A Day

It is a beautiful day here.  Everyone says so.  On my local Christian radio station, they are singing the praises of this day, with its mild temperatures, blue skies and low humidity.  It is a day to take long walks with your dog, to take your coffee or your iced tea and sit outside, to revel in it.  Really beautiful days are rare.  This seems to be the case almost everywhere, although I have only lived in a few places.

Meanwhile, across the world, in Syria, a civil war rages.  I don't claim to understand everything about this, except that it is not beautiful.  There is so much horror and pain and people are fleeing but finding nowhere to go.  Just this week there was a chemical attack in Syria, across the world, and last night the United States sent Tomahawk missiles in retaliation.

When I was a teenager, it was popular to predict the imminent demise of the world.  All of the signs pointed to it.  Some people seemed to look forward to it.  But I didn't.  I just didn't understand that desire.  I loved the world.  I looked outside and saw it was a beautiful day.  I wanted a chance to grow up and have children and write books and see the world, or some parts of it, anyway.  I loved Jesus but I did not want him to come back, at least not right now.

Today, though, as I feel the sun on my face, I understand, a little.  I still love the world.  It is a beautiful day.  I love the parts of it that I have seen:  the Canadian Rockies, the streets of Paris, Mount Fuji and Galveston and Minnehaha Falls.  I love the faces of the children in my congregation and our school, and how they all want to pray for their dogs and their cats,  their dads and their moms.  I love the people at the assisted living center, especially the woman who told me that on the song, "Love Lifted Me" I could replace the word Love with God because God is love.  I love the world, but I feel the weight of all of the misery in it, too, and I want Jesus to come back and heal us, because I just don't believe we will ever figure it out.

I still want to make it better.  I think we need to do things to make it better, even if I don't know if they will help much, or at all.  Maybe bombing will help.  Maybe it won't.  I would take in a refugee family tomorrow.

Meanwhile, it is a beautiful day, and I still love the world.  And at the same time, I catch myself in a one-word prayer.

Maranatha.

Come, Lord Jesus.

Save us.

"Hosanna!"  It is the shout of Palm Sunday.

Beautiful and Terrible

A week ago on Sunday afternoon, as the shadows lengthened and the sun went down, my husband and I drove over to a spot downtown along the Mississippi River.  We got out and walked over the Stone Arch Bridge, stopping to watch a bridal party taking pictures, children peering over the railing, young people riding bikes.  When we got to the other side of the bridge, there was a group of children standing with a man and a woman who were dressed like clowns.  They were teaching the children how to blow gi-normous bubbles.

We stood and watched, delighted, for a few moments.  But before we turned to walk back across the bridge, I walked down some wooden steps to get a better view of the river and the  bridge above.  It was not quite sunset, and the view was beautiful.

I thought back to earlier that afternoon.  After worship that morning I had stopped in at the Intensive Care Unit of one of our local hospitals.  I sat for a little while with a family as they waited for good news about their daughter and sister.  They were not getting very much good news, and they grasped every sliver they could find, and held on tight.  We prayed our silent prayers and hoped against hope.  It was a grave place, full of love and pain.

I thought back a little further to the news I had gotten on Friday, news that a good friend of mine from seminary days had died.  She was just 47, with two young children and a heart-broken husband.  I grieved the loss, and also the fact that I had not kept in contact with her over the years since seminary, even though we had been faithful friends through those years of study.  When I saw her picture on caring bridge, I saw first the familiar, beautiful smile that lit up every room she entered.  How could she be dead?  I still couldn't believe it.

"Here is the world," Frederick Buechner once said.  "Beautiful and terrible things will happen.  Don't be afraid."

As I walked over the bridge, as I watched the children playing, as I felt the setting sun on the river, it was easy to believe that God was in this place.

But God is in the Intensive Care Unit, too, though often impossible to see.  I don't say it because I can feel the warmth on the back of my neck, or because I got the news I wanted to hear.  I just hold on to it.  God is in the Intensive Care Unit, holding on to all of us.

One of the things they said of my friend from seminary, the one with the beautiful smile, the one who died too young, was that she was never afraid.

Beautiful and terrible.  Don't be afraid.

The Pastor on Vacation

I have been told that when you go on vacation, it's really important to get out of town.  And, for the most part, I have obeyed (though there was the time we went to Paris, came home and stayed holed up in our City, watching movies which featured Paris, and sneaking out for the occasional in-town excursion).

My husband loves to plan vacations.  Even though Mesa Verde was my idea (a long-dreamt dream), he made all of the arrangements.  As for me, as much as I love going places and seeing beautiful things, what really excites me at first is this:

time.

I always bring along more books than I can possibly read.
I bring paper and think I am going to write.  (sometimes I do, sometimes I don't)
I bring knitting.
I actually had the recorder out, wondering if I should bring it along and spend a little time practicing.  (I decided against it, at the last minute.)

Yesterday I took a really nice, un-planned nap.  Wow!, was that good.

On vacations, I like to learn things (I discovered that on the StrengthsFinder inventory, I am a "Learner", so that is no surprise.)   I think about things like learning the recorder, but actually, what I love is learning about a new place, like San Francisco, or Atlanta, or  Paris, or Santa Fe.

The tricky thing for me is that while I am taking a vacation from work, I realize that I'm not taking a vacation from God.  I think that this is one of the tricky things about being a sort of religious professional, at least it is for me:  how to not make my work so close to my identity that I can't just worship God without thinking about it in terms of work.  So, it's a growing edge sometimes to practice prayer and hear scripture without thinking about the next sermon.

so, there's time.

Time to read, knit, see in a different way, with different eyes.  And time to pray.