Sigh!

Are we finally able to come together as a community and share physical space more intimately than we have in the past two years?

I’m feeling things move in this direction.

Let’s sigh together collectively.

(Wait, can we breath like that in each other’s presence? So much relearning to do!)

My wife and I sighed deeply when for the first time in two years we had another couple over to share a meal and enjoy good food and life-giving conversation.

The joy of simple things we once took for granted.

But let me offer a caution. It is a hunch, my own suspicion, but I feel confident I am right.

No, Pastor, just let us enjoy the moment!!!!!!

Sorry, we need to be ready so that the moment might extend into an hour, a day, a month, a year, a lifetime. So …

Mingled with the coming joy will be great challenges.

We have lost some of our skills at being together. Using those muscles again will be hard at time. Be patient with one another; be patient with yourself.

And we will continue to show different approaches to the stewardship of risk that remains before us. Try to appreciate the different decisions each is making.

And we also have relied on communication that bore more weight than it is able to carrying. For example, emails have been heard in ways that were not intended. Feelings have been hurt and the wounds have festered without face-to-face contact to address the disconnect.

And many of our relationships have had to bear far more activity than is their custom. Usually it takes a community to keep us healthy, and having one or two individuals assume the heft of the attentiveness usually born by a dozen has left us a bit frayed at the edges.

And some of us have had the key loved one who might have been our support in these times die, resulting in additional grief and less companionship in the bearing of it.

And some of us have been so isolated that we had the more immense challenge of being our own support system, trying alone to do the work of baker’s dozen all.

We carry wounds for the past two years, not all of them visible. We carry grief. We carry divisiveness. We carry … so much pain.

And yet with all that has happened, God is still God.

God is ready to gather us into one body and teach us to be together with healing in love. God has y e a r s of experience working through crises big and small.

And while our patience can droop at times, we remind ourselves that God’s is everlasting.

In his life and ministry, Jesus has confirmed for us the central confession of the Hebrew people concerning God.

We sing this Scripture every week during Lent:

“God is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.” (See versions of this confession in Exodus 34:6; Numbers 14:18; 2 Chronicles 30:9; Nehemiah 9:17; Nehemiah 9:31; Psalm 86:15; Psalm 103:8; Psalm 111:4; Psalm 112:4; Psalm 116:5; Psalm 145:8; Joel 2:13; Jonah 4:2; Nahum 1:3.)

So be it; see to it!  (I picked up this blessing and call from the podcast Octavia’s Parables with Toshi Reagon and Adrienne maree brown.)

 

About Philip Ruge-Jones

After I served for eighteen years as a professor of theology at Texas Lutheran University, my family decided to return to the Midwest where my wife and I grew up, attended college and seminary. Read more...