Instead, it feels as if, if I don’t find something to do about this restlessness, I will simply fade away and disappear. That is a very odd feeling and one that feeds my uncomfortable sense of uselessness like little other. I feel as if I am lost in a world that does not belong to me and that does not wish for me to stay in it as I am, and so it is trying to change me and form me into something I do not have the capability to be, and in so doing, instead of becoming something false to myself, I will become nothing at all. And I feel as if I’m fighting it but with no weapons, and so my battle against this army of seminary academia is one in which everyone knows I will lose, because how could I not. But then I remember David struck the great warrior with only a slingshot and stone and a heart full of faith and the Philistine fell to his death.I don’t necessarily mean I wish to strike down the “beast” of seminary. But then again, maybe I do—not out of heroic effort or a belief that it should not be, but maybe because seminary, as I’m experiencing it here in Kentucky, may be full of a lot more Philistines than Israelites. These words are harsh, I realize, but as I search my inventory of language, this seems the only accurate way for me to state it.
I have had a lot of people ask me why I stay in seminary if I find it gives me such a bad taste in my mouth. And I can only say that I stay because this is where God has called me right now, and this confuses people, because they don’t want to believe God may call someone to something they do not enjoy. This response, though, is not a Christian response. It is entirely American, so let’s go back to the beginning.
Noah was called by God to build an ark where God would house him and others while the rest of the world died after their spirit finally gave way and instead of oxygen, they began to breathe water into their lungs. Noah was stuck on a big boat with his family and a bunch of wild animals for forty days. Wild seas probably left a number of them sea sick. Dead bodies of both people and animals likely bumped up against the side of the boat. Seven pairs of all the clean animals and birds and one pair each of unclean animals undoubtedly caused a ruckus of both sound and stench. And after forty days, even if it were the size of Bill Gates’ largest yaught, the space of the ark probably felt pretty confining. I would imagine the time on the ark for Noah and his family was not exactly like a cruise through the Caribbean.
David was called to be Israel’s greatest king and yet for what scholars suggest may have been a good fifteen or twenty years, he lived in the wilderness, fighting the enemies of Israel and running from a crazed King whose family he was eventually to dethrone. We can see through numerous psalms that this was a time and place where David felt lost and confused.
Jeremiah was called by God in his very making—“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.” Something about Jeremiah just gives me chills, I must admit. He’s not exactly a rock star to me, but he’s definitely one of my favorites in the Bible. And yet the calling of being a prophet utterly destroyed Jeremiah’s life. He was threatened, fought against, jailed, and despised by is very own people. In one place Jeremiah declares it is impossible for him to not mention or call upon the name of the Lord, that it would be like a burning fire shut up in his bones, and then only a few verses later we find him cursing the very day he was born.
Mary was called to carry, birth, and raise the very son of God. In that call, she watched her son be rejected by his people. I wonder sometimes if he baffled her at times as much as he baffled others. And then she had to experience what no parent would wish even on their worst enemy. She had to see her son die, and she watched him die a bitterly cruel death.
And then there’s Jesus Christ himself. He came to Earth to show us what it meant to live a God filled life, but in that calling he was expected to die a painful and humiliating death.
Now, I do not think I am Jeremiah or Mary or Jesus Christ. I believe that God will eventually give me a job I love, but I do not believe I am destined to live a life of comfort and peace. I will always have a heart that aches and breaks for the world, which will leave me living in a tension that will keep me in a place of constant movement, and I will always have a distaste for the places in the church that don’t have that heart, or worse, the places that pretend to but really don’t.
Late tonight, in the middle of writing this, I got to have a phone conversation with my good friend and old college roommate Heidi from back home. I have not spoken to Heidi since before I moved to Kentucky and it turns out this phone call was one we both needed. Heidi and I undoubtedly hold very different political views and likely interpret the places where politics and the Bible meet quite differently, but Heidi has a desire for God that I marvel at. She has a purity in the way she speaks about God that I love and it is always a joy to hear what she has to say, because even in her searching and questioning, she speaks with such a longing for God. Heidi’s life is full of new things just as mine is and with that has come some of the same struggles in each of our relationships with God. It was so good to share with someone who knew my heart because hers was right there with it.
Amongst all this restlessness, of my search for my identity in a place I can not understand, God gave me a jewel from home, and I’m reminded that in the middle of the wilderness, David still had friends, and in the midst of persecution and rejection, Jeremiah still had God who declared that though people would fight against Jeremiah, they would never prevail, because God was with him and would deliver him.
I don’t really expect this restlessness to go away. Writing these things down will not ease the discomfort this causes. But in a way I have not desired for a long time, I hope to delve into the word of God with a long forgotten passion. I do not want to study the Bible. I do not want to analyze it or read commentaries and write papers about it. I want to read the story of the Bible, the story of God’s people. I want to know who God was with David and Jeremiah, because I now that that is still who God is.
Like usual, it’s long past time for me to be in bed. It’s 2am now and will probably be closer to 2:30 or 2:45 before I finally shut off the lights, but I hope that I go to bed and get good sleep and tomorrow give time to God that I have not done for a really long time. I hope tomorrow that I do not have a devotional, a time to hear what God may be speaking to me for that day, but that instead I get to hear the story of God, and that through the story of his people of Israel, I begin to hear more of the story of myself. Christianity and the Bible, I am remembering, is not a lesson to be learned, a moral to be gained, or a set of rules to be followed. Ultimately, it’s a story. It’s a story of sacrificial love, of grace, of heartbreak and retribution, of good choices and bad choices, and of unfailing redemption. It is our story, and it is my story. Tonight, I will read a little of the book of Jeremiah before I turn off the lights to fall asleep. Not much, but enough to get me started. And tomorrow, well, tomorrow is a new day, and for the first time this summer, I am going to treat it as such.
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