Reflections

photo by z_everson on flickr

1 Psalm Of David When he was in the desert of Judah
God, you are my God, I pine for you;
my heart thirsts for you, my body longs for you,
as a land parched, dreary and waterless.
2 Thus I have gazed on you in the sanctuary,
seeing your power and your glory. Psalm 63:1-2Psalm 63:1-2
English: King James Version (1611) - KJV
63 A Psalm of David, when he was in the wilderness of Judah. ¹ O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee: my soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is; thirsty: Heb. weary where...: without water ² To see thy power and thy glory, so as I have seen thee in the sanctuary.  

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The other day as I read Psalm 63, I was deeply moved by the first two verses (see above). When I tried to express what moved me, I wrote the following essay. Hopefully it makes sense and will bless someone.

Exiled in the wilderness, the psalmist gives voice to a wilderness deeper than the barren landscape. As he cries out to God, he gives voice to the ache and longing of people across the ages.

I have known the wilderness. Not the wilderness of desert living, or the wilderness of suffering under war, poverty or totalitarian rule. But I have known the wilderness of a dry soul, aching for something, someone.

When I was just four-years-old, I remember sitting amidst the toys and trappings of my Bozo-encircled room wondering, “Why do I exist?” In the stillness of the night or the quietness of the day, the longing for something or someone penetrated my heart even then. Looking through the fairy tale books, I longed to jumped inside the pictures and enter their world.

This longing opened the world around me as though everything was pointing beyond itself to something or someone. The soil in our backyard hid treasures just out of sight. The basement in our house pressed right up against other realities, powers, beings. In my childlike mind, the world seemed to open in two directions.

A thin veil stood between me and a world of light as well as a world of darkness. At times, everything around me seemed ready to burst forth in song at any moment. At other times and places, everything seemed pressing up against a terrifying void. This darkness threatened to disintegrate everything and everyone.

The hell I feared was not of fire but of isolation, disintegration, and absolute loneliness. In this world, hell would be waking up to no one. Consciousness without any relationship.

I could not survive by staring down into the abyss, so I searched for the light places, the holy places, the sanctuary. And like the psalmist, I’ve seen God’s glory and might in these thin places. I’ve found refuge and peace and joy within the wells of faith.

Like the sparrow who builds a nest, I found my nest in the faith of my fathers. I make no great claims to have disputed and disproved competing truth claims of world systems, religions, and ideologies. When facing the darkness, I’ve done what most children would do, I went home. Home to the faith of my fathers.

Wrestling with the claims of Christianity, I encountered the Who who kept calling, provoking, striking my heart. In the heart of Christian faith, I met Love in Person. So I write and speak and think from the position of one who keeps coming home to rest in Christ.

From this place of rest, I join the psalmist who prays,

“Whom have I in heaven but you Lord, and to be near you, I desire nothing on earth.” Psalm 73:25Psalm 73:25
English: King James Version (1611) - KJV
25 Whom have I in heaven but thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire beside thee.  

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This short sentence has become something of a “breath prayer” for much of my life. Sometimes this prayer stood between me and the darkness. At first, this prayer was most likely a prayer of escape the struggles of this world.

Over time, I discovered something hidden deeper within the prayer. It is a prayer of relation that is not escaping earth by going to heaven. Rather, it is a prayer for relationship in the midst of the injustices, struggles and questions of this earth. The psalmist desires nothing of an earth where the Lord is absent, where humans are cut off from one another, where our own selfish cravings drive us further and further into isolation, destruction, and corruption.

The psalmist cries out not to be abandoned. He is not abandoned. The Father loves His creation. The Father loves His rebellious children who run from the light of His love. The same Lord who created the world in relationship, redeems the world in relationship.  The Father reconciles the world in and through the Son by the power of His Spirit. He enters into the breach of relationship between God and humanity. He brings all the anguish and suffering and disaster of this breach within Himself.

This restoration is about glorifying the entire cosmos in a relation of love. It is this relation, the mystery of this love revealed in Father, Son and Spirit, calling me into love, into relation, into life.

