Cold Coffee

It's Saturday morning, the smell of freshly cut grass seeps through my open windows like some sort of cheap, store bought, bottled up cologne identifing the seasonal aroma of this middle class surburbia. Thunder rolls in the background, drowning out the groanings of birds and bugs, like a drum in an orchestra drowns out the harmony of flutes and french horns. A freshly brewed cup of coffee runs down the tunnel of my throat like a floodwater through a city street, awakening the sleeping marrow tightly tucked inside the blanket of my groggy bones. Coffee I've heard helps you focus, as much as it does make you need to take ritalin to calm you down, so I drink a cup when I read and write, which I'm doing an awful lot these days, to help me focus. A man next door silences the thoughts shooting off in my brain with the roar of his gas powered, high octance motored weed wacker, chopping down blades of fertilized grass, rationalizing between breaths about his diligent labor and self-absorbed motive to maintain his lawn. The sun is fighting to shine behind the overcast shadows of the late morning sky, but the grey thunder clouds float unwaivered and unsympathetic to the request of that great fireball. Day, for now, will stand illuminated by the backlit glow of the sun lost behind these storm clouds, which have traveled thousands of miles from the Pacific Northwest to dump more rain on the already soaked soils of Stillwater, Oklahoma.

I used to write to a soundtrack. Ryan Adams, Blue Merle, Sufjan, Wilco, Radiohead, U2, Bob Dylan, and occasionally DMX would fornicate with my thoughts and together we'd come up with the products you read here or the ones that go unread in my journals. I'm just kidding about DMX. But lately, for the past month in a half, I've been writing to the tune of the world outside my window. Creation has been keeping me company. I've turned down the volume on the speakers of the soundtrack inside, and turned it up on the symphony performing daily, for free, without form or genre, producing tracks at it's own pace, to it's own natural rhythm, in perfect harmony with the groove of life before the mess of man disrupted the flow. It's a beautiful sound. A sound I fear too many of us never stop and really listen to.

Silence is a strange sound. To sit in the nothingness of time, to have silence disrupted by the rustle of the wind through the trees, the call of an insect hiding from your eye somewhere in the leaves of grass, or the tiny droplets of rainwater pelting the ground, like God was throwing little pebbles from the heavens down on us, mimicing a chorus of applause. Silence. What a dangerous place to bring your heart, you know? In silence, you can't hide the secrets of your soul behind noise; the burdens of your heart are laid completely bare, stripped naked of its clothes by the hands of silence. Maybe that's why so many people drown out the groans of their heart with music, or television, or noise, because no one wants to feel the conviction of silence, the awesome interruption of this constant crying of creation that we brush by everyday like some distant stranger we never stop to shake hands with on the sidewalk. Silence exposes our brokeness, reveals the fractures of our heart in us all. You see, silence is always speaking to us. It to, like the claims of creation, is a product of that groove of life before the world was fractured. Silence is there to remind us of what the world was like for seven days when the lion and the lamb laid together across the savanna. It reminds us that once man walked in perfect step with creation, that community and oneness with God wasn't as distant as it seems now. Silence is there to remind us that we, man and woman, child and elderly, tree and soil, lion and lamb, are in repair. It is there, reminding us that we are walking through life broken and need to be fixed. And silence offers us a rewiring of the heart through what it's saying. And that's why I fear so many of us never take the time to step into the house of silence, because it has something to say, something to whisper in our hardened ears. We don't want to be fixed, we don't want to be repaired, even though every area of our mangled lives demands it. We are afraid of the silence, afraid of what it might tell us. We are afraid, for some strange reason, to be told that yes, we have failed, that we are a shattered people, but we can be made new, we can be fixed, that as a whole our damage can be repaired. And this is what silence has been screaming at me through the open windows of my room, day or night, through the groanings of creation. So silence, is in fact, not silent at all. Silence is always trying to say something to us, it's just a measure of if we're willing to listen. And this is what I've been listening to in the chirping of a bluebird during the day or the faint everglow of the moonlight dancing of the glass of my window panes at night. We're promised repair in the life-giving rhythm of the cross of Christ. I've been hearing the faint whispers of our God pleading with me to turn down the noise of my life and turn up the volume of His silence interrupted by the voice of His creation. And that great song of salvation rings through my head louder than Bono's voice ever did when I used to write to the beat of Where the Streets Have No Name. We have shut up the calling of our King with the humdrum, sing-a-long kid songs of our watered-down, Americanized Christian religion. We have dumb-downed our faith, rooted upon the soul purpose of magnifing the Cross of Christ in the middle of our brokeness, and manipulated into a self-centered routine driven by a fleeting attempt to make us more self-righteous than we already were. When we shut up silence, we shut up the groaning of God of his desperate need and passion to repair his people. We've made church our bandaid, we've made Christianity the bandage that we slap on to every cut or scrape we get when we fall, and it becomes our quick fix, our medicane we take to protect us from the disease spreading whore that first infected Adam. Well, Christianity, Yaewah, Christ, His Cross, Grace, none of it was ever supposed to be a bandaid, its design was not be something that stops the bleeding; The purpose of the Christian faith is to be the butcher knife that reopens the wounds, scabs, and scars that we hide in shadows of our hearts and make it bleed more because more blood means more Cross, and more Cross means more rescue, and more rescue means more Christ and more Christ means more Glory, and the glory of Christ is what we're after. When we are crawling in our own blood, fighting amongst the carnage of our prideful hearts, lost in the maze of the fallen man, Christ ushers us into His silence and reminds us, through the groaning of His creation, that we to, are intended to groan, that we are designed to bleed, groan and bleed in Him. The deep groaning that rumbles in our bellies, that pains our hearts is intended to be fufilled in the future grace and glory of Christ, Our King. So silence, my friends, is a dangerous sound, it is there to make us bleed, there to make us magnify Christ, to boast in the beauty of His Cross.

