Just one more slice

I am not about to turn my blog into a deep well of gravity/solemnity/whatever your word is, but today's Slice of Infinity I just had to post.

Lately, at work and therefore at home, I have been absolutely, completely, wholly, and altogether conclusively bone-weary, drained, and depeleted of all energy, enthusiasm, life, zeal, and persistence. That was one wordy sentence--but such is necessary to express how I've felt this week. It's not been a sleepy kind of exhaustion, nor the result of a couple of hard days at school. Rather, this is more of a soul-weariness, the kind that makes you feel emphatically weak--mind, body, soul, and spirit. I've felt as though I've absolutely nothing left to give--and that whatever I did still have would be received with complete apathy anyway. This article may have pinpointed the reason why.

I wanted this job for a plethora of reasons, but the heart reason is hope. Nothing and no one is more defiant than hope--not even my students. And the hope of Jesus breaks through anything. So, the deepest reason I wanted this job was to show the students that hope and the One who offers it--and to help them see what, tangibly, that means for their lives.

Well. I'm not sure how effectively that is happening, or even if it is happening, but today's Slice hit the nail on the head for me in a lot of ways. In order for me to invite my students into the right house, do I need to change jobs to be able to best do that? The answer is not easy, and I'm definitely not about to quit my job. I'm just thinking out loud. This is long--grab a cup of tea if you've got the time to read it.

02/15/08
The Right Side of Pain
Jill Carattini

We shuffled back and forth between the states that sat like metaphors between our divorced parents--a summer, a spring break, a Christmas without one of them. The pain of the one we were leaving was always palpable, but we always had to leave.

It’s strange the things we interpret as children with the limited perceptions we have. I was six years old when I silently vowed I would not allow anyone to keep me on the wrong side of people in pain. As a result, I have spent a lifetime collecting strays, searching for the oppressed, feeling the pain of others, and desperately attempting to bind broken hearts, usually without much success. Every church I have ever been involved with has been one somehow marked by suffering.

As long as I can remember, I have been somewhat frantic about expanding my circle of care. The world of souls is a sad and broken place. I was certain of this because I was one of them, and I vowed that they would not be alone--or perhaps more accurately, that I would not be alone.

There were other unhealthy patterns to my ever-expanding circles of care. With each oppressed group, I came among them with the best of intentions. I gave everything I could and some things I could not--love, time, money, tears, depression--until I collapsed, no longer able to give anything at all.

I always thought I was retreating out of necessity because taking in pain was understandably exhausting. I figured that the metaphorical house I tried to keep filled, at times, simply needed to be emptied. I was opening up my house until people were hanging from the rafters and lamps started getting broken, and I was falling apart.

Little did I realize, the house was falling apart before any of them entered in the first place. I was inviting them into the wrong house. Sometimes God in his mercy must tear down even walls built with good intention. "Unless the LORD builds the house, its builders labor in vain... In vain you rise early and stay up late, toiling for food to eat--for he grants sleep to those he loves" (Psalms 127:1-2).

Such was the case with me. In my house the broken and the oppressed found care with limits, hospitality with conditions. But we are like olive trees who “flourish in the house of God,” says the psalmist. For in this house, we can “trust in God's unfailing love for ever and ever” (Psalm 52:8).

Describing the disparity between the mind of humanity and the mind of God, Abraham Heschel writes, “The [human] conscience builds its confines, is subject to fatigue, longs for comfort, lulling, soothing. Yet those who are hurt, and He Who inhabits eternity, neither slumber nor sleep.”(1)

In other words, God never sleeps or slumbers because those who are hurting never sleep or slumber. Try as we may as caretakers we cannot be as God to the hurting. We can stay awake with them in their pain and suffering, we can care for them as neighbors, but the house in which the suffering find unfailing love is the Lord’s. This is the house to which we must bring them. This is the house in which we must live.

In this season where we journey again to the Cross, might we be as the friends of the paralytic who carried him all the way to Christ. Though I still seem to move toward broken communities and still struggle with the weight of some of the things I see, I realize I struggle equally with the apathy that makes me want to flee from it all.

But I am convinced that the right side of pain can only be accessed through the house of God, a house built not by human hands, but held up by the beams of the Cross. Here our souls find a house with rooms prepared for them and a table set with room for our enemies.

God has invited us into the kingdom; the doors of a great house are opened wide. And it is a house where hospitality is not a conditional sharing of personal pains, or a self-centered preoccupation with suffering, but an extension of Christ's invitation: Come to me, all who are weary and I will give you rest.