A Whole Lot of Nothing

A while back, I shared some of my aspirations with a trusted group of advisors. One said I should take a sabbatical.

“Hmmmmmm”

Of course,I wouldn’t have been frustrated if the advice didn’t resonate so deeply. I wonder if this is how David felt when God told him not to build the temple. “Nice idea, but . . . No.” Inside I heard the still small voice, “You are not emotionally, mentally, relationally healthy enough right now."

After two weeks or so, I crawled out, and said, “Yes, Lord.” I set my sights on a 180 day journey of rest, reflection, and repentance.

Here’s how it’s going.  

This weekend I went camping. Camping for me takes me back to age 12 or 13 when a few friends and I used to forage for existence for 24 hours far from the eye of any adults. We were a half mile from any car, road, phone, or house.  It was a moment of unbridled and unscheduled freedom when there was nothing particular to do but no boredom either. 

Maybe this is why my behavior resembles that of a chimpanzee on weed when I am at a camp site. Or as one of my friends called me when I was crawling out of my sleeping bag, “You look like a drunk moose.”  Truth is, I can stare for hours at nothing when I am camping. I nibble on the most random scraps of food I find lying around. Anything in my hand seems to eventually find its way into my mouth or into the fire. I can be both miserable - like this morning as I stood in the rain contemplating how I was going to wrap up our campsite and get it into our car – or peaceful like last night when I found a random stroopwaffle and roasted it over the fire to create a tasty snack. Basically, I just wonder around in circles doing stuff with no particular rush or expectation.  

Camping takes me back to before the time when I had to figure out the world. That happened in my middle teens, and it was not a good time of life for me or anyone who had to live with me. Camping started before I took up the big questions of life. I had random passions of course, but they blurred into the night just like the sound of rocks we flung out onto the freezing ice. 

That was the time we almost froze. It was Nov. 11 in Northern Ontario where I grew up. When we set up camp, the ice on the lake was frozen out from the shore maybe 50-60 feet. When we threw rocks out onto the ice it made a high pitch, cool, echo-y sound as it gilded out to the edge and splashed into the unforozen part of the lake. The sun set early as it always does when it is cold in Canada, and throughout the evening, we continued to throw rocks out onto the ice intermittently, just to hear that warbly echo. At one point, we noticed that we didn’t hear the splash anymore. As hard as we threw the rocks, the notes never seemed to end. 

After a long, very cold night that still brings me shivers, there came the morning.  When its cold in Autumn, the sunlight makes everything bedazzled. The tiniest blade of grass glistens with each ray of dawn. Mom would have called it a “heavy frost.”  We were just trying to get the fire going again to thaw out our stiff limbs. 

Anyway, the bright morning made it plain to see that our suspicions from last night were accurate, that the lake had frozen over completely that night. This was the official beginning of Winter, and we were the first to see! In the still brilliance of dawn, the frozen lake was like the sea of golden glass described in the book of Revelation. The rocks we had thrown the night before, they were still there, held up by a new force (newly formed ice) that we couldn’t see in the dark evening before.

Maybe that’s a bit like what Job learned at the end of his whirlwind experience. The questions, the ones we fling out into the night, they don’t splash anymore. We can’t see them, but they just keep spinning and echoing off into the night. I know I can’t even quite tell when I can’t hear them anymore. 

This is faith, questions flung out into the night. We don’t quite get an answer, but we don’t hear a splash either. 

Then comes the morning, and we see.  We see that faith was enough. We see that flinging something with all our might was enough for God to use. 

That is what I want with my life. I used to always have this secret narcissism that someday I would finally really do something truly great for God. And my 50’s has me thinking, “If not now, when?”

But God really doesn’t need more ministry narcissists. Like David, He doesn’t need me to build a glorious temple as an extension of my warring heart. He just needs kids who will fling stuff just for the joy of it. He needs people who will live life in faith with a lot more freedom and a little less calculation. 

So I am finding that this 180 day journey is about release and surrender. Asking the hard questions in joyous abandon with less concern about exactly where it will land and more concern about the cool sound it makes to bring my heart fully to God. To fling my aspirations and questions out into the night knowing that God is silently working to hold me up and make something beautiful — in the morning.