Do You Want to Go With Me?
Learning about letting go and reaching out.
The-most-strong-willed-4-year-old-in-America asked me to the movies this week. Hours after going to the movies for the first time, Declan was ready to go back and share the experience with me.
“Dad, do you want to go see the Super Pets movie with me? Lemonade. And the big popcorn. Maybe some fruit snacks.”
I took him to a movie theatre that I valeted cars at a decade ago (I could have never imagined what the future held). We buy our tickets, and the lemonade, and the big popcorn and fruit snacks. The look on his face, folks.
Declan is sort of in-between the size where you can comfortably sit in a movie theatre chair. After sitting on the edge for a bit, and trying out the getting-entirely-swallowed-up-by-the-chair approach, we settled on him sitting on my lap. He ate fruit snacks until his tummy hurt. He pushed through being up past his bed time and made it to the end of the movie — even if I did have to carry him to the car.
As a father of two, my inroads to understanding God right now is as a father. In the Psalms, David writes:
Where can I go to get away from your Spirit?
Where can I run from you?If I go up to the heavens, you are there.
If I lie down in the grave, you are there.If I rise with the sun in the east
and settle in the west beyond the sea,even there you would guide me.
With your right hand you would hold me.I could say, “The darkness will hide me.
Let the light around me turn into night.”But even the darkness is not dark to you.
The night is as light as the day;
darkness and light are the same to you.You made my whole being;
you formed me in my mother’s body.I praise you because you made me in an amazing and wonderful way.
What you have done is wonderful.
I know this very well.You saw my bones being formed
as I took shape in my mother’s body.
When I was put together there,you saw my body as it was formed.
All the days planned for me
were written in your book
before I was one day old.God, your thoughts are precious to me.
They are so many!If I could count them,
they would be more than all the grains of sand.
When I wake up,
I am still with you.
I heard someone say this week that the message of the four Gospels can be summed up in five words: Let go and reach out.
As G.K. Chesterton famously wrote of God with an unseen hook and an invisible line… long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world, and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread. We are God’s children. Wholly loved. The steady hand of the Father asking us the eternal question Do you want to be healed? and continuing to love us regardless of our answer. All wounds, in time. Eternally caught when we let go and reach out.
There is an evening every year — in August or September — where I swear to you that I can feel the season of summer end and the season of autumn begin. The Anemoi were the gods of the four winds in ancient Greek thought. Each direction had a name — Boreas, Zephryos, Notos, Euros — and a function. I couldn’t tell you the name of this particular wind or why it speaks to me every year, but it always completely stops me. It’s the closest thing I’ve ever heard to God’s voice. It feels like a perennial holy moment to me. And the moment I’ve focused in on it, it’s gone. But it was there. Just right up there. I promise.
This year, it left me with a sense that life is about to change for our family. I suppose anyone looking at our family could see that — but it’s different when you are living in the middle of it. Until this year, we had babies at home. But, at the ages of four and soon-to-be two — they are really too chatty to be considered babies any longer. And, of course, Declan reminds us, directly, that he isn’t a baby when we accidentally treat him like one. As we gear up to launch Declan into Kindergarten next year — and realize that it will be here before we know it — their increasing independence is creating space in our own lives and work. The haze of the baby days is moving behind us. They have a wonderful daycare provider. Kelly and I are going to be able to focus a little more on our careers and a little less on dirty diapers.
And with that in mind, I come back to the ideas of letting go and reaching out. Henri Nouwen wrote an entire book on the latter — attempting to summarize his entire understanding of what being a follower of Jesus was really about. Henri saw reaching out as three movements - each suspended between two polarities: to our inmost self (from loneliness to solitude), to our fellow human beings (from hostility to hospitality), and to our God (from illusion to prayer). He summarizes it this way:
“In the midst of a turbulent, often chaotic, life we are called to reach out, with courageous honesty to our innermost self, with relentless care to our fellow human beings, and with increasing prayer to our God.”
Dear God,
I am so afraid to open my clenched fists! Who will I be when I have nothing left to hold on to? Who will I be when I stand before you with empty hands? Please help me to gradually open my hands and to discover that I am not what I own, but what you want to give me. And what you want to give me is love—unconditional, everlasting love.
Amen.
And so I keep asking, what does it look like for me to let go and reach out as the season turns to autumn? What would it look like for you to do the same?