High School Graduation

Last week I attended a “senior celebration” at a high school within walking distance of my apartment. If you haven’t picked up on this yet, I don’t live in the best part of town and the high school near us is no exception to that general rule. Granted, it’s not like the school where I took my SAT, where there were rumors of weapons and gang fights (most of it was probably made up by the easily frightened white kids at my own suburban high school). But it doesn’t rank very high in Colorado. According to CSAPs the freshmen were 48% proficient in Reading last year. Now, I’m not a statistician but that doesn’t seem very good. A group called “Great Schools: Involved Parents, Successful Kids” only gave it a 3 out of 10 and the over all district received the same score. I read on another site that it’s the 128th district out of 136 in Colorado. Let’s assume the stats are somewhat accurate, despite the fact that I only just googled the information about five minutes ago.

Danny, Laisa, Haley, Sara, Helen, Emmerance, Tshite

Even with a reasonable margin of error, that high school still isn’t doing well.

On the opposite end of the spectrum from my neighborhood is a place like Douglas County where I later attended the graduation party of a young woman I once nannied during my college years. It was a very different experience from the previous night, and not simply because it lacked tedious awards ceremony with perfunctory speeches which no one will recall by the end of summer. It was a party with food in chaffing dishes and cupcakes that cost $3 each at the shop where they’re made. The women were in dresses, the graduate in heels. I wore my chacos and a pair of loose shorts that were $7 at Goodwill last summer. But it is more than that, the clothes and fancy food are only symptomatic. This young woman is attending CSU with the plan of graduate school afterwards.

I’m relieved my neighbor was accepted to two colleges and even has a small scholarship to help cover some first costs. When we leftthe ceremonylast week, another friend who had attended hooked her arm into a younger sister’s elbow–another refugee who will be a freshmen next year.

“Four years!” she said brightly as we skipped down the stairs outside in the warm night air. “We’re going to see you here in four years, right? You’ll be getting awards and scholarships too!” The new freshmen giggled but agreed.

That is the difference. Most days, I’m happy the kids in my neighborhood can read and that some can write. The syntax is often a mess, the grammar is usually backwards. But this is at leasttheir second language, for some it’s a third. I want them to graduate high school because I want them to have a chance in life. Education in America is the beginning of anything. It’s hard to communicate that to our refugees, but there are a few students who seem to understand.

The young woman in a wealthier part of town–I love her and I’m thrilled about her future plans. But for her, for me, college was just an expectation. It was a factual part of life that followed soon after high school. This is what is different about the children where I live. College is a dream. High school graduation is a journey.

But it’s the beginning of life in America. The start of life in a new land to which they’ve escaped, where they are rebuilding everything from the ground up. High school is no longer just a fact of life, it’s the foundation for a future that was vastly altered the day they left their homes and set out for this place.

High School Graduation never meant so much.

WHY: Social Media

I used to manage social media for people. A friend and I started up a company that worked with authors, businesses, and musicians to manage their social media and marketing via networks such as Twitter and Facebook. It was a fun summer spent outside on the back patio at the home of a friend who was remodeling while being on tour with his band. But school started and I needed more income more quickly, so my part in the journey of entrepreneurship ended. My friend still plugs away at that company, building it slowly, arduously, from the ground up.

Because of that short term position, I understand the power of social media, for good and for bad. I spend too much time on Facebook, to be honest, it sometimes destroys my contentment. Twitter wastes much of my time as I invariably click away at posts by favourite authors and networks like the Resurgence and Desiring God. I’ve thus far refused to join Pintrest but I watch girls in class who are always adding to their boards and I know that would ruin my time management and contentment as much as the first two.

But these networks aren’t all bad. I have not quite released my grip on Facebook because it is useful in a number of ways. I am also decently committed to my Twitter account as it allows me access to articles and stories that are encouraging and convicting.

Stories like this one about Ian and Larissa. They were married even after Ian had a brain injury in 2006 and lost a number of physical and mental capabilities. I almost cried while watching it in the student center and I don’t think that’s simply stress from the end of the school year. I was struck by the beauty of their relationship and love–their commitment to each other and to God. In so many ways I look at their situation and it makes me almost envious to know that kind of love and devotion. Not envious because I want to experience that (though I do) but because I want to be like that.

Suffering is painful, no one desires it for a reason. In the west, especially in white suburban America, we have a pretty weak view of suffering. We don’t understand it, we avoid it, we ignore it. But in the midst of suffering there is such growth and beauty. I see it in the story of Larissa and Ian, I see it in my friends at school and church who are struggling through a variety of things. In all these different situations, my friends are becoming new people, greater and stronger in the faith–even when that means admitting their weaknesses. Even when life seems to come apart, God is always reconstructing it and making all things new. He suffered as one of us and he knows our pain. Not only does he know it, but he is always working in it to make something good come of it, for our sanctification and for his glory.

