A View from the Outside

It’s been 9 Wednesdays since I last met you here, reader. We’re exactly half way through the year and I have only 5 haikus to my name.

I have reasons for my inconsistency which would bore you to read. Suffice it to say, at the mid-year mark, “I am well, but my soul lags behind.”1

Those aren’t my original words, but they’re my experience so far this year. What began with high hopes in January has stuttered and sputtered and dwindled by July.

After an extended period of chaotic wedding planning for two daughters and a major transition in our lives, my husband and I planned a trip to one of my favorite places on earth - England. It was supposed to be a time of well-deserved rest and relaxation.

However delayed flights and luggage woes, tube strikes, a persistent injury, a last-minute cancelled accommodation, and a historic heatwave2 all contributed to more stress, not less, which left me emotionally and physically exhausted.

So at the end of my trip I found myself standing outside the entrance to the beautiful Hereford Cathedral in England, crying, longing for some kind of divine help.

It had been a particularly rough Sunday morning. We’d planned to attend services at the Cathedral, but through a series of very frustrating events (including an argument with my husband) which made us late, I found myself standing at the entrance to this most beautiful of cathedrals waiting for him to solve our parking problem while the service inside began without me.

The organ music and choir’s song filled the cathedral, pouring outside onto the green where I stood, sending its worship-notes into the town. I began crying. How long had it been since I had experienced beauty of this kind in any church?

At that moment I felt like an outsider wanting so much to be an insider.

It has been almost 3 years since I’ve had any normal, consistent church experience. If you’ve read my posts from last year, you know why. It’s been difficult to reconcile my experience of “little-c” church harm with the larger picture of “big-C” Church life. Oftentimes, I’ve felt like an outsider in church environments.

But once inside the Cathedral with eyes soaked in tears and with a heart that still felt like it didn’t belong, I took in the glory of this place that for centuries has housed all manner of spiritual help and harm. As I listened to the sermon3 packed full of the realities of following Jesus, I realized that the lives of true disciples are filled with the tensions of “both/and” discipleship - both help and harm, devotion and abandonment, flourishing and lagging. To some extent, this is the story of every true disciple.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the past 3 years it’s that there is a danger in getting too comfortable with the inside position. There’s a specific kind of temptation in thinking we’ve figured it out, have the answers, and see the light. In reality, the opposite is true. We close ourselves off from divine light when we get too comfortable with the way spiritual (or church) life “works”.

Darkness, confusion, and even apathy can be places where God stirs the dregs of the dead-things we’ve given up on. It’s where he re-orders us, re-aligns our priorities, humbles us and often he does it while we stand outside looking in.

As I sat listening to the sermon about how Jeremiah and Jesus both experienced great struggle as outsiders in the midst of insider self-righteousness, a thought kept rolling around in my head. Could my soul’s lagging, inertia, even disappointment, be part of a healing process? Not an ending, but maybe a small spark of a beginning? Could this spiritual lag be the place God is inviting me to wait for Him?

Historic Heatwave

     Historic heatwave
     melts my spirit as I sit
     tethered to my one
     oscillating fan.
     The imagery is not lost
     on me. My soul lags
     under oppressive
     heat which has melted the pride
     of my rock-solid
     faith. I wait for Your
     Spirit to stir the coals of
     spiritual fervor,
     which has been displaced
     by the Dark Nights of the Soul.
     I'm at Your mercy
     for healing wind.