Dear Faith Family,
When something feels different, often our initial question is: What’s wrong? Think about the last time your spouse or friend mentioned, perhaps offhandedly, that they didn’t feel right. Did you not, like the excellent spouse and friend you are, press in asking, “What’s wrong?” or “What’s the problem?” Of course, you did!
Instinctually, or at least culturally, when we or those near us experience something different, something other than the status quo, we assume the origin of the unsettlement is a disorienting crisis: some pain point of faith, within self, or among relationships. Perhaps that is because the experiences of disorientation are jolting. Whether microbial stings or cataclysmic shifts, pain forces us, pushes us, does violence against our state of stability. So naturally, those memories stick in and stick out in our minds, hearts, and prayers. And it is amid these pain points that we have been learning to pray via our Psalms of Lent.
Yet, pain is not the only unsettling experience in life. Goodness and mercy, too, are violent. Goodness and mercy, too, have the force to knock us out of death and into life. Goodness and mercy are enough to push us out of the narrow confines of life lived in the dark of sin (our own and another’s) into the wide open spaces of something new. New things, like painful things, can be unsettling too. At least, that is what we learned from Psalm 102 on Sunday.
We can all recall those times when goodness and mercy caught us in a way that made everything feel different. Whether you were caught off guard by a kind word, a just-at-the-right-moment encounter, or the arrival of daily bread. Or you were raptured in tears by a fellow human’s courage, a form of beauty, or the end of some evil. Each of us experience moments when we sense in body and soul that the world is not as dim as it seems, that there is more to life than we can see, and that we are not merely tossed around by random forces but caught up in something magnificently more.
May days are like an everlasting shadow; I wither away like grass. But you, O LORD, are enthroned forever…set free those who were doomed to die…. (Psalm 102:11-12, 20)
Amongst the many amazing graces of goodness and mercy knocking us out of the darkness of pain and reviving an atrophied heart is the push often comes from a person. Certainly, the Spirit’s presence and providence are evident, at least in hindsight, in the expanding light of reflection. But the initial contact that shifted our status quo arrived through another human not too dissimilar from you or me.
So, what if you and I, having been recipients of the force of goodness and mercy from another’s words or actions toward us, assumed we, too, might be the instruments of reviving violence? What if we entered into our ordinary roles and relationships, assuming we may get to be the means of a push out of darkness and dismay into light and life? What if we believed today, whether in our home, workplace, neighborhood, school, or friendships, it had been planned that we’d be the evidence of goodness and mercy chasing after our fellow humans?
For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. (Ephesians 2:10)
What if you lived ready to give a push of goodness and mercy to your children, your spouse, your friend, your employee, your employer, and even your enemy? What if, more than any other force you could muster or design or will, such a God-attuned heart could actually change a life, unsettle it into something new and more? What if you believed it, desired it, and woke up ready to be a part of another’s resurrection?
May you (we) be willing to push others around with words and actions of goodness and mercy and so practice and participate in resurrection.
Love you, faith family! God bless.