Crash.

 

 

Yesterday morning, God and I went on a date. I decided to take Him somewhere new… Well, new to me. As the sky tumbled gray, threatening to cry all over me, I welcomed the opportunity to be drenched in the earth’s renewal.

 

Due to my current homelessness, I parked my overly-cluttered home at the edge of the empty parking lot. Perfect, I thought, we get to have the place to ourselves!

 

I grabbed My Sword, though I didn’t intend to battle this morning. I walked across the lawn of the Veteran’s Memorial Park towards the beautiful, wind-whipped pond and the shaky, sun-bleached dock that seemed just unsteady enough to break away from it’s grip on the grass and float away to sea.

 

As I approached the quaky haven, I noticed a lone white duck amusing itself on the edge of the dock. It turned out to be a piggly wiggly sack full of trash, but for the purposes of peaceful imagery and my own ego, I will pretend it was a lone white duck, amusing itself on the edge of the dock. I found myself at the oppsite end, away from the duck, so as not to startle it and cause it to flee. I love seeing God’s creatures in their natural habitat, and I felt no need to drive it away.

 

However, I had to stop before reading to take notice of the most stunning performance I could imagine, being played out  right in front of my eyes. These beautiful, tiny little orange and royal birds were singing and diving all around the dock, the pond, and me. They chattered, gliding across the sepia expanse of morning, singing their heart out to the God they somehow know sees them. They soared high, opening their wide arms to embrace the wind beneath their weight, and they dove low, dipping their feathery fingers into the rippling water, leaving beautiful streams all over the pond.

 

It was one of the most serene and overflowing moments with God I’ve had in a long time, completely enhanced by these little scissor-tailed treasures, no thanks to the duck.

 

I began to open my heart in worship. So with the swallows, I sang songs as loudly as I pleased, to the God who made the bodies of men and of birds and the vocal chords of both to glorify Him. My scratchy, morning voice filled the empty space between the lake and the rolling, tree-heavy hills. I felt freedom and an overflowing sense of joy as God sang back to me and his birds, his cool breath making little mountains in the water and gathering my messy hair behind me in a neat bundle. Oh, this morning is so full of God!

 

I began to meditate on the love of God. How great, how wide, how deep, how long… How much higher it is than my thoughts can reach, how much more ferocious than these peaceful images of flying birds, how much more gentle than the skin of newborn babies, how much more insane than every justification I can imagine, how much more unfair to God that He should have been made to love us in this way!

 

I am acutely aware that my mind, as a blind explorer by night touching the base of Mount Everest, has come upon something great and towering and incapable of being understood even if the dawn were to break. It is my limitation, my inability as human to see, that leaves me only able to feel how great and wide and deep and long this mountain of love and mercy is. My eyes are not yet trained to see it; my body not yet prepared to scale it. I may only, as this handicapped, crippled sojourner, sit in the shadow of this Everest and know that He sees me, that He scales me, and that He deeply, maddeningly, ravenously, loves me.

 

And as this love washes over me, two birds careen past my face, pulling me from my meditation. I watch as they are entangled in a hot pursuit, one bird chasing the other. The first bird plunges, swoops, dives, somersaults, backtracks, and for all intents and purposes, tries to shake off the pursuits of the other bird. I am dumbfounded in awe, particularly because the second bird seems to anticipate every single plunge, swoop, dive, somsersault, and backtrack of the bird he is chasing. It is like he has the power to read the other one’s mind, and every single turn and jerk is made in complete unison, as if rehearsing elaborate, synchronized motion.

 

The chase becomes more intense; the first spins through the air, breaking through low hanging leaves and skimming the caps of the God-blown water. The second bird never relents, he never slows down. He spins through the air, breaks through the leaves and skims the water caps. Even their wings beat in time.

 

I feel God speaking to me, This is how I pursue you.

 

And suddenly, I feel so ashamed. How many times have I felt like God was like a stern, emotionless parent watching his children run around the yard? This God, when we fall and scrape our knees, simply rolls his eyes and walks over to us, snatching us up by our armpits and carrying us at arms length to put a band-aid over our cuts, refusing to even clean the dirt out first.

 

No, my God, He pursues me. As I run in the yard, God is rolling around with me, chasing me down, falling on top of me and pulling up my shirt to blow pig noises on my belly. He pulls me up, launches me into the air, carries me on his shoulders and spins around with the speed of a tornado! He throws me through the air and makes airplane noises as I imagine I’m a Boeing 747 tearing through the cotton-down of nimbus clouds!

 

This is Abba, this is Daddy. This is the God that pursues me, this is the God that loves me as that mountain.

 

This is the God that I have made like the redneck in that Jeff Foxworthy routine, sitting on the couch watching his two year old pull the 900 pound television set on top of them over and over again. “Let ‘im do it a few more times, he’ll learn!” He laughs, and watches.

 

 

This is the God that bobs with my weaves and doesn’t relent. Just as the bird that is being chased, I can’t seem to shake Him. If I fly up to the heavens, He is there, if I make my bed in the depths, He is there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, He is there. And if I settle on the far side of the sea, He is there.

 

Wherever I go, He pursues me. If I float on the winds of heaven or if I trudge through the debaucheries of hell, God follows right behind me with all He has. If I run through the mud, if I crawl through barb-wire, if I squeeze through fences, if I tunnel through garbage, if I swim through refuse, God does not relent.

 

 

As I watched the bird’s chase get more wild and out-of-control, I realized that soon, someone had to give in.

 

I found myself thinking, What kind of crash would occur if the first one stopped?

 

So today, I ask you,

 

 

I imagine the kind of collsion that would ensue: feathers flying, a crazy intertwining of legs and beaks, unsure of where one bird ended and the other began. And, I also imagine, that the impact of the high-velocity crash would jolt every single other care from the first bird’s mind.

 

No worries about what the other birds think…

                                    No thought to what she will eat tonight…

                                                            No care to whether or not her plans go the way she wants…

                                                                                                                     No wonder to how she’ll keep running…

 

The only thing she would be able to think about is the collision, the form of the other bird upon her as she meets the end of herself.

 

What if you quit running?

 

Learning to love God is a beautiful fall, but an earth-shattering crash.

 

The moment you stop, well, the feathers will probably fly, there might be some bruises, some aches, some broken bones.