I’m on social media sites and I read blogs because they remind me, even in the midst of finals week in grad school and great exhaustion both mentally, physically and emotionally that God is here, in all things, and he is working.

soli Deo gloria.

WHY: The Marriage Metaphor

I enjoy a slightly hipster-esque–Indie–Folksy–Blue Grass band by the name of The Civil Wars. One of the first songs I fell in love with is called Poison and Wine. I love the words, I love the timbre of their voices, I love the way they haunt and redeem my heart with every chord.

Last week was a bit of a rough one emotionally. Not only for me, but also for others that I know and love. Sometimes, there is this illusion that seminary students, counseling students, future pastors and teachers have their “stuff” figured out. But the truth is, we’re actually very messy people.

A few brief examples:

My friend who is “engaged” but is on break.
One that I look up to who is struggling with depression.
There’s another who is struggling with burn out from ministry (already!) and depression.
A new friend who is coming out of depression but has mixed direction on life.
Another who is dealing with childhood abuse.
Everyone who can’t afford their lives.
The one who is so desperate for love they keep going back to the same broken relationship.
My friend who longs to know that God does love him.
The one, surrounded by friends, who still feels alone.

These are the people I do life with, each and every day. It’s exhausting, it’s beautiful, it’s truth. Over the weekend I went out with a couple friends after one of them had moved into a new apartment. I had heard some basic things about his off kilter relationship, but that night I asked a few more questions. I wanted to get to know this man better, and as a friend, part of that required knowing his story, his relationships, his hopes, the things his world revolves around. The story given was not long but it was full of sorrow amidst lingering hopes. When we returned to their house from the restaurant, I stood outside with the roommate I am very close to suddenly found myself overwhelmed by sadness. I burst into tears. My friend wrapped his arms around me while I cried and repeatedly mumbled the same questions.

Why does He let this go on?
When is He coming back?
When will He put things to rights? Bind up our sores, heal our broken bones?

My friend, of course, couldn’t say. These are questions that have plagued human history and Christianity is no exception. The failure of God to come when we expect has always been a mystery in human suffering.

I managed to pull myself together enough to get in my car and make it onto the highway. I pulled the pieces together and placed trembling hands on the steering wheel as I guided the little sedan through late night traffic and construction. It didn’t take long, however, before my lack of control resurfaced. Two exits after my entrance to the highway the same sadness overwhelmed me. I cried the entire way home, a twenty minute drive of blurred lights and stifled sobs.

In the midst of this, as I pounded my steering wheel and demanded to know when He will return, the sounds of The Civil Wars whispered through my stereo. Poison and Wine seems, at first listening, to be a song of dried up hopes and long forgotten love. It is a relationship kept alive only by the power of will, by sheer stubbornness. Or so it seems.

There is a part in the song that suddenly hit home that night on the highway. The music crescendoes and the man sings in a terrifyingly raw tone, “I don’t have a choice, but I still choose you.” They surge into the chorus where their voices mingle together, singing desperately, “Oh, I don’t love you, but I always will!”

It seems so open, so broken, so lost and hopeless.

But I suddenly understood why the Prophets, Israel, the New Testament writers–why even Jesus himself–calls us His wife. The Scriptures have long said we are the promiscuous wife who runs to others, who forgets her first love, who stands on the street corners outside a house of sexual indecency, who lies and scorns the things of her husband. We have always gone running to other things, and God has always stood waiting.

That is only one side of it though.

It’s true, I’m a child of indecency, and I often go after things that lead only to my destruction. It’s true that I pursue other lovers, that I forget the One who redeemed me, who cleaned me, gave me new clothes and took me into his home with nothing to offer him.

But there is another side, the one we face day in and day out. It is the side of sinful reality. The world is broken. Jesus hasn’t yet come back. We speak of progress and the improvement of man, but we have only improved ways of killing each other, ways of keeping the poor underfoot. I railed at God in my car on Sunday night, beating the steering wheel with a tightly closed fist. It isn’t the first time my car or my body has been abused for the frustration of His postponed return. Sunday night won’t be the last time I get angry and tell God He’s wrong for waiting, it won’t be the last time I ask Him to come back right now and save us from all this mess.

But, I realized the marriage metaphor is not only about a wife who has abandoned her master.

It’s about a wife who waits patiently for her husband, trusting that he’ll be true to his word as he always has been.

“I don’t have a choice, but I still choose you,” they sang as I raced down the highway through a construction zone where even the cops themselves drive over the limit. I stood in the city, burning its way to the ground in selfish debt and hopeless sin. I drove on the edge of town to a place where the sin and violence are the stories in the lives of my neighbours.

And I thought, I’ve tried to run from the faith so many times, Abba, but you always hold on to me. I don’t have a choice. I don’t have a way of getting out of what I know to be true. I couldn’t leave even if I wanted to.

But I don’t want to leave.

I don’t have “freedom” to leave. But even if I did, I wouldn’t want to. Even when I don’t love God, I always will. I will always choose Him, even when I think He is dawdling in His return. It’s like a marriage. A covenant. I agreed to stay, and so I will. Just as He has waited and stayed for me, so I will wait on Him.

