Hurting, waiting and down time...

About four years ago I came down with pneumonia. It was awful. Apparently after spending time in the New Mexican mountains, I was exposed and totally run down. But for about three weeks kept avoiding what everyone else understood: something was wrong and I was hurting. So, my dear friend and colleague in ministry, Debby, forced me to the doctor's and within 10 minutes he confirmed that I had pneumonia and had to be out of the loop for 3 weeks and then only part-time for another month.

Part of me hated this hurting and waiting and down time: after all, I'm a man of the Baby Boomer generation - not some slacker - and I had things to do, god damn it! It isn't any wonder that one of my favorite passages from Scripture is Peterson's reworking of Romans 12:

So here's what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.

Ever since my calling into ministry at 16 - in the aftermath of Dr. King's assassination in 1968 - I have been wrestling with doing precisely this: presenting my body as a living sacrifice to use the old words. And now in my illness, I couldn't do it. I couldn't finish writing my doctoral dissertation, I couldn't preach or teach, I couldn't visit - man I could barely pray - because I was always falling asleep. (NOTE: it was only during this enforced sabbatical of sickness that the words of an old monk started to make sense; when asked, "Is it wrong that I fall asleep almost every time I pray?" the old one said, "oh my dear no - you are getting God's reply in the most clear way - because apparently you need to sleep.")

So for almost two months I rested - and slept - and prayed a little. I watched tons of foreign movies - slept through most of them - and became a fan of the TV program Homicide: Life on the Street all over again. And, I got used to living in my own skin again. Apparently there was really something to this away and quiet time; thankfully I was able to listen a little more carefully. For during that waiting two more scriptures became part of my heart, too:

+ Matthew 11: Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you'll recover your life. I'll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won't lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you'll learn to live freely and lightly."

+ John 21: Peter was upset that he asked for the third time, "Do you love me?" so he answered, "Master, you know everything there is to know. You've got to know that I love you." Jesus said, "Feed my sheep. I'm telling you the very truth now: When you were young you dressed yourself and went wherever you wished, but when you get old you'll have to stretch out your hands while someone else dresses you and takes you where you don't want to go." He said this to hint at the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God. And then he commanded, "Follow me."

A Zen master helping me with spiritual guidance once said, "Don't expect to make BIG changes in your life, ok, man? Inner change is incremental. Slow. Be gentle with yourself - and others - because you don't want to make things worse by your striving, ok?" So, I am relearning this right now - this week - once again when there are a TON of things that need to be done and addressed and I want to be a part of them all. But, after waking up and aching like I had been hit by a truck and having a low grade fever, it is quiet waiting time, yes?

T.S. Eliot put it like this in Four Quartets:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong things; wait without love
For love would love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not yet ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the
dancing.

"What we strive for," said Jean Hardy, "in the effort to resolve the tension between our sense of inferiority and our grandiosity is not modesty, but humility - that is, spiritual dignity." I love that: staying closer to the ground - humility - is what spiritual dignity is all about. And it often takes a time of hurting and waiting for me to recall this timeless truth. Like St. Alanis Morissette said so perfectly: "thank you dissillusionment... thank you silence..."

So... hi ho, hi ho, its back to bed I go.