In Blue Like Jazz, Donald Miller writes about how jazz sounds sad to us because it doesn’t resolve- that is, the music doesn’t come together the way we expect it to, to make us feel the way we expect to.
For most of this month, I have reveled in being in Africa. But leaning against the wall of the tiny room I shared with my teammate Rachel in Zambia, I leaned back into the tension of the first four months of the Race and cried at the reminder of Eastern Europe.
Eastern Europe hasn’t resolved for me. The long, cold months I spent sleeping in converted shipping containers and triple-decker bunk beds and back rooms of churches haven’t yet crescendoed to a sweet end.
This is a benediction for a continent that won’t let me leave it cleanly behind.
May the Lord bless you and keep you.
May he make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious unto you.
May the Lord lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace. Amen.
Augustine of Hippo, a first century theologian, said, solviture ambulando. It is solved by walking. “It” could be anything- it’s the walking that matters.
Walking away from Eastern Europe was all I wanted, but I have found that it is insistent. It demands to be remembered, hitting me at moments when all I want is to rest easy. I can’t turn away, as much as I tried, without praying for the people I met and countries I visited. It’s the only way to walk away unscathed.
So for Eastern Europe, for the countries that broke my heart and the people imprinted on my soul, for the situations that ripped the fabric of my theology, I will say the benedictions of my childhood and add my own, trying to speak the peace I seek into existence.
Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy, to the only God, our Father, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and power, for all time, now and forever. Amen.
Eastern Europe was a long four months, and I stumbled so much it sometimes felt like all I was doing was falling. But in walking away, onto a new continent and new season, I can look back and pray the words of Jude for cities and countries I never thought I could love.
I am living in the tension of a jazz song: waiting for the sweet resolution, yet feeling the pulse of minor chords and bright trumpets all at once, in a swirl of sound. And I believe in a God who is there in the melody- who is, of course, writing the music.
Sometimes I want only part of God- the soft minor notes of quiet solitude or the major chords of sweeping structural change. But the Lord is there in all of it, in the thundering clashes of ideology and the tender moments between children laying down to sleep. And none of it resolves.
It’s all like jazz, and it’s best to walk right through the middle of it.
