For the past three months, the news of death and illness has hung it’s weight across my heart.
Those that have passed on include one of my husband’s oldest friends, one of my dad’s friends, my friend’s baby, several people I once went to church with, a youth leader I knew and cherished.
My dad’s best friend has been in the hospital. A family friend is at the hospital with their son.
There are daily updated death tolls for the flu as it kills children and mothers and no one is giving any really good reasons for why some people live and some people don’t.
There are new stories every day of children killed by their parents, women murdered by the men they let into their lives.
School shootings – and the most recent one is feeling like the final straw within me, we weight of it all is too much.
And all of that is just American news.
There is so much sadness in the world, so much brokenness, so much we can’t control.
I wonder if there used to be a time where death, sadness, loss, heartbreak, and need used to pull people together and make us try harder to be better to ourselves and one another.
I look around for a someone who has words of comfort and direction for us. All I really hear is noise – everyone yelling, everyone scared, everyone broken, everyone indignant and angry and grasping and tired.
I feel the temptation to be discouraged and afraid. I feel the pull towards isolation and numbing. I see the opportunity to join in with the fury of the crowds. Words crawl across my tongue, itch at my fingers, pulse in my chest. Reactions.
I don’t want it. I don’t want to give in. I want to dig in, deeper. I want to sink into the substance of my soul and listen to the stillness that says the things said by the Divine Love and the Divine Healer when we are quiet enough, when we are humble enough, when we are open enough.
There is not one easy answer and yet there is one true light in the darkness, one true salve of comfort, one true presence of peace, one true source of wisdom, one true power that overcomes and it all lies within the space in which we welcome who we know to be God.
We often keep our God in a building, a book, a box, a list. We often pull God out at specified times, for only certain purposes. We keep a neat God in a messy world but what we need to do is set God loose around us and within us to wreck every system we have worshiped and turned to in place of the Holy One. We are being called to a wilder faith, a wider reach – beyond our comfort and our homes beyond our selves. The world is pulsing with an ache and we have something to contribute to a better way of being.
Light and Love and Faith don’t bring an end to tragedy or hurt but they bring a healing and a wholeness to us that change the outcomes of even the worst things.
I don’t mean they make them less bad. I don’t mean they explain them or settle them. I mean they lift us beyond them and do a holy work and that does matter. That does change everything, though it may fix nothing.
But not everything must be fixed, can be fixed. Some things must be endured, overcome.
The underlying evil that divides us and destroys us must be overcome. We need our armor and we need to understand our enemy is not flesh and blood though it uses flesh and blood to do it’s bidding.
Not believing in or acknowledging spiritual warfare doesn’t decrease it’s carnage, it just allows it to cover more ground.
Let us put on our armor and let us set loose the powers of the Heavenly Realms and let us fight the good fight with a sense of hope and purpose so that the darkness does not overcome us.
Our whole life is a battlefield and we need to go into it daily prepared. And that requires spiritual armor, spiritual disciplines, and prayer.
But I don’t mean prayers like what have we have come to know as the often trite phrase “thoughts and prayers”. I don’t mean a passing prayer. I mean the kinds of prayers that drop you to the floor and bring about a wrenching cry from your gut. I mean the kinds of prayers that cause your whole body to shake and sobs to escape against your will. I mean the kinds of prayers that move your lips without your knowledge, that raise your hands to the air, that make you look foolish and out of control. Those prayers.
We don’t need mere religion with all of it’s rules and denominations. We have plenty of religion. We need intimate relationships with the Holy One that supersede any lines or barriers our society and culture has in place. We need to be doggedly determined to defeat the demons that roam our homes and streets and schools and hearts. We are all guilty. We are all complicit. And yet, we are all redeemable. We are all made in God’s image. We are all capable of being part of a revolution. In our hearts, in our homes, in our schools, in our streets.
We don’t need any policy changes to do the things we are called to do.
But will we do them? Will we abandon our sides, our opinions, our wants, our fears, our personal agendas. our comfort zones and will we join forces to defeat the Great Darkness that constantly attacks us? Will we?
If we will then we are called to bring the Good News of God’s love and redemption, we are called to wear the truth of God’s love and mercy around us, we are called to do the right thing even when it is a hard thing or not a thing the world around us (even our family or friends) wants us to do, we are called to spread peace where there is dissension, we are called to have faith where there is cynicism and doubt eating away at the good, to use the words of God not to fight one another as we have been, but to fight the enemy who is a liar and manipulator working to turn us against one another. We are to protect ourselves with the knowledge that we are precious and loved and our souls are safe so that when the ruler of the darkness starts to whisper in our ear that we are nothing, no one, and not good enough we can toss off those evil lies and see them for what they are – tricks being used to weaken us.
This is the battle we are called to first and foremost and always. If anything needs to change, it is this, it is us, it is me.
There is nothing else, this is everything – what we do with our souls is everything. All else will fade away one day. We must turn our eyes to the Light and we must let it change us from the inside out.
