Take a Walk on the Wild Side by Suzanne Woolston

As summertide sinks in on the heels of another May, we are all left with a subtle but distinct challenge: how can we individually continue to the personal growth we've experienced through Bible Study, community service projects, Sunday services, and overall Christian fellowship at Old South? Does the summer represent for many of us a hiatus from our quest to grow deeper as disciples?

It brings to mind one of the strongest concerns facing most folks in today's society: how do we hear God speak to us, how do we feel God's presence in our everyday ordinariness? Most of us feel small in the face of pursuing such a big God. All too often Christianity remains a Sunday morning experience, with prayer and Bible study on our own sketchy at best. Our intentions are good, but our follow-through is too easily swayed. Life is filled with a cascade of minute distractions: worry over money, fear over future jobs, yearnings for the perfect romance. As T.S. Eliot once wrote, "We measure out our life in coffee spoons" . . . the mundane erodes our hours quietly, dissolving our resolve. And yet, we constantly scan the horizon for a glimpse of the glory of the Lord, sure that our Maker is watching, but also certain that the vision is one way. Oh!, we think fiercely, for just one glimpse of a burning bush!

Indeed, for a good many of us, our life feels crowded with the wrong sorts of things…. long work, fast food, short sleep. We make do with a few fragments of life on the weekends, which blur past so fast, dumping us like cold rain at the feet of Monday mornings. Sometimes winter and summer months are indistinguishable—the days feel like one long slog onward in the trenches, head down, just keep walking towards something vague and ambiguous. But why vague? Why ambiguous? William Butler Yeats wrote:

I believe part of the reason we all struggle in our Christian walk is that we struggle with faith. Not faith in Jesus as the Christ, or the reality that there is a Creator who loves us. We recite our creeds and truly believe in the resurrection. We sing our beautiful hymns, and feel sublime moments. And yet, do our minds really allow our hearts to go all the way out on the limb of belief? To engage with the living God? What are the implications of full faith in the true immensity of God?

We hardly know, because most of the time we shove God into a box. The fear of God is translated in the yearning to contain God; hence we try to cage the wildness of heaven. Our expectations are the limiting factor as we labor to fashion God in the image of our needs. We end up domesticating the Trinity in our own backyards, setting the Godhead up in a hen-house to roost like pet chickens! We get an egg or two when we need it, that's all we ask. But we forget: God the Almighty, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, yes, our God . . . is more like the fox in the hen-house. A fox that invades our cooped-up sense of religion, forever invading our hungering darkness. At every turn, Christ the fox confounds us: not a King, a Jewish peasant. Not a coronation, a crucifixion. In our world, God's reign breaks in as it will. While we sleep, the chicken wire is bent to the ground.

One of my favorite theologians, C.S. Lewis, once wrote:

"There lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing. I submit that this notion has no part in the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are halfhearted creatures, fooling with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered to us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea... We are far too easily pleased."

We must never accept status-quo when it comes to our relationship with God. Always we must push onward—harder, deeper, with a vibrant thirst for greater connection. Summertime presents merely a different scenario for loyal Marshians. Adrift from the insightful sermons of Deans Thornburg and Luckie (and our wonderful Chapel groups), we are called to recognize that spiritual opportunities remain rich indeed. If we look, if we open up our faith to the scary unknown, we will realize that God's presence fills our houses and cars and beach chairs just as surely as our church pews. The Holy Spirit riding shotgun on your bicycle fender as you sail down sun-drenched, summer streets? Oh yes!

The Bible reaches down through the centuries to say to us this season, throw open the church doors wide: God has escaped into the world. +