It seems now that the walk between darkness and light has been a walk between love and rejection of love. On the one hand, the Father has caught me up in a dance of love between Him and all His people. On the other hand, I am tempted to rejected this love, this dance.

In of our world of broken humans, rejecting love becomes so easy for all of us. We can be offended by almost every person we meet during the day. Real pain and real grief from the present combines with old offenses stretching back into relationships and even into childhood. We haunted by the ghosts of our past.
To escape, we may reject love, escape relation and plunge into a waterless wilderness of self-absorption, self-preservation, and self-consciousness. Life becomes heartless and lonely and hellish.

Into the Gehenna of our own creation, the Lord comes. He finds us on the refuse heap of corrupting self-imposed exile and adopts us into the family of God.

He leads us into sanctuary, into a thin place where heaven penetrates earth. We discover this holy place is a place of meeting, a place of relationship, a place of meeting. He is dancing a dance of love. In Him, we hear a song that is singing through all His creation.

Some days, I hear this anthem of love wherever I go. When I show up at the coffee shop, He’s already there loving the people in line, at the counter, sitting at the tables.

Might I join Him?
Might I follow Him into loving those who offend me, who disagree with me, who compete with me?
Might I join Him in loving the Mary Magdelene and others who are cast out and put down by the world around?
Might I also love those in power like the Pharisees?
Jesus is free to love those above and below, those oppressed and those who oppress. He freely embraces friends who will prove unfaithful, unreliable, and undependable.

He even embraces Judas. After a night of seeking the Father about who to appoint as disciples, Jesus welcomed Judas into this community of love. Even though He knew Judas would ultimately betray Him, He loved him, He welcomed him, He served him.

He loves and loves and loves and continues loving from the cross. This love is not momentary: I love you today, but tomorrow I may cut you off. This love is eternal: it crosses ages; it penetrates the good times and the bad times. While looking upon those who are killing Him, He prays for their forgiveness.

His dance of love is a dance on the edge of heaven and earth where light streams through into all people and places. Even the darkness. Especially the darkness.

In this dance, my steps are faltering and failing. I often choose anger over kindness and jealousy over graciousness. Even when I resist and reject His love, He continues calling, embracing, transforming.

He reminds me that I’ve really been adopted into the family of God. I’ve really been embraced by a Father who can turn every wilderness into a fruitful valley. I can really rest in His love. He is completely trustworthy.

Even when I face the darkness of suffering and death, He is still present. In Christ, I let go of pains, of sorrows, of hurts. I can rest. I can dance. By His grace, I am learning to live in the wonder that is bursting through everyone and every thing.

So I join the psalmist this day in crying out for sanctuary in the midst of the wilderness. Lord, I long for Your unfailing love, let me dance with you, in you, before you.

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photo from pfv.

At the end of my Sophomore year in college, our college pastor invited me to start a drama team. I was studying absurd theatre at the time, so the skits that came to mind seemed a bit strange for church. In one skit, one guy turns into a bowling ball and soon knocks over a group of human bowling pins. The point of this skit eludes me, but the strange transformation of human to bowling ball still entertains my imagination.

Another time, we staged a group of people standing around a plastic fire in post-nuclear holocaust America. In turn, each person spoke some strange incantation like mathematical formulas, gibberish, or sports talk. A manual directed every act, every movement around fake fire. In my own strange way, I was trying to communicate the problems of dead tradition.

We mocked the dead churches, the universities, and the whole culture as dancing around lifeless formalism. Our little drama team performed in churches and on the college campuses (street theatre) with a prophetic passion to waken the world to a revolution for the Lord!

Years later I stumbled across an essay by Thomas Merton entitled, “Tradition and Revolution.” He suggested that the Christian faith is both. We practice the faith of our fathers because it has been graciously handed down to us by tradition. And yet like true radicals, we must return to the “source” of our faith rooted in Jesus Christ.

