I can't help but think that some stories exist to help us sort out human spiritual experience, and even though this one is about horses, for heaven sake, it seems to have a metanarrative twist. There is much about God and Scripture and life that remains a complete mystery to me, and yet I believe in God as my Helper, and that only He can help us withstand the vagaries of life and death and draw a path through incomprehensible adversity…Up north where I grew up and where Mom lives on an acreage next to Dallas, my youngest brother, you can see his small herd of horses ranging across the pastures. They are visible from almost any window in the house; they graze, roll, freak themselves out over who knows what from time to time flagging their tails and galloping to the end of the field and back again.
One night last summer a neighbor's stallion sniffed the air and found it ripe with the scent of a particular mare. Intoxicated and following his nose, he jumped the fence, ran a great distance and broke through another fence to be with the mare that called him out of celibacy.
The next morning Dallas found them together. From his point of view it surely wasn't going to be a planned pregnancy if that was the result. He called the owner who decided his stud needed to be gelded. Dallas knows how to do that…a skill passed down from father to father for several generations. However, the procedure was complicated because the owner had never handled this horse, not so much as laid a rope across his back. He was three years old and apparently only around for his handsome looks. So the men waited to catch him until he was engrossed with the mare, then he was roped and dropped. In the wild struggle that followed the stallion gashed his head against a post in the corral. As others held him down, hog-tied and haltered, Dallas cut the offending organs, poured on disinfectant and he rose with blood running down his flanks. That part is normal and inevitable in the process of gelding. Wearing a halter and lead for the first time in his life, snubbed to the back of a pickup, he learned to walk with it, following it all the long way home.
Not long ago, about a year after his trip to the mare, the now gelding escaped his pasture again, just for the joy of it I guess, no sex luring him this time. His owner was a habitually impatient kind of guy with everything and everyone including his wife. Inconvenienced and in a rage, he shot the horse with a rifle in the driveway. Just like that. His wife called Dallas, crying. But what could he do? Sheriff responsibilities don't cover such things though he felt badly.
This story doesn't transition perfectly to application for obviously the horse didn't know he would be captured, wounded, and eventually shot. Unlike Jesus who knew for sure what was going to happen to him and why. During the last two weeks of His life Luke records Him saying: "We're going up to Jerusalem, and everything that is written by the prophets about the Son of Man will be fulfilled. He will be handed over to the Gentiles. They will mock him, insult him, spit on him, flog him and kill him." The predictions were so appalling, it must have seemed like gobble-de-gook to the disciples and it looks as if they dismissed it at the time. But it wasn't hormones or delusions or jihad that motivated him; it was getting to us.
The long way that took Jesus through incomprehensible adversity has became our path home, our redemption. As we follow Him we are led through our own adversities and could easily be tempted to think they're meaningless.
Marva Dawn reminds me that their purpose is to "knit us to Christ and the grace of his passion. Jesus bears our suffering not only for us, but with us." (Being Well When We're Ill, Marva Dawn, 2008, Augsburg Books) Even if we don't feel the presence of God, He enfolds us nonetheless. I try to imagine how this is demonstrated; where do we see him carrying our sorrows whether we speak of it personally or in the larger context of the global church? Sometimes the answer stuns when we hear things like this report from a North Korean Christian who writes that recently five women from his neighborhood were publicly executed for the "crime" of trying to survive by looking for food. He courageously writes: "Nevertheless we are not afraid to die." ("Church Around the World" July, 2009) We know that only Christ can bear such suffering, and though we can't feel it or see how, he can turn it to glory.
Infected with Glory
In time it became clear that the mare was going to foal as a result of her tryst with the runaway stallion. Early this summer she gave birth to a little paint filly they named Ziva. When I was there visiting my mother in July, I watched her as she lay napping sprawled among the dandelions or gamboling around her mother full of life and curiosity. Whoever named her was thinking of a character from the television program NCIS. I don't know if they know Ziva is a Hebrew name that means radiant and bright. So if that lively baby means anything…well, I guess it's obvious.
To be born of God, to be his child still has power to surprise me. We're told that Jesus is "the radiance (the Ziva) of God's glory" (Hebrews 1:3) and by association we share some of his brightness because we "reflect the Lord's glory," and are "being transformed into his likeness with ever increasing glory which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit." (II Corinthians 3:18) Reflecting Christ is quietly evident when we're simply doing or being what God created us for - it could be so ordinary we're apt to miss it. It might be the way we kiss a child, plant a garden, listen to a friend. When Joy Davidman, C.S. Lewis' wife, had a few sweet months of remission from cancer before her death, it was simple delights she loved best like sitting in the garden discussing books with Jack. She writes in a letter that she took "positive pleasure in making beds and clearing tables." - an interesting transition from her earlier years when she complained bitterly about the mundane. Even while Joy was unable to walk and care for herself, there was something about her ordinary self, her essential, intrinsic self that reflected a kind of glory. It caused Lewis to write: "We have much gaiety and even some happiness. Indeed, the situation is not easy to describe. My heart is breaking and I was never so happy before: at any rate there is more in life than I knew about." (Out of My Bone: The Letters of Joy Davidman, 2009, Eerdmans)
Until Then
(From my journal. A date in July.)