Poe: our favourite morbid American poet and a doctrinal summaries paper

”The death of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.” [E. A. Poe]

It’s a bit morbid, granted, but I’ve been thinking about this statement a good deal over the week. I have an app on my macbook that gives me quotes from Edgar Allen Poe every time I scroll over the particular desktop where it is located. Some are more amusing than the one above. For instance, I just glanced back and read this one: ”If you wish to forget anything on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered.” It is so true! Annoyingly true!

But as I said, I’d been thinking about the death of a beautiful woman, and considering why that would be a rather poetic thing to consider. Let’s be honest, Poe was a bizarre individual. He wrote beautiful, imaginative poetry and narratives. Some of them are haunting simply because they are so well described and the reader can easily envision the words he tells. I remember having nightmares in high school about The House of Usher. (There is a reason I don’t watch horror movies.)

But there is more to the quote than Poe’s obsession with analyzing, describing and memorializing death. Think of the classics we read in high school: The Killer Angels, Anthem, Animal Farm, Asher Lev, etc. Granted, not all of those listed have death at the focal point, but there is a sense of darkness in all of them, something that pervades the stories and something that we desperately read over and over and over.

I just finished a paper from my Doctrine I class. It’s a doctrinal summaries paper. [Thrilling title, I know.] In essence, I had to choose six doctrines and give three different perspectives on each. If you know me at all, the three theologians won’t be difficult to guess: Wayne Grudem, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Integrative. I wrote on the Trinity, immanence vs transcendence, general revelation, scriptural authority, the imago dei and the transmission of the sin nature. If you don’t know what all those are, or you simply don’t care, bear with me. I won’t give you the 22 pages I’m handing in on Monday. Promise.

The imago dei (image of God) and the transmission of the sin nature were the two most difficult doctrines for me to work with.  I think it’s because the compassion in me wants to hope for the best, to pray we aren’t as warped and distorted by sin as Paul claims. But I’m a fairly strict Calvinist most days and last night I whispered to my new nephew that he was beautiful, handsome and perfect–except for being totally depraved. He giggled as I nuzzled his cheek and clucked my tongue and my father roared in laughter. Some of us, I muttered, are obsessed with being theologically correct, even with a nephew who can’t hold his head up.

But it’s true, you know. Did you see that man run the red light on your way home from work last night? Did you hear about the dictator killing his own people? They are broken, ruined by the fall. Yet, there isn’t only that. Did you hear about the people who ave money to Blood Water to build wells for people they’ll never even meet? Did you see the way that teenager held the door open for you as you walked out the door with too many things in your hands?

There is this awkward tension between the goodness of humanity, the reasoning, the grace, the mental abilities, the beauty we can create, the impulse to create and hope and dream–coupled with the tendency to fight, to destroy and use our abilities for creating new, more efficient ways of killing each other, for gaining power and ruining the earth. It is not as though every human being is as bad as they possibly could be. Total depravity simply says every aspect of human nature has been compromised.

Coming back to Poe, we must remember that there is, despite the complications, still beauty in the world. Today the earth is bright and flushed with colours because of the thunderstorm last night. The girls I nanny giggled today, making faces, playing peekaboo and when one cried the other hugged her and found a toy to comfort her. “You’re okay, Lil’” she said, “mommy will be home soon. Don’t cry.” There is tenderness among humans that can not be explained except for our high position, bearing the image of an intrinsically good and relational God.

Poe says the death of a beautiful woman is poetic.

I think he could have said the death of anyone with beauty is poetic. There’s something in human nature that recognizes the problem of death. We see that this is not how things were meant to be and it is most clearly reflected by the death of beauty. In a strange way, we see our depravity, our hopeless state when darkness swallows up fleeting glory and beauty. This isn’t how it was meant to be, our soul whispers, and then we put words around the phenomenon to try and understand it.

In the end, Christians have a sense of hope. We look forward to a time when the image will no longer be distorted and we will not give birth to another crooked generation. Instead, the imago dei and humanity will be renewed at the end of days to our former glory. At that point, in our ontological reformation, we will only produce that which is good, holy and pure as we were originally intended to do.

In that day, we will not need death to remind us that something is missing. Because in that day, it will be missing no longer.

WHY: Living Among Refugees

I’ve talked about this briefly in other posts, or perhaps, I’ve only mentioned the bare facts of the case: that I live in a rough(ish) part of town among refugees. I’ve thought about telling you more, for many months in fact. But today, with soft grey skies and the hope of a thunderstorm this afternoon, I thought I would tell you more.

We moved there almost a year ago. Molls and I had been talking about living together for a few months. She wanted a house, a yard, I knew I could never afford that. So we drove around and I let her look at signs, always knowing in my heart that this would never come to be. I simply didn’t have the income. Eventually, when nothing turned up, we  both put the idea on hold. I wasn’t panicked yet. Sure, G and J were moving and I needed a place asap. I didn’t worry though, because my life always turns out to be alright. But I thought that was the end of living with Molls and I started to consider (in thought if not in reality) other options.

