Our Flood

This is our neighborhood creek on Saturday. Since then, Nashville has been awash in devastating thunderstorms, tornadoes, and flooding. Areas that have never flooded have been initiated - they are calling it a once in a 1,000 year event. Click here to watch a slideshow portrait of what is happening here in Nashville and is regrettably not being reported very well on the national media scene. Johnny Cash accompanies the video, appropriately! And it is continuing to unfold - already swollen tributary rivers are going through the domino effect as the Cumberland spreads out. I am so proud of our city, and the Volunteer State is being represented well with all the citizens who jump in to help, don't loot and pray for their neighborhoods. Also, check out this article that states the spirit here very well. Our church mobilized immediately to help setup, staff, and assist Red Cross shelters and be the hands and feet of Christ throughout our Middle Tennessee community. It's not just Nashville - it's Franklin, Crossville, Belle Meade, Smyrna, Antioch, Bon Aqua, and many more. Love to you all from the South! and hoping you have the same type of neighbor response when disaster comes knocking - we count ourselves blessed to live amongst these people. None of us could have imagined last week that just two days of thunderstorms would have turned into this.

Teensy jonquils

teensy jonquils

daffodils?

in pairs
blooming

at our entry step

almost underfoot

easily overlooked

barely noticeable

but   by   some   grace

s e e n

by my eye

o look!

running in for the camera

to digitally capture

and document

and share

their moment of glory

not to fade, to keep,
to trumpet the glory
of their creator
who placed them there

Be sure to check out...

...Holy crap! a blog series by my dear friend, Jen Taylor - honored to be so! She addresses how sometimes the church office can be the most dysfunctional place on earth because of the all-too-human desire to avoid conflict. Favorite teaser quote: "Boundaries are like PMS — real, but used as an excuse for lots of bad behavior."

Thoughts on an Easter Resurrection Sermon

Sunday - in the eyes of the women, the stone rolled away and the empty tomb meant one ugly but logical conclusion - theft. Someone/Some hateful group had stolen the Master's body. There was no immediate understanding but a gradual but shocking revealing of what was true - that Jesus was who he claimed to be and that death met its master. The angel messenger prompted the women "Don't you remember?" and then the Word says "and then they remembered!" Luke 24:6-8

Have you ever been in the midst of a situation or event that did not make sense? Or rocked your world of what you thought you understood? Or every sense (sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste) were telling you one thing, but your mind another? Our speaker identified that experience as "having no categories" to understand something foreign. He used some examples:

• a Central American Indian traveling in a car on the interstate for the first time and thinking that a type of dragon was after her in the form of an 18-wheeler coming up fast behind them.
• Scholars cited the Islanders/Mexican Americans that greeted the New World explorers as gods, not understanding their armor, their ships, etc. They had no categories to comprehend the tools and accoutrements of these humans.

I have only personally experienced a bit of this phenomenon when in other cultures:

• a Guatemalan trash dump where whole societies were arranged in a pecking order of who had the highest community standing to have earned the honor live at the 'top of the heap' (literally) to scavenge the best pickings as the dump trucks delivered the 'fresh' trash. Everyone else descended in levels until the lowest of the low who lived at the bottom of the pit. I walked in a daze - unable to comprehend this sight, to take it in fully. Embarrassed - knowing that I didn't have to stay here, live here, that I could leave at any time to go get clean (or try to) and have some time to try to understand what I had seen.
• Or sitting in a room full of orphans in Ukraine, trying to get by with nonverbal nods, smiles, and gentle looks to try to connect and bless while waiting on an interpreter.

I can't imagine trying to wrap my mind around resurrection and all its implications, especially with tear-puffy eyes from grieving, from a state of exhaustion (emotional and physical), and while on a mission to tend to a burial scene that had been hurriedly put together (another's grave, borrowed - spices not applied, wrapped properly). I can hardly understand now - except for in one way.

Our speaker, Josh Graves, briefly mentioned fairy tales - Disney stories. Idyllic longings for the seemingly impossible (but the just or right) to become real. That possibly the Resurrection Miracle is the norm in God's equation, and our broken world the anomaly. I think of the Matrix movie, and so many other literary associations of wrestling with the injustice and wrongness of the world (To Kill a Mockingbird).

I believe this to be true. I came to find ways of affirming this life/death/life cycle (especially visually) and believe in the promised return of life years ago after watching the Disney Firebird short video. It epitomizes my thoughts on this cycle. This longing in me for things to be made right, for justice to be truly administered, for the broken to be mended or restored completely is a reflection that things have gone horribly wrong here and need redemption. That I'm part of an interim timeframe where it is my joy to shine light, to support the lifting of a standard high that sometimes will show how horribly things have shifted from dead center, where they need to be. And sometimes that the world hates seeing or recognizing the contrast. And that in that moment of recognition it brings out a visceral hatred. Keep things dark, so that we can all agree that it's just dark. Don't mess with the system (or wake the volcano). Or even worse - don't be made a fool of, don't be naive. Stay cynical.

On a lighter side note ( I know, I digress all the time, sorry) - this makes me think of the HGTV show Holmes on Homes - we all want the building contractor who knows how to use the plumb line correctly - that he can tell when there has been shoddy work that won't stand the test of time, and he knows just how to fix it - to "make it right" as he says. We all want that kind of hero to come in and save the day in an hour show.

We live in a messy world, where nature, friends, children - die. Or where relationships get twisted, marred -  misunderstandings abound between people and nations. Sometimes my tears have the power to heal, or at the very least draw attention to, injustice. I know people much more talented at this than I, but I want to walk in their footsteps, and learn from an ineffable Holy Spirit that always knows a way to heal, to restore. And when there is silence, and an inability to do anything at all to help, to wait silently and in trust that the mysteries of the Godhead will resolve it in a wondrous way that I could not have imagined.

I don't believe this is naivete - I have experienced this cycle over and over again personally in my short life, and there is no denying the agonies of the death phase, when you truly believe that there will be no returning light. Or even just the numbing, trudging surviving phases where lifting the spoon to your mouth exhausts all your reserves. But I do testify to the reality (that is in the truest sense 'real') that life comes again - that the dawn breaks even if behind obscuring clouds, the burnt blooms again, the catepillar dies to his form to break out of his tomb a radiant butterfly, that fellow believing mourners can laugh at death's sting, that the birthing mother believes she is to die only to bring forth new life, and that abandoned daughters can learn to trust again.

Ask around - and see if there are not compelling evidences of rebirth. They are but pastel hue examples of the real stained glass, my friends, of new transformed life after passing through death.