Over the years, I’ve come to embrace the words I once derided as empty formalism. Words like tradition, ritual, and liturgy. I’ve come to believe that the path of faith is not simply a journey into the future (as though tomorrow is something we seek because it comes tomorrow). Rather, the path of faith treads upon the stones of tradition even as it stretches in revolutionary, unexpected twists and turns.

As we walk in Christ, we are walking backward and forward simultaneously. In Christ, we are stretching back to Father Abraham and the promise of world-wide redemption, yet we are also stretching forward to the New Jerusalem, and King Jesus ruling and reigning.

Recently, I was quietly repeating the words, “O Lord open my mouth and my lips will declare your praise.” As I formed the words on my lips, my breath carried the words into the air. I was praying inside the rhythm of breathing. It occurred to me that my breath moved like the gentle, steady liturgical rhythm of the church stretching across time and reaching all the way back to the ancient Hebrews worshipping the Lord of Glory in their psalms.

Their psalms still echo from our lips. And we still move in a great dance of God’s Spirit that stretches from the creation of the world to the climax of history.

As I think about my life, I realize how much of it has been in rhythm. Repetition. Patterns appearing again and again much like the repeated patterns of tradition. My family shared a meal every evening. This family meal repeated over and over and over throughout my childhood taught me about eating, about socializing, about language, about relational dynamics, about storytelling, about prayer, about listening, about loving. In less than an hour each evening, I gained an education deeper and far more lasting that all my years in school.

We learn by repetition. By patterns. In fact, we can rest in the cycle of day after day after day. Or for many, weekend after weekend after weekend. The repetition of sleep and eat, of day and night, of work and play brings sanity to our chaos-ridden world. This repetition of pattern is like the tradition of our fathers. And tradition is gift. It is the gift of be able to keep walking even when I’m tired.

In Fellowship of the Ring, the weary travelers must walk beneath a mountain. For days they walk in the dark. For days they feel the dread of shadows following, watching. For days they have no sense of what lies ahead or when they will finish this drudgery. But the pattern of walking one step after another step after another step keeps them going through darkest pit until eventually they reach light again.

In our lives and in the history of the world, there have been tunnels, dark ages, hidden suffering when the light seemed to be gone. In this valley of the shadow of death, we cannot see the light but we must keep walking. Peter exhorts those suffering under these shadows to humble themselves under God’s hand and resist the evil one. And Paul encourages the saints when “when having done all, to stand firm” (Ephesians 6:13Ephesians 6:13
English: King James Version (1611) - KJV
13 Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. having...: or, having overcome all  

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Much of our life is lived in the pattern of faithfully standing or walking or doing what we know to do. It isn’t all fireworks and drama and excitement. It is faithful submission. In some ways, it is like the simplicity of breathing. We don’t think over every breath. We don’t find some great spiritual meaning or experience in every breath. And yet, every breath sustains us. Whether joyful or sorrowful, each breath is vital for our survival.

Walking in the rhythm of tradition like weekly church observance, daily prayer, reading of Scripture is much like breathing or eating a meal with our family every day. We follow a pattern and we faithfully act and live inside the pattern. Sometimes it’s exciting and sometimes it’s not. Yet, this pattern is resisting the very real forces of chaos and evil in our world.

And from time to time, this pattern, this rhythm is disrupted by a voice. The call of God may challenge us to step outside the rhythm into a new path, a new walk. God calls Abram to “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.”

This revolutionary call is not simply to young men for even the old men will dream dreams. As an older man, Moses is called. He must leave and return to his people.

And so we always live between tradition and revolution. Between standing and stepping out. For some of us, the challenge is learning how to live faithfully in the patterns of day after day after day. While it doesn’t seem dramatic, it may be the step by step prodding of God’s people as we follow our Savior who is ushering in His Kingdom in every city on the earth.
Even as some of us may need to rest in the simple pattern of faithful obedience in the mundane, others may be called, may be disrupted into a new path. Some may be like Zechariah. He and his wife were “advanced in years.” Their days of revolution were over. Or so they thought. In the midst of worship, the Lord calls Zechariah to a new path. His life and marriage are disrupted by the surprise birth of John the Baptist. God may soon  disrupt your life with a surprise that will change everything.