So when Molly called on a rainy afternoon that I actually had off of work, I was surprised. I barely asked her how she was doing before she cut me off with “I found where I want to live and I think when you see it, you’ll want to live here too.” She was talking fast, about visiting Baba and children in the courtyard, something about Aurora and a landlord who could hold an apartment for two white girls. I paced and waited for her to come up for air. My mind was whirling. I remember looking at N, the guy I was dating at the time and I could see in his eyes, there would be disapproval. She said, “Colfax and 225, but there are so many kids,” and “you just have to see it.” Before I even knew, there were words coming out, “yeah. when?” We hung up, and N asked what was going on. I told him and when he asked where it was, he muttered in an exasperated tone, “I knew you were going to say that.”

He wasn’t the only one. As soon as the word colfax comes out of my mouth, anyone who has lived in Colorado long enough just looks at me like I’m crazy. Two single, white girls, there?

I understand why they question it. In the summer time, E bought dowel rods because it made Molly feel better about leaving the windows partially open at night. I was dying every time she closed the glass, suffocating with out air conditioning, despite the massive box fan lodged in my window during the day. The heat was brutal. But Molly was worried about someone breaking in so we put rods in the windows. To this day, whenever one of us forgets to lock the door at night, I never tell her in the morning. I almost always leave first, and as far as I’m concerned, she doesn’t need to have extra worry added to her burdens. But it isn’t just the windows and doors. There were five cops at the apartment next door only a couple months ago. Across the breezeway there were cops to settle a domestic dispute. Sometimes–when I get home from a late night out–the parking lot makes me anxious. Once I’m inside the courtyard, I feel safe. But the lot is a different story.

So you see, I understand the concern because I feel it every night, every day.

That isn’t what I thought of when we went to visit. Y took us to an apartment that was being renovated. The twenty year old stove was pulled out from the wall, there was new carpet the colour of watery mud. The white tile was smudged with the dirt of the courtyard, tracked in by workers who we would discover are not always competent. Outside I heard kids screaming and laughing. There were children who shied away from us, but peered in the open door at our backs as we surveyed the first floor home. I think they were curious because we were white. Because we were women without men.

I don’t remember anything Y said. I remember Molly looking dismally at the dead roaches all over the floor, killed by a recent bug bomb. I kid you not, all over the floor. I kicked some of them out of my way as we went down the hall to the bedrooms. Molly would later tell me she feared that was be a turning point for me; that I would say no. I glanced down at them and shrugged. “Those are little ones,” which was true. These are the size of my little toe. The ones back in Costa Rica were the size of my palm. They’d be a nuisance but… the children outside, the dreary rainy day, the cold tile beneath my sandals and the uneven cabinets… it was like coming home.

There were so many languages being yelled in the courtyard that day. There were ethnicities and clothes I didn’t recognize. The parking lot was (and is) a mess of potholes and unevenly parked cars. The bedroom windows looked onto the highway. But the breezeways were open and there were trees in the courtyard. There were children and isolated mothers, wearied men and lost grandparents who hardly survive the transition to this country.

It was home. It was everything I longed for, even when I did not always know it.

I said yes. We signed a lease two weeks later.

It isn’t always easy. Sometimes I stay away until late at night because I can’t deal with being needed as soon as I get home. My little free time is easily sucked away by people who want to talk, who want your help, or who just want to be with you. Molly is much better at it than I am. It’s an annoying drive to school–30 minutes on a good day. The workers are incompetent at fixing most things. I wish I was closer to the mountains that always wait so patiently for me to come and find my rest. Last night I walked into the bathroom at 1230 to find a cockroach on the toilet. I didn’t even apologize as I killed him and wiped the seat clean. The refugees get married too young, they drop out of school, they don’t do homework, they don’t fight for their jobs or their GEDs. I don’t know how to help them. I don’t know how to explain Jesus to them because he is so easily entangled with my western churched perspective. I’ve cried with friends about the frustration, the hopelessness, the incensed anger I have to the societies that drove them here and our failure to make their lives much better than the ones they fled.

But there are these times when I am reminded of why we went there.

A few weeks ago, I climbed the stairs after another long day of classes and work. The sun was shining and I was hot. The children were back in the courtyard, riding second hand bicycles and kicking a half flat soccer ball. There was a little girl spinning in a circle, her skirt twirling around her. She wore a hijab* of brown with faded teal blue swirls that look like sunbursts. Her sweet face was framed by the cloth of her land, her smile was brilliant as she giggled and hopped from one foot to another. The orange of her hijab clashed horribly with the dress she wore but one could hardly notice that for the glow of her eyes in the warm light that covered the rowdy courtyard. She spun again and again to the delight of a younger sibling, wearing her own hijab of flowered print. They were playing with the Nepali girls, battling through cultural and language differences. I walked on the breezeway above their heads, leaning over the railing to watch them with enraptured hope that these children could someday heal the wars of clashing civilizations. Boys hung off the railing, jumping ten feet to the cement below with wild laughter. Women squabbled and laughed and pushed their children in strollers or held babes on their hips. There was a woman in purest white, her hijab edged in bright yellow that glowed like the sun and made me long for summer. She has such dark, smooth skin, she is what the ancients might have called a Nubian beauty.

