Lament: Up and Down

Our whole professional lives have been defined by the Up and Down. Is the church doing well? Yes? Then we go Up. Is the church doing…well…you know…not badly, but, um…stressfully? Yes? Then we go Down. Up and Down. Up and Down. Like we're on one of those old seesaws you never see anymore.

The pastor isn't supposed to go down, though. The pastor is supposed to be the even keel. The pastor, who am I kidding, IS the even keel. It can't ever be about him. Let me just say that again, because it's true. It cannot ever be about him. It has to always be about Jesus. Every single moment of every day. It has to be about Jesus. And so that everyone thinks only about Jesus all the time, the pastor absorbs a great deal, or let's it roll off him. He doesn't “go down”, he doesn't “go up”. He fixes his eyes steadily on the mark and keeps going.

But he talks over the church a great deal. How is it going? Is it ok? Are the people all walking in the same direction? Is someone ill, in heart or body or mind? Does something need to be recalibrated? Reworked? What are all the people doing? What is motivating people to do that which they are actually doing? What needs prayer and attention? The way a mother fusses over her children–are they surviving infancy, can they read, is that cough turning into something terrible?

Up and Down.

I try not to go up and down. Honestly, mostly I'm up, or at an even point. But lately I've been struggling on the downside. I measure all the things and they accumulate together to be an up. Clearly, God is working in the church. Extraordinarily. So many things that God is doing are surprising and encouraging. But I keep sliding down. Matt has been looking at me, helplessly. And I've been looking at him, like a sloth, a depressed, slow moving, partially sad, sloth.

The church is Up. The garden is lush. The children are healthy and good and attending. But I can't shake the restless sea of unlikeness. I keep sitting down to weep, hanging up my harp, wailing as if a captive required to sing a song, wandering into a foreign land. From whence cometh my help? I keep asking. “Thy help cometh from The Lord” says Matt, the person who now devours the psalms, when before it was me. I was the reader of the psalms, and he would stare at me, mute, ununderstanding. Now it has switched. I look at him in blank sadness.

What do you do on the down? Turn that frown upside down? Count your blessings name them one by one and when you've finished you'll have just begun? Trust and Obey for there's no other way to be happy in Jesus but to trust and obey? Have an attitude of gratitude? You know…an attitude…of gratitude…get it?

I get it. I get it. But I can't get it. I can't just take it. Unlike Eve, reaching out for that gorgeous mouthwatering beautiful apple. I lift up my hand and then let it fall. Jesus stands between me and myself. Me and my sloth. Me and my inconsolable mood. Me and my insolent discontent. I won't grasp. I won't take anything. I will sit by the Waters of Meribah and sing the required song. I will pray against the locusts and the violence. I will grieve and mourn. I will fret. I will relent and repent and ask for the wind to shift. I will lift my eye to the hill and wait, however long. It may be that God will have mercy on me, a sinner, a slave to his will and his glory.