Years click off faster than they used to. Amy and Daniel were small just yesterday, but now they’re grown (practically). So many events once to be looked forward to are now slipping by one by one, complete. There’s lots more adventure ahead, but there isn’t a day goes by without my head reeling with it all.
I often say “The world is just too much for me.” When I say that, I’m referring to a density I just can’t wrap my head around (or my heart, or my spirit). Life must be focused to be effective, they tell me, and everywhere, slices of reality clamor for attention, all of them well-deserving. In Kenya, where we support orphaned AIDS children, rioting over the recent elections have claimed many lives, according to an email we received from a Kenyan missionary who was just here less than a month ago. Here, we are just ramping up to choose a new president, and the political conversation will be bitter and ugly, a challenge to any decent person’s sensibilities. My son will leave for college soon, and both Amy and Daniel will be in hot pursuit of the dreams of the young. I stand before a church each Sunday and challenge them to find life, to follow the Christ because he’s the one who knows what life is. I have a novel needing attention, plays to write. This morning I am working on a scene for Willow Creek, reading online about M16a2’s and the velocity needed for a bullet to piece body armor effectively enough for “lethality.” My body aches with intimations of a cold coming on, and somehow last week, I threw a wrench in my right shoulder. Six people were gunned down in Carnation on Christmas Day. I need to call my Mother.
Truth is, life is rich with glory…God’s glory. We are such broken people, people wanting so badly to find the good in life, willing to do almost anything to find it, except the things Jesus tried to explain. Die to live, he said. Follow me, obey my commands if you love me. Such odd instructions, and how odd that we say Lord, Lord, and don’t bother with much of what he said.
I told the church yesterday to make a New Year’s Resolution, knowing full well we all know such resolutions “don’t work.” Which, I reminded them, is nothing more than saying we haven’t got the resolve to follow through on what we resolve. Nothing new here, but I challenged them to pick one command of Christ–just one–and pursue it during 2008. Implement it, take action, live it fully. Just one.
It might just change our lives.
JEFF BERRYMAN 