Joy #2

 Foundations are comforting. 

Our house is closing in on its one hundredth birthday and, while the pipes are leaky, the floors are creaky, and the electrical system is one you really only want to look at with your head on one side and one eye closed; the foundation is solid. It's drafty and worn-down, but the walls are thick and you can tell it's weathered many a violent thrashing from both inside and outside weathers of various kinds.

The last three years of our first twenty years of marriage have been difficult, to say the least. We've tested our relationship in ways I never imagined, or wanted, but the foundation is solid. We're both exhausted-- soul-weary-- and we're definitely in a mood to circle the wagons and hunker down with our small brood inside this tight protected center of five. But I've realized that what we have created over the years through mutual sacrifice of self and willingness to bend and mold to accommodate each other is a solid, intertwined foundation of shared beliefs, priorities, ideals, and experiences that is still weathering this season of heartbreak and testing-- from both inside and outside weathers of various kinds.

The deepest testing this year has come, fittingly, to the foundation under the foundation; the bedrock on which the foundation was laid nearly twenty years ago. My faith has taken a beating this year. Brought fully into the glaring light of public demonstration and public scrutiny, my faith in the church and her people has been turned upside down and shaken hard. A lot of dirt fell out of places I wasn't aware existed. I gradually realized that my Christian identity had  been set on a layer of quicksand; cultural similarities, community of common experiences, and comforting notions of easy externalities. The problem with wearing Christianity like a mask is that when push comes to shove and the masks fall off, sometimes you just don't recognize the faces underneath. Sometimes they are hard, shiny, and unsmiling.

But. Also. Under that layer of shifting sand, my faith in the Father of lights, with whom there is no shifting or shadow, found a solid rock. A cornerstone. This foundation, too, has withstood millennia of violent thrashings from both inside and outside weathers of various kinds. It is good to remember that this latest storm, although the first for me, is only another in a long series through which Christ has brought His Bride. Battered she may be, and worn, with painful truths revealed and laid bare; reviled and rebuked for her sins, but Redeemed and continuously Reclaimed, nonetheless. And the promise remains:

The church’s one foundation
is Jesus Christ, our Lord;
we are a new creation
by water and the Word.
From heav’n he came and taught us
what perfect love can be;
through life and death he sought us,
and rose to set us free.

Still, schisms, tribulation,
and hatred fuel our war;
we wait the consummation
of peace forevermore.
The saints their watch are keeping;
their cry goes up, “How long?”
And soon the night of weeping
shall be the morn of song.