She says: Want to know what keeping a promise feels like? I’ll be available to you every night for one hour. I won’t make small talk. I won’t socialize. Don’t expect me to be charming. I will be supportive. I will answer any questions. I will supply any facts. I will hear any ramble. Every night you pay me for my time with a blog. For that one hour, every night, I’ll be your beck and call grrl.
And that was my incentive to catch up on my blog. It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t very impassioned or intelligent or even very Christian. There were several threads of hypocrisy. But it was real and it was proof that I’m only human. I have never given in to a bully but I gave in quite easily to this bribe.
So I’m playing catch up. Ketchup. With faith as small as a mustard seed. But Christ assures me, while I blush and run my hands through my hair and relearn to type in txtspk, that even that seed is enough.
You’ve got to start somewhere when you’re starting all over again.
The world can be... no... let’s start again. The world *is* ripped out from under our feet not only when we least expect it but by forces we never expect. The photo of an orphaned child on the front of the discarded paper in the coffee shop. The way the baristta tosses her curls. The clouds broken like san skit glyphs across the sky. A pale blue rose dying in the vase at the local bookstore.
I never saw the train coming. My earbuds were in and my feet were dancing, my hands were raised skyward and my voice was raised in halleluiahs. I never saw the train coming even as I danced down the tracks.
The world is ripped away by the casual glance of a friend, eyes filled with tears that drown everything into bleak perspective. The world crumbles and falls inward, spins outward and away and we find ourselves standing in a void so impossibly dark, black hole dark, that not even our own words can escape the event horizon even as insults, fears, and other jagged things come spiraling in almost out of control.
You are a bad leader.
You’re an ineffectual father.
You haven’t been a good friend.
You were never what I wanted.
It is sometimes so stunning to hear what one person will say to another. I am sitting here listening to strangers. My earbuds are in but the music is off. The blue rubber-coated thread of the wire weaves into my pocket but attaches to nothing. I gaze out the café window. I sip my hot Earl Grey. I listen to strangers. I listen to the things they say not in anger or tones of attack, but rather the things they say with a grin or a nod or a knowing crease of their brows.
You think you know everything but you don’t.
You’re really not right for that job.
I could solve all your problems if only you’d listen.
You choose to shoulder it all; no one asked you to.
Our mustard seed of faith is buried under the onslaught of careless compost that our loved ones can dump on us in the spirit of honesty. This isn’t to mention the truck loads of garbage that strangers and the opposition and our competitors will haul in and pour on our heads. These are just the well-meaning comments.
It’s your favorite color, but not really your best.
I like you a little over-weight.
You’re trying to hide it, but you really don’t look well.
You can’t continue to push yourself. You’ll break.
Maybe I want to break. Maybe I want to push. Maybe I want to fill every moment of my life to its rim and then jump in and swim. Maybe I’ve found my balance walking on fire and my only problem is that you don’t want to walk with me. Maybe my faith is so much bigger than a mustard seed. Maybe my faith is a crisp fall apple. Maybe my faith is my deep red heart. Maybe my faith is a boulder, my laughter in a room, my tears when you hurt me, my voice when I scream.
Maybe my faith is the moon... or every constellation.
Let go, let God. You are holding on so tightly that you’re crushing me. You are making it impossible for me to give it up to Him. Aurora borealis couldn’t escape your grip. Don’t make Him work a miracle just to hear you pray: Lord, take this off me. Show me the way.
In His time. Only and always in His time. He makes us wait not because He can and not because it teaches us some lesson. He makes us wait because He has a reason. Christ is not chaos theory. His father is not cause-and-effect. All things for a reason and all things in His time. We need only to trust... with our mustard seed.
Do you see the cycle that emerges? How we make miracles impossible for one another. How we press down the seed too far, bury faith beneath life and piles of bills and bundles of problems. The cliché that we find it so easy to fix everyone else’s lives but our own. But as mortals full up of flaws, we don’t fix other people’s lives. Only Christ fixes lives. We all too easily mistake criticism, ego and control for help. We will just as easily crush the seed of hope as we will nurture it, and worst of all: Many of us don’t even know it.
I ask myself this before I open my mouth:
Will any good come of it?
Those who cannot do, teach. I have never believed that. But I do believe, those who cannot hope, crush everyone around them.
Many of my friends have argued this point with me for hours and evenings on end. The idea that sometimes the saying is wrong: If you have nothing good to say, say nothing at all. I disagree and I will always disagree. I may not always be able to shut my trap but I have found every time that voicing criticism and negativity only breeds more of the same. It is a mold, a virulent strain of dis-ease that spreads and sprouts crops of doubt, of distrust, of discontent.
I wish we all could have that seed as big as the night time sky. I wish we all were warriors like Athena, like Hercules, like Virgo. I wish we all could take everything the world dumps on us and survive gracefully every time it crumbles from beneath our feet.
I think that will be my prayer tonight. To give the rest of us bigger seeds. Bigger hope. Faith as bright as dawn.
EJ
