learning to bend to the shape of the journey
"Do you know what I'm so thankful for?" I asked Grant last night before bed. "I'm so thankful that I finished the airbnb cleaning on Friday evening, so I can just stay home tomorrow. I don't have to go anywhere. Just do the laundry."
This morning, one child woke up and couldn't open his left eye.
So it was that I actually dashed off to the doctor with him first thing. So it was that I spent the first three hours of my morning, frustrated at the setback and slightly in a hurry, but in a hurry that could not be hurried. It just was, that this is the amount of time it was going to take to get this problem solved.
I was mentally hurried, until I drove down the street to grab coffee while I waited on his prescription to be filled. The moment the drive-thru attendant handed me my hot coffee and bagel in a bag, the smell of bread reminded me to unwind a little bit. Perhaps the most frustrating thing about the morning had been this - that I really wasn't in a hurry. Sometimes there is something else I need to be doing, but in this case there wasn't. I don't even like doing the laundry. I had the time. I just didn't have the patience.
Patience is an action. Grant and I recently visited a place where I saw it happening. In a tiny little coastal town in Southwestern Mexico, we visited a gathering of believers. They've been faithfully gathering for years, and their growth as a church has been very slow. But since the last time we visited was 10 years ago, enough time has passed for the growth to also be noticeable. Over the course of time, direction and some semblances of leadership have slowly emerged, and they continue to plan toward the future. They continue to do faithfully each week what they should do - gather together to study Truth, and to pray for their children to become believers. But relationships (with God, with others) are not a process that you can shortcut or streamline. In fact, I've been observing over the past year or so that shortcutting relationships or organic growth with false substitutes like money or programs will always fall short of the ultimate purpose - because so much of the growth happens in the journey of growth and relationship. Certainly, there is a place for programs to address gaps or problems and a place for financial aid to relieve suffering. But not every circumstance is that place. Sometimes the circumstances we'd like to apply more efficient solutions to, only need patience.
Commonplace magazine published an article last month on page 79, and it included the following quote from a separate, externally-referenced article: "At three miles an hour [the pace of walking], the world is a continuum. One thing merges into the next: hills into mountains, rivers into valleys, suburbs into city centers; cultures are not separate things but points along a spectrum. Traits and languages evolve, shading into one another and metamorphosing with every mile. Even borders are seldom borders, least of all ecologically. There are no beginnings or endings, only continuity." - Nick Hunt
We wonder about the speed of culture change sometimes - in our country, in our church, in our communities. We struggle to pull it all together and make it all make sense - we want to quick slap together the answers at the speed of an airliner, which has become our default speed as a society, it seems. We want to quick figure it out and sort everything into categories so that we can get on to whatever our life is supposed to be. Perhaps we are willfully ignoring the fact that actually we have time. We just don't have the patience. Everything seems urgent, so we must shortcut with rules and boxes and categories and efficiency. In our lives, we must schedule. In our churches, we must group based on arbitrary lines. In our families, we angrily lash out at each other - frustrated at the time it takes to accomplish our own agenda. In our personal lives, we are either winning or losing, no in-between, and so our sense of purpose rises and falls with our self-esteem. We are lost in the speed of it all. We need to walk more, which is exactly what the aforementioned article was advocating for.
In her book "All That's Good", Hannah Anderson writes in her chapter "Whatever is Pure" that in the book of Malachi, when God was coming to purify the priests of their infidelity, that "The priests' adultery was symptomatic of a larger duplicity. [...] The priests' unfaithfulness to both their wives and their work revealed them to be unfaithful men to the core. In this sense, their adultery did not make them impure; they committed adultery because they were already impure. They had divided hearts." (pg. 114)
Last weekend, we went to Bishop Hill for an event. One of my children spent most of his time watching the blacksmith. He watched the man heat metal to 600 degrees - an unbelievable temperature - in order to bend it and beat it into the shape he wanted it. This process took hours and hours of repetition, heating and hammering over and over again. It was repetitive, and yet my son never grew tired of watching it because even though the progress was slow, there was visible progress. It was just a little different each time. Here the blacksmith used one technique, there another. It was slow - but it was very steadily moving in the direction it should go. Impurities require a process to eliminate them.
Our outward sin or even just strife is symptomatic of where our hearts are at. If we reach a point where sin becomes externally noticeable, the lies inside of us have already been there for quite some time. Sin is often an indicator that we have tried to avoid the pain of purification and have refused to kill the things that compromise the flesh. Even as a church, we sometimes attempt to shortcut the purification process, make it easier to appear more effective, with any number of worldly measures - lifestyle and clothing regulations, processes and programs, even the good and lovely promise of community. All of these things are good and I believe they can even succeed at aiding some of our personal journeys to holiness if our brains are keeping up with our bodies. Some of us are doing the things but never slowing enough (walking) to understand God and His process and purpose of purification, and so the things will ultimately fail us just like any other false god. Others of us are not doing the things because we want to cut out the weights that are besetting us but we also aren't slowing enough to understand God and His process and purpose of purification. All of us have the tendency to quick jump on whatever bandwagon makes us the most comfortable, without allowing God's work to refine and teach us and without staying humble enough to admit where we might be wrong. All of us need to slow down and walk, and let our brains and our bodies find some equilibrium rather than letting the culture dictate the speed at which we should be moving. This applies to us within the church most of all.
Because, after all, culture is so much more of a spectrum than a box. Technology and speed have forced us to throw up walls and to adapt with concrete and to shove every concept and every idea into it's proper place as fast as we can like robots in a warehouse because otherwise the concepts and ideas will just keep piling in a heap behind us because they are coming at us so fast. But just because they are in a pile behind us doesn't mean that it's our responsibility to sort them all and respond to them all today. We may not even be able to sort them because each thing might fit into multiple boxes. In some cases I don't think we even have access to the information that is needed to sort them, because we do not have the mind of God. And no matter what, even if the things are sorted into boxes, we still take them with us as we continue on the journey. We cannot just stuff and ignore and move on without the things we have encountered that have shaped us. But we do actually have time. Things are not as urgent as they seem. And we do actually have a God who is purifying us, giving us understanding, and building in us wisdom and discernment every single day. We just don't have the patience.
We all have change fatigue, and we're all tired of being tired. And the world is tired too. But duplicity, which is often our attempt at efficiency and shortcutting the purification process, is not the answer. There is One True God and His work is not to be shortcut by any scheme of man. If we find ourselves adulterers in any form - craving a certain liberty, craving a certain rule to be enforced, craving a temporary fix to an eternal/spiritual problem, this is an indicator of duplicity in our lives. When we see something coming at us - something that is different (a change in the church), something that our flesh is screaming at us to respond to (a temptation to sin), anything that we so desperately want to act on in order to rid ourselves of discomfort and tension, we must choose instead to let patience have her perfect work. There is immediate response required - but that immediate response is to take it to the Father, and He will take us where He wants to from there.
For further reading, see James 1.
A final thought, also from the article I previously mentioned: I wonder if we are acting as tourists or pilgrims in this life we're called to live. The author of the article writes, "I once noted that the tourist bends the place to the shape of the self, while the pilgrim is bent to the shape of the journey. I do think the length of the journey matters in such cases, but perhaps a walk of any sort, if we set out in the proper spirit, might afford us the opportunity to practice the virtue of setting ourselves aside."
Are we pilgrims?
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