Sometimes I lock my thoughts away and let them have a field day only in my own head. It's as if I forget how much I crave banter and fairly intelligent conversation and let it course under my skin but never surface.
This summer's been a weird one. I didn't expect that. Last summer was full of little oddities, and I fully planned for that. The first summer post-my-new-life...naturally that's going to feel a little funny and not quite normal. It was a lonely summer, though I was never alone. This summer, however, I've been much more alone, though I haven't been lonely. For that I'm grateful.
I was sitting in a worship service the other night listening to my friend Greg preach on love, and out of nowhere, I was deluged with flashbacks from my experience during the hurricane in 2005. Literally, memories I had blocked for nearly two years came rushing back to me without a trigger and without any connection to what was going on around me. I sat on the cold linoleum tile and closed my eyes and pulled my knees in close. It lasted about 20 minutes, and I endured it with much more composure than I could have hoped for.
Fairly unconnected (though nothing in my thought process is truly ever unconnected), I've been reading The Mermaid Chair, and today I came across a passage about how life in a monastery is much like a tiny experiment in life...an attempt to actually live together in peace and love...to coexist. It stuck out to me that this sort of existence should happen outside of cloisters as well, right? Sometimes I wonder if that's what Christianity is or not. It's what it should be...a web of human experience enduring this life with grace and love that's not our own. Why is it, then, that we hurl rocks at one another? We throw grenades, we attack, and we sit back to watch the aftermath. There's a sadism to the way we treat one another despite our call to do exactly the opposite. How are we to show the difference Christ makes in our lives if we are too busy chipping away at our relationships?
"A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another." -John 13:34-35
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1 comment:
i read this. i don't have anything i feel like i should say, really. but i wanted you to know that i read it. because maybe that means something. i dunno.
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