Idle and Blessed

How surely gravity's law, strong as an ocean current, takes hold of even the smallest thing and pulls it toward the heart of the world. Each thing - each stone, blossom, child - is held in place. Only we, in our arrogance, push out beyond what we each belong to for some empty freedom. If we surrendered  to earth's intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees. Instead we entangle ourselves in knots of our own making and struggle, lonely and confused. So, like children, we begin again to learn from the things, because they are in God's heart; they have never left him. This is what the things can teach us: to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness. Even a bird has to do that before he can fly. -From Rilke's Book of Hours

Your first word of all was light , and time began. Then for long you were silent. Your second word was man , and fear began, which grips us still. Are you about to speak again? I don't want your third word. Sometimes I pray: Please don't talk. Let all your doing be by gesture only. Go on writing in faces and stone what your silence means. You be our refuge from the wrath that drove us out of Paradise. Be our shepherd, but never call us-- we can't bear to know what's ahead. -From Rilke's Book of Hours

About a year ago, Don Miller wrote a blog about why he doesn't go to church , and it went a little viral. I haven't gone back and read it recently, but I remember him saying some things about the modern church being a business, aimed at getting more people in the door and giving them an experience as efficiently as possible. I very rarely attempt to disagree with Donald Miller on things, considering he's the one with the successful career in ministry/writing/blogging/conference-leading and I'm the one sitting on my couch blogging on my old MacBook, but now that the rest of the world is done blasting him for that article, I have some things to say. I don't usually want to go to church. Let's start here. I grew up going to a wonderful, vibrant, connected, growing, teaching church in Nashville that I still call home. My favorite place to be on Sundays (and any other time they let the youth group in) was church, and even when I struggled through my theology clas...

So welcome to mid-September, when pumpkin drinks make their annual debut and candy corn lines the outer walls of grocery stores. But have you stepped outside in Georgia lately? It's still really summer, guys. I always have this frustration with our refusal to see a season all the way through. There might be some mornings when, if you wake up early enough, the dew on the grass and chill in the air talk to you about autumn. But I say let's be here now, in our summer selves, barefoot and warm in the sunshine. Autumn will come soon enough. School will get busier, fall races will be run, pools will close. But for now we have the magic of trees green and lush, tomatoes fresh from the ground, and a sun that flushes cheeks, and my soul isn't ready to come back inside yet.

There are times when distance running is so monotonous that trying to drink from a glass bottle without stopping becomes something joyously interesting to do.

What is it that makes us run from our pain? Turn our backs, avert our eyes. We are shy of ourselves. We hear the rumblings of the deep and sense the darkness that lies beneath our surface, a darkness that quickens the heart and the feet to run. Why? The murky blackness of our souls is something we are prone to sleep through, like the blackness of the night. There is mystery and terror there. There is the fear that if we face our pain it will rise up and flood our whole self, like an ocean the shore can't stop. I have felt this fear. I see it everywhere. And we turn off our awareness of the dark, we turn on every light in the house, anything to keep away the black corners and keep the monsters under the bed. "Go back to sleep," we tell ourselves, and during the day, "Don't slow down." Run and run and run. Sadness and slowness and darkness and fear are ushered out to the prisons and hospitals, and when our own evil breaks out in the streets, like in Fe...

In the certain corner of Christian life I encountered in Tennessee, the sweet and good and true corner I call home even while trudging out beyond it, I learned the way to true compassion for the Other is to be in relationship with them. At my home church, we did missions that way and I was raised on it. Those summers in Russia, as my dearest and oldest blog readers know, were the days I learned that lesson best. I learned that Christian love and ministry is nothing but solidarity with the hurting, although solidarity can have a thousand faces. Our small and me-centered perspectives are always insufficient and the only cure is to go live from someone else's side for a while. I learned what Russian culture is, how the politics play out in people's lives, and what the prevailing opinion on America is from Eurasia, but what really shapes the person I am today are my friendships with them. They are my family. I miss them like I miss my own parents. And never in a million years wou...