All The Way Home

My time in seminary has been full of surprises, some good and other not. One of the best surprises came in the form of a professor’s “off the topic” story. This professor is a well-known theologian, author, and speaker. He only teaches at the seminary sporadically due to his other scholarly engagements. At the seminary, he is known to turn off his microphone before telling juicy stories sure to get him in trouble when taken out of context. As students, we look forward to the stories as much as the lectures themselves. However, I was not prepared for this “off the record” story.

With humility and sadness, he spoke of not truly knowing his father until the six months of his life. My professor expressed how little he thought this relational void had affected him in the years after his father’s death. However, he was confronted with a broken heart and deep longing when he was told years later how much he favored his father in demeanor and speech. It was here my professor and renowned storyteller uncharacteristically struggled for words and composure. All he could say was a broken sentence: “You think you are over something, but then in a moment you know you certainly are not.”

Being in the midst of the hardest year of my life, I could not stop myself from falling apart in the back of the classroom. It had been a year of brutally understanding “but then you know you certainly are not”. Like a bucket collecting rain during a monsoon, my heart began to overflow.

Before returning to the lecture my professor finished the story with a single sentence. “It is in those moments, especially in those moments, when you must cling to the hope in a God who carries us all the way home because we cannot get ourselves there.”

As the class returned to the lecture, I had no interest in joining them in the theological pursuit. I felt gratitude and sadness refusing to loosen their grip on my mind. At that moment, sitting in the back row of the room, I couldn’t help but acknowledge the divine gift I had just received. For a brief, blurry eyed, moment my inconsistencies and sorrows faded out of focus in light of a God who carries me to the place of shelter and healing I most need. And even now, as I write this meager entry, I am only beginning to see how he IS the shelter and healing I most need. Maturity and strength are not found in the number of steps we walk on own but are instead found in surrendering and accepting our need to be carried along in the unfailing strength of God.

Image credit: http://cather.unl.edu/ss026.html