Am home in Rochester now. Glad to be. Very heavy-lidded. Making self stay up. Denis is in Knoxville tonight consulting with a group who'd like to do a film festival. I want him here now. Been visiting my mother and kids for a week. Mom's doing very well since Dad died in February. Have had plenty of blueberry pie, rhubarb cake, fried walleye. Hardly got enough of Paige and Anson. Paige-y turns four this week. Micah is carrying a third child, her breath a little shorter these days. I ate too much, slept too little, watched the horses in their emerald pasture, saw the jet stream send clouds flying past the sun to the edge of the world. At night I lay with my head to the north window, cold air flowing across my pillow, blankets tucked round, leopard frogs trilling past midnight. The silence is vast, replacing urban noise with its constant racket of traffic and air conditioners.
On Saturday, a strange encounter. My brother, Dallas, brought a visitor who'd stopped in to leave a donation for the little country cemetery nearby. He and Marijean keep the plot records and see about upkeep these days. Somehow it came up. This man, Shorty Doree, once lived in the county and remembered a plane crash from many years ago. He was twelve years old, playing outside with a friend on a hot August day when a small plane flew over their farm, too low. They heard a loud banging noise, then silence. Knowing something terrible had happened, they ran through the field and woods to see. They found the plane crashed in a grove of ash trees. The pilot was already out walking around dazed. The passenger, Keith Sorenson, was still in the cockpit, his head severely wounded, beginning to lose consciousness, with fuel from the ruptured tank pouring over him. They were the first ones on the scene.
Shorty began to cry remembering it even last Saturday. He said, "I had to leave. I couldn't look. I knew Keith. He was one of the good ones, not like some you know, he was a hero, everyone loved him…" Shorty mused that this man, Keith, had been married to a beautiful French woman. (Mom isn't French.) Dallas showed him a picture of her from back then. "That's HER!" he shouted. Then Dallas told him Keith was his mother's first husband and that she was right next door and would he like to meet her? So there we sat in the kitchen and they talked, he and my mother, about the crash and about my father who died that day when he was 23 years old, and I wasn't even born yet.
Mom thinks he may be in heaven. Sometimes she says she's sure of it. She wasn't knowing Jesus herself then…and Keith's family didn't either. But he was always well-liked, a good man. Things happened in the War, he didn't tell much, but he did say…no atheists in the foxhole. He insisted he and Mom go to the only church he knew though none of their friends went and the church was not even orthodox anymore. Still…the words of hymns, of Scripture can be Holy-Spirited… penetrating the heart even if spoken by the unbelieving in dying rituals… That evening I stayed back to quietly work on the next issue of Notes From Toad Hall while Mom and everyone else went to a church meeting. Didn't get far. Thoughts of family. How strangely we are woven together in streams of sorrow and love, comfort and uncertainty. God holds all these things. One day we rise again.
On A Theology of Leaving
In the busyness of daily living it's easy to forget that God insists that the rhythm of work and rest are necessary to human existence. When I came across this essay by Prof. David Nelson, I was pleased because he was on my favorite soapbox and being very eloquent. ("On Going Home at the End of the Day" from betweenthetimes.com) He helps sort out why it's important to shut out the lights and go home even when facing tasks that are unfinished or will never be finished. Nelson writes, "our theological reflection (in the sense of reflection upon God) should lead us to recognize that God himself has not chosen to accomplish everything in one day, one week, month or year. Not only does God's creative work occur over time, but His providential work of bringing all things to His good end occurs over millennia. Since God Himself does not accomplish all his purposes in one day, it seems odd that His people might fret, forsake rest, and live disordered lives to do what God Himself has chosen not to do. What God could do, He does not, and what we cannot do, we attempt to do, to our own detriment."
Just the other night we had some young (any one under 30 is almost a baby) friends for dinner and when they left late in the evening there was a bushel of dirty dishes left in the kitchen. Denis made us go to bed and deal with it the next day. That night I had the oddest dream bordering on nightmare. No one would ever mistake me for a mathematician, I don't even like numbers unless they have to do with how many chocolates are left in the box, but I dreamed I had the equation to life--all the symbols and numbers on one side equaled the answer on the other side, and I lost the answer! How weird. I spent the entire night trying to find it. I blame this on not doing the dishes the night before.
I know for many leaving what we do is more difficult and more serious, but then isn't it all the more necessary? (I'm not making a case for laziness.) Our friends who run an organic vegetable farm are never done. The weeds always grow, the animals never stop eating, there is always a crop that should be harvested, sorted, washed, boxed. People in ministry are always on call: how do you tell someone in crisis that you can't come? For others, say, who do research at Mayo or see patients, there is never enough time to update records, write grants or read all the journals. Many of us live with the pressure to never quit until we "put it to bed." That's a bit ironic when it is we ourselves who ought to be put to bed.
This rhythm of work and rest that Nelson writes about is rooted in creation and pre- supposes that what we do in an ordinary, everyday way is ordained and blessed by God, which applies to all sorts of vocations--not just religious or missionary callings. God not only grants us the freedom to do nothing visibly useful at times, he insists on it. He desires us to trust that our resting accomplishes his purposes even when closure looks way overdue and our path looks grim.
