Monday
Ordinary Time: the part of the church calendar we’re in at the moment. It’s the time when I just want to hunker down into the rhythm of regular things for a while. In the Southern Hemisphere, ordinary time is when we pass through the eye of the winter needle of diminishing daylight hours, the hope of Spring teasing us with winter blooms of camelias, magnolias, and that odd eager cherry blossom.
This year, it’s a weird time for me. I’m ending this chapter of life where I have been part-time university chaplain and part-time teacher, and am entering liminal space before my husband and I move overseas so I can undertake more study. Life feels less and less ordinary by the day, as we say daily the small goodbyes that start to slowly unmoor us.
It’s seasons like this one that I see with new eyes the value of my years of humble and halting attempts at reading and praying Scripture daily: it is a practice that tethers me long enough to dip my hands into the stream of life which is always flowing beneath me. Some days this practice is reading from the devotional Seeking God’s Face. Other days, it’s reading a psalm from the lectionary with my husband.
Some days, like today, my devotional remains unopened on the side of the couch. I didn’t sleep well and thinking is hard. All I can manage to do is what I need to do to get out of the house. Try again tomorrow.
Tuesday
Tuesday to Thursday I am a university chaplain. This is my last week of work. I don’t know quite how to be—how do you leave? Today I read Psalm 129 and Romans 3:21-26. In Paul’s exhortations, God has met me with a line of Scripture that is like an inhale and an exhale:
“For all have fallen short of the glory of God… (inhale)
This phrase hits me as both a burn and a balm today. Or maybe it’s like the re-setting of a broken bone that was healing wrong. It turns out I’m feeling different kinds of grief as I leave the chaplaincy: the grief of things we didn’t do, the grief of things we did do, the relationships that aren’t whole, the failings of the systems and the institutions that still make me angry. For we all have fallen short of the glory of God. Every one of us. Me. There’s no sense of reproach in this; just a profound sense of humility descending on me like a damp fog, as I look in wonder at the university I have been serving in. We did—we do—our best, and even having given it my best, even though I’m tying up all my loose ends, the incomplete feeling is inescapable.
…and all are a freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus (exhale).
This is a mystery to me. It was a revelation for me to discover these two phrases—the inhale and the exhale—are, in fact, one sentence. All are freely justified by his grace. My colleagues and I are freely justified by God’s grace. The university administration I have served: God’s grace is available for them. The confessions I have heard, the struggling lives I have accompanied: God’s grace does not call these moments the end of their story. Praise God. And so, today, this week, I keep this rhythm of breathing in our inadequacies, and breathing out God’s grace.
But how do I continue to relate to this world where “falling short” is everywhere? …but then, so is grace?
Wednesday
I share in morning prayers for the last time with a group of students. We listen to the Pray As You Go app. The Scripture is Matthew 5:17-19, which reads:
Do not think I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfil them. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. Therefore anyone who sets aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others accordingly will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.
For me, these two verses echo the whole of the Sermon on the Mount. My one thought was: It’s a high bar that Jesus sets. It was a day where after the moment of prayer, the Scripture left my mind, as my attention and energy were swallowed by the demands of the day.
Thursday
Today is the last day at the chaplaincy! Last days are weird. At one end of the spectrum, it’s the abrupt end to the usual rhythms, as time is made to slow down and share in farewells. At the other end, it’s the frantic push to get all the last minute things done without any ability to discern what’s really important and what is simply my drive for completion. I don’t really know how to be today. How do the Scriptures lead me?
Psalm 131: My heart is not proud, Lord, my eyes are not haughty. Lord, let me not look for praise today. Let me be content in who you are and what you have done.
Romans 8:1, 12-17: Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. This theme of freedom from condemnation continues to resonate with me. It is a place of safety that I find myself running to. I guess leaving a job is a moment of reckoning, of final evaluation. There’s no more time to do or be better, no improvements I can make any more so that in the final balance my aspirations and my reality align. But I need not be afraid: there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ.
Friday
This morning, as I prayed Psalm 31 with my husband. I remembered and gave thanks for the people I had read this Scripture with over the years. For the poets in my community who have been captured by the image of the “spacious place” as a metaphor for God’s salvation. This psalm resonates more brightly for me because of their gifts.
Today is one of my last days in my role at Laidlaw College. Despite all the “endings” of yesterday, I still have assignments to mark and a lecture to prepare—as well as being frequently visited with thoughts of things I forgot to take with me from the chaplaincy. Onwards!
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This day ended with an unplanned visit from an old grief. I made a modest mistake, but I watched, helpless, as someone I care about lost hold of the reality that they are loved—by me and others. It’s not the first time. Lots of things have to happen in someone’s life to form basic distrust of love. Yet with each new experience of this grief it continues to amaze me how physical the experience of emotional pain is. My heart is torn again. My old wounds are opened up. I cry, and I cry, and I cry. I have nothing with which to pray. I ask my husband to pray for me.
As I get into bed, I have not recovered. I am anxious about these moments alone before sleep comes—that the grief might swallow me again. Some words from this morning’s psalm find their way into my mouth: In my alarm I said, “I am cut off from your sight!” Yet you heard my cry for mercy when I called to you for help.
I cling to the thought that God is near to us, even when we feel distant from God. Mercifully, I sleep.
Saturday
I wake. It feels like a hammer has been taken to my heart. In my failings, through the failings of others, my love feels like it has been destroyed in the eyes of the person I tried to give it to. The anxiety of condemnation threatens to overtake me.
Saturdays, in general, I try to do Park Run. I like routine. At a loss for what to do or how to be on this particular Saturday, I follow the routine. Breakfast, devotional, get in the car, go. Psalm 133, Romans 13:8-12. In Romans, Paul speaks of the debt of love that we owe one another. And then he says, and do this, understanding the present time… our salvation is nearer to us than when we first believed. I ponder the connection I had not seen before between these two things.
Part of the routine is the pre-Park Run playlist for the 15-minute drive. It features songs about Saturdays and mornings. Nina Simone is singing, “Please be patient with your life, it’s only morning and you’re still to live your day”. I first heard this song sung by a flatmate who playing the ukulele to his newborn daughter as we drove around Eastbourne in Wellington. I can’t remember where we were going, or why. I’ve often wondered: At what point does this song not apply anymore? When is it no longer morning? When are we in the full-sun day of our life, and we better get on with it? When are we out of time? But this morning, as I drive with Paul’s words resonating in my ears, I consider the potential eschatological vision of Nina Simone’s song: maybe our lives, as we know them now, are the “morning”. Maybe the “day” we are yet to live is in our resurrection and restoration of all things. John Dennison’s advent metaphor of Christians as morning people revisits me: We are people who greet the light of the new day it is coming into the world. The light of the morning signals the day is both already here and coming. Yet how long, Lord, is the morning? Carry the pain and broken pieces I am carrying today for my whole earthly life is a sobering prospect.
This particular morning is incredibly beautiful. There is vapour steaming off the lake as the sun hits it, and the soft golden light fills the trees around us. It happens to be the one-year anniversary of this Park Run route, and amidst the festivities, a man in an orange road cone costume playing the guitar overtakes me.
