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Minutes of Meetings with God |
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Off Balance ... |
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| Off balance, fragmented and going in about 37 trillion different
directions at once, that's about how I feel, you know, normal. However, in
addition to the normal pandemonium ("pan" means "everything," "demonium"
means "going to the devil," or something like that) in my life, I've been
experiencing a gnawing frustration, a restless undercurrent of anger and
dissatisfaction, stuff I mostly target at myself and that I allow to overshadow
my joy.
It's hard to really describe. It's not that things are terribly wrong in my life, it's that things are almost, but just not quite right. It's sort of like one of those optical illusion pictures that fool around with how the eye focuses. Things look clear, but really aren't and it causes vertigo if the illusion is looked at for too long. Maybe that is what has been happening in me, a sort of spiritual vertigo, a sense of being off center and not really balanced, a kind of unwelcome dizziness. What is particularly troubling about my current condition is, there doesn't seem to be much that is really firm to grasp to steady myself. Everything seems to be more or less spinning in the strangest and most unexpected ways. As usual, questions arise from deep inside me, questions about "why evil?" "must good people suffer?" "where is justice among us human beings?" "must we make the same mistakes and sin the same sins over and over again?" and still other questions. I feel rather like C.S. Lewis must have when he penned the words: When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of "No answer." It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook his head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, "Peace, child; you don't understand." Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are there in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask, half our great theological and metaphysical problems, are like that. No doubt God persistently speaks "peace" to me, and kindly tolerates my inability to understand but my impatience disturbs the peace and I am terribly intolerant of my own inability "to get it." I really, really do not understand so much of what is going on in and around my life. I want to know what all of this stuff that is going on is about and I want to know, now! A big "chunk" of my "spiritual vertigo" simply comes from being human. We frail mortals cannot really "understand it all." Another big chunk of my condition is about "readiness." There is something about us as human beings that demands that we have to have a certain amount of experience and understanding of life in general before we can comprehend and give meaning to other new things and experiences. For whatever reason, I am probably just not ready to understand what is going on right now. And, yet another big chunk of my condition has to do with trust, the single most important lesson that life has to teach is about developing a fundamental trust in God. I am not a very trusting person for a pretty large number of reasons. Trust has to do with relying on God to work all things together for good although God seems hidden and the circumstances shout that everything is going bad. I, for one, have a hard time just trusting God. God keeps trying to teach me... but ... This summer, for example, my wife Susie was out working in her flower beds. Her garden is one of her great joys. Someone stopped by to talk to Susie and, as she took off her gardening gloves, she noticed that the gemstone was gone from the setting in her Lindy Star ring. Now that ring is the one that I gave her as our friendship/engagement ring almost 30 years ago. The "star" in this stone was visible because of the extra fine finish that had been given to the gem, it wasn't one of the less expensive "etched" stars. The stone had been lost out of it once before and it was terribly hard to find a replacement and took years to get it fixed. Susie was afraid that the stone was gone again and maybe this time we wouldn't be able to get it repaired. We said a little prayer that we would find that Lindy Star. Susie checked inside the glove, no gem stone. She checked her pockets, just in case the stone had come off when she had reached for a facial tissue, no gem stone. We scoured the flower bed where she had been working, no gem stone. Then we checked the grass around the flower bed, still, no stone. I pretty much figured that the stone was lost and gone forever. Then, one Sunday morning, several weeks later as I was desperately trying to get myself out the door so I could get to church on time, without forgetting anything important (like bulletins, my sermon, the cassette recorder and a tape, shoes that match, trousers, etc.) Susie hailed me from the laundry room. She said, "Michael, how do you take that agitator thing out of the washing machine? Just tell me how." My reply was: "Say what?" and "Why?" I was more than a little confused by the request and a bit annoyed at the timing of it (I really was almost out the door ...) Susie excitedly explained that as she was unloading clothes from the washer, she saw some thing that looked like the Lindy Star slide under the agitator. She just had to check and see if it really was the stone. Although I figured that what Susie had seen was just a small rock that had fallen out of a pair of my jeans, I quickly yanked the agitator from the washer (it was faster and easier than trying to tell her how to do it... "a guy thing, eh?"). There on the bottom of the washer tub was the Lindy Star, undamaged. What an amazing event. A little bit of miracle touched our lives. God provided another lesson in trust (our prayer was answered in the most unexpected way). The problem of the lost gem stone was solved. We have no notion of how it got in the funny place it ended up. Susie and I gave each other a quick hug and a kiss in celebration of the find and gave God a hardy "Thank you". And I rushed out the door to church. C.S. Lewis also wrote: Heaven will solve our problems. We shall see that there never was a problem. And, more than once, that impression which I can't describe except by saying that it's like the sound of a chuckle in the darkness. The sense that some shattering and disarming simplicity is the real answer. Now... what is the first rule of "wing-walking" and who is that I hear chuckling? |