Fog and the Mountain

The fog crawls up the mountain

Digging its tendrils deep between the trees

Hugging their leaves and licking their branches

As the fog reaches the mountain’s pinnacle

Wind rips it away from its lover

Never to meet again

The fog dissipates in feathers and wisps

Into tears of contentment

Satisfied by its one great union

Confusing King

A new king comes to power and immediately abolishes the old taxation system. The subjects wait with great anxiety to hear what will replace the system they have known. Past kings have demanded the subjects pay different percentages of their income and harvests every year. The people of the kingdom know punishment certainly awaits anyone who fails to comply with the king’s orders. Not knowing the expectations of the new king causes great consternation and gnashing of teeth across the kingdom.

The traditional day of taxation arrives but the new king still has not announced his demands. The people line up outside the castle with goods representing the ten percent tax rate required by the previous ruler. They wait and wait for the gates to open and the king to step forward, but nothing happens. After a full day of standing in line, the people become restless and even more worried. Finally, the king looks down from a balcony on the side of the castle and repeats his announcement that the old taxation system has been abolished. The people stay where they stand, waiting to hear how the king likely will increase the former rate and what day they will be expected to render such taxes. Instead, the king waves and tells them all to go home and back to their fields before he turns and goes back into the castle.

Over the next several months, the king walks through the fields and visits his subjects in their homes. No king has ever done such a thing. Kings don’t spend time with their subjects and certainly do not visit them in their fields where they work. The people assume the king spends time among them to see for himself how much they harvest or how much they make. Maybe the king does not trust his subjects to give him the full tax amount demanded. If he walks among them, he will have a better sense how much his people will owe him so as to guard against the subjects not giving their full amount.

The king’s presence among them makes them nervous and resentful, so they begin to inquire about the king’s desires and purpose in visiting with them in their fields. The king simply says that he likes to see their hard work and how they find fulfillment in the work they do. He wants to know their families and understand how he might better serve them as their ruler. He cares about his subjects and wants to provide for them the best way he possibly can.

Out of utter confusion and frustration, the subjects continue to fill the void of demands and expectations by coming up with their own. They tell one another stories of terrible punishment that is to come if they do not pay the king tremendous tributes of money and harvest yields. A rumor goes around that the king is building a massive dungeon under the castle where subjects will be thrown for decades if they fail to pay 40, 50, 60, even 90% of their harvest to him.

Once again, the subjects line up outside the castle on their customary tax day, this time with even greater offerings for payment. They grumble and complain that the king would demand so much of them, even their full livelihood. They fuss as they wait for the king to appear to take their taxes or throw them in the dungeon for failure of payment. The citizens begin looking at one another, comparing their offerings with others, worried they might not have brought enough because their neighbor seems to have brought twice what they have. They worry and argue among themselves.

Once again, the king comes out on the balcony, reminds them of his previous announcement, and tries to send them home. But many of his subjects stay where they stand. The next morning, he finds several of them have chained themselves to the walls of the castle. Some among them have told the rest that the king is angry because they did not bring enough on tax day and that is why he sent them away. These leaders have convinced people that the king soon will come to enslave them for their failures and the only way to gain favor and some forgiveness is by chaining themselves before the king does. He will favor them for realizing their wretchedness and locking themselves up.

The king comes out, breaks the chains, and sends them home once again.

The following year, on tax day, the people show up at the doors of the castle. This time, some have brought 1%, some 6%, others as much as 50% of their year’s earnings. No one is grumbling and no one is judging their offering against their neighbor’s. The king steps out on the balcony to ask why they have come since they no longer are bound to any tax system. The people tell him they have not brought taxes, but offerings of thanksgiving. They have come to understand the king. The day after he walks in their fields with them, he has supplies sent specific to the needs he has witnessed among them. If a farmer has a broken fence, he sends other farmers to help with fresh fencing supplies. If a family has lost their livelihood because their milk cow was killed by a wolf, he sends another milk cow. The people have come to show their gratitude for the king’s faithfulness to them, not because they have to, but because they want to. Life now is infinitely better than it ever has been before and they want the king to understand how thankful they are for his generosity, care, and kindness.

The king does not judge their gifts, assessing if they are adequate. Instead, he accepts their offerings, saying each one is enough. Before he brings the goods into the castle storerooms, he has his subjects consider who in the kingdom might have need of their offerings. If they know someone who needs what they have, he tells them to first take their offering to their neighbor, then bring it to him. What remains, the king stores and uses when he sees a subject in need.

I imagine this to be God’s experience in watching humanity. Patiently, God watches as we try to twist and redefine grace, unable to accept it as unbounded and infinite. We expect a certain economy, one that demands tit for tat based on bartering and exchange. We try to make God live by human rules of commerce by telling ourselves and one another that we must earn God’s grace and love or that we have received it and now are indebted to God to a crushing degree.

God wants a response from our heart of gratitude and love. We keep trying to make our offering compulsory. We cannot believe God would love us unconditionally and pour her grace upon us with abundance. We make new rules and spread misconceptions because we cannot accept such an immense gift. Meanwhile, God waits and watches, wanting us not on our knees but with arms open, ready and willing to return even a small fraction of the love she already has given.

