I began to write this post yesterday, before knowing about the tragedy in France.

I had just walked the woods here at the University of British Columbia, and I was filled with nostalgia. Filled with that awareness of how much I lacked in appreciating what I had 20 years ago. 

I wanted to write and tell current students to soak this all in, to not miss the remarkableness of this season of their lives. 

We do that, don’t we? We see someone in a situation we experienced, and we want to stop them and tell them to really look at their life. To inhale and pause long enough to take a lingering look around them. 

Yesterday I walked these trails and thought of our dog we had walked here, thought of all the wonderful classes I had listened to. I had scrambled to take the correct notes, writing furiously and concentrating intently…now I wish I had sat back a little and just listened. 

I wish I hadn’t rushed through that season.

We say the same thing to parents with new babies: “Soak it all in because it will be over before you blink. They will change so quickly.”

Sometimes it is difficult to soak in the goodness and appreciate the wonder when you are trying to get facts all straight for exams. 

Or the baby is crying and you haven’t had a decent night of sleep.

Or, the diagnosis takes your breath away.

Or life has just made you weary.

Or someone carrying terror in their hearts drives through your peaceful evening.

I hesitated to write this this morning, because it felt callous to talk of celebrating your life and appreciating wonder when lives were just so harshly destroyed.

One of my favorite quotations of Frederick Buechner, and one often used here and elsewhere is this:

“Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”

Alongside that, hear this:

“Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.”

Sometimes it is very difficult to not be afraid, sometimes the mystery is overwhelming.

In those moments, following deep tragedies, there is this ache to do something. Find some way of bringing healing. 

In the book of Jeremiah, in a letter to the people being taken into captivity under Nebuchadnezzar, this is the encouragement they are given:

Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Jeremiah 29:5

In the midst of what must have been a terrifying time: plant gardens. It goes on to tell them to marry and have children, and to pray for peace. 

Translated for me today…go for a walk in the woods. Continue to live. Bring peace in your sphere of influence, bring wonder. Bring healing…but also fill yourself with wonder and healing. 

Go for a walk in the woods. Weep for those who are overwhelmed in suffering. Look around Creation and see it is touched as well. See that in its beauty are the marks of pain…of lightning strikes and storms, of decay. 

Still, so much wonder. Still, so much beauty, and even more so for the marks of lightning and wind.
   
   

Find that place where you can plant gardens, where you can continue to live and bring hope when everything feels terrifying. Find that place, and feed it. Protect it. Nurture it. 

Pay attention when you are in the season of laughter and of lingering walks in the woods, so that when things are filled with terror you have the strength to continue to pay attention. You have the strength to  look at the terrible things and see God make a way to hope.

“Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.” -Buechner

I am in the midst of an amazing splurge. I am waking each morning this week in Vancouver, British Columbia and marching down the street to attend classes at Regent College.

Fourteen years have passed since I completed one of my Master’s degrees here. All I have left of the second degree is a pesky thesis. Fourteen years is a long time. The awareness of how long it has been settled on me the first day; that sense of familiarity and yet awkwardness of not really belonging here in this season. 

Still. This place, the grounds and the Chapel and the sounds, they are iconic to me: they help me see God with an awakened mind. I simply think better here because I have been trained to do so. I am ready to hear, ready to listen.

Most of my time this week has been spent listening to Dr. J.I. Packer expound the book of Colossians. Walking us through the insights and truths and wisdom of Paul.
 
The refrain I keep hearing? 

“Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.”

Walk, without anxiety and fear and uncertainty, but abounding in thanksgiving. Abounding in thanksgiving. 

I don’t abound in thanksgiving very often, and yet on these splurge weeks in a beautiful place pulsing with lively thought, it is much easier. 

These days in general, though, it can be difficult to be filled with thanksgiving… abounding in thanksgiving. Much easier to be overwhelmed with news intended to stir fear and anger and anxiety. But things have shifted when we place ourselves in Christ. Paul tells us in Colossians, “and let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful.” 

When peace, shalom, rules in our hearts it is much easier to be thankful. In the midst of a world stirred by fear, in the midst of daily lives marked by stress, in the midst of families weighed down by sorrow….allow our peace to bring hope and grace to our world.

Last night the steady analysis of Colossians was interrupted as I attended a lecture by Malcolm Guite. He opened up for us a poem by Seamus Heaney, “The Rainstick.”

When Regent Audio has these evening lectures available, please go listen. I am only going to touch on one aspect, and the lecture is immensely worth your time.

From this poem about a Rainstick and the music it makes, Guite encouraged us to think of the upendings God accomplish in our lives, of the music around us and the imagery God has given us eveywhere to expand our thinking of Him.
The refrain I keep hearing this morning?

And now here comes

A sprinkle of drops out of the freshened leaves,

Then subtle little wets off grass and daisies;
Then glitter-drizzle, almost-breaths of air.

Upend the stick again. What happens next

Is undiminished for having happened once.”
I have thought of that all morning as I walked.

Another thought, another refrain, was touched on, and this one is becoming like a mantra already. Guite drew our attention to the story of the woman at the well, and this phrase of Jesus:

“If you knew the gift of God and who it is that is saying to you…”

If you knew.

If you knew, really knew, all that Jesus is offering you…me…oh, would our thanksgiving abound. If it really settled in our souls that nothing is diminished when His grace comes to us again and again, if we could hear the music the Spirit can make by upending our dry and ugly moments…that shalom peace would settle about us.

If you just knew..the wonder this Creator God has placed all around you. The images and the sounds, the smells and the tastes, all ready to enliven you. All there to give you language to worship, to express…to know.

If you just knew …the strength you possess in this moment as the Spirit of the Living God waits to quicken you, to fill you, to equip you. 

If you just knew…the dignity of each person you encounter.  See them not as an enemy, not as an annoyance, not as an inconvenience or a problem, but instead see them clothed in the delight of God with the dignity of an Image Bearer of the Creator.
Sometimes we have to step back. A week in Vancouver is not always, very rarely, a possibility. A walk with our heart attuned to God’s creation is often available. A moment taken to listen afresh, to try to really grasp, to really know the gift God is offering in this moment, and to really grasp who it is that offers this gift. 

 We need to find those iconic places or items which spark our thinking and inspire. Whether it is a graduate school, a park, a chapel, a kitchen sink with a window overlooking a yard full of children. Or an upended Rainstick reminding us of unexpected music and teaching us to abound in thanksgiving.