Lent Three: Walking in between

In 2016 I helped start Fair Districts PA,  my husband Whitney and I took an amazing two week trip to Scandinavia, he left his job of 20 years, and much of what I had planned for my own future turned upside down. For us, it was a roller coaster year of highs, lows, and lots and lots of questions. 

A friend had burned me a copy of Josh Garrels' Love and War and the Sea in Between and gave it to me because she thought I'd like it. She was comfortable sharing it because Garrels had repeatedly made the album available for free download. At first there was only one song that resonated; Farther Along, a remake of an old familiar gospel song:

Farther along we'll know all about it
Farther along we'll understand why . . . 

The following year I found myself driving, often, to places I'd never been, listening to that one song, over and over. For the first time in decades we had no clear income, and I wondered if I should be looking for a paying job instead of volunteering all my time on a hopeless cause like redistricting reform. I was facing into my glossophobia, a fancy name for fear of speaking in public, an affliction I first encountered sitting in the back of my junior high auditorium, wanting to audition for the school play but too afraid to walk to the front and stand on the stage and speak. 

I was struggling to be obedient to a call I couldn't quite decipher.

Looking for a card table to put a projector on in a large historic church while hundreds of people waited for me to speak.

Standing at the podium in a large, new high school auditorium staring out as the room filled and an expectant audience waited. 

Driving across the state to Erie, where I was greeted by a TV reporter, then stood in a crowded auditorium while the library technician struggled to make my powerpoint work. 

Asking internally: Why? How did I get here? What am I doing? Why? 

I had never heard of Josh Garrels before my friend gave me that CD, but I wore it out, listening to him wrestle with questions that echoed the questions in my head:

Tempted and tried I wondered why
The good man dies, the bad man thrives
And Jesus cries because he love 'em both
We're all cast-aways in need of rope
Hangin' on by the last threads of our hope
In a house of mirrors full of smoke . . . 

Somewhere in there Whitney went back to work, first part time, then full-time, working harder, longer hours than ever at American Bible Society. Somewhere along the way my fear of speaking evaporated and I discovered a person apparently hiding inside me all along, cheerfully confident and ready to lead a growing grassroots movement. Somewhere in there that CD no longer worked and one of my daughters burned me a new one to replace the first. I wore that out as well. 

Meanwhile the questions never vanish: where is God in all of this?

The past year has put us all in that space: asking, wondering, waiting. I've been playing that song again, always hearing parts I never quite noticed before:

Where did i go wrong? I sang along
To every chorus of the song
That the devil wrote like a piper at the gates
Leading mice and men down to their fates.
Some will courageously escape 
The seductive voice with a heart of faith
While walkin' that line back home. . . 

The pandemic of course raises more questions than our hearts can handle. Why does God allow such suffering? What could/should be done for so many facing illness alone, isolated and fearful, so many dying in hospital beds without family at their side? The recriminations, the second-guessing, the weariness. 

But equally wearying: the political maelstrom, fury and folly. Followers of Christ led astray by pied pipers of partisan paranoia. The seductive voices of self-protection, of the way it was, of who "WE" are, with an ever shifting "we."

I get hard pressed on every side
Between the rock and a compromise
Like truth and a pack of lies fighting for my soul.

I've been reading the Gospel of Mark this Lent, traveling the road with Jesus and his disciples. I find myself resonating with the constant bewilderment of crowds and disciples: who IS this Jesus? What does he mean? What is this kingdom he speaks of? What is this death he insists is coming?

That's the walk we're called to. To live into the questions. To hold them lightly. To admit we don't know, won't know all the answers any time in this life. Pain and suffering are real. Evil is real. Joy and glory and beauty are real. 

There's so much more to life than we’ve been told
It’s full of beauty that will unfold
And shine like you struck gold my wayward son
That deadweight burden weighs a ton
Go down to the river and let it run
And wash away all the things you’ve done
Forgiveness, alright . . . 

Skipping like a calf loosed from its stall
I'm free to love once and for all
And even when I fall I'll get back up
For the joy that overflows my cup
Heaven filled me with more than enough
Broke down my levees and my bluffs
Let the flood wash me

Garrels challenges me. His work defies punctuation. His style defies category. But in some ways that seems to be the point. He invites us to that space where heaven breaks down our levees and our bluffs, our definitions, our assumptions, our need to control, to explain, to hold God on our terms. 

The daughter who supplied the replacement CD bought me another for Christmas, with another of Garrel's CDs, his own pandemic versions of familiar gospel song: Peace To All Who Enter Here. 

As I listen to both, as I pray and wait and walk out my faith in this hard, too-long in-between time, I am reminded, again and again, that my categories are too small. My heart is too human. My assumptions don't meet the needs of the day.

I may feel like spring will never come, but it's already leaping up under melting snow, in patches of mud, despite the biting northwest wind: beauty, bird song, new life, a new season.

And in far deeper ways, God is at work in the dark, the cold, the sorrow. I may see no way to bridge the political divides, but God's spirit is at work, already changing hearts and minds as only God can do. There may be no family members holding the hands of those who die, but God is already there, in every room, speaking words of love and welcome to fearful, lonely hearts.

This may be a hard, long, painful chapter in the unfolding story, but it's not the last chapter. We already know: the story ends in joy. 

So put your voice up to the test
Sing Lord come soon
Farther along we'll know all about it
Farther along we'll understand why
Cheer up my brother live in the sunshine
We'll understand it all by and by