I’m not good at balance. The pendulum of spirituality in my life drifts and swings back and forth from bitterness to worship, from selfishness to selflessness. It’s a constant wrestling match, this line I walk. Maybe it’s the same as mountains and valleys, but sometimes it seems more like a constant avalanche with a few seconds of holding onto ledges when I catch my bearings.

I want to be holy. I want to be pure. I want to find the rhythm of gods heart and connect my heart to that but I always seem to come just “this” close before I fall back down into the chasm that is distance.

Spiritual maturity has become an excuse for the death of passion.

May my life be used. May my heart be open to the things of a God who constantly searches for me and circles me. May my heart beat to the rhythm of a Creator who creates, daily, ways for me to connect with him.

“I have buried you - every place I’ve been. You keep ending up, in my shaking hands.”

This is from a song of Justin Vernons (of Bon Iver greatness) “Song For a Lover of Long Ago.” While he may have written it for an ex girlfriend, it speaks much more to me. There are things I’ve buried, things I’ve left on the other side of the bridge and then cut the ropes only to find it again on this side. I’ve tried to let go of things, tried to run, but yet I’ve found there are still those things inside me.

And lately, it seems a flood has caused things to resurface and brought so many things that I have buried so long ago up through the ground. Whispers in darkness, things I have tried to drown out with success and prayer and ambition.

I don’t know if these things ever truly leave. Maybe we all have a “thorn in our sides” that we wish we could get rid of, words we wish we could hear, situations we could handle differently. I just don’t know.

What do I know? I know there is a God who loves us, a God who searches the Earth and the ground for the million little pieces our soul has been shattered in. A God who see’s the choices that we had no say in, and who chooses to heal them deeply, through hurt and through pain. A God who creates symphonies of love out of cries of brokenness and screams of anger. A God who looks at scars and hurt and pain and brokenness and says “I Am.” Whose grace is sufficient to pull every thorn away, even those that I don’t know about.

Instead of dropping our stones, we’ve turned into a culture that looks for a Bigger boulder.  Since when was finger pointing the cool thing to do?  Forget being a Christian, the greatest qualification we have is that we are humans.  That qualifies us to seek grace and offer forgiveness. To give somebody the benefit of the doubt. We are supposed to protect one another.  We are supposed to stand with those that are hurting, to fight for those that cannot fight themselves.   Somewhere along the way in history, doubt has replaced hope and cynicism became our go to defense.  We cut out world changing thoughts at the knees because we are uncertain and scared of what could happen if we were to latch on with hope and belief.  We make ourselves feel better as we sit and doubt holding apathy by the reigns and cast spears, not caring where they land or who they’ll hurt.  We forgot that we are all trying to change the world, one way or another.  Whether it be through earning the almighty dollar or through loving somebody else, we all are hoping that our actions ripple throughout time and get caught in the current of life.  

My heart is heavy tonight.  Perhaps I am beginning to understand what it means to intercede.  I am learning to stand in for somebody else.  To take the brutal punches of cynical onlookers and those whose doubt only causes further pain.  We can choose to love that way, and I’m afraid it only ends in a never ending tunnel of bitterness.  Call me childish, but I believe in dreams and hope for days where we can truly change the world.  Where we can hold hands with those around us and weep with them and build a hedge around them to protect them from the world.  We are here to give people a break from the cruel world for a while, not to throw them further into the depths of it.  

Think before you speak. 

We’re all here, standing in your place tonight.   

Fatigue will be my enemy.  

It sneaks in, quietly, unnoticed, throughout the day, throughout the weeks it has grown and it has stolen compassion.  It whispers “you don’t have time” or “we all have choices." 

As I drove through downtown Baltimore today, I took a wrong turn.  I ended up on a street I haven’t been on.  It was like I was instantly transported to another world.  Closed stores, boarded windows, people in the street. For blocks and miles it continued like this…and I thought: 

This is where I came from. 

Yet, lately I’ve found I’ve closed myself off to this.  Fatigue has stolen my compassion.  Fatigue has so quickly made me forget where I came from and has made me lose sight of where I am going.  

An excerpt….

