This Sunday our church is holding its first service in the new building.
Two and a half years ago my son found himself alone in our church. Other kids have trouble relating to a teen with an IQ of 46.
He heard voices.
He turned on the ovens and stoves in the kitchen.
He found a candle. He found a lighter. He went to a stairwell and played with fire.
We were in a meeting at the church. Our church elders were talking with folks about our youth program.
My youth was burning down the church.
Jeremiah was born in Haiti.
There are indicators he was abused.
Physically (there are scars on his head).
Psychologically (he thought we would withhold food from him).
Sexually (odd reactions when he was bathed).
Spiritually (he witnessed Voodoo rites).
Now we are moving into the $2 million building.
There is a beautiful cross going up in the new building. It is made of laminated beams from the old building, charred by the fire. The seared burns on the wood are centered, fading toward the ends, symbolic of the sins our Lord sacrificed Himself for two millennia ago.
There are a lot of mixed feelings about this new building which provides a superior place for worship, for our youth, for offering a resource to our community.
But it is just a building.
Though our family has a unique perspective on this I recognize how others see it. It is a wonderful improvement. It is an asset to our community. It is a place where people can more easily meet with our Lord.
This building will host concerts, and weddings, and baptisms, and services which will draw people together.
Still, it is only a building.
The real purpose of church isn’t a building. It is the relationship which springs between human beings (an odd little species on the edge of a rather ordinary spiral galaxy) and the Creator of the Universe.
That is a real mystery.
There was an interesting image recently on Astronomical Picture of the Day.
A survey of the galaxies which lie south of the axis of our galaxy of 100 billion stars shows 2 million other galaxies.
I’ll let that sink in a bit.
One direction from our galaxy we can easily count 2 million galaxies, which might comprise as many as 100 billion stars each.
We are clinging to a tiny ball of soil which dances about a rather ordinary star on an outer edge of a rather ordinary galaxy floating amid perhaps 500 billion galaxies.
I believe that our universe is is held together at the quantum level by an intelligent force. A force that appears to work in groupings of three. A force I have come to know... and love.
That is the real church.
This being, a being who works through trinities of the quarks within the depths of the fabric of atoms, is the Church.
I don’t understand the details of the strange dance my spirit has waltzed these past few years, but I know that the rebuilding of this church has at its core the growth of the Church.
Strange mystery.
The Creator of the Universe is interested enough in a soul among 6.8 billion to use his family to change the intersection of the souls in the community and Himself.
I haven't forgotten this blog.
I have been busy with the usual stuff... work and family... and have had some added stress in my life.
I have been focusing on the latter.
In that pursuit I have been blogging quite a bit. Almost a post a day. Those are on another blog where a few have gathered around me to pray and follow how I am processing new challenges.
But I love this little blog, Job's Tale, which chronicles my weird life, and I need to give it a little attention now and then.
Lately I have been thinking about character.
My character, God's character, the character of those in my life.
I have been trying to be true to what I know is right, but that lends itself to narcissism, the idea that I can attain anything exemplary on my own.
It isn't true.
I, like every other human who has ever lived except one, am self-centered first.
It is not in our nature to readily accept our own failings, deny our own desires, and live the perfect life, following the example of our Lord.
We are born with the intrinsic belief that we are the center of the universe, demanding to be fed, demanding to be held, demanding the world conform.
I suppose that tends to reach its peak about age two when the world starts to put its foot down and say: "Wait your turn!"
However, there is something about being intentional.
There are folks who float along, their faith casual, their actions flow along the path of least resistance. Lately I have found that nearly every decision I make comes at a price.
It gets old.
Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us. --Romans 5:3-5
Interesting progression...
Perseverance
Character
Hope
According to this passage character develops out of perseverance. It means that holding true develops its own reward, character.
I've hit some hard spots of late.
But out of those hard spots I emerge better able to... hit further hard spots.
And...
From that I develop hope.
That doesn't mean I will gain the rewards I want. It means that I will gain the inner space where I see possibilities of success when others may not.
That is good enough.
For without hope there isn't much point in riding this ball of dirt around and around as it dances circles about the sun for the three score and ten years of a human life.
It was just a dream. Bits of flotsam and jetsam. Or is it jetsam and flotsam since that is the order they would happen? At any rate, dreams are often weird metaphors for what is going on in our lives, a way for the heart and spirit and mind and even the body to work together to keep us sane.
Still, I am going through my day with the emotional residue left by a strange dream.
