Five Minute Friday: After

Happy Friday!For a few months now, I’ve the pleasure of participating in Lisa Jo Baker’s Five Minute Friday blogging challenge. Every Friday, a group of eclectic bloggers turn off our inner critics and perfectionists and just write for five minutes straight. Zero editing. Just a stream of consciousness free for all. And then we all link up and encourage each other. To learn more about Five Minute Friday and how you can participate click here.This Friday's topic is AFTER.***Go. I thought that after I moved, it would all make sense. The burnout, therestlessness, the ache in my heart to live in a foreign country that never went away.Then, after I got settled, I would be happy.After I made more friends, I would feel home.After I set a schedule, I'd feel peace.After I started a new job, I've feel engaged and connected and alive.But it wasn't so.It's not that I'm not happy, it's just that I'm still waiting for the AFTER.After I get in shape, I'll be happy with my body.After I go to Spanish school, I'll be fluent and confident and no-longer-shy.After I write, I'll feel accomplished.After I pray, I'll be at peace.But the AFTER never comes.The waiting-for-something-better becomes a trap. A prison. A recipe for discontent.Because life isn't in the AFTER. God isn't in the AFTER.Life is HERE, right now. God is HERE, right now.

In the flowers on my table. In the words I tap-tap-type.That's the idea of GRATITUDE. The awakening of joy in the current moment.So I surrender my clinging to the AFTER. This unfreedom of waiting. The discontent of a life disjointed into BEFORE and AFTER.I forget the BEFORE and AFTER. I open my eyes to the HERE. 

Carpet Diem and the Upside Down Kingdom

Shew. For the last week my life has been turned upside down. You see Holy Week, or Semana Santa, is a pretty big deal here in La Antigua, Guatemala—and for all of Latin America for that matter.Life turned upside down. Hundreds of thousands of people poured into the city to take part in the veneration, adoration, and celebration.Cars choked out black exhaust as they lined up in the narrow streets that resembled more of a parking lot than any kind of thoroughfare. For days, my attic bedroom shook with the rumble of every passing truck, car, and moto. The sidewalks were bloated with people, with families, with little girls in tiny woven skirts, and with the faithful donning purple, black, or white cloaks as they marched in the many processions commemorating the passion of Christ.It was a bit like living in Disneyland for an entire week: the crowds, the lines, the noise, the street vendors calling out assorted fried and fattening foods.Since the beginning of Lent, there were processions in every town and village and aldea. And not only every town had a procession, but every church in every town had at least a couple of processions. Sometimes, especially when I was trying to find my bus route amidst the chaos, it felt like there was literally a procession on Every. Single Street. To my foreign, non-Catholic eye, it seemed over the top—what more could they possibly be celebrating?How much incense is just enough for the prayers of the faithful to reach the ears of God in heaven without burning his nostrils too?Stores and banks closed from midday-Wednesday on. Families stayed up all night Thursday night to watch processions and participate in making alfombras. Alfombras (or carpets) are beautiful works of art that cover the streets or floors of churches before a procession passes by. They can be made out of flowers or colored sawdust or chalk, and are absolutely stunning to see. The time and care and creativity that goes into each alfombra is truly remarkable, especially considering that they’re literally trampled in minutes when the procession marches over. (My friend and housemate wrote a beautiful post on these works of art here.)I started the week with a great admiration for these faithful street artists and procession participants, but as the streets filled to bursting and my introverted self cursed my broken noise-canceling headphones, I found myself falling out of the Lenten spirit. I found myself caving to annoyance and silently praying that everyone would just go home already. I didn’t like having my life turned upside down.But as I think about it now (granted from my quiet, crowd-free bedroom), I start to wonder if maybe that’s the point. This turned-upside-down-ness. This break from the status quo.If we're really celebrating how Jesus is God-with-us and how everything has changed with his life and death and resurrection, then maybe a life-stopping celebration is a little more appropriate than pastel eggs and tales of an Easter bunny with jelly bean treats.Maybe we’re meant to be turned upside down. The Kingdom of God is an upside down kingdom, after all. A place where celebration trumps personal space. Where the sick are healed, the captives set free, and the blind can see.And the best part is, this kingdom is here, now. In the Gospels we can see “a new set of signposts, Jesus-shaped signposts, indicating what is to come: a whole new creation, starting with Jesus himself as the seed that is sown in the earth and then rises to become the beginning of that new world.” (Simply Jesus, N.T. Wright)And we are called to be a part of this new world. To be kingdom-bringers, signposts of hope, sowers of healing and pillars of peace in this new upside world where Jesus is alive.And that is a life-stopping celebration I can get behind.Happy Easter, everyone! 

I don't believe in God

  Over the years I've come to find that I don't believe in God--I hope in God.I want to share an article on faith and doubt and belief and hope from pastor and writer, Jay Bakker, that resonates so deeply with my own journey from certainty to doubt to the newfound hope and faith I embrace in my life today.  Jay writes,

"I've gone from believing in these things to hoping in them. Because when you believe in something "unseen" to use Paul's word, you become dogmatic. You can't prove it to anyone, and so you end up insisting that you are right instead of insisting on what is right. But hope -- hope leaves room for doubt. Hope embraces your doubt. I hope in God, but I could be wrong. I hope in heaven, but I could be wrong."

Hope means living as if the too-good-be-true Gospel of Jesus Christ, of love and redemption and freedom, is actually true, even if you can't prove it. Even if there are days it makes no sense and the doubts rise up like engulfing waves. Hope means choosing Love and meaning and life amidst the questions. Hope means having faith that we are connected, that our lives matter, that the lives of those around us matter, too.

"With faith, I can work for good in the world. I can see the world in all of its messy, random, meaningless tragedy and say: So what? I'm going to create meaning. I'm going to love my neighbor. I'm going to work to free the oppressed. I'm going to live out grace. I'm going to feed the hungry. I'm going to live as if life has meaning, despite the evidence, and hope that I'm right."

This last paragraph mimics so closely my own journey back to faith, back to hope in the God of Love. The God who is Love. When I lost my certainty in God, in religion, in the black and white I always knew, I found the freedom to love, anyway. To serve, anyway. To hope, anyway. And, somehow, this hope has been much richer and much deeper and much fuller than any certainty or belief I ever had before.To read Jay Bakker's full article on Huffington Post Religion, click here.How about you? How do you handle doubts and questions? Would you say you believe in God or hope in God?