And that was what I thought of as I walked to my apartment, where I left the door open and dumped my bags, like empty burdens, as I sat on the arm of a stained white chair.

That little girl, spinning in her mismatched clothing, she was beautiful. I don’t know her name, but I want to. The sound of their laughter and shouts rang in the open door, the afternoon breeze drifted lazily through the courtyard, bringing with it the scent of curry and unknown spices.

There is beauty here, and that is why we came. It is not the sort of beauty that America looks for: clean, contrived and subdued. It is the type of beauty that survives, that endures, that stands strong, that remains true. It is the beauty of resilient humanity that remains ever hopeful.

We came for the beauty.

And I, for the first time in at least four or five years, I was gifted a home.

 

___________________
Hijab: muslim head covering for women. Though, this one might technically be more of a chador or at least has some resemblance to being worn with a jilbab. Basically, the Somali hijab covers more than the typical ones I’m used to seeing.

Good Friday

I would love to post something brilliant, deep and full of wisdom for the somber day that we woke to.

Unfortunately, there are no brilliant words of wisdom that come to mind….

The wind howled last night, during my OT Prophets class and she pushed my little Hyundai to and fro on the highway as I made my way across town. It was a long day, an exhausting day. I returned home to children in my apartment learning the story of God who died 2000 years ago. I snuggled under a blanket next to one of them on the couch and stared blankly ahead at the walls of our hallway. I finally made my way to bed, with flannel sheets to keep out the draft of my window beyond which the skies still blew in stormy rage.

It’s like the world knows. Like creation knows. She’s groaning. Waiting, hoping.

And I, with a hot electric pad clutched to my abdomen, I fell asleep to the sound of the wind beating against our home of brick and mortar, the sound of the earth screaming against the injustice of it all.

Today, the wind still blows, warm and dry. What was it like, to stand in the courtyard and listen to the trial? What was it like to watch the procession, the bloodied path to the city’s outskirts where the scapegoat had always been sent to die, bearing the burden of the people’s sins as he wandered into the desert beyond the camp. What was it like?

Tonight, we go to service, and we’ll remember the day that Jesus died. It’s black and dark and somber.

It is, in many ways, the darkest and most beautiful time of the year.

O sacred Head, no wounded
with grief and shame weighed down,
Now scornfully surrounded
with thorns, Thine only crown
How pale thou art with anguish,
with sore abuse and scorn!
How doth Thy visage languish
which once was bright as morn!

What Thou, my Lord, has suffered,
T’was all for sinners’ gain;
Mine, mine was the transgression,
But Thine the deadly pain.
Lo, here I fall, my Saviour!
‘Tis I deserve Thy place;
Look on me with Thy favor,
Vouchsafe to me Thy grace.

What language shall I borrow
To thank Thee, dearest friend,
For this Thy dying sorrow,
Thy pity without end?
O make me Thine forever,
And should I fainting be,
Lord, let me never, never
Outlive my love for Thee. 

Palm Sunday

It’s Holy Week.

Doesn’t look like it in Colorado. After hot days all weekend long and an obscenely dry March, today is cloudy and the grey. The mountains looked like ghosts when I arrived in Littleton, they are barley visible, even from this distance. In Aurora, when I entered the highway rush hour, you couldn’t see the mountains at all. It’s dark and windy, the chill is back and my there is a weight in the air that you can feel, even within the confines of the library that shouldn’t be using electric lights so late in the morning.

Yesterday was brilliant, hot with blazing life across the front range. I wore shorts yesterday, shaved my legs and pulled on a pink tshirt that once belonged to my parents’ ill-wed neighbour. It was warm enough to take children outside to play in the waning light at the evening sunday school I run. We laughed and screamed on slides and monkey bars with toddlers still learning to speak.

Yesterday fell like a proper Palm Sunday though I did not attend a church service.

It was warm and the sun was throwing life towards the earth with careless joy. Trees have started to glow with buds of every colour and the grass has turned green almost overnight. It’s springtime. In Israel, in ancient Palestine, this is the time for lambs, for calves and new life all around. It’s the time when shepherds keep watch over their flocks at night and once heard angels sing of a king born in stubby little Bethlehem.

But we didn’t celebrate Bethlehem yesterday.

Yesterday, my Saviour rode triumphant into the glorious city that had once been Israel’s jewel. Yesterday, the crowds clapped and sang for him, they threw down cloaks and palm branches because a horse bearing such majesty ought to walk on cleaner ground than dusty old Jerusalem’s stones. They whooped and hollered, beads of sweat on wearied faces that yesterday held only smiles as they forgot, momentarily, the travails of life under Roman occupation. And he came in, on that donkey, and the disciples walked alongside him…were they proud to be at his side? Did they think fame and glory would soon follow such an entrance to the city where David and Solomon once ruled?

