Pandemic Ponderings -- Idols

 I am currently taking a course toward my Doctorate of Ministry, which requires a great deal of reading. One of the books I have recently read is called Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy, by Mark Vroegop. It is a book on lament, and in it, Vroegop notes that times of suffering can unearth idols in our lives.

Now didn't he touch a nerve.

Or five.

Suffering reveals idols. Like the idol of financial security. I can hardly afford gas anymore. Every time I fill up my tank, I am filled with rage at a government that insists on spending more and more money on green technology when other countries around the world pour filth into our air and water. Every time I see a car with a plate that starts with the letter G, I think snidely and smugly to myself how lovely it must be for that person to drive a car that I helped to pay for when never in a million years could I ever afford such a car for myself. I deserve financial security. I am owed cheap groceries in whatever quantity and variety I happen to wish for. I am not merely somewhat uncomfortable or inconvenienced; I am enraged. Because I am worshiping the idol of financial security. When so many all over the world are experiencing genuine deprivation, I am enraged that the price of citrus has gone up. When so many all over the world can't afford a car or the gas to put into it, I am enraged that I have to pay more to fill my tank.

God, forgive me.

Suffering reveals idols. Like the idol of treating people like saviours. Or maybe not people. Maybe vaccines and vaccine mandates. Or lockdowns. Or anything that will get us out of this wretched mess. If only everyone would get vaccinated, we could be out of this. We should force them all to get vaccinated. We should lock them up, the filthy germ-spreaders. We should let them die, gasping for breath, in the hospital parking lots. After all, they brought it on themselves. We assume the vaccine will save us, and we treat the unvaccinated with more and more contempt until we are treating them worse than we would treat our animals. Or if only the government would open things back up, and I chafe more and more at the lockdowns and restrictions. We call our leaders Hitlers and Nazis and have the temerity to liken our loss of freedoms to the horrors of the Holocaust as though we have forgotten the pictures of the living skeletons and the rooms full of eyeglasses and false teeth and children's shoes. If only someone, anyone would see the damage being done by the lockdowns, the job losses, the school closures. I cast my mind far and wide looking for a reason, a logical explanation, the one magic thing that will get us out of this, the one thing that will save us. Some trust Trudeau, Trump, the truckers. They will be the ones to save us. And I worship the idol of human leaders, human innovation, human wisdom, and I am enraged when, one by one, they fail.

God, forgive me.

Suffering reveals idols. Like the idol of craving cultural comfort. My world should just be nice. People should just get along. Everyone should just always let me in when I'm trying to merge on the highway. And I am enraged when I see society crumbling around me and life becoming more and more uncomfortable. Families are torn apart. Brother against sister. Son against mother. Society is fracturing and dividing along the edges of a chasm so deep and wide it seems impossible there will ever be bridges built. Shrieking at each other with fury in eye and voice. I want to join them. Every fibre of my being wants to join them. If I just scream loud enough and long enough, maybe someone will hear and I will be able to go back to living my comfortable life when the price of gas was reasonable and the shelves were full and I wasn't obliged to show papers to get into a restaurant and I didn't have to cover my face every time I am in public and people wouldn't give me the side-eye or automatically think me a radical alt-right fringe lunatic for following Jesus. My world is no longer comfortable, and I am enraged.

God, forgive me.

Suffering reveals idols. Like the idol of spiritual leaders. My church is right because we obey the pandemic restrictions. Your church is wrong because you ignore them. Your church is wrong because you have followed the pandemic restrictions. My church is right to ignore them. And we divide up behind our spiritual leaders and we shriek at each other across the abyss, an abyss full of the flames of hell and the stench of sulphur and satan laughs.

Oh, God, God forgive me.

Suffering reveals idols. Like the idol of presuming divine favour. I just assume that I deserve the blessings of God. I'm not lucky; I'm blessed. Of course I deserve financial security and a comfortable life and food on the shelves of the grocery store and a front-row parking spot to boot. I'm a nice person and I've always had those things, and I'm surrounded by a triumphal spirit that everything will always work out and God works everything for the good (aka comfort) of those who love him. Never mind the fact that around the world, people -- yes, believers -- are starving, caught up in military conflicts, being blown into oblivion by volcanoes, drowning in floods, burning in wildfires, dying for their faith. They're just unlucky, I guess. I presume divine favour. Oh, I don't say it out loud. I would never dare to say it out loud. But I live it. Because when I do not get all those earthly comforts, I am surprised. No, not just surprised. I am enraged.

Oh, God, forgive me.

Oh, God, forgive me.

