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If we listen closely, we may find that God does not view people as problems to be solved, and that right answers are often an illusion. We may find that the gift of salvation was never something to be earned by our hands — or rationalized by our words. We may find that for the Spirit to speak, we may need to shut our mouths.

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…

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.