2024-11-26 A Meditation on Going Patient

To the inducted, Christianity has created such boundless possibility as to give a permanent ministry in the realm of patience. That is, we waken each morning and remember the tears, the promise to dry every eye. We waken each morning and remember the listless or injured former times. We waken each morning and remember the blotto overwhelming ground-shifting first encounters, encounters mysteriously couched in plain patience themselves.

And where we land, Christianity positing an Experience, is our personal sphere, a circle within, off-center, another circle related by familiarity, and more circles ebbing outwards, as somehow the Personal Quest to hear the Gospel, is attuned and intertwined with a broad Movement called The Faith.

We are not cynical, except that we nurse ourselves and shelter inside our personal circle. Something therein meant so much as to be Home Base for life, at least, a touching-off point, a landmass kept in sight—mentally or literally—by the missional sailor, a Relevance that accepts the post-celebratory friendship or friend request.

Christianity posits a prayer life in which deep Needs are brought to the table, and somehow our Expectation—that these needs will, one day, be met—is for real but also gives pause. We are somehow weaned off of the plain need and find our contentment mystically Here and Now. We will see the Father again. We will meet the Son in Him, and in them the Spirit Three-In-One. We also acknowledge plain simpler impetuses, the masculine-feminine interplay and the excuses we try to make therein (friendship is for real!). The dreamt upon substance or chemical dependence, as though some inner debt of sobriety was as of yet still unpaid. It is a broken repetitive reminder that we do no wrong to long for and to invent excuses to pursue. Only our Present Expectations indulge the imagination in places that the Assembled Body draws boundaries of a sort unheard of in unchurched masses.

We know how potent is a friend in a time of need, or in any time. Jesus dealt out Human Experience in spades, that we might cease simply imagining a Healing, and start to Expect and Experience one. We have removed ourselves so that it all becomes special, the coffee date, the gladsome greeting, the many ways there is no sin in what what-ifs surmount, only that for now we are patiently Rewarded and Weaned, never too self-content, but also knowing there is much that is Good and Noble that, in today’s hour, is unpursued.

It isn’t the lusts of the flesh that present themselves so much as the more solemn or sublime thrills, the nearness to what is ultimately passed over. It is astonishing, too, how we judge one another, this too being our ability to remember one impatient jibe and overlook a hundred chores done selflessly. We come to believe in some strange Recompense, that the bothersome soul shines on his or her day in the sun, with good deeds, with a cigarette lent out or a jovial report on the latest sports scores. We in short cannot invent what God does through an instant with a Person, ministry therefore being a game of patience and unmined bottomless reserves of Good Deeds if only we would go simple rather than esoteric or clever. Remembering the tearful eye. Recalling the morning injury of a friend disappearing into the mist. Recollecting the gift that we as of yet still haven’t quite assessed, for it was a gift of Presence, and all our idols and totems are now shifting. We are finding our circle. We are centering it in intertwined proximities because of the sincerity of our own pursuit, to acknowledge Friends in the Scripture-reading mentality. To acknowledge friends in the pews, Today a waking Reminder it is not so blase or simple, rather we have Decided, and our Decision is once and for all: with such as these I shall make my camp.