Sitting with Jesus
Over the past four years, I guess you could say I’ve been in the trenches with Jesus. I’ve scrambled. I’ve learned. I’ve done what needed doing. Greek vocabulary got memorized. Hebrew grammar got parsed. Systematics papers on atonement and forgiveness got written. Reformation history got tested. I have fought the good fight.
And then there were the internships where I learned to love beyond the limits of my own compassion. I discovered the love of God going before me and behind me and beneath me and above me. I had opportunity to practice conflict management. I mostly practiced conflict avoidance. I discovered who I was a person and as a pastor. I wrote sermons on Friday mornings. I was present on Sundays for worship and fellowship and last minute preparation and worship again. I slept late on Mondays. I went to meetings. I went to hospital bedsides. I didn’t always get it right but I showed up. I have finished the race.
But have I kept the faith? Have I kept the faith? That is the great, haunting question, after all. All I know is best said by the church father, Ireneus, who wrote: “The glory of God is the human person fully alive.” I know that I have come alive over these past four years, even as pieces of me have been sloughed off like so much dead skin. The core of my humanity – body, soul, mind and spirit – are, indeed, fully alive and I have felt the glory of God in the midst of that vale of tears that was a car ride home from the hospital. And I have felt the glory of God at worship in the outdoor ampitheatres of our national parks. And I have even felt the glory of God in the study of church history, that great communion of the saints, and the task of piecing the story together in something akin to a systematic fashion. I have felt the glory of God in the words of Scripture, lifted from ancient texts by skilled hands and presented to us in breath-taking moments of “that’ll preach!” So I know beyond knowing that God has been present with me in the trenches.
I’ve been in the trenches with Jesus for four long years, even longer than that. More like a lifetime. But its only now in the lazy pace of summer that I can sit with Him for hours. I can read and pray and write and think and FEEL again. It’s a place of reacquaintance, which, I’ll grant you is strange, because we’ve never been unacquainted. God’s been with me all along but mostly in what Wendell Berry terms “the household economy” of togetherness. We’ve been together to get life done. We’ve stood together shoulder-to-shoulder (yes, I recognize the presumption of this statement. I’m sure that God has had the lion’s share in all of this and yet it feels like partnership too). And at long last, we are collapsed together onto the couch. And we are talking. And laughing. And crying. And looking back over the past four years at what we’ve accomplished, well, there’s no other way of saying it, of what we’ve accomplished together (presumption again!)
There has been much love manifested in the hard work of the trenches. Isn’t love, after all, most normally lived out in the ordinary? The mundane? The rote? The seamless union that barely requires words but moves forward upon the strength of mutual understanding?
I’ll grant, though, that in the midst of maneuvers, it is impractical to say all that may need to be said. It is in the quiet of recouperative stillness that mid-course adjustments may be broached. It is the coziest of intimacies that allows us to say to one another, “You know that thing you always do? Well I don’t know that its helping our relationship any.” And the outrageous piece of the story is that, in the quietness of recouperative stillness, I can hear these words from Jesus. And in that coziest of intimacies, I am freed to ask, “What are we going to do with me?”
And Jesus says He guesses He’ll keep loving me. And I say, Good thing. And then we sit some more.
