Important Matters

Thursday, March 14, 2014

3-14-14.  I like dates like that.

Today was about human loneliness and whether or not we had people with whom we can discuss important matters.  The Bible verse was Esther asking for God’s strength and grace because she was all alone and “taking my life in my hand.”

We’re more used to the phrase being about putting your life in someone else’s hands, which should feel scarier.  Holding someone else’s life in our hands might feel scarier – probably depends on how capable you feel.

But what Esther is describing is something that only God can help us with and perhaps that only God can really share with us: taking our lives into our own hands.  Acting, working, living, risking, our own lives.  Taking our comfortable lives as the queen consort in our hands in order to do good.

This past weekend, someone told me about a project, and it is only today that I realized why ever since I have been filled with fire and dread.  Because I have found, at last, a project that I know I want to spend my life doing.  I have found it.  This is what I want.  To work on this project.  I want it to start right away, and I don’t want to give it up until I’m dead.  I want it to be mine.

Not exclusively or anything, but I have found the thing that I want desperately to be a part of.  Enough to risk and sacrifice and break down my life to pick up and move to do.  Without really hesitating.  All the doubt and hesitation is me forcing myself to do it right – not a doubt about what I want to be doing.

God is speaking through this book, reminding me to keep Him a part of the conversation and prompting the epiphany between it and an old story I’m rereading this evening.  God truly is amazing – that He can use both together to comfort me and help guide me.

I don’t know how the reflection book knew, but I did feel dreadfully lonely tonight.  I drove around for awhile when I stopped by the house and saw that Daniel wasn’t home.  I wandered around, thinking how very dull I must be that I can’t even think of anything I’d like to do at this hour – which was only 8 p.m. except stop at the DQ on the way home.

Perhaps that’s the real moment when God gives us purpose – or perhaps the place from which we are most able to see it.  Other people’s needs, other people’s wonderful community – they can obscure it.  Visionaries with pure, simple callings had to take time away from the community, however supportive, to listen and get their heads straight.  To put their lives back in their hands.

Perhaps that is the gift of loneliness – purpose.  Perhaps it is the quiet where grace can shout rather than subtly suggest.  Perhaps loneliness, too, is holy.  Perhaps it makes us feel braver and stronger or just takes away the things that would keep us from acting, making our purpose clearer and easier to follow through.