paul Airport just as I reached the final section of The Wounded Healer, entitled, “Ministry By a Lonely Minister”. As I read the chapter’s title, I did two things. First, I quickly shut the book, knowing that these words (despite all that God had done over the course of the past week) told the story of what my heart felt. And second, I promised to finish the book the next morning (in part because it’s due tomorrow). Sitting on the rapidly dropping plane surrounded by dozens of giddy students eager (whether they admitted it or not) to see the smiling faces of missed parents, it occurred to me that I would, within the hour, walk through the door of an empty town home, drop my bags, brush my teeth, and fall asleep–all without any probing questions from bright eyes or invitation to be still celebrate what God had done from one who knew how weary my soul was.

Nouwen, I think, knew that feelings very well. This morning, as I sat at the local Caribou Coffee, tears filled my eyes as I read Henri’s challenge to fellow ministers, a challenge that bled of the pages of his masterpiece,

The Christian way of life does not take away our loneliness; it protects and cherishes it as a precious gift. Sometimes it seems as if we do everything possible to avoid the painful confrontation with our basic human loneliness, and allow ourselves to be trapped by false gods promising immediate satisfaction and quick relief.

Nouwen goes on to cast a vision beyond despair, painting a picture of how the loneliness mentioned above might actually serve as a healing balm,

But perhaps the painful awareness of loneliness is an invitation to transcend our limitations and look beyond the boundaries of our existence. The awareness of loneliness might be a gift we must protect and guard, because our loneliness reveals to us an inner emptiness that can be destructive when misunderstood, but filled with promise for him who can tolerate this sweet pain.

As I read these words I suddenly saw the same faces my students did as we made our way to baggage claim last night, but instead of grateful eyes of parents who were excited and relived to see their sons and daughters return home safe from a week abroad, I saw expressions of excitement over my own return, because the families who showed up in the infant hours of the morning to welcome their kin also welcomed me. The truth is twofold. First, I am not alone. Not only is God omnipresent and abiding in even the least likely of places, but when moments of clarity arrive I find that I am surrounded by the love of many people who have made it very clear to me that I am, indeed, a part of many families. Second, I am sincerely alone, and the fact I deeply felt the impending silence of my townhome the moment the plane’s tires touched down on the runway is proof that I have been given a charge to reinterpret my loneliness (and the loneliness of those I am called to minister to) through the lens of the cross. As Christ’s beaten body felt the weight of all humanity’s sin and shame at Calvary, He spoke a promise to we who sojourn through the already/not yet reality of His Kingdom, that His prenence is in the very heart of our pain, anger, shame, and, yes, loneliness.