[Vision2020] reflecting on what it's all about

[keely emerinemix]

I'm writing this with a heavy heart and tears streaming down my cheeks, and 
I know that I'll wake up tomorrow and wonder if I should be embarrassed or 
apologetic -- I'll wonder if I messily poured my heart out in an entirely 
inappropriate setting, just because of grief that right now floods my whole 
being, or if I've written because my grief offers something that may 
encourage or touch anyone reading it.  I don't know; I doubt that I really 
will.  Still, please accept my apologies if what I write offends you, and 
know that it wasn't my intention.  The morning may reveal that I've been 
maudlin and sloppy, but not deliberately cloddish or grating.

All of us have seen the "Jesus -- The Reason For The Season!" signs, 
buttons, and bumperstickers that pop up this time of the year, and while I 
absolutely affirm the sentiment, I cringe at the form of expression it 
takes.  The birth of Jesus, for the Christian, is what we celebrate on 
December 25 with carols, gifts, food, worship, friends and family -- no "war 
on Christmas" can change that, and it isn't lessened at all by acknowledging 
and celebrating Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or just general feelings of goodwil this 
time of year.  Still, I have a rough time with "WWJD?" bracelets, "Jesus is 
the Reason" pins, and anything else mass-produced at profit, even by sincere 
believers.   Like most profound, deeply held beliefs, the idea of Jesus 
taking on human flesh as God Incarnate loses a little something when 
expressed via a candy cane-festooned broach on the sweater of a Wal-Mart 
clerk, and I doubt that I'm the only one whose belief in the sentiment 
struggles to keep it elevated in the midst of holy kitsch.  But Christmas 
and what it means does matter -- to me as a Christian, but also, I'm 
convinced, to a sin-soaked world desperately in need of the love offered by 
Jesus.  And this evening, why it matters, and why I care so deeply about the 
Gospel and its presentation on the Palouse, was made clearer to me than I 
can ever remember.

We got a call this evening from an old friend of ours, a former neighbor in 
Snohomish who has been part of our lives for the entire 22 years of our 
marriage, even longer for my husband, who was adopted by them, in a sense, 
when he first began scratching out space for a greenhouse on five densely 
forested acres there almost 30 years ago.  Don told us that his grandson, 
Dana, had died suddenly and without apparent cause Dec. 14.  It hit us hard, 
in the way that bad news drains the oxygen out of your body and leaves a 
jarring, iron-like grip around your gut.  Dana was only 30.  He was part of 
our lives since he and his sister were preschoolers, and in some ways Jeff 
and I parented those two kids long before we had children of our own.  Dana 
and Monique were part of the tapestry woven in our first decade together as 
a married couple, and even when they grew up, we never lost touch.

Dana never knew his father.  His grandfather, our friend, is an alcoholic.  
His mother veered from booze to boyfriends like a punching bag on a 
too-loose spring, occasionally knocking over any semblance of structure the 
children had managed to construct.  His beloved uncle was murdered when Dana 
was only 12, and Dana himself was molested by another family acquaintance.  
He ended up doing what everyone pretty much knew he would -- he turned to 
violence, petty crime, and drugs, and his course in life seemed pretty much 
set.  Dana Hendrix was, in the eyes of the world, the least of "the least of 
these," and that was just the way it was.   God knows Dana got the message, 
and often from "religious" people who knew better, knew more, and knew best. 
  It was enough for them to "just know" about Dana, without the invariable 
messiness of actually knowing him.

But Dana came to see that Jesus Christ knew him, loved him, died for him, 
and had a plan for him.  He began to go to church; then, he grabbed ahold of 
God and never let ago.  He fell -- many, many times -- and then he got back 
up, because his heart had new life that nothing could extinguish.  He   got 
clean, studied the Bible, married and fathered five children.  He worked 
hard, played hard, and laughed like a chorus of angels.  He knew he had been 
ransomed, redeemed, renewed -- he knew nothing about presbyteries and 
Calvinism, nothing about postmillennialism and the Reformation, nothing 
about egalitarianism or patriarchy, and he didn't know that he didn't know.  
Because what he DID know had lifted him, filled him, and carried him; Dana 
knew that his Redeemer lives, and loves, and when he couldn't find life and 
love in the church, he blessed them anyway, and kept his hand in his 
Savior's.

I believe he's home now, and I know Jeff and I will see him again.  But 
tonight the grief is overwhelming, for his grandparents, his mother, and his 
wife and kids.  I can hardly type this for the tears in my eyes, and every 
memory of Dana is for now a suckerpunch to my heart.  I don't want to 
preach; I'm not trying to use Dana's death as an opportunity for strategic 
evangelism.  I'm not that clever and not that dishonest.  But Dana Hendrix 
was someone you would have wanted to know.  Just like Riqui, my friend who 
killed himself last year at age 18; the mania and the depression held on 
longer than his faith did.  But Riqui's life was changed by the baby in the 
manger -- the presumed bastard son of a poverty-stricken carpenter and his 
wife under occupation and real, grinding persecution.  Riqui's family 
attended the church I led in Duvall in the late '90s, and I saw what grief 
and horror, faith and steadfast love, did to his parents.  And then I saw 
grace poured out and demonstrated beyond measure in a community of people 
who possessed nothing and gave more than I ever did, because Riqui's faith 
when he was well had touched so many people and did even more when he became 
ill.  Just like Lucy, who died in January of  cancer.  She was a good 
person, a saint unlike anyone I've ever met.  She worshipped Christ  with 
her eyes and her touch when the cancer ravaged her brain, paralyzing her and 
robbing her of speech.  I'll see her again, just as I'll see Riqui and Dana. 
  And when my precious friend Shannon dies -- and it will likely not be too 
long from now -- what will be true about her life won't be the homelessness, 
the rape, the meth addiction, the violence endured and the fury lived out.  
It won't be the beatings, the abuse, the poverty or the cancer that appears 
to have hopscotched throughout her body in the last year.  The "last thing," 
the true thing, about Shannon will be that her life, considered worthless by 
virtually everyone in it, was remade in the image of, and by the grace of, 
her Lord and Savior, who loves me enough to let me be part of her 
exceedingly messy, extraordinarily beautiful, life.

I write a lot about "religion" on Vision 2020, and I'm the first and loudest 
to howl when mine is misrepresented.  I get it right a lot and then blow it, 
and I sometimes wonder which is which.  I imagine I'm not alone in that.  
But I guess I'm trying to suggest here, grieving over three friends lost and 
one just hanging on, is that despite what many of us have seen on Vision 
2020 regarding the Gospel, the "religion" of Christianity, or the meaning of 
this guy Jesus, there are Spirit-wonders all around us, and often in the 
most unlovely places and people.  My life has been transformed by Jesus 
Christ; I have the painful privilege of grieving the loss of three people, 
soon -- perhaps -- four, who weren't content to simply be loved and blessed 
by Him, but who lived radically messy, untidy, unpredictable, utterly 
unconventional and entirely gracious and grace-giving lives because of the 
One whose birth we celebrate now.

And I guess that's why I felt like I needed to write -- because this stuff, 
the breathing of Spirit and life and agape love into the forsaken and 
forlorn, is what I celebrate, and it's slander and perversion is what I will 
fight against, as kindly as possible, until I join Dana, Riqui, and Lucy in 
Heaven.

May you all be richly blessed -- with relationship, with forgiveness and 
reconciliation, with joy, with Godly sorrow, and with the privilege of 
seeing what a poor substitute religion, Christendom, and even the 
institutional church is for a life filled with Spirit, nurtured in love, fed 
on truth, and guided by the Shepherd.

keely

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