Waiting...

So you wait. You wait for school to start. You wait for school to end. You wait for the big vacation trip. You wait for graduation. You wait for Mr/Ms Right. You wait for the baby to be born, and then for it to sleep through the night, and then for it to go to school and for it to come home from school…and this begins to sound familiar. You wait for the promotion and for the raise and for the paycheck, or sometimes for the job to show up. You wait for retirement and for pension checks.

You wait to die.

Through it all, you wait with longing that is sometimes passionate and sometimes faint but persevering, for Jesus to come.

They waited. “Redeemer,” said the angel at Eden’s gates, and “Messiah,” said the prophets, and the centuries and the lifetimes slid by, and they waited.

When you’re the one doing the waiting, it’s endless. It might be ten minutes for the phone call or a week for the medical test results or nine months for the pregnancy or hours for the birth, but it’s all forever.

“It’s all relative,” said Einstein. “

To me, all times are soon,” said Aslan.

“God is patient,” said Peter.

And still we wait.

Advent comes every year. At least you only have to wait one trip around the sun for that. Then you only have to wait a month for Christmas. It’s a time when we can rediscover both the waiting and the end of waiting. When the little girl and her fiancé got through the night at the stable, and the waiting was over, it had still just begun. There was babyhood to be got through, and childhood (bar mitzvah, Son of the Covenant) and then 18 years at home waiting for the ministry to begin.

That 3 ½ years must have gone by in a flash. Not so the hours of the “trial,” or, God help us, the crucifixion. Or the grave…But that part ended. And IT WAS DONE!

Then he said, “I’ll be back. Soon!”

And so we wait. Even so, come, Lord Jesus!

Sh’ma by the River 5—Loving the Great Spirit with All My Little Soul

Hear, O Israel,

the Lord your God, the Lord is One.

You shall love the Lord your God

with all your heart

and with all your mind

and with all your soul

and with all your strength.*

Many people separate soul from spirit and think of them as two different things, or as two different aspects of selfhood. I don’t do that. As Adventists, we believe a human being is a soul, rather than possessing a soul. We believe we are one being, that mind and body cannot be separated (except for consideration, such as in this series). What we do with our thoughts affects our physical health. What we do with our bodies affects our spiritual health. It’s all one.

If I were to draw a diagram of the self, it would look something like this:

The three smaller circles would be the body, mind, and heart, or emotions. The little spot in the center is where we are our full, true selves—all elements and aspects of us living and functioning as one whole being—a human soul. The large circle represents the Holy Spirit—the soul or spirit of God, “in whom we live and move and have our being.”

During this series, we have considered how to learn better to love God, others, and ourselves from our whole physical selves, our whole minds, and our whole hearts. To learn what it means to love God, others, and ourselves with our whole souls, just put it all together. Simple. Hard! Almost impossible! But simple. When all of our little circles are centered inside God’s big circle, then the peace God brings seeps into the center. It comes into our stomachs, and calms them. It comes into our emotions and lives with us in and through them. It comes into our heads and gives us a new outlook on life.

Simple, it may be, but it can also be scary. In the Bible, the Holy Spirit is often likened to wind. (The Hebrew and Greek words are the same—so is the English, but we’ve kind of lost it inside other words: inspire, respire, and perspire all share the same base as spirit, and they’re all about breath. So, for that matter, is expire.) Today, here in the last week of my Cape Breton Sabbatical by the river, the wind is so powerful it reminds me of that text in Acts, about “the sound of a mighty, rushing wind.” The cabin is shaking. When I went outside, I experienced something I’ve often said, but it’s never been actually true before—the wind really did nearly knock me down. When I would pick up a foot to take a step, that leg would be blown out from under me. The wind blew away my ice chest and all its contents, and took a large wooden picnic table off the porch and dumped it in the yard in two pieces.

Today, beside the river (from a safe distance, inside) I’m thinking about what it might really mean to throw my whole, puny, little spirit, my whole broken self, all my body, all my mind, all my heart, all my love, into the whirlwind that is the Holy Spirit of God, and go wherever that  Spirit chooses to take me.

Do I have the nerve?

Do you?