I’ve been thinking about what it was like, that day in Palestine. What were the Romans thinking? Another grungy zealot, leading people to their deaths in hopeless rebellion against the greatest empire the world had yet seen. Did they think him a madman and laugh? Perhaps, but it was a laughter tinged with anxiety: what might this madmen do? The Zealots were always attacking, ever since Judas Maccabeaus, attacking like ghosts, then melting into the countryside without a trace until the next assault. Would the troublesome Jews rebel? The country was full of madmen, claiming only one God and refusing to light incense of Caesar. Lunatics.

But even lunatics are dangerous.

Did the disciples yet understand what awaited them at the Passover feast? Or did they think like the Romans that this could end with war? I don’t think they expected him to die. He was Messiah, after all! Anointed one! Didn’t the Prophets of old anoint the ones who led them in to battle agains their enemies? What of Saul! Or David! David, of course, to whom God gave peace on all sides. And what of them, the twelve? They would be given places of honour when government was wrenched away from the puppet kings who were not born of the Davidic line. As they walked at the side of the donkey, how odd, a donkey! Not a triumphal creature, but lowly and foolish. As they walked beside the beast that carried their teacher, their master, did they expect a more triumphal entry than this one today? With the palm branches and the cloaks flung down for them to walk on; could there be greater things coming next?

But glory is not always what we expect.

But what, I wonder, did the common folk think? Here was a man front he outlying prospects of Nazareth, a Jew who lived in Gentile Galilee. A carpenter turned Rabbi. His face wasn’t handsome but the hands that held the reigns were strong and firm. His gaze looked sorrowful, despite the fervor around him and the cheering onslaught of the crowd come out to greet him. Do you think they wondered why? To look at the soldiers in their burnished armor, swords at their sides in easy reach, with helmets reflecting the bright springtime sun, to see those marks of domination, oppression and suffering and despite their fear, to cheer boldly for the man on his donkey. This morning, this afternoon, this was a day to mark down in history they must have thought. This was the rescue, so long awaited. See the gates opening to him, see the crowds press in with anxious hope. Feel the temperatures soar with the heat of bodies crushing against each other, hoping for a glance, just one, to see the Messiah who would break all fear and renew all hopes. Look at him! They cried to each other. This ride into Jerusalem it is the marked entrance of a king! This is the way they rode in when they conquered us! The Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Seleucids, the Greeks, the Romans! But now comes one of our own, and he will call them to account as Moses did in Egypt. He will establish peace and justice as David did, as Solomon kept. But he will do it better than even they! We will have food to way and clothes to wear. We will have dreams to hope for and no longer regret the world into which we bear our children. This man is hope, this man is justice, he will establish Torah and we will live under the Shadow of Glory as when we made the covenant at Sinai. We are being rescued, they thought, they hoped. And so they shouted, hosanna because no other words could describe the burning in their hearts.

But rescue comes in many ways.

Yesterday was Palm Sunday. Bright and warm, with hope for springtime and new beginnings.

Today is grey and cold.

When did the hope die? When did the people run in fear? When did they turn and betray him? How could their hearts so quickly falter? How could they have stopped believing so soon, so easily? Today, with hidden mountains, I can feel the anxiety, and the weighty sorrow of ended dreams. Lent is coming to an end, I thought of this today when I longed so desperately for a warm soy chai after a morning of traffic and errands before work, before school. Last week was Spring Break and for a few fleeting days I felt free, excited for summer, energized and thrilled by creation, beauty and all that is life. But then today came, and the triumph is gone.

Jesus has entered Jerusalem. Passover comes now.

With unsteady hands and tensed shoulders, with furrowed brows and wearied feet, we wait. Will it be the Passover of Moses in a new place, freeing from new oppression? Or will this be another failed Messiah, another judgement against us, another refusal to rescue as we’ve long been waiting for?

Yesterday was triumph.
Today is suspense.

shafts of light

There’s a section of the library, over the research and librarians’ desk where the ceiling is lower, sloped beneath the main window that sports a cross enmeshed in the panes of brilliant glass. The light is coming in that way, this time of the day, and it casts a shadow over the sloped ceiling and down onto the floor, where the light is cut into clean rectangles  by the bars of the cross.

The sun outside is clean and warm and the mountains have begun to give up their winter blanket. The foothills are brown, with only patches of white amid their trees. Campus, sadly, is still barren and the ground remains that tan shade of green from rotted death–but she will soon give way to rich life and brilliant shades of green and yellow and flowers whose beauty can hardly be named. Trees will flourish again and shade the grass where students will lie out and momentarily forget the studies that the came here for.