Someday maybe I’ll write another absurd skit. And the absurdity will be that some people can be plodding along in the path of ritual, simple obedience and faithfulness to tradition while others will be disrupted by the surprise of God into something new, something unexpected, something revolutionary. And both sets of people will be circling the same fire, the same person, the same Savior.

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Don’t sell your Soul, originally uploaded by FotoRita [Allstar maniac].

“I think the Lord may be calling me to die a martyr’s death.” I told my one of my college friends.

“I’ve been thinking the same thing,” he replied.

As it turns out, many of the guys in our college group had a sense that we would give the ultimate sacrifice in service of the gospel. And we were ready.

25 years later and I’m still here. In fact, I think all of us are still here. As far as I know, none of my friends were thrown into prisons, shot in the jungle, killed in the arena. We were ready to give everything, but God called us to give something.

Jesus tells his puzzled listeners that they might just have to give up their hands, their feet, and even their eyes if they are going to follow him into the kingdom of God. What? Laying my neck on the line is one thing, but giving up something specific like an eye, a hand or even a foot is asking too much. Sometimes it is easier to die heroically than to live in humiliation.

Several years ago when I entered in dialysis, I was prepared to die. I felt a peace that if I didn’t survive God had already enclosed me in his loving grasp, and I could rest. In the mystery of His grace, I was blessed with another kidney.

In the last year, I lost a church building to a fire and a job to a sour economy. Strange as it sounds, these losses seemed far more dramatic to me than my health problems. I’m not sure I was even aware of the impact until my wife made a comment to me about dying. It seems I had been acting like I was dying again.

She saw through this and spoke to the discouragement that seemed to sap my vision and steal my laughter. I realized that I felt as though God was cutting off a foot, a hand, an eye. By inviting me into failure on multiple fronts, I experienced shame, anger, resentment, and jealously. I had begun reciting a daily litany to her of my failures.

This litany of self pity hid an unwillingness to trust in God and a resentment toward those who enjoyed the blessings I felt that God owed me. In His grace, He revealed my own unwillingness to love and my own desperate need for His grace to repent and rest in His love that flows through me to all people, including those I’d prefer to be mad at.

Sometimes He calls us to cut off the foot, the hand, the eye because they have become obstructions to love. Sometimes He simply amputates the offending limb. He removes those things that hide our hurts, our broken places, our attitudes that resist the limitless love of God. These things seem so deeply connected our lives, our ego, our identity that to lose them feels as if we’ve lost a vital limb.

In the midst of such sacrifice, we may live under the illusion that we cannot continue to live without our foot, our hand, our eye, and sadly many times we sink into depression and even bitterness. But the call of amputation (whether it’s the loss of a dream, a house, a job, and sometimes even a relationship) may just be the call of love.

Paul encouraged the saints to love for love is the fulfillment of the commandments.

Owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. For the commandments, “You shall not commit adultery, You shall not murder, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,” and any other commandment, are summed up in this word: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law. (Romans 13:8-10Romans 13:8-10
English: King James Version (1611) - KJV
8 Owe no man any thing, but to love one another: for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law. ⁹ For this, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, Thou shalt not covet; and if there be any other commandment, it is briefly comprehended in this saying, namely, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. ¹⁰ Love worketh no ill to his neighbour: therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.  

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But what we may fail to realize is that learning to love will not simply cost us everything, it will cost us something. The wounds of sin have damaged each of us in ways that hinder us from loving fully, completely, divinely. The trauma of living in a sin-stained world means that we will and do continue to suffer wounds. Whether acknowledged or not, these wounds are real, are painful, are deadly.

Many a successful law practice, business and even church has been built on the foundation of wounded hearts in need of healing. The success simply hides the ache. While the Pharisees appeared as the righteous leaders, Jesus accused them of being white-washed tombs. The nation of Israel appeared to be worshipping YHWH and walking in His righteousness, but Isaiah indicated otherwise.