Pandemic Ponderings -- Foreigner

 I haven't been writing. I haven't wanted to. There's been far too much going on in the world around me and I have been far too busy merely surviving to have the bandwidth to actually write. But someone asked me the other day, "What has God been teaching you recently?" As I thought about that answer, and as I look at the world around me, and as I think about all that I have been reading and learning over the past two years, my answer is threefold and will form a three-fold blog mini-series.

First,  I am a foreigner on this earth.

Second, I serve a lot of idols.

Third, I am learning to lament.

So, first, I am a foreigner on this earth. The last two years have made me intensely uncomfortable as a Canadian. Oh, not just in the typical pandemic-living-is-awkward-and-unpleasant way, but more in a I'm-wearing-shoes-that-don't-fit way. It all just feels so wrong, and it's not just about the pandemic restrictions. It's about the attitudes, the rage, the fear, the disrespect and disdain, the deep hostility people are holding toward each other. I've spent the last two years trying to figure out what my response ought to be to all of it. I can't move about as easily as I could before. I can't meet with friends and family as freely as I could before. Costs are rising. Violence is rising. I've had to teach online -- ok at best, but certainly not ideal. Who do I listen to? What news channel do I follow? Is all of this really a deep global conspiracy to overthrow all that is good and light and right? Should I be taking up arms (literally or figuratively) and fighting for rights that have been stripped away? If I do choose to follow the injunctions, am I giving in to a great evil that will soon see me receiving the mark of the beast? Or am I doing the right thing as a follower of Jesus by submitting to the authorities? Are people who throw anti-lockdown protests the heroes because they are fighting for our rights? Are people who quietly roll up their sleeves and get vaccinated the heroes because they are fighting for the common good? Who do I listen to? Who do I follow?

As the last two years have crept by (and they have felt longer than all the other years of my life) I have become more and more convicted of one thing: the reason living in this country feels like wearing a shoe that doesn't fit is because my citizenship is not of this country. My citizenship is of the kingdom of heaven. I am a Christ-follower, not a Canadian. Oh, sure, I live in this country, and I carry a passport for this country, and I pay taxes in this country, and, to this point, I have been afforded certain rights because I happen to live in the borders of this country. But my allegiance is not to this country. It is to Christ. My citizenship is of the kingdom of heaven.

Yeah, yeah, sure, you might say, but what's your point?

Just this: I had fallen into the trap of believing that somehow the rights I have as a Canadian equal my rights as a citizen of Christ.

Let's face it -- it's been pretty comfortable in this country. I have never been persecuted (unless you want to call someone making some fun of you being persecuted, but go tell that to the Christians in Iran or Afghanistan). I've never gone hungry, at least not in the way that people go hungry who are trying to survive on two spoons of maize a day. I've never been prevented from gathering with other Christians (or with other people period, Christians or not).  When I got sick, there was always medical help. I've been allowed to go wherever I want whenever I want and no one has ever stopped me. And I have believed that these rights are not just earthly rights of an earthly kingdom, but divine rights. That is, they are rights that belong to me as a citizen of Christ.

But that's a lie.

They are not heavenly rights. They are earthly rights of an earthly kingdom of which I am not a citizen, and as earthly rights of an earthly kingdom, they could be here today and gone tomorrow. And the rights that I have as a citizen of Christ are very, very different.

Blessed are the poor in spirit.

Blessed are those who mourn.

Blessed are the meek.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.

Blessed are the merciful.

Blessed are the pure in heart.

Blessed are the peacemakers.

Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness.

Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you, and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me.

Pray for those who persecute you.

Take up your cross and follow me.

When I examine my own heart, I don't see a whole lot of poor in spirit, mourning, hungering and thirsting for righteousness, mercy, pureness of heart, peacemaking, or rejoicing in persecution. I see instead pride, complaining, hungering and thirsting for the items missing off the grocery store shelves, hostility and rage, throwing of insults, bristling against restrictions and calling it persecution, self-satisfied smugness and superiority, and on and on. My heart is an ugly, ugly place, bristling against the removal of earthly rights I think I am owed because I happen to live in this country.

God has convicted me. My attitude is not right. My eyes have been on my earthly citizenship, and not on my heavenly citizenship. I have been chafing against shoes that don't fit right anymore when they should never have fit in the first place. It is very easy to think I am poor in spirit when no one pushes on my pride. It is easy to talk about mourning when I am not actually mourning. It is easy to act meek when everyone is polite. It is easy to be a peacemaker when everyone agrees with me. It is easy to talk about persecution when I'm not actually suffering at all in any way. I should always have recognised the upside-down nature of my citizenship. But it is only in the last two years that I've really begun to feel it.