I think the emotions of a dream are often stronger than their content. When we relate a dream it seems to carry no emotional impact to our listeners. They may find it odd, but they miss what the dream left behind in our hearts and minds.
I wrote a post last night, and I posted it this morning feeling the emotional residue of a dream crystalized in the post I had written.
The post was about the strange series of mechanical breakdowns in our home. How it laid stress on my fragile marriage and offered the fodder for theological debate between my wife and I on the goodness or even existence, of God.
Drifting off to a prescription drug aided sleep I found myself wading in deep dark water, a common dream metaphor for feeling overwhlemed.
There were things floating in the water.
Some were right on the surface, much of it floated at varying depths in strings and clumps.
They were fish hooks.
They were brightly colored bits of rubber and plastic imitating edible tidbits fish might enjoy, and each had hooks on them, some single, some triple, all brass.
I was moving to get people out of the water, my wife, my children. I could feel the hooks biting into my arms, legs, back, chest, sides.
When I emerged from the water the weight of those hooks, some of them clinging to dozens of others, pulled at my skin.
I got my family out. I pulled out a pair of wire cutters and clipped the barbs off the hooks that most hampered my movements and started going around, removing the brass snares from the flesh of my family.
A sense of horror rose in my heart. I snipped the tiny gaffs from my wife’s flesh, backing the curved metal pieces out of her skin.
Now and then I paused to remove a few from myself.
Snip. Off came the barbs. Then I’d tug at the bits of metal and nonsensical, nearly Dr. Seussical type rubber creatures with their impotent hooks stabbing out of their bellies, tossing them to lay beside the lapping water.
As the sun rose in my dream it rose outside my window. The alarm went off. I rolled out of bed.
I began my day with emotional gossamer threads of the strange dream clinging to my heart... Six hours later I still feel wrapped by tiny spider threads of emotional horror and pain and damaged flesh, it is clinging to the emotional reality of this new day.
At work I can accomplish clear goals. I almost wish I didn’t have to go home.
I’m one of those annoying morning persons.
I bounce out of bed, and bustle about making coffee, showering, scraping the fuzz on my cheeks (under the impression that a little facial scraping makes this ol’ mug of mine bearable).
Brenda shuffles about, trying to get her blood flowing and shake the resentment of being conscious after the bliss of sleep. I sing silly little songs, and if I am being especially insufferable, do a little dance. (I have most absurd dance moves, keeps my family in groans.)
I don’t really do a lot of groaning myself. There have been times when I groan internally and once in a while, when the heaviness in my heart makes it hard to step as lightly as I am normally wont, the groan slips out between my lips.
The year after Willy died that the internal groan slipped out quite a bit.
We had wanted children for so long. It was a constant ache. Every few weeks Brenda’s mood would let me know that her disappointment was fresh once again. That hasn’t ended.
We were talking quietly in the yard last night (I have been turning the weeds and vegetables over for Winter) and it came up again.
“I started my period today.”
I gave up on my portion of that dream long ago.
“I’m sorry.”
That longing for children has been carried in human hearts since before the first couple wandered out of The Garden.
That desire has dogged for over 27 years ago.
There were false joys. Twice she became pregnant. Each time she ended in the hospital, threatened by a tubal pregnancy.
On August 30th, 1992, on Brenda’s birthday, our first child was born. Though he was a touch fussy, we were very, very, very happy.
For three months and fifteen days.
I’ve talked with kids who have wondered how grownups gain their authority. What secret did their parents learn that made the mysteries of the adult world clear? What happened that changed them from ordinary people into grownups?
I tell such kids, every time I do a study skills program, that there was indeed such a moment, that there is a secret to being an adult. That someone did give them a special grownup secret. that I will tell them because they will not understand until it happens to them.
The secret to becoming a grownnnup is... them.
I tell them that there was a moment when their parents had someone walk up to them and hand them a baby and the whole universe shifted. They looked down at that baby and something clicked inside their heads and hearts. Suddenly they were no longer brother, or sister. They were no longer friend or son or daughter or employee or employer or any of the other appellations and roles they had carried for so long. All of that was shoved aside and they became... a parent. Their central identity was now mother or father.
I tell kids that their parents looked down at them, at their newborn bodies which were both so light and so heavy and saw a future of 18 or 20 years stretching out ahead in which they would have to help this tiny person who could not even work its hands enough to place food in its mouth, to become fully independent, fully able to go out into the world and find work and love and their own families.
