Right now I am sitting on my porch in FL, watching my dad, my sister, and two friends dismantling the play-fort my dad built me when we moved into this house 15 years ago. Right now all that’s left is a little skeleton that has to be held up to keep from crashing. It seems a fitting metaphor for my little house of childhood dreams. Right now it does seem like a little skeleton of a frame is what is holding me up.
This has been a really hard year. The spiritual warefare of last semester has only intensified this semester. Many of my friends’ parents have lost their jobs. My best friend is ill beyond belief, and tomorrow we find out her diagnosis. There are struggles on the hall. Another close friend just joined the army. Two close friends just ended a relationship, and their broken hearts are hard to comfort. One of my best friends lost several guys off his hall due to disciplinary action, and one of them was his brother. My friend Liz jokes that being a friend of mine is dangerous and she is waiting for the lightning to strike her. We laugh, but also tremble because it is true: every close friend of mine is suffering right now.
At the beginning of the semester, I spent some intense time with Jesus at campground in the Carolinas. For a hour, I hiked around a lake, poured out my heart in prayer, and wept for the brokenness I saw. I prayed for my hall and my friends and my school, and everyone I knew who was so tired and burdened. We were worn out from fighting, I reminded him. I didn’t want my girls to have to fight anymore, to have to stagger uphill under a burden of spiritual warfare. I wanted them to dance through life with freedom and joy because they knew Christ loved them. The semester started out with some big steps in the right direction, but none of them were easy.
Last year I learned that when I can’t see God working, the darkness is simply hiding him. He’s still there. Like a child playing peekaboo and realizing that, even when the parent is gone, yet any moment they may return, I learned to cling to Jesus even when I felt like I was grasping in the dark. In the darkness that night, I asked God to reveal himself. I can’t wait for the moment that he bursts into the world and cries, “surprise! I was here the whole time!”
Our chaplain has been preaching through the book of Mark, a gospel that has captured my heart this semester. Each character in Mark is presented with the dilemma of fear vs. faith–will they trust Christ and take the risk, or give in to fear and remain in the dark? This is the dilemma of my life. In the midst of the darkness, it is really easy to give in to fear, to cower in the corner and weep and never expect anything to get better. To watch my life dismantling before my eyes and just be paralyzed in terror.
The thing with the book of Mark is that it begins with the exciting proclaimation that “the kingdom of God is at hand!” With that announcement, Jesus then proceeds to do absolutely nothing that signifies a king proclaiming his reign. He hangs out with people, heals a few sick, and rides into Jerusalem on a donkey. Not very kingly and conquering things to do. Why isn’t he mustering an army? Sometimes I feel that way about my world. Why isn’t the all-powerful God acting very kingly right now? Why isn’t he fixing things?
I read John 11 the night that Katie Jo, my best friend, went home for a battery of tests. When Jesus came to the tomb of his friend Lazarus, John says he was “angry in his spirit.” I asked my mentor Tuggy why he was so angry, and she told me that it is anger at the destruction of sin and death and the Devil. There is something within our hearts that does the same thing. When we see people that are suffering, when relationships fail and disapointment stings, there is a natural reaction in our hearts: this is not right. This is not what God wants. This is not the way things are supposed to be. When things go wrong, bad feelings naturally follow, because we are not designed for this kind of evil. We are designed to delight in God, and things went horribly wrong. There is, as Marie says in Dan in Real Life, “a certain rightness to our wrongness,” a response of the image of God to the marring of his image that says this is not okay.
That feeling of “not-okay” is what has dominated my prayer life these past two weeks. I keep reminding God that this is not his design and asking for his intervention. Still, sometimes nothing happens; and sometimes another chunk of my life gets pulled apart. A chapel speaker at Covenant on Wednesday talked about the certainty of suffering in the Christian life. Anyone sold out to Jesus will suffer, he said. His advice? “Be faithful. Wrestle with the Bible. Cling to the Gospel that never changes.” So what is that gospel? Why does Mark tell us “the kingdom of God is at hand,” and show us how one disciple after another fails at being faithful? Why doesn’t anyone get it? Why does the gospel end at the darkest point of Jesus’ ministry: his death?
The secret is that he really is proclaiming his kingship, and he really is mustering an army. The psalmist teaches us that sickness is an affront to the reign of a God of life. Suffering is a challenge to the kingdom of God. By healing the sick, by calming a storm, by feeding the hungry, Jesus is showing his authority over what sin has done to his world. He is challenging the reign of the Devil by storming his bastions. He is mustering an army by drawing all men to himself. The secret is that the king of the universe came to claim his kingdom disguised as a fragile human. Hiding in humanity, he sneaked into the kingdom of darkness and proclaimed war. The kingdom of God was a fragile seed that did not take root until the death of Christ. In his very weakness was the establishment of his kingship. He comes in weakness and surprise! he is really filled with a power we cannot comprehend. The Israelites thought they were abandoned by God and surprise! he was really among them. So when Jesus calms the storm, his disciples are terrified: something stronger than the sea (a metaphor for the reign of chaos!) is in their boat. And then Jesus says to them: “take heart, the I AM is here.” Surprise!
So I’m looking at the childhood play-fort that now lays in pieces in the grass, and I feel that broken. But maybe the dismantling of things is the beginning of a new thing altogether. My friend Pastor Imbumi likes to say that “God is unravelling the works of the Devil.” He’s still working undercover. No big fortresses are being established. But Satan’s work is being undermined little by little.
Things aren’t making a lot of sense right now. The future is really uncertain. But we have a God so near–near enough to burst through our darkness and cry “surprise!” Because he has been there all along. Keep looking for him. The kingdom of God is at hand.
