Hope: A Last Word
The straw. It’s here. The last one before the camel breaks in exhaustion. Are you there yet? Is your back breaking like mine? I’ve hit a moment. Our family already struggled with not having a community, having come back to a world that we had been away from, and under a new covid reality. We already felt on the outside. But now, the few connections we have been able to stitch together are fraying. I rally the inner reserve but the truth is that dependency has always been my biggest weakness. I need people. No really, I need them a LOT. How am I to do this parenting, to do this living, to do this moving forward thing called life, without others to laugh with, cry with, vent with. Not virtually, but actually?
I am trying, we are all trying, but I am tired of trying to forge a way. I have had to do it across cultures and language divides, I have had to do it across socio-economic divides, I have had to do it across age and stage divides, but this? I have no idea how to do it across literal divides.
No more socializing.
Though I apparently fit into the ‘millenial’ bracket, I am older than the internet. I grew up in a time of fax machines and playing with neighbors at the dirt pile. I don’t do virtual living. I am a nurse, I work with people in the flesh. Hand-on-hand, face-to-face, that messy business of getting up close and personal to people is my life’s work. I don’t know how to not get up into peoples’ lives. I don’t know how to literally have no entrance. It’s not so different than Malawi in some ways, living behind walls of compounds was a barrier that I really struggled to overcome. Now here, how do I forge relationships with neighbors and friends, how do I care for people and be in proximity to people when there are literally rules that prevent us from doing so?
I am tired, bone-tired of trying to figure out how to connect. I need it so desperately, so I have to rally, I have to keep trying. Somehow it feels harder now, though. At the end of a time where we were in transition for years, when we were abroad for years, and now here in this covid-suspended-state for what feels like years. I am spent.
But.
How do believers do it in the underground Churches of the world? How do prisoners do it in cells separated by concrete divides? How do families do it where they are scattered between nations? I see the refugee communities and all they have had to endure. I see the resilience in immigrant families and adoptive families and so many spaces where the exertion of pushing for community across divides was never not worth it.
We have got to be the Church, within the walls. We have got to connect across the boundaries somehow. We have got to be the ‘not-give-up’ kinda people that have the resilience to keep on. Hope WILL lead to resilience. Let’s dare to do the things that give us life. Let’s dare to create, to revive the tired world around us. Let’s dare to get creative and quit fighting it and find a way to live within it. This is a reality we live in and there is opportunity here and now to love people.
Lord of mercy, give us your spirit to see the cracks between the walls. Not the ‘disobey the rules’ kinda cracks but the actual places and spaces we can be able to shine a light. Give us the innovative ideas, the generous ideas, the explosives-in-the-mine kind of ideas that transform enclosed spaces into open spaces of joy, for your glory. We need you, here. Revive our hope, inhabit our emptiness, and transform our vision of community. Amen