It was a frightening moment when the fabric of the universe slipped out from under them and in the moment of internal vertigo they grasped a new identity.
I felt that joy. I have also felt its opposite.
That was a horrible moment in my life, that instant when I saw the blue lips of my child, when I frantically blew into his mouth and thumped emphatically yet gently at his little chest; that moment of three and a half months after the joy.
I walked numbly through the next few days. I was lost in confusion without sleep, without eating, without even the most basic responses to the needs of my body or reactions to the world outside of my breaking heart.
It was during year I learned a grief.
I felt destroyed inside.
I felt my life was empty, that I would never heal. I felt there wasn’t any point in looking forward to a future that no longer held the child whose entry into my life had changed my self image from an ordinary man to a father. My grief felt like a twisting spiky thing throbbing in my chest, all sharp edges, an odd shaped thing I could no longer bear to carry.
They pain was so deep I felt I could do anything, absolutely anything, to make the pain stop.
That lasted about a year.
I learned a lot of valuable lessons that year. Some right away, some are still coming to me.
One lesson came on the three month anniversary of Willy’s death. You can read about that here.
In general the year was painfully numbing, and oddly, painfully expansive.
Out of that experience with death I began to see the suffering in the world around me. I felt surges of emotion when I read about those who starve and weaken and die. There was a visceral reaction to news of famine and war and horrible diseases which cause so much suffering.
At the same time I felt greater joy than I had before. I was lifted by sunrises and rainbows and the life flowing throughout the world. I became ever more thrilled in the act of worship and in seeing the good that flows from the Hand of God.
It’s as if the emotional horizons of my heart were expanded. I felt greater sorrow and greater joy after the death of my first child.
Grief is a normal human experience. It surprises the adult who thinks he has felt all there is to feel.
Even our Lord, member of the Triune God, experienced the shock of grief:
When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled.
"Where have you laid him?" he asked.
"Come and see, Lord," they replied.
Jesus wept.
Then the Jews said, "See how he loved him!"
But some of them said, "Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?"
Jesus Raises Lazarus From the Dead
Jesus, once more deeply moved, came to the tomb.
--John 11:33-38
Beautiful mystery. Divinity constrained by flesh. What a wonder that the Lord God can feel grief just like His mortal servants.
I think in grief there is an element of the loss of dreams, of expected experience in coming to the realization that we are entering the Desert of Loss.
I felt grief over the realization my children are mentally handicapped and they are incapable of learning the things I had hoped to teach them.
I felt grief over my son burning down our church.
I feel grief over finding a satisfying place in the world for my children. Their disabilities limit them so.
I grieve over current troubles too personal to describe here.
A sad thing. A sad thing, for the vision was beautiful. But like all human visions it was a product of imagination, perhaps of hope and love and longing as well, but primarily a product of imagination.
Perhaps the state I find myself in is a healthy thing. I have no clear idea of what my future will be. I know there will be a lot of change in it from thevision I had. But everything adapts. Everything changes.
“Change is growth, and growth is painful.” --Albert Einstein
If I can protect my heart as I change, allow it to grow rather than wither, then it will be OK.
It is OK to have vision. It is OK to try and to fail. It is OK to grieve.
To love is to take a chance at being hurt.
But I can love anyway. Take the chance. Maybe the future will be better than I can imagine. Maybe I will be hurt.
Joy is its own reward.
Grief brings the blessing of growth.
I’ll keep running at that football, hoping it will be there when I kick with all my might. If it isn’t... well I guess I’ll just lay in the grass a little bit, catch my breath, and take joy in the quiet blue sky.
Greetings!
I haven't been posting so much on this blog as I have been pretty busy. A lot of my blogging energy has been going elsewhere as many of you know.
Still, I love this little blog and want to keep it going.
The previous post was about a painting I did, an experiment in some new materials.
I want to do another, but the Spirit hasn't given me a lot of direction.
So...
I'm looking for inspiration.
I want to do another image relating to Advent, the beginning of the Christ Mass season.
The theme should be around "Light and Life" in Jesus.
So... how is this for an experiment...
Give me a suggestion. I will be open to anything which looks at the way that Jesus has brought light into this darkened world.
What images work for that? Space, dark woods, wilderness, a cityscape?
Drop me a note on an idea you have and I will see if something opens up the creative floodgates.
I will then post the stages as I create the picture.
Leave a comment and let's see where the Spirit leads!
