Idle and Blessed

I want the things that make me come alive. I know that means not-Atlanta. It means not-church-ministry, and not-Baptist. It means not-office, not-sitting, not-idling. What does it mean? I’m really introverted most days, and that forces me to live with heightened awareness of my energy. Where it goes and when it returns, what things drain it and what things sustain it. I have to choose where I invest it, because when it gets down to the bottom of the barrel, everything else must wait. My energy drains in the city. My energy drains in traditional ministry. I cannot be sustained in an office or cubicle, or in a life of being still. I’ve been watching how my energy surges in academia done right, in rooms of people with ideas and solutions. Bioethics meetings. Management meetings. The days when I go in and out of yoga classes, ethics classes, running trails, and important work. I am drained by monotony and jobs that don’t matter. I am drai...

All of the real things are born out of darkness. The whole earth began as darkness hovering on the face of the deep. From it the light was formed, and the rocks and the trees, and then the more lively loud things like elephants, and human beings. Our common origin was deep darkness, something we instinctually fear but remember. Babies enter the world through darkness. Rain falls through dark clouds. We wake up every morning from darkness, a new awakening. A new birth. A tiny creation story. All of the true things are spoken out of silence. First there was silence, "then God said," and it was so. We know God speaks this way, sending voices to cry out in the wilderness. God is one who speaks from the stillness, and we know it when we get still enough to hear, to give up our own unceasing loudness. I know this: real things are born into my life through darkness. Nothing valuable has ever come to me without pain. And true things are spoken to me in the silence of selfle...