From
Hebrews 11:1-16

 

H,
These days I vacillate between hope and despair. It is mostly a matter of waking up and how I start the day. I read bad omens like mood and good omens like getting the tea-milk balance just right or a good day of writing against a bad day of trying. It is all hopeless at ten pages of dust or bright and hopeful at five minutes of inspiration. You see the problem with all that? I have reached the limits of mere hope. Faith is what is needed now.

 

It is faith that allows us to see the opportunity for change in every stumbling block. It is the thing we need now in the presence of this dark mold of absolute buffoonery that leads our country. That is high talk. What about our own day to day encounters with the limits of our control? Those brushes with our own weakness and bumbling acts of failure that we are more forgiving of because we know the full story. Well, put that in the bag too and let us trudge up this hill to try and make sense of things.

 

Lately, I have had the sense that I am completely alone. I do not mean this in any metaphoric sense but in real terms. I meet and talk and share but my heart is hardly in it. I always want to be somewhere else. So, of course, I never want to be anywhere. It is too easy a thing to get caught up in the faults around you, in the high jinks of governance and the low rustles of work and career. It is a necessary escape from the absolute questions of character and truth. If we do enough and make enough progress it is easy to not handle who we are and the way we treat others. The only signal we have of falling is that we do not have those necessary acts of love in the way we live. We can change a government but we cannot change ourselves. We can provide for all things but we cannot elevate anything into wonder.

 

I am reminded of those patriarchs we study in the Bible and their incredible journeys of faith. The stories become so familiar that we lose the miracle in each of them. We lose the epic nature of Abram becoming Abraham by seeing a nation when he did not have a child or Moses seeing deliverance for this nation when all they and he knew was the reality of slavery and the safety of the slaver. Or us, right now, believing in perfection when all we see is fault or in good when all around is the evil dark. We give up on ourselves, on others, on our nation and on the idea of the regeneration to come because we do not know that the journey is not a story in the living but only in the telling. It is more about the character it will breed than the things it will do. This is not an empire of walls and gates but a coming glory built on love, truth, kindness and a clean heart that sees only forever.

 

In that sense, we are always in the walk of faith. We might not like the lack of a movie score or the dirt and grime of coming awake to our lack of and need of God in a real, communing sense. We do not want to think we have made no progress all these years. Our minds are still results driven and we are counting years and seeking milestones of greatness. It is a time for heroes but the best of them come from the worst of vulnerability. It always starts with a call to kneel and ends with a lesson in worship. We are not that light that we once were but we were never that. We had flashes and thought we had reached the peak. The ascent is just beginning.