Like Those Who Have No Hope

It was an odd Easter. And while, for many people, the cries of, "He is risen! He is risen indeed!" are fading from memory at approximately the same rate that the remnants of the Easter feast are disappearing, I haven't been able to stop thinking about it this year. Thinking about what it really means. Thinking about what difference it makes - outside of the Easter weekend.

A lot of what I heard this Easter weekend hurt this year.

"Christ is risen from the dead
Trampling over death by death.
Come awake, come awake!
Come and rise up from the grave!

 "Oh death! Where is your sting?
Oh hell! Where is your victory?
Oh Church! Come stand in the light!
Our God is not dead, he's alive! He's alive!"

-Matt Maher, Christ is Risen

True words, all of them. Amazing, affirming, victorious words. They capture the joy of the Resurrection, and normally, I would rejoice to sing them. But this past weekend, I sang them through tears of sadness.

Because the day before Good Friday, I attended the funeral of someone I love dearly. I would love for her to come awake, come awake, come and rise up from the grave, for her to call me up and say, "Let's meet for coffee." But it is now several days after Resurrection Sunday, and she lies in the grave. I can feel the sting of death in the sting of the tears in my eyes, in the ache in my heart, in the way my breath catches when I have to remind myself yet again that she is gone.

It strikes me that we are very quick to rush to Resurrection Sunday. We bypass the pain of Friday and Saturday, keeping ourselves busy with preparations for the big dinner and the Easter egg hunt. We anticipate the choir and the new Easter dresses and the family gatherings. We can hardly wait to shout the victory cry.  He is risen! He is risen indeed! We read Paul's words in 1 Thessalonians 4: " But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep." It is a stunning word of hope. Because Jesus died and rose again, we also will rise again. But I wonder if we read the words, ". . . that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope . . . " and act like they mean, ". . . that you may not grieve."  Period.  I wonder sometimes if, in our attempt to express our hope, we do not allow ourselves or others to grieve.

But the disciples grieved. They ran from the horror of that day. They sat in stunned silence, huddled together, every fibre of heart and soul aching from the loss. Perhaps it was disbelief. They knew Jesus would rise again, just as we know our loved ones will rise again.  He had told them he would. Perhaps they truly had forgotten what Jesus had said, or doubted him. Or perhaps it was the agony of watching someone they loved so dearly being torn apart, suffocating on a cross, being laid in a grave. But perhaps it was disbelief.

Except that Jesus grieved, too. He wept at the tomb of Lazarus. He wept, knowing full well that in mere moments, he would call Lazarus back from the dead. He wept, not because he doubted Lazarus would rise again, but because at that moment, Lazarus was dead.

At this moment, my loved one remains in the grave. It is the Saturday between Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday. I know she will rise again. I know there is hope. I know that Jesus has risen as the first-fruits. The truth is, my God is not dead.  He is alive. He has trampled over death by death. I know that. I embrace it, perhaps this Resurrection weekend more than ever. I know it is my hope. And someday, my dear friend will come awake and rise up from the grave. But not today. Today I miss her. And I find myself sitting in the sadness of the Saturday in a world that insists on rushing through the celebration of Resurrection Sunday.  It is the already-but-not-yet reality of the Kingdom of God -- already inaugurated but not yet consummated. I have hope but still grieve. The sting of death may not be unto death, but it still smarts.

The calendar tells me that Resurrection Sunday has passed, but my heart is still in Saturday. I know the Resurrection is coming. I know it with all that is in me. But this is my Saturday, and I'm not going to rush through it. When I allow myself to feel the pain of the loss, it makes the wonder of the reunion all the sweeter. Sitting shiva on Saturday makes the wonder of Resurrection Sunday even greater.

Tribute

I lost a reader this weekend.

She read my blog faithfully.

She read my blog not because she thought that what I had to say was so clever but because she loved me. She always wanted me to write a book. She thought people would want to read what I'd written. I always laughed her off. "I'm not writing a book," I'd say. "I'm not writing a book!" This blog was my concession to her, my way of saying, "Ok, fine, if you think I should write, I'll write in this isolated little corner of cyberspace." (As if there can be anything like an isolated little corner of cyberspace.) But it was my testing-ground, a way to continue to hold her off while exploring the whole writing thing and see if there was anything to it.  "You should write a book," she'd say, and I'd say, "I'm not writing a book. I have a blog."

But she's not going to read this entry.  Or any other entry I might write.  Or any book I might write.  Because this weekend, she died.

She was diagnosed with cancer just 10 days ago.

And she's gone.

Just like that.

It's hard to explain what she meant to me.  She entered my life at a time when I was very broken, very vulnerable. Brand-new in my faith, I was struggling to learn what it meant to be like Jesus, what it meant to leave the brokenness of the past behind and become who He was calling me to be. I had walls around me so thick and impenetrable I had been told that life was easy for me because I didn't have feelings.  I did.  I just hid them well.  But she looked past that. For some reason that to this day I cannot fathom, she cared.

So I began the journey to trust.  It started with a letter, the old fashioned kind, with pen and paper and a stamp.  I mailed it off, and immediately berated myself for my foolishness.  As if she cared.  As if she would even care. I should never have mailed it.  If my arm had been long enough, I would have reached into the red mailbox to pull the letter back out.

But she did care.  She wrote back.  And I wrote back, and she wrote back, and I wrote back . . . . Each time, I shared a little more, opened up a little more, let her see a little more of my heart.  Each time, I became almost physically ill after I dropped the letter in the mail, wondering if this was the time that I told her too much, shared too much of my heart, and that this time she would turn from me in disgust.  I felt like I was throwing stones in the well of her grace, and I wondered when I would throw a stone so big that it would fill up the well and her grace would not be enough to cover it.

