BEN : Stealing my words . . . .

Stealing my words is much less an offense than my being haunted by the words you wrote — returning, rest, salvation, sabbath, letting go. I am terrified I will never be able to receive the gift hidden within the practice of such things.
Margin is not simply the difference between retail price and product cost these days. Margin is what’s missing in my life. At each corner, the complexity of responsibility and scheduling seem to push against any hope I might have of finding some sense of margin beyond that of a break-even or profit analysis spreadsheet.
My attempt to find margin has become an empty promise to myself and seems accompanied by a blatant disregard for the limited capacity of my human self itself. I push myself to the what seem to be my limits and dance on the edge of what seems to be an insanity. This is the life I have chosen and yet I worry it may consume me.
I have a burning need to find the News somewhere between our words and my attempts to find a kind of Divine metronome to help me pace myself at the speed of God, rather than keep dancing to a drumbeat of expectation.

O God, by whom the meek are guided in judgment, and light riseth up in darkness for the godly: Grant us, in all our doubts and uncertainties, the grace to ask what thou wouldest have us to do, that the Spirit of wisdom may save us from all false choices, and that in thy light we may see light, and in thy straight path may not stumble; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

I pray you are right that we may be closing in on the News. I need such a thing to be true.

BEN : Is it possible to hit the rewind button . . . .

Is it possible to hit the rewind button and start Lent again?

It sounds like a strange question, I know. But in a day and time when everything seems to be on-demand, being forced into an ancient rhythm that doesn’t allow for play, stop, pause, or rewind is strangely unfamiliar.

I should know better and be more disciplined. I feel very scattered and stretched as I attempt the daily feat of meeting the pace of the life that I’ve been given. While I long to find spans of silence, I eagerly await moments of intense awareness of a Creator and a dimension that exists beyond my own world.

The difficult balance of being made in the image of God is not allowing ourselves to believe we are “little gods” and, thus, the center of all existence. The Lenten experience refreshes our practice in the reality we are not god at all. In fact, there isn’t a time when that difference is more present than during this season.

So how do I interpret an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-present God in an on-demand world? I certainly can’t escape God. That’s that story of Jonah. He ran as far and as fast from God as he thought possible but ended up running right into Him. Perhaps in my attempt to press play, stop, pause, or rewind throughout this season, I, too, will find God waiting for me.

Most merciful God,
we confess that we have sinned against you
in thought, word, and deed,
by what we have done,
and by what we have left undone.
We have not loved you with our whole heart;
we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.
We are truly sorry and we humbly repent,
for the sake of your Son Jesus Christ,
have mercy on us and forgive us;
that we may delight in your will,
and walk in your ways,
to the glory of your Name. Amen.

BEN : It was not so much . . .

It was not so much the falling asleep at the wheel and wrecking my car as it was that my young son was in the back seat at the time. We were both unharmed. And considering the encounter my vehicle had with the concrete running parallel to us, the car was relatively unharmed too. I’m grateful we are all OK.
      By the grace of God, my young son never woke up. To my knowledge he has no recollection of the event. I will never forget the sound of the tires popping and metal scraping that woke me from my inopportune slumber.
      I pulled the car, pulsating between two flat tires and two good tires, into the parking lot of an elementary school. I immediately called my wife who, upon arrival, ensured our child was safe and sound. She then looked at me in that quiet voice and said, “I hope it was worth it.”
      I recently took on an extra project at work. It is one of those projects that when they come, you say yes. They don’t come often, so I gladly embraced the opportunity when it presented itself. What she was referring to was the fact that I had been pushing myself beyond my limits the last two months.
      She had been warning me for weeks; I had simply dismissed her concerns.
      In my usual style, I invested more time and energy than I had to give. I was running on a deficit of sleep, only averaging about three hours a day. As my wife gently picked up our child and carried him over to her car to take him home to finish his afternoon nap in the safety of our home and his bed, it occurred to me that she had been right all along. No project or opportunity was worth this.
      When you talk about becoming all that the One Who whispered me into being wants me to become, I stumble and stutter. I seem to substitute what I do for who I am. It’s strange that as often as I was asked ‘who do I want to be?’ growing up, I never really answered the question. The question I answered was ‘what do I want to do?’
      These are two entirely different questions. One is temporal, pivoting on circumstance; the other is eternal, existing within and beyond time and space.
      In that moment, in that parking lot, I began to know that nothing I did, no title I earned, no project I completed really mattered. I am a husband, father, son, and brother. And to answer my wife’s question, no, it wasn’t worth it.
      So it is in the posture of Lent, with my hands open to let go and to receive, where I hope to find the power of the resurrection in another new beginning. Borrowing from the Benedictine tradition, I will write a Rule for my life, a guide that will help me stay focused on my being and prevent my doing from getting in the way.