*These words combine the Sh’ma, found in Deut 6:4, 5, with Jesus’ words in Luke10:27, to give all four:  heart, mind, soul, and strength.

Sh’ma by the River, 4: Loving God with One’s Heart

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God

with all thy heart…

Loving from the heart seems like a no-brainer. Literally. Of course we love with our hearts. That’s where all emotions are seated, right? Or maybe the bowels, which is what the Hebrews used in this context. It seems to me that other societies have used other body parts, possibly the liver, certainly the brain, as the seat of emotion, but even Wikipedia is failing me on this one.

In the immortal words of Dr. Temperance Brennan, of TV Bones fame, “The heart is nothing but a pump.” True. However, I believe there’s good reason why humans have always thought emotions, positive and negative, (love, hate, fear, anger, happiness, sorrow, contentment, etc.), rise from body organs. There is a connection. Emotions make our blood pressure rise and drop, increase and decrease heart rate, adrenaline, dopamine, and more. Feelings, to put it more succinctly, are feelings.

The river overflowed its banks this week. I assume it did so just to give me good subject matter for this devotion. Emotions are scary for some of us. (I am one of them.) We have been raised so carefully to believe in “mind over matter,” and being mature and rational and in control and all that. We even name self-control as a gift of the Spirit. But the Greek word used in Galatians 5:23 is egkrateia, which means temperance. (Huh. Wonder what Bones would think about that?)

Temperance means the middle way. Not too hot, not too cold. Not too controlled by emotion, and not too controlled by brain. The river is essential to life, I want to say, when it’s contained within its banks, wending its merry way, not too low, not too high. But my analogy suffers a little when I think about the millions who depended for millennia on the seasonal flooding of the Nile, for one example.  Is it okay to overflow once in a while? And what does that mean?  Give way to emotion? Surely not…

Unless “give way” is taken literally. Make a way, or a path, make allowance for feeling.

When the Baddeck River overflowed this week, I don’t know if it caused harm or damage. I know it didn’t here, because there’s a nice big swale between the house and the riverbank. Room for it to swell, and to go back down again. A place for it to deposit, perhaps, all kinds of life-giving nutrients for future growth in the meadows.

This devotional did not go in the direction I had planned for it. I’m just saying.

Love God, others, self, from the heart. With the full strength of emotions. Without doing harm.

What does that mean?

Sh’ma by the River 3, Loving God with All Your Mind

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy…mind…

When I walk by the river and think of mind, I think of flow, of current, of direction. The river is born to seek the ocean, and that’s all it does. Our minds were born to seek God, but they, unlike the river, have free choice. We are even free to choose to believe we have no free choice. Consider that one for a minute!

I see the river doing all kinds of things at once, just like my mind. In the middle, it’s rushing along without much impedance, heading ever downhill. Then there are stretches that rush and ruffle over rocks and sandbars—impeded, but not letting the obstacles stop it. In fact, you could anthropomorphize (not that I would ever be guilty of that!!) and say the river seems to enjoy the obstacles.

Along the edges, there are spots where the river slows, circles, seems to get nowhere, but as long as it’s still connected to the main flow, that part of the water will move along, too, just at a different pace.

I mentioned last week that people used to be able to care for this river, to keep an open channel. I got to wondering what things I do, or could do, that keep an open channel in my mind?

I’ve noticed that one thing that makes the river flow more freely is rain. At first, I thought of this in the usual, even clichéd interpretation  of rain as adversity, but for the river, rain is not adversity, rain is life. Rain, to fill my mind, might be the water of the Holy Spirit’s presence.

Side waters might be good, for breaks, but how can I keep them from becoming separated from the flow, and getting stagnant?

I can use my mind to love myself by not allowing obstacles to get me down, by not speaking to myself in hurtful ways I would never use with another, by, as a friend of mine puts it, “paying attention to what I’m paying attention to!”

I can use my mind to love others by my words, written and spoken, by listening carefully when they speak, and watching their faces for the things they can’t say in words.

I can use my mind to love God by casting out into the depths of that immense, unfathomable love, by thinking of that love and patience and majesty, by trying (and failing!) to put some of it into words.

How do you keep your mind flowing free with love?