Friday, May 24, 2013

The Last Post (for now)


For three years we wandered through the desert. Often alone, sometimes together, always with our eyes turned toward something that we could not quite see. But that unseen something was our goal; it was what kept us going.

We used various names at different times to describe it — our calling, our formation, our deepening knowledge, our developing authority, our burgeoning leadership. But it was always something “out there,” something just out of reach and slightly out of focus.

In the midst of all the trials and travails of the journey, we doubted the thing that we followed. We did not believe that we would reach it or understand it or become it. We started to think that the unseen thing was actually just something we had made up, something that was now standing in the way of the work that was before us.

And then the work became the thing. So much work. Painful, back-breaking loads of work. Working till we thought we could not go on and then working some more. And writing and reflecting and reflecting and writing. Turning inward. Turning inward again. Turning inward even more till we tired of ourselves.

Somehow we supported each other. We wept together, laughed together, were homesick together and then missed each other when we had returned home. We learned to love each other at the same time we drove one another crazy.

But one day while working, while preaching, while listening, while encouraging, while enduring, we discovered that we knew things we had not known before. We discovered that the thing that was so distant at the beginning of our journey was no longer so far away.

In fact, we never did quite see that unseen thing. But we felt it. We experienced it. We shared it. What we once carried in the sacred ark of somewhere else now dwelt within us. And it was in this way that we became vessels of the holy, carriers of untold blessings, containers, if not masters, of divinity.

Here is where the beginning ends. Here is where opening up begins to move us in the infinite spiral dance out beyond the known and unknown, with something like a song in our hearts.