It’s beautiful this time of year, you can smell it in the scents that waft in my window in the early morning hours. You can feel it in the look of people as they pass you on the street. There is new life coming! There is hope and joy awaiting us!

But where do they wait?

Lent hasn’t ended. My body longs for it to end–literally in my physicality and spiritually in my soul. I want Lent to end because I want a latte, with soy foamed to tufts of silky white edged in carmel brown as it seeps into the espresso. But more than that, I want Lent to end because I’m tired of waiting.

The earth, this time of year, she throws off her dusty coat and declares that she too is finished with the longing, the craving, the groaning for newness. She knows that things will end again, and in only a few months she will return to deep inside herself to rest and sleep and wait. But now, in these months she bursts with hopeful expectation. Come quick! she cries to the waiting life. Come quick! she cries to the coming hope. Come quick! she whispers in resignation. Come quick. she sighs and dreams of the day when spring will not be only spring.

But spring will be new life.

{when Aslan shakes his mane
we shall have spring again}

WHY: Soundbites Shouldn’t Matter (and Church History Does)

In my Church History class we’ve finished the Reformation. We’re on to the English Revival under George Whitefield and the Wesley brothers. Dr. W recently handed back our papers on Luther. I went in to talk with him about it not because I was unhappy with the grade but because I wanted to do better on the next one. We ended up discussing me. Everything from Meyers-Brigg’s to my current living situation and all the way back around to my church home in Seattle.

I don’t want you to think I’m going to mount a great defense for Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill. To be honest, Mark makes me incredibly uncomfortable sometimes (despite the fact that he’s tagged on my list of things I’m listening to). I’m about as Egalitarian as a Complementarian can be without actually being an Egalitarian. But in recent weeks there’s been a backlash (again) with Mars Hill and I felt slightly compelled to write as one who used to attend church at Mars Hill and who still podcasts Mark on occasion.

There was a matter of Church Discipline recently at the church and unfortunately someone’s information was let loose on The City and there’s been some controversy over whether or not church discipline is (a) acceptable and (b) too harsh in this instance. From what I’ve read in Scripture, I think that church discipline is entirely necessary. From what I read of the situation in Seattle, the situation doesn’t seem out of hand–it’s harsh, but sometimes truth is painful in its redemptive act.

That being said, it was hard to watch the church be attacked again. You don’t know what it’s like to be embroiled in controversy amid believers until you’ve had to walk to church through protestors to get to service on a Sunday morning or had to take criticism from a professor at your Christian college for where you attend church. It can be exhausting. It can be discouraging. Last week was like that experience all over again, via the internet.

And with that being said, I will acknowledge incredible reticence with Mark. In the past year, it sometimes feels like the man just says things to get a reaction, to force controversy. I don’t agree with all of his theological positions. I don’t think I’ll be reading Real Marriage if I get married because of the mixed reviews I’ve read. I don’t appreciate how argumentative he is. Sometimes, I wish Mark wasn’t so…well…so Mark-like.

But when I spoke with my professor the thing I kept coming back to was Mark Driscoll reminds me of Martin Luther.

Most of us know Martin Luther as the spark that ignited the Reformation. Erasmus laid an egg, Luther hatched it and by God we don’t trust the Pope anymore, do we! But Luther was much more complicated than that, and he was not the noble rescuer of lay people that we sometimes imagine. Luther was incredibly anti-semitic, and he cursed his opponents. Literally: Luther wished some of them to Hell. He was bombastic, he wrote against his opponents with incredible ferocity. Some of the things are disturbing. Some are amusing. I have a friend who sent me this link recently where the page refreshes each time with a new insult that Luther wrote.

I don’t love these parts of Luther. I find them disorienting: how could a man so obsessed with grace refuse to show it to his opponents? That’s a different discussion. The point is Luther was complicated. He had faults. Yet, he was the man for the job. Who else could have stood up to the Papacy in the 16th century, with the threat of excommunication (i.e. damnation), being hunted and yet continue to stand forcefully against the church that ruled the entire Western continent? Luther. Maybe he had to be bombastic, verbose and abrasive to get his point across, to maintain his position, and to change the tide of history.

Mark Driscoll isn’t going to change history, not in the way that Martin Luther did. But he is in a unique position. He pastors a church in one of the most unchurched cities in a rapidly secularizing nation. It’s a city of art and music, one of incredible beauty. But it’s a city of abuse, sorrow, and conflicted ideas. Mark is pretty black and white. He stands against the culture of his city, he is always pushing people onward and forward. Yes, he says wrong things. Yes, he overstates his position sometimes.

But I think that Mars Hill also does incredible ministry.

I don’t mind the criticism of Mars Hill and Driscoll. God knows, we should all suffer some criticism to keep us humble. What does make me uncomfortable are those who react to soundbites (which is truly all we hear at a distance), and then refuse to engage the man, the ministry and the good things that are happening.

We don’t write off Martin Luther–in fact, we celebrate him! Every Reformation Day friends and I drink German beer together and toast the man who freed us from the tyranny of the medieval church!

