Lately,
I have been remembering a time of learning,
in a desk
in a classroom
in a college.
It was a favorite professor that day
who looked at his young students
to say,
Trouble will come to you. I promise.
In your lifetime you will see it.
You will not finish life without it.
I thought and thought
two different thoughts.
One of starry-eyed disbelief:
My life is calm and steady.
I'm sure I will live out my days
in no big ups or downs
and be happy forever and always.
And another of hopeless horror:
What terrible thing will happen to me?
When? Will the pain be forever?
How terrible will it be?
And in my mind now I see that student
who both doubted and feared
the pains of living
and could only carry on in
a known temporary happiness
And all the while
secretly bracing for impact.
And now years later,
I find in myself
a different kind of a learning.
Not of
desks or
classrooms or
colleges.
But as one tiny student
whose eyes have gained just a little
of this unwanted wisdom.
Trouble comes and
people want to say,
"Poor him," or
"Poor you,"
but right or wrong
I can't help but think:
You are not immune to this sort of thing.
Trouble comes.
It just does.
And it feels like fire in your skin
and it won't let you sleep
or eat
or breathe
And your body shakes at night
and you lose all of your words
and thoughts
and the ability to walk about in the world.
But I must say,
there is something about fire.
Something about the heat,
the intensity,
the relentlessness of it
that feels very, very necessary.
I'm reminded of how
babies are birthed,
and how pearls come to exist,
each in distress,
but all the while being navigated
by the complete naturalness of it all.
He knows.
He knows.
He knows it all very, very well.
And once the fire has given its all ,
and something physical
has been changed or destroyed,
then we come out to view the ashes.
We come out of hiding,
Shedding those rigid layers we
had believed we needed to endure.
And we see, yes there were things here before
that are not here now.
Yes, something very terrible has happened.
But, here I stand.
Here I stand.
I did not die from the pain.
And what did die away has been taken care of
by one strong and gentle Savior
who covered the work of even the worst of fires
on a cross
on a hill
so that our unconquerable parts
might know peace forever and ever
and ever.
