away in lake city, no place for a bed

sitting in a four hour meeting that should have been two hours, but everyone has an opinion and everyone's opinion is, apparently, worth more than families, than my school work, than health, than sanity, than the tireless work of underpaid ministers...so, it was a four hour meeting.

as the committee began to argue about increasingly petty things such as where and when coffee is served, my mind, under nourished - i made the faulty assumption that a 6-10 meeting would include dinner and hadn't eaten much more than carrotts all day - began to wander.

for a moment, i began to hold the good people have seen in me without dismissing them as uninformed or untruthful. i began to transport all the passion and hope i can feel when steeped in theology into the place i once hoped could be a community where theology lives. i began to feel a strange thing called confidence.

for a moment, i began to hold these things - i began to hold myself.

then, holding myself, i looked for a place to take and offer me. like a child, over excited about having bought the perfect gift, i looked with wide eyes for someone to take the gift and together marvel over it.

no one wanted it and, in fact, it disappeared behind some fogged curtian. i still saw its shadow as it left my hands and floated off to wherever it had been hiding.

why am i not that person? why is my ministry not that ministry? why do i have potential that seems to be imaginary or an optical illusion?

there's no space for me here. no space.

when i went on a mission trip to ireland, my mission team said they were amazed at how i moved into a place and a people and gently but firmly made space for myself.

and here, there is no space.

even as i hold myself, the space in my hands expires as the pain of wanting so desperately to give myself only to be rejected grows too bitter and intense and somewhere inside, i wish myself gone. i obediently disappear like a magic trick in a cloud of illusion.



then, who is our God?
our God had no place to be born, so Jesus came in a stable
our God's people had no place to live, so they prayed and marched and blew triumphant horns until walls fell and land became theirs.
our God was bannished to the point of death - not in a mystical cloud, but on a too real and ultimately cruel cross.
three days later, our God returned to embrace those who bannished "God with us."