Tag Archives: pioneers

Exile or Pioneer — we don’t really know what you are going to do with this blog post

I really have no idea what is going to happen — most of the time, I like it that way. I don’t really know if Circle of Hope can sustain itself, since it runs on conviction and covenant. I don’t know whether the stock market will dive and take us with it, whether aggrieved people will unite and upend the social order, whether my friends will move away, or whether my pipes will freeze in the endless winter. Most of the time, all that uncertainty seems like a good excuse to have faith. It is a great grace that living by faith is more fulfilling than knowing whether I should have bought salt before it was all sold out.

mr. batesBut people have a lot of guilt and anxiety about not knowing. They are ashamed they made what look like mistakes and they did not know what was going to happen before it happened. Mr. Bates may do something terrible because of his guilt and shame about not knowing what was happening to Mrs. Bates!

The other day I was at a baby shower and people were quite satisfied that they did not have to buy yellow baby clothes because they knew the baby’s gender already — I am sure science developed in utero photography to ease the anxiety about how to decorate the nursery!  Maybe you laugh, but people are still angry that the government did not predict and prevent 9/11!  Many people defend the government’s right to collect our phone records because they think every measure must be taken so “nothing like that ever happens to anyone ever again!” — we even see our personal experiences as contributions to anxiety relief, guilt reduction and the hope of controlling the future. Don’t we insist that the future must be “better” than the past? And aren’t we taught that good people band together to make sure it will be?

Continue reading Exile or Pioneer — we don’t really know what you are going to do with this blog post

A Psalm for 2012

When Gwen and I spent a couple of days on Kent Island in December, I imagined what it must have been like to be the first English settlers there. Even now it is something of a “nowhere.”

When we crossed the big bridge into Annapolis and told a sales clerk we were staying on Kent Island, he said, “Kent Island! What are you doing over there?” He made me a bit ashamed to be on my eroding bit of the Eastern Shore.

Photo of the Week: Beautiful Kent Island Sunset - Chesapeake Bay Foundation
Kent Island sunset

Ever since, those images have stuck with me. I sometimes feel like a pioneer in inhospitable territory. Maybe you do, too, as a Jesus follower. So I share my psalm of hope for me and you in 2012.

I confess that my hope was eroded.
The debilities took bites out of my enthusiasm
like Chesapeake Bay taking chunks
out of sandy islands
held together loosely
by scrawny trees and waving grass.

I possess that small hope you created.
But impossibilities blunt it and weaken any resolve,
like English settlers planting rye
on burned-over plots
waiting for hurricanes
to level their homes and carve new shores.

I cannot protect it.
The winds and waves obey You.
I am an island inhabited
by bad farmers.
I am a bad farmer inhabiting
an impossible island.

In this year
I do not expect to move elsewhere.
I do expect waves on my sandy shore
and ploughs sending dust into the wind.
Please guard my hope.
Please husband my plans.
Be my boat when the island is gone.
Be my home when the hurricane hits.