I dug up the past today. I don’t know why. It was hiding in my filing drawer – that overflowing, allegedly organized black hole of papers holding everything from traffic tickets to bank statements. It’s that drawer I crack open every time some leaf of paper makes it into my hands so I can cram stuff in and be done with it. Once something makes it to the filing drawer, it rarely sees sunshine again. But… I got a paper organizer thingy for Christmas, and of course I needed papers to put inside!
Thumbing through my crumpled airplane boarding passes to Jamaica, I tried my best to avoid that file marked “spiritual stuff.” I wasn’t dreading what was inside that folder…prayer lists, scribbled snippets of favorite Scripture, church notes…but I was most certainly dreading the reality that I knew would slap me in the face when I looked back over the past couple years: that God and Time and Life have changed me, right under my very nose. I’ve been picking up on little hints that I’m a new creation, but I hadn’t seen the whole past chapter of my story all spelled out in black and white. And I didn’t really want to. Looking back might prove God’s plan to be an immaculate mountain and mine to be a crummy crumb. Self-righteous control freaks can’t deal with that. However, the organizer in me trumped the freak. I got out my shovel, and went digging.
Why on earth have I saved so many church bulletins over the years? One might say they’re all the same: pretty cover displaying the sermon series, with the inside delineating the call to worship, Apostle’s Creed, and sermon outline. They’re not all the same though. As I was sorting them by date, I thought about how each individual one (habitually creased in half and tossed in the drawer on Sunday afternoon) marks a time where I had sat and soaked in the grace of the gospel. The older ones are filled with silly notes written back and forth between me and my brother or between me and my friends, but the ones from this past year or so make it look like I was listening, really hanging on every word. I was. And still am, increasingly more so. But there are some patterns I accidentally dug up when I lay out these countless bulletins all in order. Patterns that made me remember; patterns that made me cry.
The bulletins from last winter show my true interest and enthusiasm for what was going on during the church service. I was taking thorough notes on the sermons, jotting down inspiring song lyrics I heard. But then in early spring of 2010, it looks like I got bored. Sure, maybe I forgot to bring a pen, but regardless, for about five weeks in a row the bulletins are almost bare, with just a couple shallow notes trickling down the margins. Sitting on my bedroom floor this afternoon and rereading the various sermon outlines, I scolded myself for not making an effort to connect with God’s truth during those months. You may say it’s not that big of a deal, that everyone goes through spiritual dry places, but it rips me up inside to realize that Truth was being spoken straight at me in a time I would need it most, yet I let it slip right through one ear and straight out the other.
In late April, the bulletins reach a gap. My friend Skylar flew away to Jesus on April 27th, and I took a short sabbatical from corporate worship while my grief process festered. I had my faith group supporting me on Wednesday nights at church (and all the time, really), so I remained steady in the Word during those worst weeks of my life, but sitting through the Sunday service felt way too routine after my world had just been dumped upside-down. The gap stretches till June, when the broken pieces of my heart found their way back to my family’s favorite pew, back to note-taking on the trusty bulletins, and back to falling in love with God’s love revealed at Christ Community Church as I rebuilt my life on the joy of the Lord amidst tragedy. I can’t help but wonder, now that I see the full picture, why God allowed me to daydream the service away in the month before Skylar fell, instead of thumping me on the head and preparing my heart for the sorrow and suffering. I’ll never totally understand His reasoning, but He likes it that way.
Well, a pattern really isn’t a pattern unless it repeats itself. There’s a shorter gap in late September, when the saltiest salt from the Dead Sea was poured into my wounds of grief. I had another funeral to attend, another friend to say good-bye to, in that very same funeral home, in that very same cemetery. This bulletin gap was not near as long as the first, because suicide was no new tragedy to my soul. I didn’t spend weeks in grief for Chris. I was back in my Sunday seat after a week or two, still hanging on the pastor’s words like before. I couldn’t sing the worship songs for a while, but my heart and soul were fully present in my worship of God. My flesh simply refused to express it. My lips wouldn’t budge when the band played “How Great is Our God.” I firmly believed that simple and humbling truth, but I couldn’t shout it at the top of my lungs. I stood with my church family and swayed back and forth with the peace God gave me as a dance partner through this new episode of Loss.
I think it’s safe to say that I’m relieved to turn the page on that chapter of my life. Not so I can forget the shadow of death, but so that I can gather up my new strength, my new peace, my new self that has come so far and seek new direction for the new places God, Time, and Life will take me next. It’s so good to have that filing drawer organized, but most importantly, to have dug up the “spiritual stuff” instead of letting myself take the easy way out by burying it all deeper. I pray to never see another repetition of that painful pattern, or another gap in paying my full attention to God’s wisdom in church. It’s out of my hands, though, isn’t it? I’ll rest in the fact that it’s all in my Lord’s hands, and that His hands have already paved the next road I’ll take.
Speaking of hands, it’s time for me to go wash the dirt off of mine. It’s been a lot of digging tonight.
Empty Jars 