It’s that time of year here in China where the Lunar New Year celebrations take over everything and the world is awash in red lanterns and banners. The boom and crack of fireworks can be heard all throughout the day and night, as city restrictions on the use of them has somehow (along with COVID restrictions) been strangely and suddenly lifted.
As I walked our neighborhood this morning with Zoë (without my phone, and thus no pictures), the courtyard and streets were all covered in red debris, reminding me of our early days in Qingdao when we would wade through the aftermath of New Year fireworks and marvel. It’s been years since we’ve seen those kinds of displays here though, due to government crack down.
This strange and sudden lifting of limitations has been both remarkable and nostalgic. Our family traveled to Beijing for a few days to have a sort of staycation, and it was like a dream, getting on subways and trains and entering buildings, all without the scanning of codes or requirement of covid tests. We came and went freely, and it was like we barely remembered that just a few weeks ago, our lives had been entirely hemmed in and controlled by rules that somehow evaporated overnight.
The past three years have been difficult on so many levels and in no way do I think the regulations this entire country has endured were necessary or good. It’s safe to say that I am fully rejoicing in these long-desired freedoms. Even the fireworks are giving me a kind of joy, reminding me of some of the charms I have come to appreciate about living in this place.
Here’s a funny thing, though. In a way, the limitations we experienced did bring about good in our lives. I have seen the good of course, only in time, and in slow and small ways. I have seen it in areas I wasn’t asking for or expecting. Some of the good may still be yet to come, or to be seen. It’s also hard to say whether these particular limits are the only ways this good could have come about in our lives. I know only that it is what God used.
Paradox sits in the bones of our human experience, but is no stranger to the way God inhabits the world. Jesus is full of inverted truths that don’t seem to make sense to the way we naturally understand our lives or the world when he says things like:
it is the poor who are rich,
the blind who see,
the dying who live,
the suffering who are blessed,
the limited who are free.
If you are a Christian or have grown up on these words, they may sound so familiar as to not be astounding. But it takes some courage to live as if they are true.
I feel this need for courage whenever I am faced with embracing limitations on my life that appear to bring about loss, not flourishing. How can this loss be good? It’s a question that anyone who experiences limitations in body, in circumstance, in place, must certainly face.
It’s important to distinguish between saying the limit itself is good, and the possibility for the limitation to lead to good. Death is not good. Suffering is not good. Oppression is not good. And the list could go on. What is astounding is the possibility for something so entirely not good to be transformed.
We have inklings of this transformation in our mimetic ability to take broken, discarded, lifeless forms and arrange them into things of beauty. I think of the Japanese art of Kintsugi or the “victory gardens” made in WWII internment camps— both concrete ways of responding to the ugliness of life and transforming it into a thing of beauty.
These examples seem to point to a truth that lies beyond the mere physical. If we make beauty out of brokenness or meaning out of suffering only for this present and embodied life, it still seems a waste, something that blows away in the wind and is gone. Jesus shows us that both the physical and the spiritual transformations are important; both reflect reality. This surprising inversion that God makes possible is seen most powerfully in the resurrection, where not only a body, but an entire spiritual reality is forever transformed. For good.
Maybe it feels like a far leap, to go from something like the limits of my COVID-restricted life in China to the resurrection. It’s not as though I rehearsed all of these things in my head every time we had to go take a mandated test or have our code scanned. But in my core, as I trace the response of my inner spirit through tears or worries to the things I have had no control over, I am led back to the One who stands there with his hands held out, the nail scars still there for us to (one day) see.
Some of the good I can already see. And some of it I am entrusting to God, believing that what he says about the world and the way it works is true.
I am praying the same for you.