Help, I Need Somebody

I have been a little under the weather recently and have succumbed to the woe-is-me regiment of sleeping all day, taking drugs, and whining.  I, like most men, revert to a two-year old any time my temperature even flirts with triple digits.  More than anything, what I desire the most is for someone to take care of me.  Michala does an excellent job of this, rubbing my forehead, bringing me blankets, and always offering them with a smile. Sometimes I wonder if I have a secret longing to be sick just so she can fly to the rescue. Even though I feel as if I just got out of the ring with Mike Tyson, everything is OK. Perhaps I am not alone in this longing to be cared for, I can see this desire manifest itself in other places than merely my sickbed. When the responsibilities of being a grown-up pile up and I  feel as if I could be destroyed under the pressure of it all, I merely want someone to share my load, to hold me tight and tell me it will be alright. Maybe I am just weak or maybe just honest. Yet it is in the moments where I admit my desperate need for help that I fell the greatest peace, the most acute sense of hope, and a faith that I can make it.

I think that our DNA is wired in such a way that we operate best when we operate together. This game called life is a team sport. Yet we often live in a way that does not showcase this fact, in fact we often live in away that shouts "It is all about me!" We want to be the strongest, the bravest, the smartest and we want to do it alone. But as someone once said, "Its lonely at the top." What if we redefined our ideas of what it means to be fulfilled, successful, or even happy. What if intrinsic to all these was a sense of connectedness, that we need one another.  I think we would find ourselves more fulfilled, more successful, and even happier. But beyond this we may just find ourselves.

One of my favorite area of theology is how Orthodox Christianity portrays God, as the three-in-one. Instead of a simple monotheism, we instead have this difficult idea that God is one but also three. I will not risk the cramping of my brain in trying to articulate how all this works, but I will bask in the glory of a God beyond comprehension but also in a God so very accessible. In the beginning, God made everything and it was good, everything except for one thing.  Man was alone. I find this to be haunting that God looks around at all He has made is left scratching His head by this one thing. But in His head-scratching, He is teaching us. God made us in His image, in His image of togetherness, in His image of wholeness found only in community. God wrote His unique love in our hearts: we are only complete, only human when we have and love one another. We are most alive when we depend on each other. Jesus would later affirm this idea by stating that the sole purpose of our existence is to love God and man, in no particular order. His friend John would later write that in fact our love of God was so deeply rooted in how we loved one another that we could not claim one love without the other.

This season of Lent, we seek to grow closer to Christ, to share in his sufferings so that we may share in His victory. When we look at the cross, we see how deep Jesus believed in sharing with us the fullness of being alive. He so desperately wanted us to be alive that He died. With one of his final cries he felt the pain of our isolation, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" If we are to share in Christ's sufferings then we must be honest with our isolation; we must admit that we think more highly of ourselves than we ought, that we think we can do this on our own. In this admission, may we begin to share in his victory too. May we find a new life in the death of ourself, a life of togetherness, a life that not only finds peace in another's helping hand, but also finds the courage to give our hands back. May we be a people, plain and simple, truly a people, one although many. And perhaps we will find life there, a life unlike anything we have ever seen or known before.