Some thoughts, and a poem.

2009 has been long, strange, and somewhat rocky for our family. Health and employment issues, mostly. The strangest and hardest part has been the feeling, the sense I just can’t shake that this time is an interim, an intermission, before the next chapter God has planned for us. This sense that something good and right is around the corner … and even as each corner we turn shows us only more of the same, it still feels as near. It would be reassuring, if it weren’t so frustrating.

Though, come to think of it, I suppose all of life is merely an interim moment before the Real and Good thing begins.

So, onwards.

…

I’ve been meaning to write something about the readings from last Sunday, which really struck me. To remind you (or, for the non-Catholic, to inform you): the first reading was God answering Job’s complaint.

Then the LORD addressed Job out of the storm and said:

Who is this that obscures divine plans with words of ignorance?

Gird up your loins now, like a man; I will question you, and you tell me the answers!

Where were you when I founded the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding.

Who determined its size; do you know? Who stretched out the measuring line for it?

Into what were its pedestals sunk, and who laid the cornerstone,

While the morning stars sang in chorus and all the sons of God shouted for joy?

And who shut within doors the sea, when it burst forth from the womb;

When I made the clouds its garment and thick darkness its swaddling bands?

When I set limits for it and fastened the bar of its door,

And said: Thus far shall you come but no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stilled!

Now, there’s a lot here, though the entire chapter can be summed up as, “God makes Job realize how dumb and small he is and how great God is.”

But this is what I took away from it. The God who created the earth and the sea, the light and the dark is also the God who set boundaries on these things. The God who makes the storm brings the sun and rainbow. The God of the mighty waves is the God who says “Thus far shall you come but no farther.”

Like Job, I am small and God is large. I am limited and God is limitless. Yet God sets the limits that his creation abides by. He allows Job to be tested, but only for a time. Whatever it is we face, it is in God’s timing, and in His hands to decide thus far but no farther.

Sunday’s Psalm was from psalm 107, verses about those on the sea, buffeted by waves, and how God stills the seas. Then, to complete the theme (and how I love that the lectionary is laid out this way), the Gospel was of course Matthew’s account of Christ calming the waters.

They woke him and said to him,
“Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?”
He woke up,
rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Quiet! Be still!”
The wind ceased and there was great calm.
Then he asked them, “Why are you terrified?
Do you not yet have faith?”

It comforts me that although Christ rebukes the disciples for their lack of faith…he still calms the waters first. How many times have I worried that my worrying would be sign of such a lack of faith that I would be punished with more trials as a lesson to me? I know, it’s a twisted way of thinking. But there it is. Christ hears and answers their plea, even though even the way they wake him is somewhat insulting. You can imagine the frustration and anger of it; “DO YOU NOT CARE!!!?? THAT WE ARE DYING??” But He does care, and he saves them, and then asks them why, after all they had seen of his works, they did not yet have faith. But of course, like all of us, they did not know what God had planned and so they feared for the present moment.

…

This, though, is the phrase from Sunday that is still resonating in my heart, striking up that aching, hopeful, scary, fragile, enduring feeling of just-around-the-corner, one line from the epistle: