Dis-quietude

"Well, we'll float on....good news is on the way...."

It has been a while since church has actually made me feel better, given me hope. But this morning, not only did I cherish the odd mixture of people who walk in the door and smile at me and kiss my cheek, but I felt as though Dottie's sermon was just aimed right at me and at my restless heart. The title of this blog was the title of her sermon and was based off of Psalm 42 which says as a refrain:

Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help and my God.

Dottie kept asking us: Do you know the holiness within you? Do you know the Jesus that lives within you and within each person around you? We are so very preoccupied, so distressed, so....bitter. We come to church doubting whether there is any point to being there, any point to making an effort at all since so many things seem to go badly and so many people seem to disappoint us. And yet, God waits for us there in the midst of all that. Just like any other day when we DO feel like it is all worth it.

She talked about a movie I got to see on Friday called Waitress where the main character Jenna is terribly sad and disquieted. Her life seems to lack all meaning. She is married to a selfish, abusive man and about to have his baby. She has nowhere to go and nothing she looks forward to. In a bunch of twists and turns so common to life, she develops and grows in all kinds of relationships and has one ultimately transformative moment: the entire time she is pregnant, she does not want the baby. She wants nothing more than to escape. But then she looks into her newborn daughter's face and everything else in the world falls away except the desire to fill that child's heart with love, the same love given her by her own mother. Dottie emphasized that God looks at us that way, and if it is possible, we are even more precious to God than a newborn to its parent.

As for me, I can get angrier and angrier and more and more jaded with life. But my faith is all about believing this about God: God is at work and present with me all the time, trying to do a new thing. Maybe I don't see it sometimes. Maybe I get stuck. Maybe the new thing does not feel so good. But it is happening, whatever it is, and whatever is is, I remain precious beyond my comprehension and have reason to have hope.