Outwardly they appeared righteous and holy, but they were really rag-covered beggars whose hearts were far from God. We are no different from the ancient Israelites. And often the successes that define us are merely compensations for the weaknesses we feel. Our hope, our strength, our victory is in Christ alone. Outside of His great grace, all our accomplishments whither and fade and blow away into dust.

In His great and unyielding grace, He is leading us into love. Love that fulfills the commandments. Love that rests in Him. Love that restores a broken world.

In my own journey, He has used the last year to challenge me yet again and more deeply to rest in His love, to abide in the vine and to let go of offenses and hindrances to love.

Oddly, this is the martyrdom I sensed in college. It is not a fast, glorious death, but a slow, hidden death in life that forms me and makes me into a living witness, a living sacrifice of His love. As I walk out the reality of His call in my life, I am sharing my humiliations with others in hopes of encouraging someone, somewhere at some time when you also are called to let go of feet, hands and eyes.

The loss will ultimately mean that we can walk more soundly, serve more faithfully, and see more truly. This is the journey of love, the journey of living martyrs, the call of discipleship. May we all know and walk in the wonder of this love that is unceasing.

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Notes on “To a Scrap of Pasture Pushing Itself Between the Slates of Pavement”

Bobi Jones sings a song a praise “To a Scrap of Pasture Pushing Itself Between the Slates of Pavement.” As he looks out upon the square in the middle of town, he sees a blade of grass growing up through the pavement. He hears God singing through this pasture, and revealing in image His wisdom in parables, His holy presence, His birth and death and resurrection.

Though we pave over the earth, His song cannot be stopped, and “His lightning will tongue-lash freely from the earth.” In this small blade, Jones sees a “deluge” and an “eloquent greenery” that “narrates His life and speaks in parables on all sides.”

Jones calls us to look with him,
“When we look, there are angels near the stage
And the mist at the back, its head in feathers.”
These words call to my mind the image of Isaiah’s encounter with the holiness of God in the temple. Isaiah sees the Lord “high and lifted up” and the “train of His robe filling the temple.” Around the throne he sees angels, covered in winged and hiding their face and feet before the holiness of God.

In the middle of a town square filled with people moving to and fro, God reveals His holy power and glory in a single blade of grass. This blade of grass becomes a “thin place” where the glory of God is revealed, shouting aloud the wisdom of God. But the simple pass by and miss the awesome display of God’s wonder.

The song that is sung is the song of the Word made Flesh. For in the blade of grass, Jones sees a mystery. He “watch(es) Him being born there.” This blade of grass speaks to Jones of the nativity and the irrepressible life of Christ, but the image of pasture also speaks of grain that is formed into bread.

As Jesus proclaimed, “Unless a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it remains a single grain.” Jones sees this grain springing up in bread that feeds the people of God with the bread of heaven, the Lord’s Supper. Jones writes,
An herb whose flesh’s heap of crops we taste
In the tasting it turns to wormwood like each scrap that grows
But I know beneath my ribs the coming of the hour’s astonishment.
The supper is bitter for in partaking of His body broken for us, we are entering into the communion of death. Jones writes that the bread is literally beneath his ribs being digested. In the meal of death, we partake of life anew.

The bread of heaven nourishes. Even as our body draws nourishment from the physical bread, our whole person draws life from the bread of Christ. In His death, we know life. For in His death, we can participate in the great mystery of life after death.

Each day we rise, we taste the sweetness of death in Christ and the hope of life after death. His irrepressible life is at work in us. So no matter what happens in our world. The fools of the world can try to extinguish God’s word and life and power from the earth, but they cannot, for it springs afresh in us, in a little blade of grass bursting through the pavement, and in all creation.

He’s performing. The foolish civilization of today can
Kill Him and bury Him deep. The inherent will frolic through the soil.
In the hand of the grassblade the creation trembles,
And it sows eternity itself: tender is the land.

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She’ll be comin round the mountain when she comes,
She’ll be comin round the mountain when she comes,
She’ll be comin round the mountain,
She’ll be comin round the mountain,
She’ll be comin round the mountain when she comes.