I am not a citizen of Canada. The rights that I have heretofore enjoyed have changed. Maybe they have changed forever, I don't know. But when I am brutally honest with myself, none of that has affected my citizenship in Christ. Nor does it affect the rights and responsibilities I have toward my King. I am still fully free to follow him.

Do the pandemic restrictions make me uncomfortable? Do I wish they weren't so? Do they sadden me, stress me, and make me feel miserable and anxious at times? Do I hate them? Unequivocably yes. But do any of them prevent me from living as a citizen of Christ? Before God, no. In fact, in these days of rage and hostility, my living as a citizen of Christ, should I manage to do it to any degree, could even be a light in the darkness of anger and fear that I see around me. But oh, how it chafes. How the shoes rub with every step I take.

"They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth. People who say such things show they are looking for a country of their own. If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. Instead, they were longing for a better country -- a heavenly one" (Hebrews 11:13-15).

May that heavenly country come with haste.

Miss You Most

I miss you most in the evening. I miss the routine of taking you out at night for one last pee, shivering in the cold, peering through the dark, watching for skunks as you take your sweet time finding the right spot. I miss having to put up the baby gates to keep you out of the living room. I miss getting your Kong and filling it, and watching you dash to your bed, eager, anticipating. One last pat as you took your Kong, and and then I headed upstairs to the contented sounds of you working out the contents of the Kong. I miss you most in the evening.

I miss you most as I am falling asleep, as my mind, in an unguarded moment, slams against the reality that you are no longer here, as I see your head drooping over the vet's arm as she helped to lift you out of the car, hanging in death in a way it never ever hung in life. I miss you most as I am falling asleep.

I miss you most in the morning when I come downstairs, and you are not there at the bottom of the stairs to greet me. There is no joyful reunion, no happy dance, no leaning up against me for your morning pet, just a breakfast I am not particularly hungry to eat, a breakfast I force myself to eat because breakfast had rituals that involved you. My kefir lasts longer because you are not there to share it. When I take out the blueberries, you're not there to ask for one. You don't come running when my spoon scrapes on the bottom of the yogurt container. It makes me not want to eat blueberries and yogurt. I miss you most in the morning.

I miss you most when I sit down on the couch to put on my boots, and you don't come running to bury your head in my lap so I can scratch your ears. I miss the feel of the soft, soft fur on your ears and the top of your head, and the way you burrowed your head in my lap and groaned in pleasure as I rubbed your ears. There are no twirls of anticipation as you pretend to try to catch your tail but are really just so excited at the thought of walks or road trips or barn adventures. Somehow you knew exactly what was coming by the footwear I put on. I miss you most when I am putting on my boots.

I miss you most in the car and I look into the rear view mirror and do not see your ears sticking up above the seat. I drive past the Starbucks and there is no drama. You aren't there to ask for your own puppachino or to flirt with the people working drive-thru. There is no new nose art, and I cannot bear to wash the old art away. I miss you most when I am driving in the car.

I miss you most when I open the cupboard to get a bandaid and see all of your grooming stuff there and realise I will never again have to clip your nails or brush you or clean out your ears or check you for ticks. I will never again have to doctor a hotspot or give you a pill or an allergy shot. I never did get the spot under your ear healed -- there was still a scab on the day we said goodbye. I had wanted it to be healed. Why did I want that spot to be healed? What difference did it make? But I did, and I miss you when I think about never having to care for you again.

I miss you most when I am working or watching tv or reading a book. You aren't there to shove stinky toys in my lap, or to lay your head in my lap and just look up at me. No more stinky toys shoved alluringly at my hands, no more heavy head in my lap, no more long looks of love, no more pats and hugs and nuzzles and leans and licks and the thousand little ways I had daily physical contact with another living being who loved me freely and was loved in return. I miss you most in those quiet in-between moments.

I don't believe you're "in heaven". I don't believe in rainbow bridges. You are not possessor of a soul created in the image of God, and while I believe there will be dogs on the new earth, I don't believe we will have a reunion. It is goodbye, girl. Not just see you later, not until we meet again, but goodbye. The greatest comfort that I can conjure is that your body will break down and nurture the ground of a place you loved. But believing all that doesn't change my grief. It does not negate the tears I shed. I do not love you less or miss you less because I believe you are just dead and not "in a better place". My life is emptier with you not in it. My heart aches so much sometimes I can hardly catch my breath to breathe. No, believing you are just dead does not make my grief less sharp. I am grieving differently because you were a dog and not a human, but it is legitimate and genuine and right and appropriate that I grieve, and it is real grief. You were a constant presence and a companion. You knew my routines and my moods. You watched me always. You brought joy and love and physical contact into my life. You were my dog, and I loved you dearly.

Oh, my little girl, my good girl, I miss you most.