It is spring break, and it feels neither like spring nor like a break. We have been home, where the weather has rewarded us with cold, wet days forcing us to pull out all the sweatshirts and blankets. We’ve been sorting and cleaning, getting ready for the new life ahead of us and preparing to say goodbye to our life here. In a fitting sort of way, the rain and the cold and the clearing out have created a reflective mood— it’s also Holy Week after all. The week of weeks where we remember how the world turned upside down.
I’ve been thinking a lot in recent days about what it looks like to change the world. Major life events will do that to you: funerals, weddings, births, graduations, mid-life crisis, mid-life moves— they can lead you to ask the question, what am I doing with my life? What difference have I made, or will I make? Does what I’m doing with my days even matter?
Cleaning out old drawers and finding a bag full of goodbye notes can be both encouraging and defeating; a realization of some impact you may have made, or a realization of how little it mattered. Preparing to leave one place you’ve given your personal and professional self to for almost two decades inevitably leads to assessing where you’ve failed, where you want to grow, where you worry you wasted your efforts or could have done more. Preparing to send your child off into the world leads to the same sorts of questions. We joke that this is why we keep having more children— giving ourselves a second, third, fourth… sixth chance to figure it out.
At some level, we humans are always asking these questions. It’s what drives our politics, our personal pursuits, our longing for change. Sometimes our search for meaning is buried far below the activities of our actual lives, and sometimes it rises to the surface and smack us in the face with its intense longing for answers.
As I’ve floated around in this reflective space, asking these larger than life questions while buttering toast and folding socks, several scenes have come to mind, giving me a place in which to set these questions down and rest awhile. They are scenes from stories I’ve been reading or listening to, which is what Off The Shelf is meant to be about: a place to reflect on reading and writing and faith and family and all the things that rumble around in our lives.
Scene #1:
A young priest finds himself in a small country parish in France, where the people are coarse and filled with all manner of sins against which he finds himself unable to make any sort of impact. In fact, he is ridiculed, scoffed at, gossiped about, looked down upon, and rejected in every way. He feels himself useless and small, a failure and a joke. Within a few months time, he discovers he is suffering from a fatal illness that eventually takes his life.
What he does not see, but what the reader of, The Life of a Country Priest sees, is that the priest’s suffering is not in vain. His small and misunderstood existence is the very kind of life that Jesus said overcomes the world.
Scene #2:
A middle-aged man sits in an upstairs room in his mother’s home. She is in her eighties and struggling with cognitive issues, and he needs to be there a lot. But he also has a career to manage, a job to do— one that might appear to promise influence and purposeful existence, but has also had its share of disappointments. Books that have failed to sell, business pursuits that have not flourished in the way he imagined. What he now ponders is a paradigm that is not flashy and is hard for most of the successful sectors of our world to acknowledge: that maybe we have wrongly assumed that Impact in the world is our greatest goal. Maybe our equation is wrong.
I see this man in his upstairs office, tending to the needs of his aging mother and seeing his impact in the world diminish before his eyes, and I see another life laid down for the sake of love. The kind of life that Jesus said would overcome the world.
Scene #3:
A woman gets up, leaving her simple bedroom with few personal belongings, walking through the rooms of the house where she and other volunteers give day in and day out to serve the poor and homeless. She struggles with discouragement. There is so little fruit for all their sacrifice and labor. People don’t really change. Suffering is everywhere. Setbacks are constant. Often she wonders if it has any worth, this life she has pursued since the day she sensed God’s hand on her life. She walks outside, breathes in the fresh air and hears the birdsong. She sits in the church and prays and later writes down words, honest words, searching words, of the sudden comfort and certainty of God’s love. That this is small and seemingly inconsequential life, is the kind of life that overcomes the world.
Scene #4
It is Thursday evening, and the disciples are gathered with Jesus for what they do not realize is their final supper together. A lot happens during this meal. And the disciples have a lot of questions. They are good questions, ones that we are all asking, maybe even still today. Judas (not Iscariot) has an especially poignant one: “Lord, how is it that you will reveal yourself to us, and not to the world?” This question has echoes of ones we still ask. What does it look like to pray for Thy kingdom come? And what kinds of expectations should we have? Does it have political outcomes? Cultural change? Should lives be transformed, crowds assembled? How can your kingdom come to some, but not everyone sees it?
Jesus answer is not as clear as I’d like it to be. But it is profound. He talks about love and what it looks like to love the Father and to be loved by the Father. He talks about giving them the Holy Spirit. He says he will give them peace, but not as the world gives it. Don’t be afraid, he says, even though there is evil in the world. It has no power over Him, or over the love of the Father. He keeps coming back to this love.
To talk about love seems almost cliché and quaint. Like an easy way out, instead of coping with the actual problems of the world. Or like we’ve reduced the problem of evil and sin to a therapeutic resolution. Holy Week invites us to see love in all its concrete and powerful reality. To step into the scenes of the historical event of Jesus’ death and resurrection on the earth, and to sit with his words, and to ask ourselves, is this the life that overcomes the world?
It’s no small thing to ask, and I’m not sure I will ever stop asking it. Everything around us screams in opposition to the way of Jesus, the way of the cross. It’s a daily exercise to come back to the feet of our Savior, to look at his nail-scarred hands, and to hold out our empty ones and say, “is this enough?”
I continue to hear Him saying, “It is.” What he has done is everything. What we bring is nothing.
But where is the fruit, we ask? Where is the impact?
Maybe it’s buried. Maybe it’s hidden. Maybe it’s not our concern.