Embracing the Incongruities

“Restore us, O Lord God Almighty. Make your face shine upon us, that we may be saved.” Oh God, there are times in life when the darkness seems to cloud over any ray of hope that we might find. We strain our eyes to see you coming to meet us. We open our ears to hear the sound of your voice calling. But it seems to be in vain.

The past week has been a painful revelation of the frailty and fragility of human life. From natural disasters around the globe, to automobile accidents in Abilene, and to the untimely death of Katie Kirkpatrick in ICU in Flint, pain and death seem to be creeping in all around. The entropy that ushers chaos into God’s very good creation is, to say the least, overwhelming at times like this.

Yet, these are the times of creative possibility. They are the times in which the dynamic relationship that is faith is pushed to limits of comfort, well beyond complacency, and to the depths of passionate conversation, as we cry out to God amidst a myriad of emotions. These are the best of times and the worst of times, when the dialogue of faith becomes a transformative force in which and through which the transformative power of God brings comfort amid the pain, healing in the midst of the brokenness, light into the darkness of our world, and life when it seems as though death would have the last word.

On Sunday, we journey together as a community of faith with the psalmists who continue to speak to us today, reminding us it is not only alright to cry out to God in the midst of our pain, but that it is an essential aspect of our ongoing journey. Together we raised our voices in lament and complaint to God. We reaffirmed God’s sovereignty and the assurance of his presence in the midst of our pain. We reminded each that the God who has been faithful to us in the past will continue to be faithful in the future. We moved from complaint to praise to communion. It was a time of catharsis, in which our cries to God were reaffirmed, our doubts and struggles answered with the overwhelming embrace of community. (If the church, the gathered community of faith, is not the right place to voice the confusion and frustration of real existence, then we have missed our calling and have ceased to be the church.)

The past three days have been a time of grace, through which the dissonance of life and faith have been felt and embraced and the God of all comfort has embraced us in the midst of our pain. Katie’s funeral was an outpouring of love. Nearly 1,200 people gathered to celebrate the life of this young woman. The breadth of her influence extended far beyond her peers. Garth Pleasant, the preaching minister at Lake Orion, rightly said that when reflects on the list of influential teachers and mentors in his life, she ranks at the top of the list. From young children to those in danger of running out of fingers when they count the decades of their lives, Katie taught people the way of discipleship, for with her infamous smile and heart of pure gold, she walked the way of Christ. She daily traveled the path of faithfulness, and all of those who came alongside her for the journey were changed.

For the loss that we now feel, we mourned together. But for Katie, we celebrated. What else could we do? For Katie, the last breath on earth was her first step into new life, into new creation.

The pain is real. The confusion and complexity of life is undeniable. Yet, we undertake it all together. We confront all of the emotions and experiences of life together. And through it all we are changed. Through it all we are strengthened. Through it all we grow, for we journey together, we face the incongruities of life and embrace the fray as the place in which we encounter the God of light who meets us in the darkness, the God of resurrection, the God of new creation, the God of life.

“Restore us, O Lord God Almighty. Make your face shine upon us, that we may be saved.”