Turn down your music, lose yourself in the song that silence is singing. Better yet, bleed in it.

My coffee's grown cold, I've lost my focus. I need another cup.

An Extended Hand

For some strange reason I'm reminded tonight of a trip I took a few years ago to Palo Duro Canyon, a deep scar cut in the sandstone and rocky face of the Texas panhandle. Though the magnitude of this big hole doesn't always make you take a step back or leave your lungs locked and unable to breathe like the Grand Canyon does, it still reinforces how little you are compared to the great workmanship polished by the Creator. It's a giant sized canyon, second in the nation next to, of course, that other one further out west. That one nearly doubles Palo Duro in every category, excpet in depth, where the Big One does more than double the number set by PD- it completely shatters it. Palo Duro only reaches 800 feet towards the center of the earth, the Grand Canyon yawns a staggering 6000. Blanketed by a bold red dirt that you could only find underneathe the white, sand bedsheet of the West Texas surface, the canyon floor is scattered with powerful trees, reaching and waving its limbs up to the roof of the world like paintbrushes painting the colors of sunrise across the empty canvas of sky. Sagebrush and wildflowers decorate the canyon like stars thrown against a desert night sky. Like all canyons, she is carved by water and time. Water and time are God's chisel, used to carve out monuments of such magnitude either in the ground or on top of it, both designed with the intention to knock us off our feet and on our ass. They are His most used tools. The ones He'll use to create things that will make us wonder about Him and what He's thinking. They make the things that silence our doubts about Him, stir our soul and remind us what it once meant to call ourselves His child. So we stand either on the rim of a great hole, like Palo Duro or the Grand Canyon, or we stand at the bottom lost in the shadows of their walls, and we're swallowed up by the magnificant humiliation you feel only when you're standing in the middle of God's glory. There's a story that seperates the trip I took to Palo Duro from the trip I took to the Grand Canyon, a story I'd like to share with you now. Now don't get me wrong, Palo Duro is absolutely nothing compared to the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon could swallow Palo Duro 100 times and still be starving. My eyes have never seen such a place, my heart never salivated at the splendor of our Savior as much as it did when I stood on what felt like the edge of the world that day in the Arizona desert. It's just that I learned different things, was in fact, told, new things from the Creator when I sat scribbling away in a fresh journal watching the sun disappear behind the backdrop of the Texas horizon.

Before you lose yourself in the clutter and jargon of my style, analogies, metephors, you know, the stuff writers like to ornament their lines with, let me tell you straight up, without any confusion, what it was I heard whispered to me in the time I spent out there. It may seem vague at first, but hang with me, I promise it will be explained.

"I created all this so that you, man, might live. I created her, woman, so that you, man, might learn love."

