All of Your Chains

As we turned East into a little box canyon nestled among the San Juan Mountains in Southwest Colorado, we found ourselves transported and perhaps transformed. The glowing groves of aspen trees lined the snow-capped peaks around us with an overwelmingly green bed skirt and drew us into the town of Telluride a bastion of beauty seemingly in the middle of nowhere. Our favortite phase soon became, "look!" We were like three year olds going to the zoo for the first time, bewildered by the scenery. There are a few times in life when you forget about all the pain and suffering that dominate not only our lives but all of creation itself, when you see or experience something so beautiful that it hides all the ugly. Jesus spoke about such things as the light and that the light shines in the darkenss and the darkness is compeltely overwhelmed by the light. This weekend I saw glimpses of that light and for a few moments the darkenss trembled and ran.

I don't want to over sentimentalize my experience, but my life like so many others I know has been filled with little but darkness and even the beautiful things around me have been hard to see. I have begun to doubt that the light will actually overcome and yet it often finds me in the strangest places. When my faith is dragging God has a way of showing up at just the right time although He often seems late or out of place. So in a sea of hippies, missing a shoe, listening to something akin to bluegrass music, I found God again and it was beautiful.

This trip was just a chance to get away and have some fun but I found my expectations lacking. Absent were my girls, my wife and daughter, and consequently my sanity. I struggled to survive camping on a baseball field in the town of Telluride. I found myself during some of the rippingest music I've ever encountered wishing they were there with me. I battled inwardly about whether I deserved to celebrate life when so many in the world were deprived of the very basics of life. But the reality is that life will not die, the light will overcome and when it breaks through we must dance.

In a weekend full of highlights and special moments, one stands out clearest. at a side stage in the midst of what amounts to a yard off of main street Telluride we saw one of my favorite acts, Abigail Washburn, perform an impromptu acoustic set five feet from me. As I sat on the grass and soaked up the surreal moment, tears welled up in my eyes as Abigail sang "Chains." As the wind gushed through the park the band delivered a cry for freedom, a cry that my heart longed to utter. Devoid of amplification, stripped to their rawest, I saw my soul reflected in the honesty of that moment. Life was passing me by. I was chained to darkness by my fears and for a split second the light of hope burst the chains off me and my soul lept to its feet to dance.

I could hardly wait to return home, both literally and figuratively, to start living life instead of merely watching it pass by.  Below is a video of the actual performance detailed here captured by the guy sitting beside me, a stranger, but forever a friend for grasping this spark of light.



I pray for the light to shine, for beauty to grasp us and free us. I pray that we breathe in deeply the aroma of life and give ear to the melody of God. I pray we dance.

That We Might Be One

My friend, pastor, and mentor Eugene Scott recently wrote a blog about the power of intimacy and the danger of isolation (you can read it here). In his work Eugene describes the desperate need we have for each other. I feel this most acutely now that a women who I have cherished my entire life struggles to relearn how to eat a cookie. My aunt Betty suffered a stroke recently and the consequences of that stroke have been difficult to learn of. While I am hundreds of miles from Betty, the strength of her love for me kept her presence close in some mysterious way. But now, I do not doubt her love, but she seems oddly distant. Even though we pray for her to recover and believe she is just stubborn enough to do so, there is pain in the separation from the strong woman we all once knew. When I heard the news of her struggles my response was anger, not sadness. I believed deep within that it was simply not fair for this woman to suffer but also because deep down I feared I might never see her again. She is doing better and I hope to see her soon, and that hope of connection is stronger than all my fears and anger.

As I said before we each of us have not just a desire for connection but a hunger and a thirst. Intimacy with our fellow man is not just pleasant, it is vital. Without each other, though our hearts may still beat, our souls no longer live. Jesus knew this well. Before his death he prays a long prayer in John 17 that repeats the same petition over and over: that we may be one. This oneness is core to his hope in us, to his death with us, and to his resurrection for us. While we often focus on the aspects of forgiveness and new life in Jesus' gospel, we must see that we are forgiven so we may be reconciled to God and each other and that reconciled life is indeed our new life. Jesus also showed that pure unity was central to his gospel message when he summed the entire law of holiness up into two relational commands, that righteousness is found in right relationship with God and with each other, nothing more and certainly nothing less.

Our relationships suffer most severely the consequences of death that our sin produces. In the first instance of disobedience, man runs and hides from the God he walked with everyday and covers himself up from his wife in shame. Our relationships were what defined us in the creation account, God in all his triune glory decides to make us in "our image," the shared image of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in perfect unity with each other. And it is that perfect unity that Jesus uses in his prayer as the model for our oneness, "may they be one as we are one." The day is coming when the groom Jesus will be united with his bridegroom the church and what a celebration of union that day will be. But in the mean time, we struggle to hold on to the beautiful relationships we currently inhabit and fight to repair the broken ones. This is hard work. Never will we open ourselves to more hurt than when we make ourselves vulnerable in relationships, than when we lay aside our fig leaves of shame and dare to live life together, in pure oneness.

