7 Cracking Takes

It’s Friday and the sun is sort of up, so how ’bout some takes?

One
Holy Week is nearly upon us and I have whole piles of stuff to do this weekend. Whole Piles. Mountains, practically. Including finishing up another quarter of school work and getting it turned in before Monday at midnight. But here’s the thing, and hold on to your Easter Bonnets for a minute because it’s big, ready?

We are going to finish all our school work this morning.

I know. I know. You’re thinking that today is only Friday. Which it is. So that doesn’t even make sense. How is that possible? How can all the work be done before time? And the only thing I can say is, and I quote, “I Don’t Even Know.” I mean, it appears to be that the kids just did their work in a timely and competent way, but that doesn’t make sense. So I guess it must just be some strange unknowable mystery, like the Trinity, or Bitcoin. We will just never know. And also, I can say pretty confidently, it will Probably Never Occur Again.

Two
I mean, it might have had something to do with the fact that way back, long ago, like in May of last year when I was planning for this year, I vaguely scaled back and both signed up for less classes and finally got a clue about how much we could reasonably do in a year. And so everyone has a proper amount of work at which they can independently (basically) be successful, and success breeds confidence, and confidence breeds if not exactly passionate love, at least some slow burning contented desire. So instead of screaming at everyone and driving them along in raw panicking fear I am wandering around agreeably helping people with their work and beginning to do my own…but just writing this out makes me know that it can’t possibly be true, so there must be some other explanation.

Three
Look at this. Just look at it.

That’s right, that’s like a hundred olive garden plastic cups stacked neatly on a table in the parish hall of Good Shepherd. I happened to be cleaning out some cupboards in the kitchen and I found an enormous box of these cups. And what I want to know is, what am I supposed to do with them? And why are they there? But until I find out the answer, I do think we should all sit down after church and do the cup song. Even though it’s an annoying song after the third time. Still, I think it must be a sign, or a call, or something.

Four
Speaking of raw, panicked fear, just to return back to my amazement and wonder about finishing a quarter fully three days before the deadline, it is always interesting to me to try to peer into emotional lives of all the people who endured Passion Week. I mean, in many ways the story is so fixed. We all, in the church, live it out in exactly the same way year by year. The services happen the same way every time. The scriptures themselves pin everything familiarly into place. Nothing about any of it changes, least of all God who is always completely the brilliant immutability of himself. And yet, because I am never the same person walking in to this particular week, I never come out on the other side the same either. My emotional life shifts and changes and bashes into the narrative from a different angle every time.

The marvel of it is that everything about the Passion of Jesus is mundane, ordinary, recognizable by me. You have to get ready for a big dinner. You have to interact with and juggle all the conflicting expectations and desires of all the people who jostle around you. You have to stare into the great terrible sorrow of human injustice and sin, the reflexive nature of the human person to do the wrong, ugly and corrupt thing. I can do all that, maybe with anxiety and fear, but confidence of one sort or another. But I can’t do any more.

Indeed, when it comes to singular thing I’m supposed to do–looking up at the cross, that terrible command in the bowels of Numbers, to look up at the curse on the pole in order to live–I have a very hard time doing it. I want to avert my gaze. I want to make excuses about how sin isn’t that bad, about how I am very tired but I will eventually get my life together on my own without divine help, about how I made mistakes before but tomorrow I will definitely do the right thing. But no. I can’t go all the way to the cross as Jesus did. Not on my own. Indeed, I am drug along by the Spirit to look at it. But when I do, what an incredible mercy lies there, what a weight is lifted of failure, fear, and corruption, what a hope lies on the other side. It amazes me every time.

Five
This year, though, I’m not boiling 72 eggs for the children to dye. I’m going to boil like two dozen, and we’ll do some kind of more complicated decoration because nobody likes hard-boiled eggs. Nobody. Also, the dye is gross. And the eggs always crack. And it always makes me want to, cough, die. That’s right Grammarly, I do know the difference.

Six
Before one more minute escapes me I’d like to ask all and any of you who pray to do so for a long time and beloved reader of this blog who was in a rather bad and alarming accident. He is recovering well, but his hospital bills are mounting up and he could really use tons and lots of prayer as he recovers.

Seven
Go check out more takes! You know you want to!