It's pouring down rain right now, and I am sitting inside Cafe Palio. Don Miller wrote a lot of Blue Like Jazz sitting right here, and I can see why the book was so good! This window lends a view to beautiful green-leafed trees gently shedding their foliage along with the rain, people come and go from the shop, cars circle the garden roundabout, and there is warmth inside. I feel like writing today, not about the struggle per se - just writing to write... It's a good feeling.
I read Colossians 3 today. Paul's letters are so heavy with layers and layers of theology. As I read the chapter, he was talking about not walking in the flesh anymore - getting rid of lust, sexual immorality, greed and the like. My immediate and visceral reaction was to grunt in frustration. He says that these things are a part of the old nature, and that we should "set our hearts on things above..." It's more easily said than done sometimes. I'm just being honest.
Paul goes on to talk about this in the context of the body - what we would call the Church, probably the local body of believers. He talks about forgiveness and clothing ourselves with kindness and compassion. Again, the frustrated grunt. Why? Because I feel so apart from community right now. I have a strong network of people in Seattle and in Nola, but not here in Portland. It's lonely here, and much easier to keep the old self...
We NEED community. We can do none of the things Paul mentions in the first half of the chapter without the people and posture portrayed in the last half of the chapter... We NEED mothers and fathers and young men and women, masters and slaves (managers and employees, if you will). Without the other parts, we cannot function as a whole. That's tough, because a lot of the time, I don't even LIKE the other parts! I'm just being honest.
My friend, Trippe, got on a plane the other day and flew to San Francisco. He needed to get away, be alone, sort some things out. That boy is growing. He's a man, now. He's making wise and difficult decisions and owning his muck. San Francisco has been good to him. He comes home around midnight tonight. I'm jealous, in a way. I want to get away, too. But after reading this, I just want to drown in community. I want intimacy - the kind where people know you... really know you. Where they see your muck and still love you. Where they hurt you and you have to forgive them, and you hurt them and they have to forgive you. Where love and humility and all that are real and true and DEEP!
I want to be with my tribe! I want Colossians 3 to be true for me... and so I look out the window, and I ask the God who is watering the earth with his driving rain and shading the sun with his big, puffy, pillowy clouds, who has turned the leaves to copper and with a breath blows them to the earth, to grant me the grace to live in holiness, as the New Man today, and to give me travelling companions on this road, other leaves to blow in this wind with, and may we prevail, and bud anew like the Springtime!
As I close my laptop and get ready for the next part of my day, I am thankful for the view from this window and the perspective it affords. I'm just being honest.
