(Parental Advisory: when reading my blog, A.D.D. may be a superpower and not a disorder…I tend to get sidetracked along the way, but we always end up where we need to be).
Yesterday I cried while I was weed eating the farm. More on that later, in the meantime, strap yourself in because this one is going to last as long as Lent — which is finally over. It ended last night, and as always, I’m glad when it’s over. Lent and I, well….it’s complicated. I didn’t even know what it was until I was forty and when I learned about the Christian calendar I jumped in with both feet — which is another way of saying, I was in over my head. I played around with Lent for several years as I clumsily and awkwardly fumbled my way through learning about this sacred season. The first year that I actually, really, truly, fully, understood and observed Lent was so crushing and debilitating to me that I did not pray for a year after and I did not observe Lent for a few years. That previous sentence is literal, not hyperbole. Let’s just say forty days committed to deliberately sitting in the presence of God daily helped me to understand why the psalmists and the prophets spoke of God’s presence the way they did. “…day and night your hand was heavy upon me” (Psalm 32:3). “…your hand has come down on me” (Psalm 38:2). “…The hand of the LORD being strong upon me…I sat there overwhelmed” (Ezekiel 3:14-15).
As awful as it may sound — and believe me, it was horrible — I’ve explained to close friends (more about them later) that I walked away from the experience blessed beyond measure, but in the moment I just felt like Jacob when he became Israel after wrestling with God — he walked with a limp the rest of his life. That sounds awful, but it’s worth mentioning that Paul assures us that God promises, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9), which prompted Paul to declare, “when I am weak, then I am strong.”
This Lent was different. Not that it wasn’t painful — I just don’t know that you can observe Lent without discomfort — but I’ve finally embraced the “no pain no gain” reality of spiritual disciplines. Exercise is not pleasant for most folks, but it is purposeful. The pain — if you do it correctly — is not wounding but healing. All pain isn’t created equal. The pain of an injury and the suffering of soreness are opposites. The former is damage, the latter is growth.
If you know me in the real world, you know that I LOVE the show The Chosen. I’ve watched the five currently available seasons more times than I remember and I’ve shared it with as many people who will listen. It just so happened this year that if you began watching Season 1 Episode 1 on Ash Wednesday and watched one episode per day, the forty episodes would lead you right up to Holy Week. Season 5 of The Chosen begins with the Triumphal Entry and leads you through Holy Week to the arrest of Jesus in the Garden. The totality of my Lent observation wasn’t just watching tv, though the daily episodes served as a sort of devotional anchor point to keep the season before my eyes when it is so easy for the hectic pace of daily life to cause me to lose focus.
As I’ve documented many times before, my prayer life has always been the weakest aspect of my faith, and it has bothered me to no end. I’ve focused on it, worked on it, learned about it, and it just always felt like something I could never get the hang of no matter how much I tried…kind of like me and a hula hoop — it looks so stinking easy, children can do it, I’m round…why can’t I do it?!? Prayer is just talking to God, what’s so hard about that? A lot actually. There is nowhere to hide in the presence of God, which is in part the focus of what Lent is all about. As I’m writing this out now I’m starting to see the correlation between my struggle with Lent and with prayer. Both leave me feeling like Adam in the Garden, peaking out from behind a bush, naked and afraid, trying in vain to cover up my shame with a garment of fig leaves of my own making. Though it’s taken awhile, I’ve started accepting that the judgment I experience in His presence is not coming “from” God...the call is coming from inside the house. The fear, shame, and judgment are arising from within because I know that I know better and I’ve just not chosen to do better and that is never more obvious than when I am looking into the face of Love. To borrow from Erin Rae’s “True Love’s Face”:
Maybe if he shows his face today
I will not turn him away
I'll see it, and I'll say
So long did I wait
Rather than to sound alarms
I'll wrap myself in true love's arms
In true love's arms
In true love's arms
I will know it when I see it
I will not turn it away
I won't question everything
As I have done until today
Hope I won't say words unkind or
Shroud myself in thorny vines
I hope I recognize the signs
I hope I know my lines
Young it would make me at heart
Wise, it would know me apart
From others right from the start
Right from the start
I will know it when I see it
I will not turn it away
I won't question everything
As I have done until today
I will know it when I see it
I will not turn it away
I won't question everything
As I have done until today
Young it would make me at heart
This Lent I decided that I would greet God each morning as soon as I opened my eyes, in the same way I do Honey when we wake up together in the morning. Nothing fancy or profound, just good morning and let me tell you about what’s on my mind. Then at night, before going to sleep I would do the same thing as I talked about my day, though I usually fall asleep. Traditionally I’ve felt guilt when falling asleep while praying, but then I thought about some of the most joyful and memorable moments of my relationship with the great love of my life — Honey — and how so many of them go back to the days of our youth when we stayed on the phone talking until all hours of the night, never wanting to hang up and sever the connection — or the years with little ones when life was so busy the only time we got to ourselves was in bed at night just before sleep as we tried to catch each other up on the events of the day — in both times, it was not uncommon for us to literally fall asleep talking to each other. If I were to summarize the deepest loving moments of our lives together, it wouldn’t be the trips or the grand romantic gestures, it would be the nights where we laid beside one another talking about any and every thing, laughing and crying into the early morning hours before our bodies sleep timers sent us into the oblivion of slumber. This Lent taught me that falling asleep in the arms of God is a blessing, not a failure. I think He would say, “The spirit is willing, but the body is weak.”