I was told this in the whispering of God on the hood of a car in the bottom of Palo Duro Canyon. At the time I was completely wrapped up in an incredible girl. It was intense. We prayed together, asked God to be at the core of what we were as a couple, wanted him to be the third wheel that always tagged along. We read books in the Bible together, talked about how each individual verse stirred our hearts deeply and romantically. We were patient with each other, wasted nothing and was careful with every moment of our relationship. We held out for that perfect moment when all things collide, resulting the spark of the first kiss. We didn't waste it on when the moment felt right, we itched in anticipation for the moment when the timing was perfect. We would write love letters to each other, but they weren't about us, they were about Him. The thesis of every letter was about how our souls were being wooed by the Maker and as a result our union as boy and girl was branded by the deeping of a relationship with The Cross. I was headed into my senior year of high school and had seriously thought that I had found the one. The only time I have ever actually known what love for someone of the opposite sex other than my mom and my sister actually felt like. And here I was, a seventeen year old kid sitting on the hood of a car staring up at the Cosmos, and as I'm staring up there, into the vast nothingness of endless time and space, the stars take shape and spell this out for me against the blackboard of night. My mind bombarded with thoughts of her face and the penstrokes of Yahweh. And in the beauty and complexity of a woman, I learned love, about the pursuit of one heart after another, about the elegant chasing and eventual dancing of mingeld and messy souls bonded by the shoelaces of Christ. God, that moment was right. I loved a girl and I loved God. I sat surrounded by the blueprints of learning how to live and how to love. I stood in the middle of the wild frontier of God's creation and was told, not by my imagination, or by my conscious, but my the very groaning of Christ, that being here, in the middle of his most obvious display of glory, devotion, grace, and boasting is where I will find life fufilled. And then I was told that in her, a woman, God's most radiant product hands down, is where I will learn to love. The trip to the Grand Canyon never told me this. It told me that God was big, really big, but forgot to tell me that in that glory was life beyond any capacity of my reasoning and that in her was a love not yet truly recgonized. So as I'm sitting there, with my hands over my mouth, trying desperately to soak all this in, God interrupts my night in the canyon to tell me one more thing.

" But you will never know any of this like it was intented if I'm not at the core."

The truth is this- You can experience all things apart from Christ: love, sex, romance, poetry, the trees, the mountains, the ocean, the stars, the sky, space, time, family, friendship, community, family, money, music, beauty, all things good and right you can know. With Christ they can be known intimately. He makes bright things brighter, great things even better. If we are not careful with how we hold His hand, we fumble and fall, and lose the ability to know these things how they were intended. We never experience their full capabilty. Without the cross of Christ at the core of who we are, we forget about living and loving. We forget about the glory exposing power of creation and the love-breeding ground the Eve walks on. I did. Eventually I lost her, I let go because I stole the sword from Him and tried to do the fighting on my own. I bombed. I sucked at it. My face had more blood on it than the blade of my sword did. I spent countless nights pounding the floor of my room begging God to give her back, to make me better at all of this, to teach about it all over again, but she was long gone. His will for my life had already taken a new course. The days of the canyon had passed because I polluted my core with the world and myself. Life and love with intention had vanished like vapor. He was purposefully pulling me into the desert, away from the shadow of the canyon walls, and into the dry, desolate desert where the only thing we can do is reach with broken fingers for the palm of His open hand or succumb to the crippling blows of a reckless war for heart. In the desert you either fight for your life or you lay down and die. In the desert the sun always sets and day turns to night, and even as you lay there on your broken back staring up into the open wound of the cosmos, spilling out the stars, the planets, and the moon set against the black blood of space, God whispers...

"I created all this so that you, man, might live like it was intended." He smiles and extends His hand, hoping that you grab it, and quietly speaks in your ear, "Hey man, let's get out of here."

Grab it, get up, and go with Him.

Groaning In Hope

It is evenings like the one I sit in now, writing to you, that dare my arms to try and wrap themselves around the ever aging, ever growing treetrunk of my faith. It is evenings like this that make me look like a five year old hugging an oak tree centuries times his age. It is evenings like this one now that make me look so small compared to something so big. The spring song of many birds bleeds through the frames of my open windows. The presense of these gentle, yet magnificant creations, are not met by eye, but instead enchanted by my ears. I cannot see them, but oh how I hear them. Their song is more complex than I will ever know; I only recognize that it is a desperate groan concieved from the fracture on creation caused by the fall before time had finished its first sentence. And this evening, fading rapidly into night, is in fact, fractured. I know this because I can hear it. The creeking of every tree branch that bends and breaks at the slightest breeze, the rustle of the junebug tightroping the vine outside my window, the song of the bird now replaced by the great chorus of crickets, the squirrel franticly searching for a nut to fill his belly, the stars finally able to start their show because the sun had to go wake up the rest of the world, they are all groaning, they are all hoping. They hope for the fufillment of that fracture, for the redeeming rescue of the one that gave them life. You see, that spring song of those birds, it is a deep groaping for the return. Those birds out there, that junebug, that squirrel, those trees towering ove my driveway and the pavement of Orchard Lane, those delicate stars, and that sleeping sun are waiting with eager anticipation for freedom from its worldy decay. They are wailing out. Adam's fall didn't only fracture us, it got them too.
They are waiting for future glory. Romans 8:22 tells us that "the whole of creation has been groaning with the pains of childbirth until now." And everyday that passes without that return, without that sweet escape, without that glorious prisonbreak, their groans grow deeper and more agonizing. The baby goes unborn; It remains trapped in the womb. And in the growing pains of childbirth, the hope for that baby's birthday grows too. To know that one day the baby will come and the pain will pass helps creation carry on; it helps them grow in hope. Their is a promise that one day the glory of creation will be fufilled, that one day the canyon left in the hearts of all things will once again be full. Until then we must groan, we must groan in hope, we must groan in Him.