I have been trying to write a post for over a week about turning forty. Yet every time I reach down the well is…not dry, but weird. I am still in this season where I feel like I am holding my emotions at arm’s length. I worry if I get sad then I won’t stop crying and if I get angry then I’ll want to burn everything down. Not really a great way to go through life! Because I would really like to move through life without flinching at myself; to own the courage that landed me in this place, to have the joy of God’s salvation restored to me.

Human beings are funny creatures in that we put far too much stock in numbers that end with fives and zeroes. As I approached 40, I thought about the other times that I entered a new decade. When I was 10, I was still a kid and that’s a pretty good gig. When I was 20, I was discovering myself in college and starting to fall in love with the woman who would become my wife. When I was 30, we had recently had our second son and I was nearing completing my M. Div. in seminary. Each milestone was a marker of progress and the border of a new frontier. At 40? Well, I’m semi-employed and staring down a chasm of uncertainty deeper and darker than any I’ve encountered in my adult life.

Bible nerd that I am, I have been preoccupied with the Fortieth Psalm for some time. “I waited patiently for the Lord; He inclined to me and heard my cry. He drew me up from the desolate pit, out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure.” There is a hope there that resonates deep within me. Of course then I also hear Bono plaintively wail “How long to sing this song?” and I wonder that too.

May 4th is a good day. We took a pun (“May the fourth be with you”) and created an unofficial holiday out of it. In honor of Star Wars Day, I decided to do what people on the internet love to do: make lists about completely subjective things. The main event is my Tier Ranking for Star Wars films. People will often ask me what my favorite Star Wars movie is and that is actually a difficult question to answer. Partly because my favorite can change with whichever movie I am watching and partly because only a Sith deals in absolutes. Over the years, I have organized the Skywalker Saga (plus the two Star Wars Story movies) into 5 tiers. For the first time I am publishing it so the internet can tell me I’m wrong.

Tier 1: The Best of the Best
Episode IV - A New Hope
Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back
Episode VIII - The Last Jedi

Tier 2: Great Movies That I Regularly Think Should Be in Tier 1 When I Watch Them
Rogue One
Episode VI - Return of the Jedi
Episode VII - The Force Awakens

There has been little rhythm to my life in the last two months. No longer working at a church, there have been no liturgical or functional ecclesial patterns for me to follow. The places I would normally go and many of the people that I talked to and shared my days with have kind of evaporated from my life. There have been moments when it has been a bit unnerving and I am feeling pretty good if I keep myself under three existential crises per week.

The irony is we are in the fifth week of Easter, but I feel like I have tumbled backwards through time and am stuck in Lent. There have been a lot of ashes and dust and remembering that everything is finite and lots of things suck. Cognitively, I know about resurrection and new life, but it feels like wilderness. I am trying to figure out again where I fit in and what I am supposed to do.

I am trying to remind myself that this experience is not a sign of failure. Most of us go on these metaphorical wilderness expeditions in our lives; usually we do so many different times. I am trying to remember that I come from a family of itinerant ministers and carnies. That I follow a faith of nomads and wanderers. Heck, Jesus spent time in the wilderness and told his followers that he did not even have a place to lay his head. When the Israelites spent four decades rambling about, God stayed out in the wilderness with them in a tent.

“All that is holding us together [is] stories and compassion.”
-Anne Lamott quoting Barry Lopez, Stitches, 23

This last month has been dark for a myriad of reasons. Holding on to hope sometimes feels like trying to hang tight to a fraying rope in a monsoon. Compassion—those moments that remind me that I am not alone—will always be the act that keeps me holding on. When I talk with my wife or get a phone call from a family member or a hug from someone I run into in town, it’s a needed reminder that this too shall pass.

The inverse is also true. When you are in a troubled time and you feel alone then it seems like you will be falling in the abyss forever. Which is tough because none of us can experience that reassuring compassion all the time. Loved ones can’t check on you constantly; they work, they have lives. Friends may not know what to say. Thank God, then, for stories which are the other thing that I have found to have held me together these last few weeks.

When I was a kid, Superman comics were a refuge for me. I didn’t really fit in at school. I had friends, but there was a pervasive sense of unbelonging. It’s that not too uncommon adolescent feeling that you don’t matter. Yet when I journeyed to Metropolis via my local comic book store, I was transported to a world where good always triumphed over evil. A place where the most powerful individual was also the most humble and kind. It was a world in which the every person and even a cat up a tree mattered. I wanted that world to be true. I still want that world to be true.

The flickering of lights in the upper room cast shadows all around. They were gathered for a meal, but a weight hung over the proceedings. The conversation did not crackle the same way. The laughter was nervous. This was unusual. Over three years, they had grown into a family; a bickering, loving, motley crew of a family bound by the amazing sights they had witnessed and their teacher. Yet they looked now at his face and felt in their bones that it was all coming to an end.

Then Jesus did something unusual, but to be honest, the unusual was actually fairly ordinary with him. He wrapped a towel around his waist and filled a basin with water. Then he knelt before each of them and washed their feet. Feet caked in dirt and mud mixed with cuts and sores. Feet that had followed him all over the Palestinian countryside. It was servant’s work, not something fit for a rabbi, much less a messiah or God’s own son.

Yet there he was kneeling before each of his students; including the one who he knew would walk out the door in a moment to betray him. He washed their feet clean and told them that was what they were to do. He was not a teacher who simply told them to serve one another from high upon a hill. He knelt down and showed them what it meant to serve and love one another, even those considered enemies. And he told them, he told us, that love was the true mark of being his follower.

God, it feels like a sick cycle. It touches every corner of the country. It shatters a new community every time and re-wounds the places where it happens before. An unspeakable act of violence that we have grown far too accustomed speaking about. A place of learning mutated into a battlefield. Children and the adults who have chosen to teach them, clean up after them, and care for them are killed.

The response is an unholy echo. “How could this happen?” “Thoughts and prayers.” “Don’t politicize a tragedy.” “Something must be done.” But there never seems to be enough willingness to do that something. Then slowly or maybe all-too-quickly, people begin to move on. Except the shattered communities that cannot and the families of people like Evelyn, Hallie, William, Cynthia, Mike, and Katherine. The rest of us forget until we are brutally reminded again.

God, help us not forget. Be with the families of the lost and wounded. Be with Covenant and the larger Nashville community. Be with Columbine, Newtown, Uvalde, Parkland, Columbine, and the scores of other towns whose hearts break with every new tragedy. Be with the children and teenagers in schools who see this pattern and for whom the inaction makes them feel like acceptable sacrifices.

This is half of a story. The other half is about heartbreak and this is not the place for that tale. This is a story about hope.

While I was on my sabbatical, I prayed frequently for clarity and direction. I would eventually learn that you better make darn sure that’s what you really want before you pray for something like that, but I was in the naive bubble of rest and renewal.

As some of you might know, I spent the last weekend of my sabbatical on a silent retreat at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky. It was amazing; a weekend that nourished and focused my soul. It was an introvert’s paradise that allowed me to read, write, hike, go to prayer services with monks, and not have to talk to anybody.

Often I would find myself staring at an evergreen tree outside the window of my room. Throughout the weekend, that tree would sway in the breeze. It was so quiet and peaceful and I would become transfixed by the gentle motion. For the first few days, I would not even think about it. I just rooted myself in my chair and watched the invisible push and pull the branches.