Waiting for Armegeddon

Waiting for Armegeddon October 7, 2015

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Today we will turn our steps back towards home, preparing our hearts and minds to receive back our children into the bosom of familial comfort (sorry–two solid days of church has rather formalized my sarcasm). Also, Matt is officially a whole year older. What a great gift it will be for him to gather back his multitudinous offspring and sacrificially care for them on this great day. Well, or tomorrow because we get in really late.

Matt is so old by this point, and I am so not awake, that it is beyond my frail human abilities to do forty four things I really like about him…not that there aren’t forty four things, there’s like at least a hundred…but I did want to mark the day by saying, from the depths of my soul, that I’m really grateful that he’s alive and that I get to be with him and that Jesus hasn’t come back yet.

I mean, of course I totally want Jesus to come back. Who among us wasn’t disappointed that the blood moons didn’t pan out, sniff. But if he, Jesus, would like to delay a little longer, at least so that more red cows can be shipped to Israel from Texas, I’m ok with that. Let’s see, what other weird eschatological hope can I jumble in here. Of a more pressing end times nature, though, is the question of the leaves in Binghamton and if they will be still so intense in their various colors or if we missed their peak by being down here in this terrible time of suffering in the warm and balmy weather. I will spend some moments today reveling in true anxiety, as a matter of discipline.

But intermixed with the anxiety I will make a list of the various happinessess I’ve been given as a result of knowing Matt these short swift years. In the past few weeks as I’ve so publicly and offensively thought about women in this modern landscape, and how it might be nice for them to conceive of themselves not as first among equals, every woman her own arch bishop, but as, well, just go back and re-enrage yourself if you want, I think that terrible slur (although I can’t exactly remember and probably deleted it because it was so badly expressed) of Dependent was flung at me. I came away curious that that would have been meant to be an insult.

What a difficult and trying existence the human person has when she refuses to be dependent on anyone. If you insist on making your own way, of rushing headlong by yourself into your own goodness and personhood, well, you have only yourself to blame for everything. Dependence is one of the loveliest, richest, most gracious experiences a person can have–to depend on, to be depended upon, to defer to another, to pick up and carry someone else’s trouble. That is what salvation is. You are in the way of perishing, having tried and failed to do everything yourself, and God comes and rescues you, he does for you what you should have done. And then he carries on doing it. Any human moment of true and gracious dependence is only an amuse bouche of the riches of God’s mercy. No one (well, not nice people anyway) says to the infant in his mother’s arms, why don’t you get your life together. It shouldn’t be said either of two people who organize their lives so that they require and depend upon the other for mutual happiness and comfort.

So a very happy birthday to my tyrannical and oppressive husband, who is so mean that he insisted on cleaning the whole house before we left home, and is looking forward to cooking himself a leg of lamb when we get back. I will faint and wilt in the background, weeping gently into my thick sweater about how tragic my life is, that I get to be married to someone so interesting and clever.


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