H,
You have always known that I am a hurried soul. I am always trying to get things over with or to get over things. I do not try to “suck the marrow out of life”. I just want to survive and get quickly away from everything. This is true even when it is more beneficial to take my time, enjoy the look of everything and learn slowly. I am never able to find my leisure in God.
We are all in a sense, unable to do so. We have been told this is the great unravelling punishment. We are here to die to live with no joy in-between. The idea of enjoying God is foreign. One of the most challenging sentences I have ever read is: “Joy is the serious business of heaven.” When I did get it, I put it all on the side of what we call “suffering and smiling”. The idea that there is a greater thing up there that makes the lesser thing of down here, more palatable, in retrospect.
Yet, all my suppositions and explanations hold no sway to the very idea of real joy. The joy of salvation. The joy of fellowship. The joy of intimacy. The joy of eternity. The joy inherent in all true love. We have felt this before; on those parched Kaduna sands, in that house we called a pillow, and even, further back, in that thrill that the voices may not be unfriendly and the mind may be unfettered from actual, physical reality, to be more, see more and live more. We have felt it and known it and been afraid of it and gone back to the fake homes of pre-destined reason over eternal destination. We know this furious joy in God. We just let it slip away.
But, brother, to find it again. To not be too attached to the idea of what we do and why we do it, to not see purpose as the will of God separate from the pleasure of His people. To not be afraid to imagine that in the wideness of God there is more than is “thought of in all our philosophy”, that there is space to always be on fire and to always be enraptured. And, none of this, in that placebo way of faking it. We will not always smile. It will not always be pleasant. But, to know there is joy there, that the body may die but the spirit will live on, that death is only a door and that we are all part of a larger plot for all the universe. To not carry the heavy-laden burden of the hero but the sweet, tiny weights of love and character. To know that all of this is just a phase, a plan, an uneven road interrupted. To agree that this will pass. But in the now, we have God, in heart and in truth. As father, as friend, as mother, as sister and as everything else thrown in. We can take our time. Like Sam, of quantum leap mythology, we can stop worrying about what the next thing to solve is. We can sit on that stool, ask for anything on tap and sit in the leisure of God.