The Long Walk Home

It’s the last day of the holidays, August has been spent, not in an office in Hove, but in the worlds of Reading, Belfast, the Lake District, our car and Brighton. We ended July in varying states of mentalness and tiredness. We wanted a nicely planned out rest programme, designed for maximum enjoyment and refreshment the way we would plan refreshment.

We didn’t get it.

Life has a funny way of getting in the way at times, plans were rearranged, holidays put on hold, other holiday moments found and our August was a different affair altogether. If we’d have known that at the end of July we might have run for the hills. As it was we dealt with it, we lived through some hard stuff and hard stuff is still ongoing in areas of our lives. There isn’t a nice cosy escape world from the pain of this life. There isn’t a perfect green pasture to lie down this side of the world to come.  There isn’t a desert island to plan perfect romantic moments on, where perfect communication will happen.  We live in a world full of brokenness, we are broken people. More and more I need it beaten into my strangely stubborn head that the perfect moments I ache for are signs of a world to come where there will be no more tears, no more pain, no more sadness.

Until then we rightly take holidays to rest from the normal routines of life, to breathe different air and to sleep.  We don’t, however, take them to provide us with what we need to keep walking. That comes from one source only. The Maker. We learnt, and more of this later, that rest comes from Him. We were reminded that God is our strength and refuge, not our plans, not certain places, not even certain people. Firstly our rest comes from Him.  We didn’t have the summer we planned but we had the summer we were given. We struggled to love each other, to love the people around us and to love God. We cried out to our God for help and He answered.  We carried on breathing, living and loving in circumstances that we did not choose.

That’s what we are called to in this life, in this world. To keep walking, to keep going despite not being in control. We are called to take the hand of the one who walks with us into valleys of shadow and death and trust that He knows the way forward, that he really is able to do immeasurably more than all we could ask or imagine and has actual power to strengthen us when all other strength has gone.

Tomorrow we get back into routine, we will go to work, we will eat, sleep and talk, life will take on shape again. It will be messy at times, we will sing and dance at times, life will carry on, we will call out to God for help, in praise, in joy, in sorrow, we will forget to do all those things and need to be reminded again that He is real and we are walking together with Him.

In short, we carry on. Things don’t work out as we’ve planned in this life and that’s OK (Meaning- it’s OK after you’ve cried, screamed, wrestled with giving up plans you had and stamped around a bit. When you’ve generally been frustrated over things either not going your way or lamented the real pain involved in amazing plans not working out and then are called into the arms of a loving father who holds you whilst you cry) Our God is with us in the pain and frustration of plans not working out and that makes it OK.  The brilliant/hopeful/scary/frustrating at times/fall on your knees in awe thing is that our lives are in the hands of someone bigger than our plans.

Saturday evening, the sun sinks lower in the sky over the city illuminating all around. Here in the flat there is peace. I look out at our view, trains rattle down into the station, cars meander around the roads, trees glow in the summer light.  Amidst all this beauty there are still times when this life feels very fragile, when it seems too much to carry on walking around these roads, when there seems to be too much confusion, too much heartache and no escape from the many tangled ways we relate to others, our Maker and ourselves.

We are tired. Exhausted and broken. But we are not defeated. We might feel like we are in despair, we might feel like the road is too long and that is OK. We aren’t the only ones and we won’t be the only ones thinking like this.  Distractions are tempting, despair seems inevitable out here when all around just looks misty, boggy and treacherous. It’s easy to believe the lie that there will be a magic button around the corner that will make this ache go away, it’s easy to believe that there is a road that isn’t this hard. It’s easy to doubt that one day the sun was out, that we laughed and joked together and couldn’t believe the clouds could ever come. It’s easy to believe that these clouds will never break and the sun is gone forever.

These are lies. There is only this road. There will be a time soon when the clouds will part and the sun will warm our backs again. Sure, they might come back, we will probably face much worse than this in our lives. That’s the nature of the journey.  We walk on because we know there is a future worth holding on for. We walk on because we know that we are not alone on this journey, that there is One who comes and holds our hands, who knows what is going on, who weaves in our lives with His power, strength and glory.  We have a God who knows the ache of our hearts so well. Who is not indifferent to our struggle. Who calls us to be more in it and who holds us tight when we stumble and fall.

We have active, powerful grace our lives. We have hope that this fall will not be the last one and we have a God whose presence is Love in our lives.

This is remarkably true:

1-6It wasn’t so long ago that you were mired in that old stagnant life of sin. You let the world, which doesn’t know the first thing about living, tell you how to live. You filled your lungs with polluted unbelief, and then exhaled disobedience. We all did it, all of us doing what we felt like doing, when we felt like doing it, all of us in the same boat. It’s a wonder God didn’t lose his temper and do away with the whole lot of us. Instead, immense in mercy and with an incredible love, he embraced us. He took our sin-dead lives and made us alive in Christ. He did all this on his own, with no help from us! Then he picked us up and set us down in highest heaven in company with Jesus, our Messiah.

We walk in company with Jesus. With Jesus, the greatest person who ever walked this earth.  We walk home in company with Him. There is Hope today, not just one day to come. There is Hope because we walk home with Jesus, who isn’t ashamed to hang out with people like us.

Tonight the air is clearer, it’s easier to remember the signs, tomorrow, who knows? But there is one who walks alongside us guiding, helping, prodding when we need it, sitting us down to catch our breath when we need it.

Phew.