After that brutal Friday, and that long, quiet Saturday, he came back. 
And that one intake of breath in the tomb changes everything. It changes the very reason I drew breath today and the way I move about in this world because I believe he's coming back again. The world has gone on for more than two millennia since Jesus' feet tread the earth he made. What would they have said back then if someone had told them that two thousand years later we'd still be waiting? They would've thought back to that long Saturday and said, 'Two thousand years will seem like a breath to you when you finally lay your crown at his feet. We don't even remember what we were doing on that Saturday, but let me tell you about Sunday morning. Now that was something!'

These many years of waiting will only be a sentence in the story. This long day will come to an end, and I believe it will end in glory, when we will shine like suns and stride the green hills with those we love and the One who loves. We will look with our new eyes and speak with our new tongues and turn to each other and say, 'Do you remember the waiting? The long years, the bitter pain, the gnawing doubt, the relentless ache?' And like Mary at the tomb, we will say: 'I remember only the light, and the voice calling my name, and the overwhelming joy that the waiting was finally over.'

The stone will be rolled away for each of us.

Hey, you.

I know you're tired. In fact, I know you're exhausted. And I know that life just feels like a battering of assignments and tests and hours put in here for school and hours put in there to pay for the hours you put in for school, and meeting this person and talking to that person and worrying about this other person... yeah, I'd say I know Anna's life pretty well.

And I know that sky looks threatening, and the boat is the last place you want to be. I also know why.

Yes, I know the secrets of the minefield, of the storm, and I know the secret of your heart: you're not terrified of craziness and explosions and being exhausted from an excess of work. The reason the minefields terrify you, the reason you and so many others stay away, is because you're afraid you won't feel anything, and you hate being bored.

Wake up. The peril is not in the obvious hazards, the literal bullets, the schedule that wings by in a blur. The danger is in the landscape that never changes, the ground that never seems to ascend or descend, the monotonous plodding that grows more maddening with every step.

Peril is everywhere, but especially in the mundane. The thing that makes the minefields dangerous isn't the mines; it's the fact that you can walk them and never know the mines are going off all around you. That you would dive headfirst into the teeth of death and experience salvation and still - still! - shut your eyes to the beauty of the reality of what God is doing because it is too small for your backwards, twisted mirror-vision to detect, too boring to tickle those itching ears, too even-keel and ordinary to rock the emotion-springs of your heart.

This generation is obsessed with feeling things, and you are no different. So easily entertained by news stories and television shows and musical numbers by popular bands that bellow angst and candied-happiness and troubledness, the never-ending lie that life is what you feel, and you have to feel something to know your life. Meanwhile, we scorn things like marriage or simply being a full-time daughter or being a blue-collar laborer for the next twenty-plus years because... well, to dress it up and put it in as close-to-the-truth and disgustingly false way as possible, a Christian is all about risk, and I don't feel like I'm risking anything in any of those boring commitments.

That's why you won't get into the boat when the storm looms overhead. It's not because you're afraid of sinking. It's because you don't want to risk finding out that the storm isn't be all that it's cracked up to be - or, rather, that you're not all you've convinced yourself you are. Dan Haseltine hit the nail on the head when he sang: I have no fear of drowning; it's the breathing that's taking all this work. The terror is in not in going down with a blaze of glory; the terror is in finding your first squall to be a few mere ripples, and that even those are enough to keep you hanging over the rail puking your guts out for a lifetime. The terror is in realizing that it doesn't take an epic gale to reduce you to the dust that you are.

Yes, there are minefields, but they aren't guts-and-glory. They're the stupid little things we have to do every day to be the people God has called us to be and love the people he has called us to love. They're the myriad of insignificant little conflicts where our life is on the line, and we have to surrender it. And that's the danger: the searing heat of the blast doesn't get any closer to us than when we are totally unaware of its presence. There is peril in the mundane, and it is that we do not know the fires are singing the hairs on our necks because we cannot feel them. We cannot feel because we are bored; we are bored because we would rather be secure than have our ordinary things threatened. Take my life, Lord; create a World War - just don't take my routine, don't take my schedule, don't take my secure little corner of the world, my idols of the thousands of insignificant places where I can feel self-sufficient... give me something grand to feel, something I don't care about so all these little things can still be mine to me, and never yours, never surrendered... 

Are you disgusted enough already? Then forsake this gluttony of experience. Feelings are all very well and good in their place, but it's faith that's meant to be your eyes now. To say that life is boring because you don't feel the battle is to fall asleep in the face of an epic gale, even as we shake in our rubbers at the tiny ripples. Yes, that's you. It's good to feel foolish and know ourselves to be dust. Throw yourself on the grace of God. That grace is the only reason you may have faith to see the goodness in being small, in being foolish, in being secure in the greatness and wisdom of Almighty. Are you going to puff up yourself in the face of such great grace and wisdom and strength, protesting that your eyes can do better without the faith he gives so freely?

Come on, soul; you know you were bought with a price, and there's nowhere for you to go but the path grace forges. Let's clamber aboard this vessel and leave the oars behind. We can weigh the anchors of pride and self-sufficiency and unfurl the sails. Let's leave the wheel unmanned; the rudder's broken anyway, and my compass always forgets which way to point. We don't need to use the stars to divine where sovereignty drives us: you know it means us to go further up and further in, and "sovereignty" isn't just a nice word. It works. No, it doesn't feel like a thundering charge up the waterfall into glory yet - this is a Far Country, and we are still plodding, but the beauty of the mundane is that there are always glimpses, and the tragedy is to miss them.

So come on, you. That sky looks doubtful enough for sailing; what are you waiting for?

The stranger approached me as I stood contemplating the barbed-wire fence. It was an old, sagging affair, flapping in the greying dusklight like the tattered shreds of a war-banner. Its gangly belly brushed the short brown grass in several places. I had been trekking through these hillsides for some hours (or perhaps years; I had long since forgotten) until the fence brought me up short. It seemed too disheveled and humble for all the legends. I halted and stared more from surprise than reverence.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia, because Google Images is just that cool.

I would say I hate to always be borrowing Jenny's ideas, but I don't. She has such good ones. Recently, she posted a brief but poignant remark on the importance of the opening lines of a book, quoting several of her favorites' at the end by way of example/an excuse to fill a post with really good quotes. This is what I resort to blogging when my brain is too tired to produce anything but unedited snippets of awkward.

A fair few of my favorites found their way into Jenny's post, and I shall not bother to recapitulate those; Rosemary Sutcliff, Beowulf, and Perelandra being foremost in my memory as such (you may find her post here). But sans-the-aforementioned, here is my own, per Jenny's request and my own desire to throw this together.

First Impressions: {Redux}