Running
We've spent a lot of time in the pool this holiday weekend. Even the two-year-old has joined in the fun, thanks to an outgrown flotation vest passed on to us by our neighbor.
For some reason, I've always avoided things like vests and water wings. I imagined that those devices prevented children from learning to swim on their own, and I took it in stride every time I had to fish my toddler out of deep water. Watching my littlest boy in the pool this weekend, I'm grateful to be proved wrong. Wearing his vest, he loves to maneuver across the pool, looking for all the world like a tiny member of a retirees' aqua-jogging class. He pumps his arms and legs and shrieks with utter happiness: "I'm running! I'm running!"
This is also his cry when actually running. I'm afraid it's a sad commentary on the highly circumscribed nature of childhood in our society today, but whenever the two-year-old is set free – whether in our small backyard or the grassy lawn of our neighborhood playground – he streaks around yelling, "I'm running, I'm running!"
My own attitude toward running has always been very different. Watching someone else run is enough to give me an asthmatic wheeze and a stitch in my side.
Even running as metaphor makes me tired. "Let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us." Just reading those words in Hebrews is enough to send me to the sofa with a good novel and a cup of tea. To write that this verse has always been uninspiring for me is to put it very mildly.
Recently, I heard a similar Scripture read aloud in church, but it sounded entirely new: "Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus" (Philippians 3: 13, 14).
Forgetting what is behind. Straining toward what is ahead. For the first time, those words didn't strike me as another unpleasant item for my spiritual chore list. Rather than a charge to be disciplined, to work hard and push through the pain (ideas that motivate me not at all), I realized the hope contained within these words.
Forget yesterday. Run! There is good stuff ahead. Go and claim it!
The idea of running away from one's problems is rightly suspect. If I've wounded someone, I should go to them. Many of us have also learned that we do ourselves no favors when we run away from grief. However, I'm not talking about running away. I'm talking about running, as quick as we can, right on through.
There are days when I know that this may be my only hope. There are enough mistakes and disappointments in my past to keep me mired in a slimy pit for the rest of my life. I can't clean up the mess, whether or not I made it. Fortunately, I hear Philippians telling me that I don't have to: "Forget about it! Just run! Run for your life and every day you're moving closer to light, to joy, to rest."
Suddenly, running sounds very, very good. I can imagine running with the same joy and exhilaration as my young son: "Lord, I'm running! I'm running!"
Our lives might demand that we keep running the same tedious laps around the schoolyard, but God calls us to "run heavenward," a race that sounds, even to me, like sheer joy. Like freedom.
How Not Waiting Feels
No one likes to wait. Still, there is a general acknowledgement within our culture that waiting isn’t exactly a bad thing. Good things come to those who wait, we say.
Christian teaching kicks it up a notch. Strength will rise as we wait upon the Lord. Blessed are all who wait for Him.
Still, I don’t think there are many of us who, if given the chance, wouldn’t choose to fast-forward through the waiting. If there existed some cosmic remote control, I would be strongly tempted to hit that button.
Why does God make us wait? Why does Scripture link waiting with blessing? It’s hard not to feel as if waiting has been devised by some strict disciplinarian. Where is the love in making us wait? It seems more than a little cruel. Especially so when we are waiting for relief from pain, for healing, for hope, for a miracle.
However, if I am honest, I have to admit that I know how good waiting can be.
When we first moved from Chicago to northern Florida, I imagined that the long, hot summers would be hardest. I expected the worst and was pleasantly surprised. In the Fall I was surprised again, but the surprise was less pleasant. It turns out that hot, humid days were easy to take in August. Roasting a turkey on Thanksgiving Day when the outside temperature was in the 80s: that was not so easy to take. There may have been tears.
Apparently, I was okay with a hot summer but not okay with seasons that seemed stubbornly stuck. I missed colorful fall leaves, apple-picking at the orchard, and wearing sweaters to the pumpkin patch.
During the first week of December, we had our first freezing temperatures, and I watched as the maple tree just outside my kitchen window suddenly turned scarlet. It was beautiful but, coming in December, also strange. By Christmas the tree had shed its leaves, and the view outside the window began to look just a little bit wintery. A very little bit. And then January arrived and ushered in sunnier, warmer days. Sitting at my kitchen table eating breakfast one morning, I noticed small buds beginning to grow on my maple. By the end of January, small, green maple leaves were once again dancing in the breeze.
I felt as if I had been watching one of those nature documentaries, slow changes effected over time had been sped up by a time-lapse camera. Only there had been no camera. Three seasons really had come and gone in the space of two months.
I hated it. It turns out that the changing seasons brought me little joy when introduced at a sprinter’s pace. Midwestern winters may be long and dark, but there is nothing like the rush of feeling that comes after spotting the first tiny buds.
I still don’t think that waiting is easy. I don’t think that it’s enjoyable. But, I also don’t think that waiting is like green vegetables or exercise; God the stern parent doling out what’s good for us. Rather than good for us, waiting, it seems, is simply good.
There is a prayer for the one finding it hard to wait, a prayer whispered for generations: “O Lord, come quickly to help me” (Psalm 40:13). And the voice of the Holy Spirit responds: “Be strong, do not fear; your God will come” (Isaiah 35: 4).
Ordinary Time
I was raised in a church that didn’t have much to do with the traditional Christian liturgical calendar. I don’t think that this was inherently a good thing or a bad thing. I do think it was probably inevitable that I would grow up and move in a different direction.
I began to love stories when I was tiny (my father told a serial tale about a little girl and her many exotic pets), and that love has only grown. It makes perfect sense to me that I would want to measure my days with the Story. Walking through a year with the liturgical calendar is, essentially, living the story of my faith from its beginning to its triumphant end.
Right now, we are in the season of Ordinary Time. As has happened to me before (and likely always will, for this seems to me the point of living the story), my own spiritual life has recently mirrored the spiritual life of the larger church, at least as it is expressed in the calendar.
To put it plainly: my days are ordinary.
Ordinary Time seems somehow outside of story. There is no drama, no central narrative. It isn’t Advent, Lent, or Easter. The meaningful intensity of those periods is lacking. Though time passes, it doesn’t feel as if we are on any kind of journey. The days simply are.
I find it easy to wish these days away. I like the excitement of storytelling. I like to know that I am quickly moving from point A to point B, from introduction to conclusion. I like that in books, I like that in church. I like that in life.
I suppose I could make an argument that we are never, truly, outside of the story. We never actually pause in our journeys, as humans, as communities. However, it doesn’t feel right to me to push these days into the narrative mold. It’s dishonest, I think, to dress these days up as more meaningful and significant than they are.
Perhaps they aren’t significant in terms of the story. But could it be this lack of significance that makes them so amazing?
They are gloriously excessive. They are like the galaxies, the uncounted stars and planets that have been created yet remain unseen by our eyes. What are they for? Why did God make them, anyway? For the joy of it?
These ordinary days don’t matter all that much, but they’ve been given to us. God gives the extraordinary – the birthdays, the graduation days, the holidays, the days spent on the mountaintop, and the days endured deep in a valley. As if these weren’t enough, God gives us more. He gives us the ordinary.
The blue-sky day in a month of blue skies. The hand-holding day in a decade of holding that child’s hand. The sunrise and the sunset, always and again. My husband in the kitchen making breakfast for all of us, not because it’s Mother's Day, but because it’s morning.