Man of Sorrows

I'm in the middle of composing some guest posts for other blogs that I hope to share with you soon!  In the interim, here is a re-post from 2014.

It was just before Thanksgiving when I found myself sitting in the second row at a funeral.  A good friend of mine lost her brother to cystic fibrosis. He lived to be 40, which is outstanding for someone living with CF, but still too young to die.  I watched as my friend laid her head on her husband’s shoulder, crying, and in turn, opening her arms wide to comfort nieces and nephews.  The morning was filled with the hope of heaven and the reality of earth.  

I sat there thinking about how this man never married or had children. Being born with disability or disease often leaves very loving people with naked ring fingers and empty wombs.   It’s sad.  Sometimes it makes a person feel like they are sitting behind glass watching everyone live their happy lives while you sit in the stands choking back tears, faking a smile as you wave to everyone else skating by.   It was haunting for me to identify with the man lying in the coffin.  I sat there at the funeral wondering if 50 years down the road that would be me.

Last Friday, my friend Steve posted this morsel on Facebook:

It took me a few weeks and a few more heavy moments, but eventually, I lay down on my floor and sobbed.  Not the kind where tears gently fall down your face and land on your lips, but the kind where your whole body heaves.  

Who is Jesus in these moments?

Sometimes it’s easier to believe Jesus really only came to earth for his final hours, and in our lives, the thing he must care about the most is the salvation of our souls.

Truly, the redemption of humankind and our salvation from sin and death are paramount.  But it doesn’t negate the fact that Jesus also cares about the mundane:  our earthly disappointment, our day to day pain.

As kids we see images of Jesus surrounded by children, smiling as he rides on a donkey.  As adults we ponder Jesus, who, for the joy set before him endured the cross… Certainly, there had to be many moments where Jesus was giddy, bubbling with joy as he worked to bring healing and redemption to the world.  Performing miracles was like pulling the curtain back giving the world a glimpse of heaven as if turning over the pages in a photo book revealing visions of home.  

So I find it interesting that “happy” is not how Jesus is heralded or remembered in scripture.  Isaiah foretells Jesus as a Man of Sorrows, well acquainted with grief.  Can you imagine it?  It’s as if Jesus was sitting down conversing with Grief, as if they were two old men, swapping stories, nodding their heads, often just sitting together in silence, acknowledging the weight of pain.

In Hebrews, the author writes that while Jesus was on earth, he made petitions to God with loud cries and tears.  Even before Gethsemane, I wonder if Jesus often had wet eyes to show the Father when he went off to pray.  Being that close to humanity had to wonderful, but it also had to be hard because sometimes beauty and suffering exists in the same face.

I imagine Jesus off in the corner, heaving and crying loud.  The disciples looking at each other, shrugging their shoulders and whispering, “He’s doing it again…”

“We’d better leave Him alone.”

____

With the end of the Advent season, it might be helpful to wonder what it was like for Jesus the first time he stretched out his hand and clenched his fist; feeling the limitation and the strength of tendons and ligaments and skin and bone working together in a human body.

It might be helpful to ponder what it like was for Jesus to change his perspective.  No longer looking down on us from above, but staring back into the face of humanity, the creation, seeing us through his own two eyes…. 

What was it like to leave the vastness, comfort, and eternity of heaven to be confined, hurt, and limited?  

All of these things point towards the fact that Jesus knew what it was to become human and dwell with us.  It reminds us that he is with us in our humanity even now.  

Proprioception

“What: Proprioception is the concept of knowing where your body is in space (body awareness) and the ability to safely maneuver around your environment. It also includes the use of heavy work activities and the ability to stimulate the joint receptors.”  (Source: Amanda, Matthews, OTR/L http://nspt4kids.com/parenting/what-is-proprioception-and-why-is-it-important/)

A colleague introduced me to this concept last week and I was captivated by it.  Words can be restrictive containers sometimes; a poor limited method to express what is welling up deep within the soul, but sometimes they can be absolutely explosive, illuminating what we have been experiencing, but unable to name. Here was this word that I had never heard before: proprioception, five syllables describing a fascinating function of our bodies that I never knew existed.  Sometimes proprioception in children with autism or other conditions have a hard time sensing the world around them, so they exhibit behaviors like hitting the wall or the ground repeatedly.  A parent can be helpful by offering a hug, or placing their hands on their child’s shoulders so they are reminded that the ground is beneath their feet.

I fell in love with this word as it came up in conversation, because it seemed like a great metaphor for life.  Lately I’ve felt like I’ve been losing my grounding.  What once used to feel safe, secure, solid, and familiar seems to be shifting and moving in ways I didn’t expect or understand.  I’m not sure how to clearly navigate my environment right now.  I’m finding myself afraid and confused.  I’ve questioned my judgement, my motives, and my decisions.  In the end, I want to exercise until I’m tired, and I dream about endless hugs.  I wonder if I too, would like to cuddle up under a weighted blanket.

I’ve told trusted friends and family about my “proprioception,” and they’ve listened, tried to give advice, hugged, and prayed.  I’ve been praying too: In the morning, in the afternoon, before bed, and lately around 2:00AM.  My mind has been flooded with comforting scriptures, and I realize He is with me always.  This is going to last as long as it lasts, but until then, I must keep moving forward.