I’ve heard that song over and over and over through my life. Seems like a silly song but there’s something in the repetition and rhythm that makes is stick out in my mind. At different times in my life, the song has brought to mind different images.

This morning it makes me think of the person who caught in a particular trial. In the midst of their frustration they exclaim, “I’ve gone around this mountain several times. I wish I could learn my lesson and move on.” I know that person because I’ve been that person more than once.

Whether in the areas of finances or job or friendships, I’ve often felt like I was circling, re-circling and circling the mountain yet again. Driving up the side of a mountain on a swtichback road has a similar feel. I see the same sights again and again, but each time I see them from a higher altitude.

It might just be that when we feel like we circling round the mountain again and again that we could be repeating a pattern but at a higher altitude each time. So we’re not really in the same place, we’re actually moving higher and higher.

Sometimes I’ve drawn two diagrams on a board to demonstrate the way many Christians perceive the spiritual life. Some might think of it as a gradual incline leading higher and higher and higher to a peak, which is the place of glorification. Depending on their tradition, this promise of glorification may happen before or after death.

Other Christians might think of their life more like a line pointing up breaking through a barrier to reach a plateau where the life of faith is lived in fullness. A key event marks this breakthrough—usually either their initial salvation experience or a secondary experience of the Spirit’s infilling. Their “testimony” normally will consist of discussing the events prior to the moment of breakthrough and the dramatic impact the breakthrough had on their life.

I think both of these pictures are helpful in thinking about different aspects of a spiritual journey but I might also suggest that, “She’ll be comin round the mountain” offers a third and valuable image as well.

The image of a circling a mountain with a gradual incline captures the image of repeated patterns in our life. I would suggest that one aspect of growth in our lives can be characterized by a series of repeated patterns.

One way to explain this understanding is to consider the seasons of the year. Each year we pass through spring, summer, fall and winter. Then the seasons are repeated. And again. And again. And again throughout our lives.

If we don’t move every year, this repeated pattern of seasons in our region will be layered into our memories. Certain smells, sights and experiences of the different seasons will bring back memories of past seasons. Driving with my window down in late spring often takes me instantly back to 1982 and my senior year in high school.

We may associate certain activities with certain seasons. For example, we may connect vacations with summer; football with fall; hot chocolate with winter; and flower gardens with spring. But we don’t have to do the same thing every season.

Some years, I may chose to follow the birds and fly south in the winter. Other years, I may head north to a snowy mountain and ski slopes for the winter. In other words, I experience the repeated pattern of the season, but I am free to improvise my response much like a jazz musician might do with a standard.

In addition to the repeated patterns, we impose a calendar upon our year with repeated celebration or patterns. Many Americans might celebrate Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, and the Fourth of July regardless of their religion.

Add to the big four a series of lesser holidays and we have a repeated holiday in most months of the year. Add to those celebrations the personal celebrations in the lives of our friends and families like birthdays and anniversaries. Then add the weekly worship services, yearly VBS, graduations, weddings and more.

Soon we discover that our life is filled with repeated patterns.

I would suggest that we learn through repeated patterns. Just as our calendar reflects this rhythm, our personal lives reflect seasons of learning. There are times when we may actively learn and other times when we may actively create and other times when we may focus on serving or relationships or prayer or mission’s work.

These seasons of intensity and focus may repeat again and again. But each time, we may remember our previous experiences and lessons from the past to play upon our experience now.

We may also pass through repeated seasons of joy and sorrow, struggle and victory, grief and comfort, conflict and forgiveness and so on. But just like the jazz standard or the repeating seasons, we don’t have to respond to the same rhythms in the same way.

One year during lent, I meditated upon the joy of the Lord. This taught me the pattern of joy in suffering. When I find myself in the midst of a repeated trial, I am free to choose a different way to respond. Jack Taylor once told the story of his son growing through grave financial difficult. In response, the family had a celebration.

This decision to alter their response to something depressing and discouraging could then give them fresh eyes and perspective to the struggle and possibly see new opportunities ahead.

