holy

Today I woke up feeling like someone took a baseball bat to me while I was sleeping.  My whole body ached, as it does every now and then, a side effect from the medicines I’m on to prevent a cancer recurrence.  I groaned as I climbed out of bed.  Ouch.  And I groaned again when I realized I’m due for a new round of treatments tomorrow morning.  No way.

I washed down a handful of Ibuprofen with my morning coffee, and then drove to church.  At the beginning of the service we commemorated Martin Luther King, Jr. and we prayed as a congregation that God would bring restoration to Portland – which, in spite of its progressiveness, struggles with deep racial divides.

I thought of what it would take for reconciliation in our community.  The white people letting go of their blindness and pride and hate, and the blacks relinquishing their right to feel wounded by the injustices they’ve suffered.

Both sides have to commit to pressing in until the broken parts are whole.  Both sides have to let go of their darkness and create space for reconciliation – a space that may not be filled for a long time.

 

But sometimes the darkness has to go before the light can ever come.

During his sermon, Pastor Rick said that hard things in life aren’t easy or painless, but they’re holy.  Often the work God’s called us to do, the trials He’s called us to go through, the people He’s called us to love —  and the ways He’s called us to love them –are unsavory and unfair.   But all the pain we suffer in our bodies and in our relationships are tiny mirrors of the way God suffered to love the world.  Not just the world in general, I realized as I was kneeling at the Communion table, but the way God has suffered to love me.

For God so loved the world….in its aching to be made whole.

For God so loved the world….in painful nights and empty spaces.

For God so loved the world….in a million sacred moments.

For God so loved the world.

Wholly, holey, holy.

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