ending | most hopeful

i ironed every shirt today

I ironed every shirt I ever actually wear today. I stood in the den ironing and hanging one after another on the pull up bar connected to the door frame.

I’ve noticed my own ironing habit over the last twelve months. It’s often after a long day at the office where people allow me the chance to journey with them through their personal, familial and communal junk as we work to find what good can be uncovered in its midst. While some days it’s an archeological journey worth photo-ops, full of good findings and the perfect blue skies to offer backdrop to their discoveries, many days end after journeying together where we don’t actually find anything.

We may have found better questions, or better ways to let go of bad questions, or better standards by which to gauge ourselves and others, but we end without any picture-perfect discoveries. We end without the pain and the mess being over. We end, after having given it all we know to give and finding that there wasn’t light at the end of the tunnel. Not yet, at least. Not today.

I often come home on those days, pull out the ironing board, and start working on a task that I know will begin and end well in one try. It helps me suspend hope, if just until the sun rises again, that some things get settled, some things end up making sense, and some things work out before the sun goes down.

Today was not a day of counseling, but a culmination of multiple days of reminders that many good people holding out great faith can’t make the pain stop and the heartache end. We can’t hope our way to the phone call giving us the news we were begging for. Today began with the news of loss. The loss of a man whose personality and gestures were in themselves reminders that there is another world buried under this one that creation itself can hardly wait to see break through. The loss of a man who made it clear, even on the day of his murder, that there is something rumbling underneath the cracking present age that speaks of a kingdom of light and a community of icons of God himself.

And we can hardly wait either, you know. We can hardly wait especially on days like today where we know what is good, but we don’t know how to get there and we feel powerless to bring it here. So we iron ourselves into some kind of sanity, so we can see something finished and something in order like all of our button-up shirts hanging on pull-up bars.

But night falls and morning rises, and we realize that as much as we would like to settle ourselves with tasks that we can see from beginning to end, neatly pleated and orderly hung, we also realize that our hearts are only truly alive in the tasks that leave us with great heartbreak, for now. And so, while they are too big to carry, we can’t help but doing our best to pick them up again. And, in the words of the pastor calling us to move toward the kingdom, it’s in picking up the things that are too heavy to carry that we realize we are actually on our way home.

djordan
Pine Tree

it’s always past the very end

I met a friend the other night and he said his latest joke is letting people know how exhausting it is for him to always be right, because he can see clearly into the future. We began laughing at the ridiculousness of this together, and then carried on our conversations, both of us acting as if we can see clearly into the future.

I spent the entire day yesterday joining in on, an hour at a time, the lives of others who find themselves at the end. It may be crippling depression, recent diagnosis of illness, recent shift of parental figure yet again, recent divorce, recent infidelity, on and on. I sit up in my chair and play serious with adults and prop myself up on elbows on the floor and play silly with children.

They don’t need me to tell them what to do, how to respond, what to feel or how to proceed next. In many ways, I’m responsible to listen well and in so doing invite them to listen well to themselves, often for the first time in a long time.

And I’m reminded this morning, riding an old Amtrak feelings myself a part of a different era, of how inside all of the stories in which I became a fly on the wall of yesterday, we are all of us, me and them, quite sure that we can see the future. We are more hesitant to admit it, but we are.

And we are most sure when we’ve reached the end of possibilities. Times get tough, we look around, and realized that the train has made it all the way to the station and there’s nothing more to hope for.

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The crowd joined in the attack against Paul and Silas, and the magistrates ordered them to be stripped and beaten with rods. ²³After they had been severely flogged, they were thrown into prison, and the jailer was commanded to guard them carefully. ²⁴When he received these orders, he put them in the inner cell and fastened their feet in the stocks.

²⁵About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the other prisoners were listening to them. ²⁶Suddenly there was such a violent earthquake that the foundations of the prison were shaken. At once all the prison doors flew open, and everyone’s chains came loose. – Acts 16

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It is, of course, after all hell has broken loose. It’s after the end has flashed across the screen. It’s after the train has made it all the way into the station.

It’s always past the very end when the whole earth shakes, unbreakable things blow apart, and something very new and very unforeseen becomes very real.

And we can all believe.

djordan
City of New Orleans, Amtrak

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i ironed every shirt today