Magnifying Glass. Walls. Lament. Protest.
“When it comes to such open-heart reflection, I'm a firm believer in the observer effect, which states that anything you try to observe is automatically changed by the mere fact that you're looking at it. The way I see it, if you try to study your emotions on a microscopic level, the best you can do is understand how it feels to hold the magnifying glass.”
Neal Shusterman
“Trust is something that comes easy,
when you've never been a victim.”
Face to Face
In my last post I wrote that I was neither good at marathons or sprints but a walker. While I was attempting a run this morning I was thinking that surely there was a reason that Adam & Eve ‘walked with God’ in the garden and that it was probably because they knew running would not be as enjoyable!
This experience that we are living through is different from person to person, family to family, home to home, situation to situation. The impact of the time we are living is more disproportionately negative to some than others. For some, what will be is not yet known and, for others, such significant change or loss has already happened. Who we may need to become, as people, churches, communities is also not yet fully realised. It is easy to write liminal place but much harder to live there.
There is a magnifying glass on all of us; on our faith, on our churches, on our humanity, on our economy, on our environment, on our neighbours, on our mortality, on the way we live, move, work and connect. It is both a revealing and an opportunity. Revealing things in us and in others that are transformative, life-giving, hope-raising but also can be separating, disconnecting, fragmenting. An opportunity to grow, to change, to do things differently. What should be the purpose of our churches in the future, how should we connect as neighbours, how could we pay workers (from bottom to top or sideways) in organisations that is fair, how might we live gently with nature and create universally affordable ways of sustainable travel, how could we find ways to talk about death more than we currently do. A magnifying glass helps us see things that we might otherwise have missed. Not always a comfortable experience but one that can change our view and our lives (Lamentations 3.40).
Many of us have become more familiar with the walls of our homes than we ever expected to. We may have noticed the paint colour, the wallpaper pattern, the marks and scuffs, the mould or cobwebs, the photos or paintings or just notice the sound of our own voice bouncing back to us in new or different ways. There are physical walls and there are invisible walls; sometimes they offer a sense of security, safety and protection and other times they enclose us in such a way that we may feel trapped, alone and scared. Jesus can walk through walls (John 20.19, 26). God can tear down walls and rebuild new ones (read Nehemiah). When praying I will sometimes say ‘we do not speak to the four walls of the room we are in but to the Living God’ and there is some truth in that but sometimes we may have to speak to the walls.
There is protest and there is lament. Lament is when we can be fully honest, fully authentic, fully real with God; the trusting of our entire selves to God. We cry out in pain (Psalm 6.6), we scream for help (Psalm 71.12), we ask God to turn the situation around (Psalm 44.23-26) but we also respond with trust (Psalm 77). It is not a starting point nor is it an end point, it is a relationship. ‘Where are you?’, ‘When will you answer me?’, ‘Why wont you answer me?’, ‘How long will you let this keep happening?’. There is much pain and injustice now, the root causes of which go deep and I desperately want others to know that we stand with them, alongside them not just now but everyday that we have left on this earth. A Bible not held in one hand, but a life lived representing its God lived with two hands, holding a dying person’s hand or lifting up someone forced to the ground or raised towards the heavens for help and hope. What does, and what should, it look like to live lives that love God with all of our heart, all of our being, all of our strength (Deuteronomy 6.4-5)? Well, I am sure you would have your own views on what it should look like. The one thing I would say is when we give everything to anything (in this case God) it almost always costs something. Lament is part of that everything, and sometimes so is protest.
Internal Protest, External Life
by Bluestare
The human condition contains a frightening submission encircled by an emotional silence
A lightening storm caught hold of a shack and teared apart what was already shredded
The situation is the line separating service and sacrifice
Where the two could be-should be-gripped in a breath of prayer
A sanctuary that divulges the inner passions crying out
A love that saturates and ignores its threats that it can be no more
A hope which fractures the unbreakable and discards the inevitable
A surrender that comes from the deep dark where God alone is pure.
Whether you feel like your life or this world is under a magnifying glass or you are more aware of walls or you are lamenting or protesting, I want to assure you that you are probably not alone. There are still many who are also neither marathon runners or sprinters but walkers. Those that just keep on walking. Fall down, get up and keep walking. Those that keep trying to walk in the garden with God. Let us walk together and let us keep going with all of our heart, all of our being and all of our strength!
Turn swiftly, with all your heart, to God and be embraced. It is in Christ where community can be found,
where disconnected parts, exiled from each other, can collide back together
both beyond and within time and space.
From the Incredible Bill Watterson’s Calvin & Hobbes