Lo, I Am With You All of the Days
Sometimes we have to be reminded we are not alone. That we are called by name.
Oh no, April cold and rain.
Sometimes I want to steal away to Jesus. Hide in the refuge and comfort of unconditional love. Radically rest and renew. Eat. Weep. Pray. Love… Trust that all manner of things shall be well. And all shall be well.
Then I realize the one thing needful is both being and doing, deep rest and active verb.
I open both the Bible and the newspaper, so to speak; listen to the cries of the people at church in the city. There are deep forces of economic and racial injustice at work in our nation. They are aggressive, cruel, capitalist energies—playing themselves out in homelessness and lack of affordable housing; jobs without living wages and benefits; lack of affordable health insurance, mediocre mental health services, addiction and gender violence…
These “habitations of safety” are basic human rights and capacities, not privileges. The difference between humane social democracy and ‘winner takes all’ predatory capitalism.
How to break into freedom fighting and just love? How to resist without becoming isolated and burnt out? I don’t have the answers, except to listen and follow with humility and audacity—one day at a time. Sometimes we have to be reminded we are not alone. That we are called by name.
“We read in Mark’s Gospel that they were going up to Jerusalem, and Jesus was walking ahead of them; and they were amazed, and those who followed were afraid…
Jesus the Christ is elusive. The wind—the Spirit blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes; so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.
If you do not know that Jesus the Christ is elusive, I hope you will discover it as you become more acquainted with his words, and his questions to us. And we must take time for that. “‘Who are my mother and my brothers?’ And looking around on those who sat about him, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother, and sister, and mother.’”
“What do you want me to do for you?” he asks on more than one occasion. And what should we say?
We can do much thinking about these things, about Jesus the Christ, his claims, his gospel; about the Healing Spirit, the Holy Spirit. We can and we do, and often we should. But let us not be misled. Jesus Christ is not an idea, a concept—and not finally one who stands still while we think about it all. He is an elusive but actual friend. The Spirit does move: it does blow. And the Spirit moves us from philosophy and religion to a living relationship. Amidst the fragments of ideas, the Spirit moves us from detachment and half-heartedness to the beginnings of friendship and new life. We may then well be philosophers or theologians, but we would see Jesus: we will not be ashamed to say in our own ways, what a friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear.
We wait for the Lord—until he comes. But the risen Christ speaks now from within our midst. For Christ comes into our midst, and into our hearts, though we resist him...
He comes to us as he came in the flesh to those on a lakeside. As Albert Schweitzer testified,
“He speaks to us the same word: ‘Follow thou me!’ and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfill for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is.”
We live in days and do not know what a day may bring. There are days of confident faith, and days of sad blundering and terrible confusion and doubt. There are days when the birth of a child brings joy, and days when illness and death bring anguish and sorrow. There are days of peace and days of war. There are days when life is music, and days when despair wraps us in impenetrable mist. Says Jesus the Christ, “But, lo, I am with you always: I am with you all the days.”
From Coleman Brown, Our Hearts Are Restless Till They Find Their Rest in Thee: Prophetic Wisdom in a Time of Anguish (Through April 30.)
This picture was taken by Clarence L. Benjamin when the people on the train first saw the allied soldiers and realized they had been liberated.