It’s similar with the church I still consider my second home. Mark Driscoll has sin. He has flaws. But the church of Mars Hill does good things. I think it’s dangerous to negate those things based on misspoken words and disagreement over issues that should be periphery within the faith.

cramped emptiness

As I drove to school recently I ended up sitting in traffic. It’s not such a bad thing, having a slow commute. It forces me to be mindful of time and how things are always outside of my control. And traffic is just a beautiful thing itself. On the hill coming down 225 just after the Parker exit there is a beautiful view of the six lanes becoming four and the mountains that are ever close and ever out of reach. I usually push my engine into neutral and coast down to the waiting brake lights as I watch the inhabitants of Aurora weave through one another’s exhaust. On cold mornings in traffic, the dance of shifting drivers is sluggish as engines and individuals still long for quiet solitude and thick blankets amid the chill that does not easily lift. On days like this one, however, when the sun is high in the clear sky despite the early hour and the frost had melted before my engine rolled over and I added windshield wiper fluid to the ever demanding hyundai, on days like this one which promise warmth and cheer the dance of traffic is fluid and swift. In music we would say it is allegretto or allegro. In the weaving and dodging of cars that still wear the drab winter dust, there is a bit of beauty.

But then the traffic comes to a halt when drivers like me have come to the end of the exit only lane and force a tight merge. In these moments I turn down the iPod that plays without end in the stereo system; less music makes it easier to concentrate and watch for open spas or the possibility of being swiped by an SUV who has moved here from Texas where bigger is better and he thinks he owns the world. It was in one of these quieter moments that I looked to my right and noticed the driver of a Chevy Impala, silver, with those round taillights that blink so obtrusively when signaling for a turn. She had hair the color of burnt orange, dyed, with the roots showing from at least two months growth and dark brown making the contrast one of painful poverty and mistaken identity. She held in her left hand, a cigarette, close to the edge of the window that was opened just a sliver to the crisp morning air. It perched precariously between the tips of her knuckles, wedged lightly between fake french nails just a bit too long for the pudgy edges of her digits. The hair as pulled back, away from the worn and soft fleshed face, the tired curve of her frown framed by the light streaming in the car. She didn’t glance my way, I can’t be sure of the eyes, but I imagine they were watery with the years of many long nights, close arguments and burnt out tears.

The night before I had driven home after work, exhausted and drained after a perfectly wonderful day. Highways opened to me, overpasses lit by glowing orange hues from lamps whose energy my neglected taxes pay for. The great pillars of cement stand on hardened earth, grappling and digging their claws deep into the soil that no longer gives life as they uphold the highway above my head. Like columns from ancient temples, columns of great remorse– but of necessity demanded by progress–misused strength supports the roads that I traverse, so wearied and burdened by the exhilarating knowledge of divine mystery and human telos. There were few cars on the road, the world felt eerily silent and empty as I gained mile after mile towards my distant home where the life never stops. After an evening in a roaring mountain town, Denver seemed, in all her cramped city life vast and empty. There are sprawling subdivisions, for Westerners like their space; the sky scrapers stretch and groan their way towards skyline fame and our roads lead ever onward to somewhere newer, and better. There is movement, life, but it is ragged and the hopes of the people have been bruised and broken by the very city they wanted to enliven.

The woman in the Chevy Impala, what is her name? Perhaps it is one of beauty, or one of mendacious parents who called her a name of ancestral origins for lack of creativity or for the honor of those who came before. She smokes, from a broken heart, from overburdened finances with tired frightened hands that can no longer haul the burden of her past. She dyes her hair to an unnatural color, as an artist, as expression of inner dissent from who she was born to be, or as an escape to the life she thought she’d have by now–the only means to have control over at least something. But she hasn’t the money to maintain the farce.

Who were you, as a child? Did you know that things would come to this? Or was it a mystery when plans were failed and dreams ruined? My sweet woman, do you know who you are and what you were meant for? Or do you only hurt and suffer the woes of fragmented humanity and lost identity? In this vast and empty city so crowded for living and jobs and misplaced peoples, how long have you held the trembling cigarette to your lips and wished the world would disappear with the embers of the flame?

Go to the mountains, woman! I thought to cry across the plexiglass and three feet that separated my car from hers. Go to the mountains and dream in the open spaces, beneath the starry nights and whispering winds that push the pines to dance. Or go to the basilica and feel your breath escape in tepid reverence as the hallowed walls soar to new heights and you are reminded of your humanity. You are broken, sure, but when you are humbled and frightened by your triviality then you will come to know the maker and feel His graceful presence begin to heal the long ravaged chasms of your heart.

Only do not sit in your car, amid the dancing traffic, on your way to work, at the job that cannot satisfy surrounded by broken dreams and fallen hopes and no hope for escape. Do not go back to the places that have always failed and always will. Go, my love, to the places of healing and to the hope of new life within this splintered world and the dream of wild places full of sunlight and glory beyond this marginal existence.