Easter in the Rearview mirror

This is a long overdue posting of a blog I began in late May -- I think it applies just as well now that we're looking at Advent in the distance as it did looking at Easter in the rearview mirror.

This is a quote from a book by Richard Russo called Empire Falls. We hear the story of the declining town of Empire Falls from the point of view of Miles Roby. In this selection, he speaks of a lonely teenage boy who is befriended by his daughter, Tick.

If Jesus had gone away, things in Galilee would have returned to normal, just as her father had promised they would soon in Empire Falls. ..No one could want this boy, this child who had dangled from a laundry bag inside a closet, not to exist. Merely for him not to exist here, because here has proven to be the wrong place. She feels like Jesus' disciples must've felt. They never wanted him crucified, of course, but what a relief it must have been when the stone was rolled across the entrance to the tomb, sealing everything shut so they could go back to being fishermen, which is what they knew how to do, rather than fishers of men, which they didn't. No wonder they didn't recognize him later on the road to Damascus. They didn't want to any more than Tick wants to welcome this poor boy back into their midst. (p. 446-447)

This is not a Christian book, but isn't that a stiking comparison? How would it have felt to be the disciples, to have had your life disrupted for 3 years, and then for it all to turn out so different than you had hoped ("we had hoped that He was the Messiah," they told Jesus)... how they must have wanted to just put the whole confusing thing behind them.

And us? How has Jesus disrupted your life? Don't you sometimes wish you could just live like the rest of the world, and turn away from what He's calling you to? It can be so uncertain, so unsettling, following that voice you think you hear on a way you think you might be called to... toward something you're not sure you can handle...Kind of like that feeling right before your foot touches the ground... most of the time you don't think about it, but there's that time when you forget how many steps there are, and the landing isn't where you expect it to be.

But then I think, "what else is there?" I could go back to living the way I was. It's familiar, so familiar that I can do it in my sleep. I have. I fill the emptiness inside with noise and sensations, then go back to mindlessly living. But I have known another way. I have known the feeling of adventure, and I wake in anticipation of what God will do next. Even if those moments are in the background faraway, there is a knowledge you can't unknow, a knowledge that God will show up, that actually He never left, and He's waiting to show me a better way, bit by bit, and He will walk beside me.

And so I determine to keep listening, to stay awake, to move, to watch and see.