The Invitation of Forced Silence

One mid-March afternoon I was taking a walk break from my computer and against my better judgment did a quick email scroll to feel connected and in control of all the things. I stumbled on an all campus email informing me and my students university classes were canceled: Cease and desist immediately.

My acts of community betterment, educating young minds for the future, instantly became harmful, collections of humans too close and too vulnerable for a virus we could not see and did not understand.

Learning flat-lined, and we are still struggling to find its heart beat.

We all have different stories of how we tripped, fell, walked, or even ran into the painful months that have come upon us and at times overtaken us. COVID-19 has changed everything. We are all in different mid-journeys of finding and losing the good of this confusing time over and over and over. I don't just want but I need to wrap it up, book end it, close the curtain. I need to hear applause, take a test, or attend a culminating celebration with other humans who I can eat with and touch without fear.

Chaos has come and no one seems to know how to convince her she would be much happier elsewhere. We are freely offering her such a grand performance I don't blame her for popping more popcorn and sticking around for another act.

My heart is screaming, begging me to take time to process the barrage of weird news and weird people and weird events. My heart is asking me to ask myself what all of this means for the teacher in me, what must change and what must remain. But, as soon as I find the capacity to just admit I need a breath my inhale is interrupted with another grenade flying into my community, my church, my living room.

Boom. Boom. Bang.

Stop, drop, and roll!

Fight for your life!

Run for your life!

Listen and speak up!

Do less and remember to do more!

The explosion feels personal. My living room floor is covered in legos. I am barefoot, blindfolded, and my kids are calling from across the room. Do I run to them? Do I search for instructions? Do I quit? Can anything be built by all of the broken somethings? I simply don't know what to do.

In Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters, Annie Dillard writes, "“I alternate between thinking of the planet as home - dear and familiar stone hearth and garden - and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners.”

We all went to sleep feeling somewhat like this was home because it simply was what we knew and had reinforced through words, habits, routines, and cultures. Somewhere in the month of March, we woke up like we had every morning before, drank our cup of coffee, got dressed in our daily morning routine, and opened the front door to find strangers digging out the foundation of our home, telling us of a history we never wanted to hear, showing us charts and graphs that meant nothing and no one is safe.

Then we all just watched mouths open, eyes wide as local and national leaders left us because our own confusion and fear kept us from meeting their desperate need to be more than human. The dear and familiar has became prickly, hard, and strange. Nothing feels safe and known.

Everyone is affected.

Discomfort and inconvenience has invaded my self-centered world and challenged my belief that this world does in fact and theory revolve around me and mine and me.

There was so much we all suddenly could not do, and I found myself standing with Hamlet on the stage, alone, soliloquy-ing (yes, I made up that word) my heart out to an empty playhouse "..to sleep, perchance to dream-ay, there's the rub:/ For in the sleep of death what dreams may come." (For the full soliloquy click here. Come on, you know you're curious and your high school English teacher would be so impressed.)

My dear spouse, the love of my life, and I found ourselves defining the essence of who we were, individually and collectively. Amidst planned and impromptu conversations, we found a humbling and uncomfortable corner lot of our marriage. A plot of land we had ignored for forever. A place we drove by daily but never noticed because we were running late or listening to Siri's directions or rehearsing the grocery list. The lot was unkempt and full of potential, but it needed to be cleared first.

Accepting the reality that our family had been acting much of the time like a collection of consumers, calendar managers, and drama brokers was uncomfortable and humbling. In our conversations and questions we were negotiating with death and inviting the great tension of our salvation into our lives for the eternal good not the temporary fix. In the end there is life and not just life but life abundantly. Yes, what dreams can come of our ends and beginnings.

We asked each other.

"Who are we as people in this world?"

"Who are we as Christ followers?"

"What is our family becoming and creating?"

We searched for words we had never heard before and ways to see a world we no longer knew. We challenged one another to build inside the silence, not bypass it. We stepped up to a ledge of discomfort and encouraged each other to dig deeply into our intentionally crafted beings and sensed a call to create in the shadow of our Creator's wings. The silence of the familiar offered us a place to build within the absence and listen for gentle lessons. We had to actively choose each hour to not of self-medicate with screens, new hobbies, and the next house project.

Life helped us open an invitation from the Lord filled with meaningful words, sights, sounds, and feelings. A, right now, opportunity to live presently and highly engaged. A loving summons to create and build instead of manage stress. We searched for solid ground and stopped rallying our family to hold tighter and fight to survive the daily roller coaster ride of adrenaline.

A great exhale swept through our lives and cleared our lungs for a great inhale.

Jesus calls to those who are curious and confused, to seek first His ways and means (Matthew 6:33). Seek it for both the process and the solution. In the seeking there is finding which leads to more seeking and finding and so on. Salvation. Sanctification. Fire. Stone. Water. Light. Darkness. Familiar. Strange. Heaven and Earth clinging to one another.

I am curious and confused right now. But, according to the history of God's redemption of humanity, that's exactly where I need to be and a familiar place for Him to find me and you.