Another focus for Lent this year was pride, ego, selfishness and motivations. Through decades of chiseling and whittling away — and in a few cases just taking a sledgehammer and ripping things out — God has removed a lot of what I thought were my greatest problems and struggles. What I often found was that when those things were removed I could see clearly where the root of those problems originated, and so much of it actually is about pride, ego, and motivations (needing/wanting validation, approval, to be liked or viewed with esteem). During Lent, my morning starts with prayer from my pillow, along with the opening lyrics of “Just Let Go” by Sturgill Simpson, “Woke up today and decided to kill my ego, it ain’t never done me no good any how.” So I decided to really ask myself each day why I do or don’t do certain things. Are my motives pure or am I seeking to gain something selfishly, even from good I might do? Let me tell ya, that’s a strong cup of coffee to start your day.
This Lent also coincides with my personal Jubilee year and my commitment to let go of all bitterness, blame, regret, hate, or hurt that I’ve harbored in my heart like a fugitive seeking to evade justice. I’m done with blaming people, trying to control people, or speaking ill of others. To borrow from Sturgill again, this year I committed to:
Taking a 49 divine day vacation
From reality and all else in between
Gonna transmigrate to my destination
Far beyond time in an eternal dream
But am I dreaming or am I dying
Either way I don't mind at all
It feels so good you just can't help but crying
You have to let go so the soul can fall
Oh my God it's so beautiful
Everything is a part of me
It's so hard looking through all the lies made of wool
But if you close your eyes it becomes so easy to see.
As Richard Rohr likes to say, “Real holiness doesn’t feel like holiness. It just feels like you’re dying.”
Back to crying and weed eating. If you assumed it was due to being fat and 50 and trying to weed eat three yards, your logic is sound, but not correct. As much as my body hates mowing grass and weed eating, my mind and soul yearn for it. This isn’t a complaint, just a statement of fact, our life on the farm is fast and furious and loud almost all the time. Four families and three littles between 1 and 4 make this inevitable, and I love it, but it does mean there isn’t as much time for quiet reflection in solitude, so when I get it — and I usually only get it with yard work — I treasure it. The mixture of nature, wind, sunshine, and music is transcendent for me and it can feel more like worship than work. Yesterday I was weed eating, listening to my ‘Eclectic Playlist’ as I call it, when the Brandi Carlisle song “The Story” came on. The first time I heard this song was about 100 yards from where I was standing at the time — it was on a Saturday evening on our patio overlook by the creek as I was grilling supper and listening to A Prairie Home Companion, as I loved to do back then. Garrison Keillor introduced the largely unknown artist Brandi Carlisle and her band made up of her brothers, and she sang the words:
You see the smile that's on my mouth
It's hiding the words that don't come out
And all of our friends who think that I'm blessed
They don't know my head is a mess
All of these lines across my face
Tell you the story of who I am
So many stories of where I've been
And how I got to where I am
Oh, but these stories don't mean anything
When you've got no one to tell them to, it's true
I was made for you
Those words cut me down nearly twenty years ago when I first heard them, and they cut me down again yesterday just as violently and mercilessly as I was cutting down the tall grass around the house. Same result, but different reasons. I am not the person I was twenty years ago. The pain and darkness that I was trying to navigate in those days is just a story now of where I’ve been and stories don’t mean anything if you don’t tell them, hence this post. My life is not free from pain — no one’s is and will every be — but most of the pain I experience anymore is healing rather than hurting, or at least I know someone who specializes in turning hurt to healing. “…a man of suffering, and familiar with pain…surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering…and by his wounds we are healed.” The lyrics to The Story hit different yesterday and brought tears of joy and gladness, not regret and shame. (Note to self, don’t reflect and write on things like this in a coffee shop unless you want to look like the weird old guy in the corner by himself crying for no visibly discernible reason).
