Friday, June 3, 2011

In the Disturbance

In my profession, we deal with boundaries. Lately the brothers had a great discussion using boundaries as a kind of parable. You can imagine. But apart from the boundaries of the land we inhabit, there is another kind of boundary that we all consider worth visiting.

We are fond of visiting frontiers of nature, in which one thing becomes another thing, at which something becomes nothing.

The glacier stands for thousands of years, but eventually becomes sea water. Visitors to Alaska take a trip to that boundary in which something becomes nothing, for upon that boundary is Disturbance.

We visit the beach, that place where the visible ends and the unseen begins. At the brink is Turbulence, the frontier of the unseen eating away at the shore of the seen.

For the backyard BBQ, we will have our wood turn into smoke, but fire is the boundary at which something becomes nothing.

And we look into these things because God is there in parable.

God is in the turbulence, in the disturbance, at the boundary where a thing becomes no longer a thing.

At the edge of the glacier of reputation crumbling into the sea of humiliation, the conflagration of religious and social standing, the erosion of certainty by the tide of the unknown, God is there in the turbulence.

As I shared this with the brothers, Oliver added this from Psalm 42...

Why are you in despair, O my soul?
And why have you become disturbed within me?
Hope in God, for I shall again praise Him
For the help of His presence.
O my God, my soul is in despair within me;
Therefore I remember You from the land of the Jordan
And the peaks of Hermon, from Mount Mizar.
Deep calls to deep at the sound of Your waterfalls;
All Your breakers and Your waves have rolled over me.
The LORD will command His lovingkindness in the daytime;
And His song will be with me in the night,
A prayer to the God of my life.