Birthing Something

Anne Lamott writes in her book Traveling Mercies about a conversation with a man who worked for the Dalai Lama, Buddhism's main guru, sort of like the Pope (but not really like him at all). She comments on the fact that sometimes a lot of bad things seem to happen at once, nothing can go right, and we are left wondering, Why? He said that Buddhists believe that when a lot of things start going wrong all at once, it is to protect something big and lovely that is trying to get itself born--and this something needs for you to be distracted so that it can be born as perfectly as possible.

Jesus said, "Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies it can produce no fruit" ( he was talking about his own death, but I think there is a wider principle involved concerning how the universe works).

Sometimes in order for something to be born, something marvelous, beautiful, luminous and perhaps even transcendent sometimes crap has to die. Without a death their can be no resurrection, no rebirth. Any mother will tell you that you don't get an 8 pound fetus out of your uterus simply by wishing and clicking your stirrup bound heels together. It involves pain. Lots of pain. But through that pain, through our pain, through all the times when the world seems like it is caving in around us and on top of us, something is born more perfectly than it might have been, and, had we not been distracted we might have interfered with it.

Take my current situation (and, by extension, your current situation): Do you think I can even begin to understand the larger picture of why I was asked to resign (all of the given reasons aside)? I felt as if we were on the cusp of something big, something revolutionary, something extraordinary. Now the rug has been pulled out from underneath us and we are left asking, Why? Why did it happen? Why am I stuck selling cars, when my calling is ministry? Why do you have to learn to love and trust a new youth minister? Could it be that something is trying to get born and God is distracting all of us from it so that He can bring it perfectly into the world without our interference? We have done our part to conceive the "thing" and now God is going to bring it to life. Maybe, to bring Jesus' words back into it, something needs to die in order for something else greater, grander, more beautiful to be born.

Could it be?

shalom, matt