Incarnation

Finally back into my old blogging app. Gosh. What a time I've had. Struggling along, trying to write whatever it was I was going to write on the Internet itself in a tiny tiny box. Life is mostly a veil of tears. But occassionaly the sun comes out, as it has today, and order and the Internet and technology are restored, and we try to carry on as before.

Also, I should note, I slept really well last night. This may seem nothing to you but I have lately been plagued by bad dreams, chief among them, as I have already relayed to a wide variety of people who I implore not to stop reading just because you have heard this before, that Wegmans was closed to be made into a Family Dollar. Let me be clear, this was only a dream, but it was so clear and bright in its colors, the sound of the Wegmans letters being taken down and the grating and scraping of the Family Dollar letters going up. I woke up breathless and perspiring from rage and fear. I was just So Angry. Other dreams have produced this similar emotion of rage in the last week or so but, in the light of day, did not continue to dwell and niggle in the back of my mind. Is this my greatest fear? Is this the point on which all the sorrows of the world turn, as my eyelids droop a little wearily?

Anyway. Where was I? Oh yes. I slept happily and well and feel as though I might cope with all that life brings. There isn't something scheduled every night of the week. I remembered to renew our library books so we have time to gather them and find the one that is lost. It's not Halloween or some other ghastly holiday. We will just sit very still and quiet and let the rage and sorrow melt away. That's my plan anyway. God probably has other ideas but I'm not going to ask him about them because I don't want to know.

The thing that I saw, all exhausting week and weekend long, that startled and alarmed me, is that God is not who I think he is or who I expect him to be. He is ordered and perfect and aloft and holy. His order extends, most strangely, into the symmetry of my bible readings. When I had Moses on the mountain in a cloud, Jesus was in the temple cleaning it out. When I had the long regulations about fair trials and how not to defraud the innocent, I had Jesus standing in the center of the most unjust, most defrauding trial that ever was. When Moses was saying there shall be no disease among you, no miscarriage, no sorrow, Jesus was being nailed to the tree and killed, bearing all my disease, all my sorrow. This symmetry can't have been organized by the person who designed my reading plan because it's just chapter by chapter, old and new and the psalm. It had to have occurred to God, in the organizing of his own book, that all these pictures would go well together.

But then, in the sermon, Matt had a line, not in his text, that suddenly came out of his mouth, about why abortion is so wrong. A man and woman come together to produce life but they are merely the vehicle. They are not its author. This is not a surprise to me, of course, I've known this to be true for quite some time, cough, but it is alarming to consider that God, who is ordered and perfect, brings life in the middle of chaos, darkness, occassionaly violence, degredation and despair. Life is always good, it always comes from God, though the darkness threatens to undo it. I was thinking particularly of the poor foolish Western teenage girls who are running off to be abused by ISIS. But that darkness is not dark to Jesus, who could go even there and rescue them, if they would call on him. But also the poor young lady with brain cancer who decided to take matters into her own hands, instead of letting God name the day or the hour. What is more devastating than cancer of the body, but that darkness is not dark to him, if she would have called on his name.

I am all the time trying to create my own symmetry. My own order. I am knocked back by chaos and fatigue. And I think, foolishly, that God cannot be near me because I don't have it together. But that is arrogant. And foolish. God, when he comes to lighten my darkness and disorder, does not find his own character and nature swept away by mine. It's not like Wegmans being swept away by the depression of Binghamton and being transformed into Family Dollar. No, he brings order and beauty to me, not me to him. What a blessing and relief that is.

And now, I'm going to walk the dog, or something. Have a lovely morning!