So today, I think I’ll rejoice that, “She’ll be comin round the mountain when she comes.” I may think I’m coming back round the mountain, but I know I’m moving upward to a place of glory. So I can improvise respond in new ways, bring new expectations to this similar season.

And even in the midst of my current circumstances, whether good or bad, I can rejoice and know that my faithful Savior is leading on the path. And in the end, he present me as blameless before the Father.

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The 10 Words appear to restrict our freedom but in reality they assure our freedom, and without them there is only enslavement. So each commandment, each word is a gift. The second word, “No carved images” is the gift of knowing the God who cannot be contained, cannot be controlled, cannot be limited.

YHWH (the Covenant God) shatters our limitations and shatters our worlds, ushering us into new worlds and leading us from glory to glory.

The IAMIAM who “is and remains present” cannot be summoned by our carved images (whether in wood or in thought). He is and always has been Present. I cannot encompass Him; I cannot comprehend Him; I cannot grasp Him. In His gracious lovingkindness, He contains me’ He comprehends me; He grasps me.

He knows my beginning from my end. The freedom to let go of carved images allows me to rest, rest, rest and rejoice in the goodness of God and the world He has graciously given to me.

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The psalmist cries out to the Lord,

“My soul clings to the dust; Revive me according to Your word.”

During Lent, the cry of the psalmist becomes the cry of God’s people. Like Adam we hear the resounding Word of God announcing, “For you are dust and to dust you will return” (Genesis 3:19Genesis 3:19
English: King James Version (1611) - KJV
19 In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.  

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Unlike the birds, we have flown beyond the horizon to the moon, and we may even fly to Mars. Unlike the fish we have learned how to live under the sea and upon the land. Unlike the ants, we’ve built buildings that stand and stand and stand and continue to stand. Unlike the apes, we’ve formed clans and towns and cites and nations.

While inspired by the world around us, humans continually discover new ways to rise above the natural order. Like gods, we create, we rule, we master, we thrive. In rain and drought, we survive. We work in darkness and light. When new obstacles cross our path, we learn ways to surmount the obstacles and even use the energy from our struggle to grow even stronger.

Diseases may threaten us but eventually, we find ways to overcome. Even while facing the dreaded cancer, diabetes, heart disease and AIDs, we don’t give up. In fact, we are discovering more and more solutions to fight and win the battle against these threats.

The accomplishments of humanity boggle the mind. We live in a time of such exploding innovation that no one can even keep up with all the new discoveries that surface day after day after day.

We are lords of creation, and yet, we are still nothing more than dust. In spite of our power, our creations, our glory, we are fading. Soon we will die. And soon we will be forgotten. Like the grass, we wither and fall and fade.

We are but dust and to dust we will return.

When God decided to image Himself, He created a world. From this world, He took the dust and breathed upon it, and “man became a living being.” In spite of our accomplishments, we have no life outside of the breath that sustains us each moment.

Take that breath away, and we falter and fade. Thus the psalmist prays, “My soul clings to dust.” And yet, even as he acknowledges his dustiness, he calls upon the Word of God to revive him. The psalmist knows that the Word of God breathes life into his dust, for the Word is forever settled in heaven (Psalm 119:89Psalm 119:89
English: King James Version (1611) - KJV
LAMED. ⁸⁹ For ever, O LORD, thy word is settled in heaven.  

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While we rejoice and celebrate the wonder of human accomplishments, let us not be intimidated by the appearance of human mastery. We are not of the universe after all. Our kingdoms fall. Our innovations fail. Our power fades. We are but dust.

As we journey through the Lenten wilderness, let us cling to the Word of the Lord. His breath sustains, his Word creates and re-creates us. And by His grace alone, we can feed upon the Word that will stand forever.

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Here’s a thought worth consideration from Pascal -

The only thing that consoles us for our miseries is diversion, and yet this is the greatest of our miseries. For it is this which principally hinders us from reflecting upon ourselves, and which makes us insensibly ruin ourselves. Without this we should be in a state of weariness, and this weariness would spur us on to seek a more solid means of escaping from it. But diversion amuses us, and leads us, gradually and without ever adverting to it, to death.

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