To live in such love and grace is true freedom. Were God to require specific offerings or demand certain acts of contrition, then we would bound in chains. The minute something is compulsory is the minute we lose our freedom. But a gift, an offering, an act of love can only be given if it comes voluntarily and from the heart out of a pure desire to show appreciation.

The day we allow ourselves one another freedom, the day we all bring our offerings out of unbounded thanksgiving and love, is the day the kingdom of God will be made real.

On Bumper Cars and Spiders

I watch as the red car with lightning bolts heads straight for the yellow car painted with the words “crash!” and “pow!” The drivers look devilishly at one another, pushing their little cars as fast as they will go, straight for one another. The drivers burst into laughter as the thick rubber bumpers around their cars make contact and jolt the cars apart. Only space exists between the cars where, for a split second, they became one mass of metal and rubber.  The drivers, still laughing, turn their attention to other cars and other drivers. A socially-acceptable maniacal obsession overtakes them as they plunge themselves once again into the fray.

We place a high premium on rugged individualism in the United States. We prize gumption and exalt people who seem to conquer life all by themselves. We crave stories of survivors who have managed to escape the worst of situations with little more than their bare hands. I chalk it up to the pride we have in our history of carving a great nation out of a wild and untamed land. I, too, want to know that I could take care of myself if placed in a truly arduous situation. It’s the reason I like to learn new skills.

Our hyper-focus on the individual leads us past the desired sense of self-sufficiency and into the realm of alienation and isolation. In our minds, we become too accustomed to thinking of ourselves as autonomous. We draw thick lines around ourselves imagining that these lines will guard us. We pretend these lines will serve as bumpers, allowing us to bounce off other people unscathed and safe. They will protect us from being tainted by the wrong ideals and impurities of those with whom we come in contact.

Despite what our shared culture delusion would have us believe, we do not simply bounce off one another to find emptiness between us as it was before we met. There are no lines. There are no bumpers. We reinforce this delusion by lauding people whom we perceive as having “thick skin.” We marvel at individuals who seem to bounce off of the worst of life with nary a scratch, not a tear shed or a scar to show for it. These types have been successful at drawing an impenetrable line around themselves and we admire their strength.

But we are not bumper cars. We are spiders. We leave a trail of webbing behind us that never breaks. It may fade, but is never severed. Our lives touch another’s and we lay down a pinpoint, a marker that we have been there and our silken web moves forward from that place. We do not bounce off of one another. We touch and part, not to find empty space, but two threads, one from us and one from the other. Forever our lives will be connected, no matter how tenuously. We may bear scars from the contact or we may be strengthened by it. We also may never remember it but we are forever changed because of it.

People who rode on the same plane as you; the clerk in the gas station; your third grade teacher; the girl in college you eyed in your history class but never spoke to; the child in the store who looked at you for comfort when he had lost his mother; you now have a thread connecting your life to theirs. We may try to break these threads or pretend they do not exist, but the Spirit created them and our power is nothing compared to hers. The threads may fade but they never disappear completely, try as we might to erase them.

Moses laments about the complaining of his people in the eleventh chapter of Numbers. He is tired of hearing them speak of their enslavement in Egypt as if it was infinitely better than their wandering in the dessert. Moses cries to God, “Why have you treated your servant so badly? Why have I not found favor in your sight, that you lay the burden of all this people on me? Did I conceive all this people? Did I give birth to them, that you should say to me, ‘Carry them in your bosom, as a nurse carries a sucking child,’ to the land that you promised on oath to their ancestors?”

Dear, faithful Moses. We have heard your argument before. We hear it everyday: “I’m not their parent. Why should I have to take care of them? I don’t have any kids, why should I pay for their education? Where is that child’s parents to teach them better? Parents today are failing their children. If I were their parent, you better believe they wouldn’t act like that. At the very least our teachers should be doing a better job so kids today aren’t running wild and aren’t so disrespectful.”

Moses, you did not carry the Israelites in your womb. You will never know the honor and pain of carrying and bearing a child. That blessing belongs to Zipporah and Miriam. But you are their father, nonetheless, because you draw breath. You are responsible to them because you are a spider, Moses, and your life will forever be connected to theirs, as they are responsible for you. The Spirit blessed you with life and charged you to care for all of creation, the same as she created and charged every person who has life.

My friends, the bumpers are myths. As surely as you read these words, you and I are connected. No space lies between us, just as no space lies between you and anyone else who might read this. Our world is covered in silken webs. We may not see them, but they are there and they call out to you. “Do not forget me,” cries the memory of a grandparent. “Care for me,” cries the line to the lonely and hurting. We hear, “be blessed and loved,” in the vibrations sent over the connection to a most beloved friend.

May we strive not to forget who we are. May we tend our threads and care for and be cared for by those at the other end. May we be more intentional how and why we place our pinpoints, the newest connection, for in doing so we change one another’s lives.