You Who Were

Last week I co-directed Junior Camp at campgrounds I hadn't been to in 15 years.  There were lots of new things to get used to, but I was shocked by how much remained the same.  The stairwells, the dining hall, the bunkbeds, the smell....all the same.  While I ran in the hushed dawn before 40 children awoke, I traveled back through my own memories: there was my first kiss, there I met a woman I still speak to, there I felt the deep claws of jealousy, there, there, there...

I have moved so many times in my life, and I rarely have the opportunity to travel back to places I once was, to remember the person I once was.  I was thankful to have the luxury to stand in my memories and reach across the great cavern of time to the sepia-toned days past.  But like most of us, I wished I could have done more than just watched the old home movies of memory.  I wished that I could have warned myself, my fragile, dramatic, silly teenage self, of what was to come.  

Here is what heartbreak tastes like....

Here is what transcendent joy smells like...

Here is what crushing doubt feels like...

Here is what utter failure sounds like....

Here is what the days to come look like...

Oh child who was, if only you knew

We cannot break the solid glass that separates our current self from our past existence.  We can only lay our palms upon its surface and watch ourselves walk into fire, walk into life, walk into pain, walk into beautiful chance.  We watch and wonder at who we were, wonder at who we have become.  And we turn to the obscured glass that stands on the opposite side of our memories and try just as hard to break through to our futures.  To know the heartbreak, the joy, the doubt, the failure, the days that are coming.  

Maybe these barriers we feel on both sides of us are the cause of the energy we put into our children, into the lives of other people.  We cannot change our pasts, we cannot know our futures, but we can try to spare those around us, we can try to bless those around us.  It's why recovering drug addicts attend NA and walk alongside those who are still enslaved to their demons.  It's why lonely former youth group members become passionate youth ministers.  It's why neglected children become helicopter parents.  It's why those who never knew love pour it out onto others.  It's why those who lost all hope preach the gospel of hope in Christ Jesus.  

The walls that block us from going backward, that keep us from skipping ahead, they are insurmountalbe.  But the walls that keep us from each other?  Ephesians says that Christ "with his body, broke down the barriers that divided us."  It's one of the reasons why I share with all of you (those known and unknown) all my heartache and grief.  The I who once was is lost to me.  But you, you and I are only separated by the screens between us.  So to you I give my stories....

Here is what heartbreak tastes like - bitter, chalky.  Here is what crushing doubt feels like - it pinches, it constricts.  Here is what utter failure sounds like - it is choked tears.  Here is what transcendent joy can be - the laughter of tiny children at play.  

Here is life.