The Beautiful Dust

A downpour of unending grace
Consuming all my reckless ways,
My sins emerged
Your love has saved my soul
Your love is like a storm

–Gracious Tempest Hillsong Young & Free

 

I have been in hiding for quite a while, I think.

It’s not on purpose, it is just sometimes I can’t figure me out, so instead of trying, I just bury it to see if it goes away. Which works with the things that no one really cares about…

Then there are those other things. The ones that arrest your heart.

You never see them coming. I think if you can, they are not those things. Those times. Those strains that stretch and pull and break your heart. Like a friend that you never sought out, but after a while you realize that you bonded in a way you will never be able to get back.

I think I have started this current blog at least a dozen times the last few nights with marginal success. I think I have to write this out, because if I don’t keep going, the ideas and feelings may become locked down so far that I won’t find them anymore. I feel this is primarily because I don’t want my heart to drift to those things. Not that they are painful, but that my heart has stored these snapshots close to my heart, and it seems that to tell them the wrong way would steal my joy. I doubt this makes sense.

You see, God is always scheming. Placing inexpressible hope and power in frail, fragile humans and forcing pens in hands with the humbling question:  “Now that you see, what will you say?”

So…let me tell you a story…

It’s not even mine. I have no rights to it other than it must be told.

Two weeks ago a group, rather two distinct groups, left in the middle of the night from a downtown church parking lot, with the goal of finding…something. I am not sure really what we were all after. Everyone goes into a trip for one reason or another. Some of them are selfish like my own: I am going to go find myself again on this trip. Some go on a trip for the adventure. Some go for the chance to help others. We all went for a reason.

In the dead of night, we turned south.

After many hours of driving, stops, a border crossing and a foreign land, we arrived at an orphanage. We were exhausted, but hopeful, ready to face whatever this was we were on.

As I stared out at the rubble and houses of the surrounding neighborhoods around our six-story compound, it became clear to me that God was powerfully here. You could smell Him. I couldn’t deny it all, this feeling that God was there, strong and expectant and ready to sift me out. To test and find out what I was made of…again.

As the week progressed, on dusty Mexican hillsides, I would stare out at the city and mourn. Not even really for the people, but almost more for the fact that I have spent so much time reading the books on my shelves in my nice little office that yell about the best way to live out my faith…and I might as well burn them all when I get back to Merced.

Because none of them work out here.

It was a very sobering thought to be working in basically some of the poorest places I have been, staring out at the beautiful slums and crying tears whose origins I could not really understand.  I just knew that my god was not God. I spend so much time serving a shadow, and have lost the chase for that Wild Beast. The One whom is not safe.

In the swirling dust and din of hammers and power saws, God was more present and roared stronger than in the most rapturous devotions in my quiet office.

I felt like my mind was going to twist in on itself after a while. Because my life goals no longer made sense to me. As a dear friend put it a few days ago, “since I got back, everything just started getting blurry, you know?”

To make it even more searing, the two groups that went down began to blur themselves. It was no longer two churches, but one. The lines we all put up no longer mattered because we were all in on the adventure. There was Something more powerful at work. I can’t decide how to explain it better than that.

As the houses we came to build were finished and the families rejoiced with us and the tears welled up and the smiles flowed and the laughter on rooftops rang out over the barren land, the scales began to fall in chunks from my eyes.

My heart grew – not a little or in small stretches, but in completely random spasms of good love. The kind that only singing together, jokes, friends experiencing shared history and joyful tears can bring.

It feels like that was the point of it all. I went to find me, and I think God was there waiting for the same thing. To find the real me again. To bring out that man that buries himself when he stays safe for too long. That man that only can live when something else dies.

I thought I went down to Mexico to complete a housing project, but in the end I think I was the actual project. We all were.

In the dirt we found our gospel.

Not of nice buildings and clean hands and sweet smelling churches. It was not the gospel of ideas or of attractive slogans and church growth strategies. There were no engaging sermon titles or room for spectators.

It was haphazard wild.

The gospel of hammers and nails and sweat and exhausted joy.

Of dirt and open sewers.

The gospel that reeked of body odor, unkempt hair and chaos and joy that cannot be contained.

In it, we found that there was unspeakable beauty in the dust. Slicing us to the point where we stopped trying to explain it to each other and simply stared, and shook our heads.

Who are we and what have we done?

Built a house to justify our existence?

A bunch of projects working on a project?

No much more than that. God built us through the building of a house. We helped families and in the toil, found family.

Last week, I felt like a fish out of water as a large team of us served in the outskirts of Tijuana, Mexico. It was very obvious that I was not from there. Which made it very odd when I came back to the U.S. and that feeling did not stop…but I think that is where I must stop. I doubt more words will make it any better.  I think C. S. Lewis said it best when he wrote: If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing…I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death…I must make it the main object of life to press on to that country and to help others to do the same.”― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

God, let it be so…