All this points to why it hurts so much to hear that a loved one is in pain, because if we truly love that person then their pain becomes our own,that is both the blessing and perhaps the curse of our oneness. The reality is that we are all meant to be each other's loved ones and every instance of isolation, death, and disconnect hurts us to our core even if we do not realize it. But gloriously Jesus became our loved one and on that fateful day he felt our suffering in its fullest and it killed him. But in that act he showed love was stronger than death, that relationships would always win over separation in the end and he burst forth from the divide of death to reconnect all of creation to itself and to himself. Just as he felt our suffering on the cross, we feel his joy in the resurrection. May we find our stories at the intersection of the cross, at the place of Jesus prayer for our oneness, and the birth of our reconciled lives walking anew without shame in the presence of the one we have only dreamed of until now. And that hope of connection is stronger than all our fears and anger.

 May we be one.

A Spring of Hope

There are several reasons why I cherish Easter, some theological, some nostalgic but right now I am meditating on the seasonal change that accompanies the holiday. The pastels we drape on us for that eventful morning echo the awakening color blossoming from the earth outside the church walls. Spring is a season of fulfilled promise. After months of often bitter cold and death, we yearn and hope for Easter, for flowers and green and life. Michala has brought this sense of life into our home by the addition of seeds planted on our window sill. Every day we rush to see what has occurred in the dead of night, desperate for a sprig of hope. And miracles of miracles, life emerges.

Is it any wonder that the season of new life we call Spring coincides with the celebration of new life we call Easter? Jesus tells a story of how unless a wheat seed is broken and dies it will not grow to bear fruit, to bear bread, the bread of life. He is that broken seed, crushed underfoot. And yet the reason we will congregate at all this weekend is that the seed does not remain dead. Just as the basil is sprouting from the soil on my window sill, the crushed wheat yields life and abundant life at that.

I've only been observing this phenomenon we call Spring for 27 years but for some reason, each time it roles around, I am always surprised that it all somehow worked again. I marvel that land so barren and cold could possibly produce such abundance again; but it does, every year. In this faithful rebirth I witness the seeds of hope. My soul is often found wandering in a Winter wasteland, barren and even dead. And as I peer within, I wonder if there is any reason to believe that perhaps once more, New Life will bloom. I desperately await the Sprig of Hope. And miracle of miracles, Easter comes and death is laid in the grave. Miracle of miracles Jesus emerges risen and triumphant. Miracle of miracles, Spring dawns full of color and promise. Miracle of miracles, this very soul of mine find more than courage, more than hope, more than my wildest dreams and miracle of miracles I rise.

He is risen, I am risen, we are all risen indeed!

Death Come No More

"Where is it I've read that someone condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he'd only room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once! Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!... How true it is! Good God, how true! Man is a vile creature!"  Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

"Everybody wants to go to Heaven, but nobody wants to die." -Loretta Lynn 

From an early age I have had a severe fear of death.  I would lay in my bed at night and imagine my dying day, lain in a coffin and then utter darkness, forever.  A great panic would grip me; I would run to my mom and have her comfort me until the panic seeped away. As I grew older, I learned not to peer into that dark day, but to live in a way that boasted of immortality.  Yet despite this chasing of the wind, death has not failed to whisper in my ear its reign over me and everyone I love. There finally came a time in my life that I suspect many of us will experience, where I had to face my fate, to stop running from it and accept the reality that death will have its day.  In some ways this was both freeing and utterly depressing.  Freeing because fear was no longer my master, and depressing because deep within me, within us all, is a furious resistance that wants to live and will never accept death.

Often we try to sugarcoat this thing called death, especially when loved ones pass away.  We say things like, "I'm so glad so and so died, they are in a better place now."  And while there is some truth in this, it is very different from how Jesus responded to the death of a loved one; He had no words only tears, bitter weeping.  I find this odd because a few moments later Jesus would call his friend back to life.  How could our King, knowing what was coming next, cry so terribly at such a moment?  I have come to believe that Jesus was making a declaration of sorts in those tears, that death is not okay. We were never meant to die; life, full-on living is our destiny.  The early church father St. Irenaeus said that "the glory of God is man fully alive."  And for Jesus, for whom the glory of the Father was his deepest longing, death's lingering reign brought mourning and tears.  But that was not all it brought.

Jesus, defying death with his tears exerts his power over death and reclaims Lazarus from the grave.  While we mourn death's stain, we also rejoice in its defeat.  Jesus would soon face our greatest enemy head on and like us all, He embraced its reality and drank from that bitter cup and with his last breath he cried out. Death, once again, brought tears.  But it would never again have the last laugh for after the mourning came a new morning and a new King.  Death's dynasty was laid to rest and the once dead man, Jesus, bust forth a new day and a new hope, a new life.

O death where is your sting? It is buried in the grave!