Sabbath

I am tired, because I have traveled all week, and am only just returning home. I never announce, in a public forum, when I will be traveling, because you never know who will be reading. You never know who will take an inordinate interest in your comings and goings, and in the workings of your family. But there I was, first in a small city and then in a huge one, and the only thing I found in common between them is that they are not home.

Sometimes, when I come through the door, I think how blessed I am, and how such things can be taken from us so very quickly, or ruined by our own hands. I think about how the passing years want to shift the proportions of hope and regret that most of us carry. Hope is a reserve that we sometimes think is filled by our own abilities, until we have lost things, failed at things, walked away from things we should have held tight. Regret is that bitter cistern running as deep as we are willing to go from God, and it is not emptied in this life, because we cannot undo our crimes. Grace is the covering over of it, the cancellation of our debauchery and self-righteousness, twins that never seem to recognize one another in themselves.

Grace covers it over, but perhaps some of you are like me. Perhaps at night, when the house is quiet and the world is stilled and waiting, you can hear the echoes coming up from that place, that tomb you have dug for yourself and would have descended into forever, if not for what was finished on Golgotha.

So when I come through the door and they run to me, my children and my wife, I hug them and I close my eyes. It struck me today that this must seem curious to the little ones. I don't know why I close my eyes except that perhaps these ones I love seem closer then, in my arms where I can smell and kiss and breathe them in. I can't see the waiting mail, or a chair, or anything before me. I close my eyes and there is only that moment of holding what I could not earn, but which has been given to me, despite me.

It is so easy to be consumed by our grievances. I have a long list of them. Sometimes I take them out and brood over them, like Gollum and his cursed ring. We are curious that way, or maybe it's just me, in that I can so easily begin to think only on what is lacking from my self-centered world -- time, vengeance, respect, convenience, vindication, luxury, meaningful work -- if you're really interested I can keep going, but perhaps I'm naming things on your own list, those of you who still sin.

But when I come through that door, and I am holding the ones I love, I forget about that list. There is only Thank you, welling up inside, a constant prayer. Ironically, it's the very list that sometimes keeps me from holding them. I am too busy with meaningless things, or too frustrated, or too sleepy. That awful list of grievances, that Bible of Me, threatens every day to keep me from the very things that render it powerless.

The thing I am working on now is to close my eyes to that list. Like my regrets, it only holds power when I ponder it. These twin dark things: what we want and what we have done, can destroy what we have been given. So I close my eyes, which is good for praying, or for holding a child, or for that wonderful gift of God: rest.