I have been at a loss to say anything on this blog, but if you’ve ever visited me at work, you know I do not have any trouble covering my cubicle walls in lines of songs and images—like this one:
“Most of my life
I’ve been watching these trees
marking the seasons,
catching their leaves.
That same slow and silent changing
is evident in me:
You could cut me open
and read my life in rings.”
– Benjamin Tissell, “3.28.12,” The Long Way Home
These little lines by Benjamin Tissell arced like an electric thread up off an album called “The Long Way Home.” Give it a listen. You may never shake it.
Last year, I started to think a lot about what some might call “kairos” time (deep time) in contrast to “chronos” time (clock time). I started to call kairos time “Ecclesiastes 3 Time.” A time for everything. Marking the seasons, marking the Gardener as I do only what I see Him doing (John 5:19), and marking my own blazing willfulness to alter the seasons if only I could. The way this works itself out is that in a season for losing, the best thing I can do is… receive loss. Not because loss is in itself good, but because loss is what it is time for, and God is available to me completely there.
I started to experience the seasons of the church calendar a little differently too when I began to receive them in this light. A friend described the discipline of fasting for Lent this spring in the most insightful way I’d ever heard it said: “We don’t go into the desert because the desert is somehow good. We go to the desert because it’s where Jesus is.” We don’t fast because we love fasting. We don’t go into the desert because we love the desert. We go into the desert because we are following Jesus:
“I remember how eager you were to please me as a young bride long ago, how you loved me and followed me even through the barren wilderness.” (Jeremiah 2:2)
What I love about these lines by Benjamin Tissell is that in them, he names two different dimensions of the way seasons come and go. We mark the seasons of a tree in the visible, natural world by its leaves; the seasons of its inner life, in rings.
May that same slow and silent changing be evident in me.
In His peace,
Grace
P.S. Welcome to the blog series where I write about what’s up on my walls!