So last night, as Lent came to a close, I watched the final episode of season 5 of The Chosen and watched as Jesus wept and prayed in the Garden, preparing Himself to complete the work He came to do. When it ended, knowing that this night and this timeframe corresponded with that real historical event, I decided to go outside, sit on my front porch steps and look to my own garden and pray. Looking at my garden, I thought of Him in the Garden of Gethsemane — a word meaning “oil press” as in where olives were crushed under grinding weight to extract their precious, delicious, and medicinal oil. I thought back to Isaiah’s song, “He was crushed for our iniquities.” I’ve felt that crushing weight too — not His — but my own, and though it pinned me to the ground in agony for a long, long time, what it produced was a sweet and healing oil He used for anointing. Though it’s not original with me, it needs to be said, “In the Old Testament, kings and priests were anointed with oil. In the New Testament, the sick are. Think about that.”
As this 40 plus day journey to the cross with Jesus came to a close, it wasn’t lost on me that 30 years ago I sat on my front porch steps, drowning in fear, doubt, darkness, hopelessness, and pain, crying out to the night sky for God to help me, save me, but on this night, I was baptized in blessings, praising Him for helping me, saving me. Last night was a sort of bookend to the story — not that I think my story is over yet, just that this story is over and it is time for a new story to be written. The awful and ugly story of humanity that was told over and over for millennia, came to a close on a Friday 2,000 years ago when Jesus shouted, “Telelestai!” (It is finished). It was time for a new story and a new beginning that began in a garden with a resurrection on Sunday. This doesn’t mean all is perfect and no work needs to be done, only that the pain is no longer a stumbling block to the work that needs to be done; it is a stepping stone. He rolled away the stone of offense and used it to be the chief corner stone for a new creation. “One of the severe limits of ‘saved/not saved’ language is it leads to a myopic view of salvation. When this happens, many don’t see the need to be continually rescued from the enslaving powers of the world. In Christ we are saved. Being saved. Will be saved.” That is a much better story.
Addendum
I think I’ll call this part “The Twelve-ish”. The Chosen is not really a show about Jesus directly. The focus is on those whom He chose to follow Him, those who chose to follow Him when He said, “Follow me.” A statement directed to all of us. While it is easy and inevitable that the audience will focus on the works and words of Jesus in the show, the director and writers want us to also focus on the disciples — their reactions and relationship to Jesus, the world around them, and one another. The last forty days of watching this show nightly caused me to reflect on “the twelve” (used here as a metaphor more than a literal number) who walk with Jesus with me each day. There is an irony to this list. Only one of them I actually see in person on a regular basis, nearly all of them I talk to regularly, some practically daily. They span in age from young enough to be my son and old enough to be my dad. Among them are farmers, soldiers, preachers, nurses, teachers, and barbers. We share music, theology, jokes, grief, doubts, questions, philosophy, and faith. We all take turns rotating around our roles. Each of us is supporter, encourager, mentor, teacher, philosopher, and counselor on any given day. With only a few exceptions, most of them don’t know one another and have never met one another. Sometimes I laugh at the thought they might only ever meet at my funeral or in the garden city. As strange as it may sound, one of them I’ve never even met in person myself, and yet, they are my brothers, and like the mismatched group that walked away from everything to follow Jesus, we are all doing our best to keep each other following the Way. So to Dick, Dennis, older Jeremy, younger Jeremy, Aaron, Wes, T.R. Dylan, Tony, and Chad — thank you for being a part of my story, it will have a much happier ending because of your part in it.
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