And the balloons spun around and around and around with high-pitched screams.

Call to Worship For in Him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through Him to reconcile to Himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of His cross. Colossians 1:20

Well, there was nothing peaceful about my classroom or the center patio yesterday when we poured out through the door with fishing line, balloons, meter sticks and scotch tape. And I felt all the teachers’ and monitors’ head-shaking pity, Doesn’t she know better?!?!?!?!?

And like I wrote my mom this morning, Mondays are often the worst days because the kids are coming off of a weekend of pain, anger, confusion, sleeplessness at home.

So just before I left yesterday, I shoved the tables around into a new, boring configuration and redid the class setup yet one more time last night, printing up the seating charts and inserting them into plastic page covers.

But what is most helpful, besides a wise pep talk with Nicole, is being reminded of what is true by ol’ Ann Voscamp as she is wandering the goat pastures outside of Bethlehem: Are our lives really bearing real fruit — or are we duct-taping on fruit to really impress others with our lives? 

We’d all sat with that here, shaken.

For weeks, we’ve all been shook with what Jesus said: “I’m telling you to love your enemies. Let them bring out the best in you, not the worst.”

And it doesn’t make one iota of difference if you’re living in the middle of global war zones or some battle zone in your own church, community, kids or marriage — or if you’re fighting a battle inside yourself — you can either ruminate like a beast over the injustice of it all, till you feel some literal heartburn and the scorch of the whole thing searing off real layers of your soul — or you can plow the pain into purpose.

Where there’s conflict — we don’t have to condemn the other, we don’t have to curse the future, we don’t have to circumvent the circumstances.
Where there’s conflict, there’s an opportunity — to practice being like Christ.

The world would change if, like Jesus, we chose
a donkey over a steed,
a cross over a crown,
a palm branch over bitterness,
and grace over guilt.

And Carlos Azarte and the Kind Souls have a new song about injustice, and a sixteen-year-old black kid who was wrongly thrown into jail for most of his life accused of  setting the Pioneer Hotel fire. Yeah, the world is full of injustice. Even in the midst of glory-filled sunsets.

Yeah, the world is full of conflict.

And condemnation.

And circumstances.

And for this we have the cross and His reconciliation.

Glory.

Contemplation All of our shortcomings related to Lent are but a microcosm of our ragged and duplicitous selves. We are far more sinful than anything we are willing to admit here. Indeed, far worse than we know or could even imagine. But the grace of God in Christ Jesus is far more lovely and powerful than we have ever dreamed.

Prayer: May I be filled with Your grace today, far more lovely and powerful than the world could ever dream.

If I was a bird, I'd go out on a limb, shake off my wings and get off the grid. Carlos Arzate

Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.  Matthew 5:4

So yesterday afternoon I was ripping through some books from next year’s curriculum in the waiting room, waiting for Wali to get out of surgery. And one of the books I had been planning to dump was Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, a book that the eleven-year-old me had remembered as being pretty dopey.  

Probably because I didn’t get it.  

“We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?”

Somehow Fahrenheit 451 rang more frightenly accurate than all of the other dystopia novels on our to-read lists such as the 1984s and Brave New Worlds sorts.  Because the evil is quiet and unarticulated and from within.  Because the people were too comfortable and distracted to ever be bothered.  About something important and real.  

And of course Fahrenheit 451 feeds my deep set resentment of television inherited from my parents and confirmed once again as mom and I flipped through more than a hundred cable stations in our last-night-in-Montana hotel last week and found nothing deemed worthy of even being background noise.  So we read.  Which keeps both Ray Bradbury and myself employed, so there could be a bit of self-preservation in our copped ‘tude.

People want to be happy, isn't that right? Haven't you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well, aren't they? Don't we keep them moving, don't we give them fun? That's all we live for, isn't it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these. All to the heart-grinding keyboard soundtrack rolling in the background. And our preoccupations are very full of real people cooking and buying and traveling and styling.  Except they aren’t so real, really. We can’t love them.  Not in the Jesus way.  The Jesus way is not distant and not sliced and diced and not by-the-way-can-you-click-on-my-link love. The Jesus love costs; the Jesus love hurts.  

And Jesus declares that the Spirit of the LORD is upon Him, and that He is anointed to comfort those who mourn, to pour the oil of gladness over their head and into their hurts and bring true healing. 

For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death.

The repentance in Fahrenheit 451, turning and seeing life in a new light, led to a salvation of sorts, in that if you drown, at least die knowing you were heading for shore, while worldly grief was a dark, unarticulated pain that did indeed produce death, death by overdose of sleeping pills, death by driving just a little too fast, death by disappearance. 

And what a blessed happiness it is indeed, to mourn, to feel the pain of a broken world including me, if Jesus is the One who gathers me up under His wings and comforts me.  

It’s the real thing.