Beautiful Disasters [door]

There comes a time when I realise that I just can’t anymore.

I can’t homework

I can’t people

I can’t even grammar.

And when this happens to a community of people, one of two things will happen: either things fall apart, or things fall together.

As the walls tumble down around me, my eyes are opened to all the crap that’s going on in people’s lives—including my own. And I become overwhelmed, because it hurts and it’s hard, and I don’t have any way to fix it or any answers to make the pain go away.

At times like these, there’s no wisdom. There aren’t answers. All artifice is stripped away, and all that is left is a collection of broken, sinful people, searching for truth or understanding or any sort of foothold in the darkness.

When we live in community, the things that hurt others hurt us too. And when everyone is hurting—really hurting—there’s nothing we can do. There are no words. All we can do is surrender to God and beg him to be king over our lives and to make something beautiful of our suffering. When we’ve given up on the trite ‘comfort’ sayings and verses, all that’s left is a lament. 

And so we lament. We lament the loss of what was. We lament the disparity between what is and what should be. We lament the injustices humanity suffers—the injustices humanity inflicts every day.

So with empty hands and broken hearts, we cry out to our Father. We cry as children who are hurting and don’t understand why. We cry as empty vessels from whom even more is being demanded. We cry as an oppressed people seeking deliverance. We cry because we feel lost and alone in this vast, dark night.

And in our lament, we see the many other mourners; and it becomes ever more evident that we are not alone—that we have never been alone in our mourning. The more we weep, the more we see that we are all the same.

So together, with joined hands and hearts, we surrender ourselves before the throne of God above, the God whose love for us runs so deep that he sacrificed his only begotten Son to pursue us—even to the ends of the earth and under the earth—and to return us to his side.

There is nothing left for us to do but to face the darkness—to stare Death full in the face and say, ‘We defy you. We recognise that your power has been broken. We know how the story ends. And so no longer. No longer will we stand by, complacent and pathetic, as you attempt to harm that which does not belong to you. We are fighting back. And what’s more, we will win, not by our power, not according to our definition of victory, but only by our Father’s power, and according to his definition. Because our Father—our God—our King—is perfect in his love and endless in his strength.’

The world does not need more nice, ‘put-together’ people with their nice, ‘put-together’ lives.

The world needs failures, disasters, screw-ups. It needs college drop-outs, alcoholics and porn addicts, the divorced and the depressed and the discontent. The world needs those who understand deeply and intensely that everything is broken, that life sucks and that we can’t do this on our own.

This is why we fight—because we cannot do anything else. Because when we fight, we take part in that triumphant lament which the universe has been singing ever since we handed Death power over our lives.

We fight for one another because God is fighting for us. We fight to take back the Kingdom.

We fight because our lives are a constant song of lamenting triumph.