Scraped Knees / Time / Futile Words

Scraped Knees.

Today Brad Jersak preached. He said the most radical thing ever is that God who is spirit in all the universe—an omnipotent presence—effused himself into one tiny man, a dot on the earth. God becoming man is the most radical idea ever. I have been thinking about the magnitude of that. He came as a servant, no less.

That God would have a scraped knee so he could empathize with every child. How humble, that God needed to experience every part of the human struggle so he could overcome each one for our sake. “God cannot redeem something he has never experienced.” How about that.

Time.

From Jeremy:

"But time goes by. Whether I care or not my existence will be a blip, far less than a hiccup in this galaxy. Time will not care. I once heard a newborn infant squirm out of its mother and whisper a profound phrase that grips me: “love remains.” That's what gets me, abstract words that we associate with deeper meaning and emotions will surpass us and build on our skeletons that are tossed into the institution of history."

I find so much freedom in knowing I am but a blip, a hiccup. It reminds me that what I am doing and why I am living is so far beyond me. What pride people have in trying to make a name for themselves. Even a great monolith is but dust in a cave eventually.

He says, "The reality is like medicine to sore souls from trying."

It is not hard to smile when you know the ending, when you know all pain gets filtered through a channel that leads to the foot of a tree, that crawls up the trunk and slithers down the branches, down the arms of a man hanging like a monkey and he screams not only because he takes the pain but because he is purifying it, the man like a monkey who is the mouth of the channel and like a fountain he spits the pain out and yet it does not appear as it did in the channel; what leaves him is something altered, something fresh, something like living water.

Futile Words.

There is a certain futility to words. What can one say in the face of trauma. I see their eyes even though I am far away. “Miscarriage.” Seeds, buds, then a dead flower. Can you imagine the feeling of a flower wilting inside of you. And what do you say. I am sorry to hear that? What does that mean? I am not sorry to hear that, I am thankful you told me, so I can grieve with you. I begin to rot. But instead shouldn't the news compel me to appreciate the fact I was plucked out of the garden and brought into the light? I made it into the light so I could bloom, and here I am now. Here I am not blooming but rotting. The air tastes like dirt. My ground has been shaken and the soil spills everywhere, climbs into the sky searching for a way out of this orb, into space, into no place, any place definitely not this place.

I say again, I feel my words are futile. At this moment presence is the only thing that matters. I would only sit. I have written words but I despise myself for writing them, I judge my nearsightedness, my inability to grasp the gravity of what happened. The mouth of my hands choke as they form words, there is spit on the page. 

We must learn to always, always receive words with grace; it is so difficult to give the right words.

Perhaps today the beauty I see in Christianity is that is is Connectedness. That we can all be In One, that we can all take a portion of the pain, that we can enter into pain as one spiritual community united by one suffering body, by one God, and sit in the same place, spiritually. There are no words but there is sitting.