Maybe I have and maybe I still do use grace as a crutch.  I don’t know.  I don’t say that as a rebuttle, I say that as a confession.  Every morning when I drive to work I watch the sun rise over the skyline of the city and I pray.  I pray for things, for any and everything.  I pray for hope.  And this past week I’ve asked God to show me where I’m wrong and to help me to hate sin and to build some sort of strong character and that He shows me just how much I break his heart when I sin.  Maybe that would make it more real to me and that would make me not mess up.  But the more I pray and the more I think about it, the more I hear and feel God’s hands and arms holding me and saying that those things don’t matter.  I think the power of grace and love is the fact that God’s view is always forward, never looking in the rear view.  That’s not to say that sin is so real and sin is wrong, that’s to say that when God looks at me and looks at us, he see’s purity and beauty.  Maybe when he said he was regretful he made man (back in the garden) it wasn’t because he was so angry, but he was moreso filled with remorse that we had seperated our hearts from his and he was regretful that he created us seperately.  That he longed and still longs for the time where we can be one with him again, no longer living in a seperate space.  

Maybe most of life is a war for persepctive.  I drive to work and watch the sun rise, while on the other side somebody is sitting on a corner downtown in the shadows of buildings broken hearted because they can’t find a fix or they just found out they were pregnant or they haven’t seen their dad in years.  I had a patient today.  27.  HIV positive.  Has struggled with IV drug abuse for years and he started to cry.  His notes say he does this, that he knows the system because he’s been in and out of it for so long that he cries and feels bad and regretful but he never commits and he is noncompliant.  But he cried and he cried because his daughter was also HIV positive.  All of this was happening while the other doctors stood around, solid, maybe not judgemental but trained to be solid in situations where we can’t show emotions.  On the inside I was crying along with him.  Not because I can begin to even understand where he comes from, but because I understand grace.  I understand the need for grace.  I don’t understand his struggle but I understand that grace is a gift and that I have to choose to not buy into the lies that I am alone and that I am abandoned and that I was the cause for brokenness and that my life was not supposed to happen.  Instead I’ve bought into the promise that my life was a gift and I was chosen and set apart and these dreams I have were because God put me into this generation and shaped me and molded me before I even knew it.  I am loved beyond what I can understand.  By the creator of the universe and by those around me.  I just wish he could see that, too.  That a CD4 count or three letters don’t give him a name, that his destiny isn’t over.  That he can still make the choice to write a different story.  

“Our families huddle closely, betting warmth against the cold.  Our bruises seem to surface, like mud beneath the snow….May the melodies surround us, when the cracks begin to show.”  Sleeping At Last - Snow

I’m pretty sure I’ve heard the phrase “the reason for the season” a million times, in one context or another, over and over again over the past month.  I asked a few questions, like “what is advent?”  Nobody really knew much. 

Aniticipation.  

Anticipation glimmering with hope.  I think that is what came to me.  2000 years ago the world began to anticipate the one thing that could glue all the shattered pieces together.  A little baby would go on to rewrite all history, disarm the world, remind the world daily that God is with us.  Emmanuelle.  God is with us.  God.  With us?  Really?    Every day, since the beginning of your life and infinitely before you took your first breath, God is with us.

In the darkness of fear and the sunshine of hope, God is with us.  

Hope.  

As the lights glimmer on the tree we are reminded of what we do have, and what we don’t have.  What we can’t offer to those that surround us, and how much they offer to us.  It’s a time to anticipate presents, presence, smiles in the faces of love and surprises.  Then, as the day passes the credits roll to resolutions and countdowns and a new picture to take.  We frame our dreams in the lens and dream of closing the shutter.  

Maybe that’s the real meaning of it all.  A Hope that gave us hope.  Hope to build our own future and our own memories.  From bruises to an orchestrated beauty, brick by brick.  Putting our fingerprints all over hope.  

I guess thats my resolution.  To hope, to love.  To give everything I have.  To love until I can’t.  To show others that there is a better way to live. 

Life is made up of moments and memories and words.  We can intertwine those words into glimmers of hope if we choose, anticipating the next memory.  With every gift, we are reminded just how important it is to start over.  

And maybe there won’t be answers, but there will be resolutions, because wrapped in all that mess is hope.  One day, we will be able to hear our hearts louder than our scars.  

This is a season of hope.  Where we realize the first half of the pages written matter no longer, and we rip them from the binding.  Where we begin to see that the thickness of the pages in our right hand are much larger than the left and theres still so much left to fill in.  This is a season where we realize that questions are really the only answers we need, and we take notes on that.  

My life is full.  My heart is warm.  Ripping out the pages of fear and failure, I have so much hope.