There’s been something else that’s become an unexpected comfort.  Not a fix, but a little ray of light creaking through the door into a dark room:  the words of C.S. Lewis.  I’ve been a Narnia fan since before I was able to read.  When I was a preschooler, PBS aired the BBC’s Chronicles of Narnia which Grandma let my brother and I watch one evening in the den when we were sleeping over.  It sparked my imagination and filled my heart with wonder…the Lion has meant much to me over the years.  This is probably why I get choked up when a child asks me if we have Narnia in the library.  I am convinced the wardrobe doors are open to all who seek to enter, and I can almost hear the pages call out in cheerful invitation to every reader, “Come further up!  Come further in!”

My girlfriends and I have decided to dive into the deep intellectual pool of C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity this month.  I’ve been hearing good things about this book since I gave a copy of it to my seventh grade English teacher in 1997, but I’ve been afraid  to read it myself for fear that I wouldn’t understand it, that Lewis’ words to adults weren’t for me.  In truth, I don’t understand all of his thoughts, but I have been reminded with childhood delight what a friend his words have been to me.  I will conclude this post with ten great quotes I found from @CSLewisDaily on Twitter…so beautiful and so good.

A Gentle Roar

There is an intriguing little story tucked into the middle of C. S. Lewis’ Voyage of the Dawn Treader.  Lucy finds herself in the upstairs room of an old magician’s house, pouring over an ancient book of spells.  Within its pages, she is drawn so deeply into beautiful pictures of herself, that she becomes captivated in her own vanity.  Lucy turns the dusty pages of the book further and discovers the opportunity to listen to her friend’s opinions of herself.  The conversation is so vivid Lucy has a hard time remembering what is actually real.  Her heart is so overwhelmed with disappointment that it spills out in a tear trickling down the page, before Aslan the Lion appears with a gentle growl and the urging to stop eavesdropping.    

I heard the gentle roar of the Lion New Year’s Eve, while driving in my car to a friend’s house.  I was sitting at a stoplight, when I asked myself a simple question, “What is most troubling my soul?”  I’d love to tell you that I was deeply burdened over the tragedies of our current events, concerned about matters of social justice, or simply wanting to love my neighbor.  I had been carrying around an ache in my soul for about a month, like a meal eagerly consumed in haste, now sitting like a rock in my stomach.

The ugly truth:  I was consumed by how many people had not responded to my recent Facebook post.

I have a bachelor’s and master’s degree in Information Media.  I recently finished writing my doctoral dissertation about social media use.  My Facebook friends helped me complete my 18 weeks of training for a 5k, helped raise money for clean drinking water in Africa, and have been an audience of readers for my blog. 

But,

I had stopped looking through my newsfeed, unable to take in one more picture of another person’s success without feeling like I was losing at life.  I had deemed Facebook, The Daily Disappointment, chronically discouraged that my pictures of shoes, clothes, and daily antidotes received so much attention while the posts about things I care so deeply about were continually ignored.  My mind was such a buzz, wondering what clever thing I should say next to gain more attention, having to resist the urge to constantly check my phone to see if my thoughts were validated with enough “likes.”  I found myself in a continual state of distracted thinking.  I missed the pleasures of deep thought, and wondered if I could actually read a whole book or if my attention span had been severely amputated to Twitter’s 140 character limits.

How many times had I snuck my phone off with me to the bathroom just so I could continue to check it?  I was addicted.  I was reaching for human connection and significance, both good things, but I was struggling to find them in a stream of pictures and texts.  I was attempting to medicate my loneliness by inhailing a fog of social media haze.

So, about a week ago, I deactivated my personal Facebook account.  Call it a New Year’s Resolution, if you will, I just wanted my soul back. I hope it reduces the amount of noise I have in my life and increases my focus, inspires me to search for significance in the right places, and propels me to interact with more people face to face.  I hoping to see in 2016 that Lewis’ words prove true, “Aslan's instructions always work; there are no exceptions.”

Beginnings

Dear Readers,

Last week I told you about my friend Steve Wiens and his new book, Beginnings.  His guest post is below to tell you more about his manifesto.  If you are a reader, I hope you'll give this book a look.

Beginnings, by Steve Wiens

I suppose it might be considered a cliché to say that my first book discovered me; that it fluttered down to me in a bright burst of color and flame, beckoning and irresistible. But it did.

It came to me as a question, but one with a smirk and a wink. It was a delicious question, the kind that invites you to leave Bag End with only a walking stick and a stomach hungry for adventure.

I was stuck, but I was only beginning to realize it, and it was a sickening kind of feeling when I finally did. My life seemed to be drifting away from me, like someone was using a pair of bellows all wrong, extracting breath from me instead of adding it.

The question thundered around me, accompanied by random flashes of lightning, and I was dazzled enough to turn aside to see what it was before it rolled by.

What if the creative act of God described so richly in the Genesis poem was not simply an event in time, but a process that is reflected in all beginnings that follow?

