Sunday, April 1, 2012

Martha

As if it was trying to be funny today of all days, the Internet in our apartment decided to go completely belly-up. Comcast does this occasionally. They are terrible here in Staunton. The timing was most inconvenient.

Because I don’t want to trudge up the university tonight to post this, I will take care of that (and everything else I needed to be in contact with my email for) tomorrow morning. Also: everyone please pray for my defense on Tuesday and, perhaps more importantly, that I get my appendices done tomorrow.

Okay, now to Martha (without the benefit of the stuff I’ve already written on her).

MARTHA

It never occurred to me that He wouldn’t come.

It was probably best He didn’t. I was full of recrimination, and just behind it was anger. Bitterness. Unfair, unrighteous, nasty bitterness. The terrible little thought: what good was it to be friends with the Son of God if He did not come to save your brother when he was dying? Had we been wrong all this time? Had we been wrong to think He loved us? That He depended on Lazarus? Was His smile for us, that special smile, false?

In four days many such nasty little thoughts can come to the surface. But they passed, along with the recrimination. I busied myself with the burial arrangements. I busied myself tending to Mary. I busied myself setting up memorials. I busied myself setting our legal affairs in order and double- and triple-checking with every official who came by hoping to take advantage of the poor bereft sisters. I busied myself doing everything and anything but giving in to the thoughts.

I busied myself, but all I wanted was to sit at His feet. Mary, she was wise. That was all she had ever wanted. I wanted to be busy. I felt useful, even powerful, when I was busy. I wanted to find God in the moments between the chores of my daily routine. I wanted to find Him in the faces of those I helped. I wanted to find Him everywhere but waiting around the next corner with His arms open to comfort me.

I wanted Him now. I wanted to sit at His feet. I wanted to feel His words wash over me, His words that I knew would slowly peel the heartbreak back, exposing the deepest wounds and washing them clean. I wanted to sit at His feet. I wanted to be held by my Lord. And I wanted my friend Jesus, beneath it all.

I busied myself because I could not sit at His feet if He had not come. But when I heard that He had, that Jesus was here, I was off like a cat out of an oven. I didn’t notice that I dropped five pots and scrambled over them in my haste. I didn’t notice that I bowled little Rachel over as I bolted out the door. I didn’t hear the shouts of surprise when I leapt over the low wall at the edge of our house. I don’t believe half the stories I heard later. All I knew at the time was that He was here at last. My Jesus. My Lord and my friend. The man at whose feet I knew I would find peace. The peace I had been too busied to be wise enough to seek before now. Before Lazarus’s death stopped me cold.

I was surprised to have beaten Mary to Him. I threw myself at His feet, remembering how Mary had knelt with precious oils and washed His feet with her own hair. I wished I had something of the sort, but I had only myself, in a soiled apron, with a heart broken under the strain of grief, finally ready to sit at His feet.

“Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”