But it never happened.  Every time, her grace rose up to cover the stone. At some point, I began to realise that it would never happen.  For whatever unfathomable reason, she just cared. Under her care, my heart began its journey to healing.  I saw in her a model of Jesus. I knew that her grace was his grace poured out through her.

And she continued to care.  Letters gave way to emails.  There were visits over coffee at Tim Horton's in between.  There were phone calls and car rides and tears and prayers.  Oh, there were tears and prayers.  She moved.  I moved.  I moved again.  She and her husband began wintering in Florida.  Emails gave way to Facebook.  Coffee at Tim Horton's became far less common as distance separated us. Others entered my life and my heart to walk alongside me through the next stages of my journey.

But always, I knew she cared. Always I knew that she prayed. Always, I knew she read my blog.

She was just scheduled to come home from Florida. I was so eager for them to come home so I could see them again. Coffee at Tim Horton's -- even though I don't drink Tim Horton's coffee much anymore. She would have told me I need to write a book.

But she died this weekend. There will be no more coffees at Tim Horton's, no more quips on Facebook, no more emails. She'll never read this blog. Worst of all, she's not there praying for me anymore.

I know she's with Jesus; she loved him so.  I know I will see her again; that is the promise of Easter. But I'm stunned. I'm heartbroken. I think I'm ok, I tell myself I should be ok, and then I'm broadsided by sadness and want to sob out loud.  I can hardly believe that she's gone. She has meant so very much to me.

I lost a reader this weekend.

Far more importantly, I lost a prayer warrior, a mentor, a model, a reflection of Jesus. This weekend, I lost a friend.

I hope that, from her eternal perspective, she knows how much I love her.  I hope Jesus shows her how he used her in my life. 

I hope it brings glory to him.

Because that's what she would want.

Breaking the Cycle of Slavery

I remember listening to the stories of the Israelites wandering through the wilderness and messing up over and over, and thinking, How could they? How could they be so dumb? How could they be so disbelieving?

They got to the Red Sea and they grumbled.
They ran out of food and they grumbled.
They ran out of water and they grumbled.
They ran into enemy forces and they grumbled.
They ran out of food again, and they grumbled some more.
They got to the land of promise and they grumbled.
They grumbled and complained and moaned and whined until every last one of them was dead in the wilderness.

How could they be so stupid? After all, hadn't they seen God working? Hadn't they seen his mighty acts? Of course they had! So how could they be so miserably thick-headed?

But the more I've thought about it, the more I've lived, the more I've begun to understand.

For four hundred years, they had been slaves in Egypt. For four hundred years, they had been owned by the Egyptian slave-masters. Every waking moment was regulated by their overlords. Their backs were ripped by the whips. Their blood and sweat and tears were drained in the brickyards. Their children were snatched from their arms and killed by the sword or thrown into the river to drown. For four hundred years. There was no one alive who knew anything else, no one alive who even knew anyone who had known anything different. No one who could say, "When my grandfather was a little boy, we were free." The best they could say was, "There was a time, long, long ago, when we were free . . . " but no one knew anyone who remembered it.

And in all of that time, God seemed silent. He allowed their backs to be beaten. He allowed their best years to be spent under the lash of the Egyptian taskmasters in the Egyptian brickyards, until they were bent over and broken and buried in the sand of Egypt. He allowed their children to be snatched and slashed and buried in the river. For four hundred years he watched his people suffer and he did nothing -- nothing that they could see.

So they walked out of Egypt that Passover night with a 400-year-old memory of tears and torture, oppression and persecution, and, perhaps most painful, 400 years of the seeming silence of God. A bunch of plagues, a spectacular crossing at the Red Sea -- those things don't immediately erase a 400-year-old memory. They don't. When things went wrong, it would be easy to think that the things that had gone right were a fluke. When suffering flared back up, it would be easy to think that God had forgotten again. It takes time to build trust -- even with God. I'm not saying it excuses the grumbling. It doesn't  justify the unbelief. I'm just saying I understand.

It's one thing to be physically free. Physical freedom can happen in an instant. In just one night, a Pharaoh can repent and a people can walk free. In just a moment, a person who has been a slave to sin her whole life can be set free by the blood of Jesus Christ. She can go to bed a slave, and wake up free.  In just one moment.  But it's another thing to learn to think free. It takes days and months and years to uncover patterns of slave thinking and to confront it and reject it. It takes time to renew the mind. At first, the fear is natural. It would require a deliberate looking past the evidence to believe that God can be trusted.

But there comes a time when the cycle needs to be broken. At some point, it begins to require a deliberate looking past the evidence to continue to hold onto the fear. The 400 years of slavery have shaped me and marked me. The marks of the whip are still on my back. The scars of the chains encircle my wrists. I can still feel them there. But to allow the years of slavery to continue to hold me is to deliberately pick up the chains and put them back on.  The memories of slavery may still be fresh, but there are new memories:  memories of a sea separating, of a rock splitting and pouring out water, of bread falling from heaven, of a mountain enshrouded with smoke and thunder and earthquake and flame, of an enemy falling back in defeat.  Memories of presence and provision and protection.  Those new memories must be acknowledged, counted, and clung to, not allowed to sink in the swamp of a slavery that no longer exists except in my head.

At what point does that time come? I don't know. For the Israelites, it came between the time they grumbled and snakes entered their camp and the time, very shortly after that, when the priests set foot in the full-flood Jordan and watched the water curl back, and the people crossed over on dry ground.

I used to think the Israelites were stupid. If they were, then I have been equally stupid. Sure, there are always difficulties that have about them the feel of the years of slavery. Sure, the years of slavery have left their scars.  But memories of presence and provision and protection abound. It is time to leave the fear behind. 

It is time to step into the Jordan.