What if new beginnings were lurking around every corner, inside every whisper, and even stitched into every ending? What if they hovered above us, and filled in the fault lines beneath us? What if being stuck wasn’t the inevitable destination?

What if the world, right here and now, is crying out once again, and what if the God who hears is responding, and sending, and moving, and acting?

So I wrote and wrote and wrote, and with three boys under the age of six, it was mostly done by magic tricks and stopping time. The more I wrote, the more I believed. It came in torrents, flooding me, until it didn’t. Then it trickled in: a paragraph, a sentence, a word. But it came all the way out, and I’m about to let it go into the world.

Beginnings is my manifesto of hope, that the creative activity of God is not finished, not even close. Beginnings is my defiant shout that even when we are lost in the inky blackness, there can emerge out of that swampland something glorious, something eternal, something covered in the goodness of God.

What follows are the first words I used to translate the fluttering reality in which I now am grounded. I hope it leaves you hungry for more.

“THE ACHE HAD probably been creeping up on me, but I didn’t notice it until that night, sitting on the deck behind my sub- urban house looking out onto my suburban life. Isaac was two, and the twins were six months old. I was a pastor at a large church, I had been married for fourteen years, and my twenty-year high school reunion had come and gone.

I didn’t go to that reunion. I didn’t have the energy for the awkwardness, the sizing up, and the plastic cups of stale beer to chase down our stale memories.

But the ache that had been whispering through my body rattled to a clumsy stop on that night, in those suburbs, on that deck.

I had been looking at pictures of my friends who went to the reunion: my old girlfriend, the guys I used to go all night skiing with on those blisteringly cold nights in Minnesota, my soccer team. And I remembered all the beginnings.

I remembered moving from Southern California to Belgium the summer before seventh grade. I remembered the sour, un-American body odor of the team of men who moved our old furniture into our new house. That smell was the baptism of our new life in Europe.

I remembered my friend Colin who lived across the street in a two-story white brick house in Waterloo with black shutters, like they all were. I remembered the in-ground trampoline in his back yard, on which we spent hours and hours, jumping our way into adolescence. I remembered his mother’s unbearably loud voice, as it boomed around their house like a grenade and made us run for cover.

I remembered falling treacherously in love with Tammi the moment I saw her, coming down those stairs in the fall of my ninth grade year. She liked me back, and then she didn’t like me. I was devastated. That’s when I started listening to the Cure and Depeche Mode, bands who were created for teenagers like me who don’t know how to express the frightening chaos brewing beneath our skin, bubbling and boiling.

I remembered Mr. Tobin, my tenth grade English teacher. Every student should have a Mr. Tobin. He got to know each of us and selected books based on what he thought we’d like. The first book he gave me was Trinity, by Leon Uris. I remember staying up late into the night reading about Conor Larkin, the main character, who was everything I wanted to be but feared I wasn’t: brave and passionate and rough edged. Almost thirty years have passed since I met Mr. Tobin, and I credit my deep love for reading to his deep love for teaching.

I remembered kissing Angie under a starry summer night on that dock that jutted out into Lake Como, the thrill of that moment reflecting off the lake and making everything luminous that summer before our senior year. I can still see the picture of us at the homecoming game: she was beautiful, holding my hand under the dark October sky. I had a ridiculous acid-washed denim jacket on, with only the bottom button fastened in the chilly air. There was a grin on my face and my eyes were sparkling. I was seventeen.

I remembered driving around in Matt’s Bronco for hours, finishing off the beer that Carl’s older brother bought us. We must have burned hundreds of gallons of gas on those cold winter nights; we were irresponsible, irrepressible and immortal.

I remembered deciding to go to college in a sleepy little town in southern Minnesota, instead of up north, where most of my closest friends from high school had chosen to go. I remembered trying to explain it to them, in the awkward way that high school guys do. I don’t remember much of that summer before college. I only remember the familiar sensation that comes with every new beginning: the thrill of reinventing yourself running parallel with the fear of the unknown—the twin tracks that lead to everything else.

But on that night, on that deck, in those suburbs, the continual forward movement seemed to have stopped. The tracks had run out. I used to be in motion, rattling forward toward a destination that kept morphing. But on that stationary deck, I had become solid and stable, and stuck.

There would be no new beginnings.

My life should have felt full and rich, but instead it felt empty and dark. There was only the slow work of playing out the reality of the decisions that had already come and gone. I was a pastor. I was a father. I was a husband. I didn’t regret any of those things. I loved my kids and my wife and my job. But the finality of it all was a relentless crashing—wave after wave, under those stars, in those suburbs, on that night. It felt vacant, like staring into nothingness.

It was empty and full at the same time. Empty of beginnings, full of endings.

As I sat there motionless with the emptiness closing in around me, there was something else hovering above me in the darkness, but I couldn’t see it.

If I could have seen it, it would have looked like a beginning.”

* * *

Steve Wiens lives near Minneapolis, Minnesota with his wife Mary and their three young boys. Steve blogs at www.stevewiens.com and he publishes a weekly podcast called This Good Word. You can order Beginnings here: Amazon | Books-A-Million | IndieBound | Barnes and Noble.  Here also is a link to the book trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RzbHDGeQrQ