It’s confusing, you know. Like, I’ve always known life is hard and always will be. A life of bullying and isolation and temptation and drifting away and coming back and seasons. Season after season. Peaks and depths and winters and summers.
You’d think by now I’d have the perspective that a 31-year-old man who follows Jesus “ought” to have.
And yet I’m still a toddling little boy learning to trust his father’s hands holding mine.
I don’t wanna fall away from You
Gravity is pulling me on down
I don’t wanna fall away from You
Gravity is pulling me to the ground
I recently saw Shawn McDonald perform at an intimate little venue. A prayer house. A building built for speaking to God. Listening.
I’ve heard a few of Shawn’s songs over the years, most notably “Gravity.” It’s amazing how different a song can feel and what it can trigger in you when the artist strums thirty feet and five rows of folding chairs away: a stripped down acoustic version of a popular CCM song that could have made me weep in a prayer house had I allowed it.
I don’t wanna go down.
I don’t wanna fall away.
After completing a summer course with my church, I’ve been intentional about finding Sabbath rest these last few weeks. Making space for it for one measly day every seven. Because left to my own devices, I’m a shark always circling, always needing movement, always needing tasks, keeping busy, hitting the road, finishing a blog, starting a new one, planning a podcast, checking Twitter, checking Instagram —
Rest is difficult for me. A day void of writing and planning and ridesharing and social media-ing. To forge undistracted, unhindered, undoing moments in my week to simply be.
For my Sabbath this week, I ventured to the Biltmore property and pretended to pick up a Lyft rider there because I ain’t paying a month’s worth of food for admission.
Yup. I lied on my Sabbath. But it was for holy rest, so you know, the ends justify the . . .
The back of the Biltmore currently showcases a broad field of sunflowers. Maybe the most bizarre flower. When you get up close to them, they look like aliens or Pokémon or some otherworldly thing brought here by space pilgrims, standing so tall and lanky, their eyes combed with golden cubicles.
I walked through rows of the things watching bees land on some and fly to others. I saw families of tourists climbing into the sunflower stalks like corn in a maze. Moms with babies. Guys and gals on holiday weekend getaways. The women with floppy hats and the men with boots and skinny jeans.
And then me. A lying loner with a camera as gravity pulls me down.
I recently attended my first Celebrate Recovery meeting in years. Old habits. We sang a popular song there about moving mountains. That if God moved them before, he’ll do it again.
And I guess I’m left wondering if I really believe that or if he really will. I must agree on his moving them to begin with, again and again, from one coast to the other, always at work, always connecting me to the next mission and the next friendship and the next leg of this race.
I just can’t explain this 31-year road without invoking his name.
I have a new perspective on mountains, having lived among them in California and now in the Blue Ridge these last three years. This concept of moving them — to Tennessee, to Iowa, to the Pacific Rim — how gargantuan. How unreal. How supernatural like a sunflower.
Indeed, I’ve seen God do impossible things. Using the death of a dog and an adolescence of isolation to prompt vulnerability and a cross-continent move that set all of this in motion. An online community that turned to real-life with stories on stories on stories: books, blogs, podcasts, videos, retreats, conferences, homes, and untold cups of coffee.
Isolation, forever a thing of the past, never to be revisited.
I’m not who I used to be. I’m nowhere close.
I looked through my senior yearbook the other night — first time in a decade. I hardly recognize that pimply quiet kid.
I’d have never fathomed this concept of investment — people invested in my life, and I in theirs — while skirting the bullies in 9th grade.
Or while walking a mile to and from my car at the IM fields after an assault of college classes and bus rides, alone, finally returning to Mitsy and driving back to my parents’ house, alone.
God moved those mountains to the Himalayas and beyond.
Do I believe he’ll do it again? Do I really not?
I’m reading a book by Aaron Niequist called The Eternal Current. He’s a worship leader and fellow melancholic Four, and his book details his journey out of spiritual disillusionment into something deeper, something realer, something stronger.
I’m learning a lot about faith and doubt these days. In my life and others. Moving into my own place this summer has helped me look in the mirror, both figuratively and literally, asking myself what I believe and how much I believe it and what I’ll do to groom and grow it like a flame in a jar, reestablishing practices long overdue.
A morning quiet time, a weekly Sabbath, intentionality with God and man.
In his book, Aaron talks about the absurdity of asking God to “show up” or “be here.” Because he already is. He is God. He is here. He has shown up.
There is nowhere we can go, be it among the Biltmore sunflowers or on a lonely college road, void of God’s presence.
Are we blind? Are we just not seeing him?
Rather than pray for God to “show up,” Aaron suggests praying instead for awareness. For the ability to see and hear God’s frequency — how he is already breathing in our midst.
Folks gathering for fantasy board games in a new coffee shop.
Two golden retrievers in a parked SUV, panting side-by-side out the window awaiting their master’s return.
Two old friends eating wasabi peas while talking about the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi: nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect.
Sunflowers arrayed in an alien army, stretching for the heavens as told by their maker.
Soon, gravity will pull those sunflowers to the ground. Their seasons quicker than sand. Enjoy them while they last, photogenic straight people.
Gravity is pulling the sunflowers and you and me down. The sun is falling, too, and these mountains are right where they’ve always been.
Do we let nature have its way or do we fight this gravity?
When the sun is out, if you sit and watch the sunflowers, you will see that those big ole blooms follow the sun across the sky. This time of year, it’s harder for them to do that because they are seed heavy. They carry the burden of next year’s flowers and the food for many birds and animals. It’s an amazing thing.
My opinion? Just follow the Son as long as you can and when you are ready, go to seed. The world needs more sonflowers.