Different living room, different street, a whole new reality: I’m disoriented as I hear the high pitched upward inflected call of a bird I am not familiar with. Though I hear him frequently, I have not yet been able to spot him in the tall tree he hides in. His call is not invitational, not even a flirtation. It’s a tease. He taunts, “You can hear me; you will never see me.”
For six days, my world narrowed to my small plot of land on this small planet of ours and my view narrowed to what lay at my knees. The narrower my focus, the wider my world became. I saw things that filled me with wonder and left me wondering. My yard became a door and I moved further up and further into a Narnia beyond.
This is the point: Job is potentially every person. Maybe you are Job, or will be Job, or I will. Maybe some people spend their whole life as Job. Maybe some of us have, somewhere along the way, just our fifteen minutes of Job-dom. What then? Will we be baffled and bitter because we are stuck in a theology of sub-biblical intelligence that tells us that God guarantees flourishing to God’s people? Will we be unable to suffer, unable to endure and even consent to the pain? Will we curse God and die?
I refuse, anymore, to spit at God. I refuse to see anyone as a barnacle. I long for everyone to be fully and joyfully on deck and 100% in the conversation about our destination.
Easter calls us all to pursue life, but Lent calls me to wonder why I shirk it. On this side of heaven, life is messy and an infinite caretaking project.
Dust. Always there. Moving, resting, floating, twirling, dancing, hitchhiking across the room on invisible currents even when the sun isn’t around to make it known. It is ubiquitous, omnipresent—always present even on the cloudy days when my eyes can’t find it.
Much usage and circulation over the centuries has worn down and obscured the relief of these linguistic coins, their image and superscription. The date of mint and object of commemoration is now difficult to discern. We speak with them. But rarely do they speak to us. Should we have ears to hear, they could tell a rich story of Christian experience and reflection.
I am now just over halfway through my employment contract, and I am excited to report that, in addition to vast amounts of Dutch vocabulary and grammar, I am learning many important truths. One of them is what it means to be Dutch. Turns out, I am not as Dutch as I imagined.
We knew all those years ago what our slow-walking and half-measures would mean for you. We knew that even with all the progress we have made over the last several decades, powerful climate impacts were already baked into the atmosphere. We knew that your world would be fundamentally altered from the one we had known. We knew that glorious future you are getting ready to explore would be more dangerous and more unpredictable because of us.
When football teams brag that God gave them the win, when musical artists sing about drinking and sex and then win an award and point to the heavens and thank Jesus, when people put silver fish on their cars amid bumper stickers about God and guns . . . I’m sick of all of it. Sick of tee-shirts with bloody images of Jesus on his cross and yards signs declaring Jesus is Lord of our county. Even Christian music, all the time, blaring from a car or piped into a place of business gets to me. I know it’s mostly well-intentioned, but I am repulsed by it.
