Recent days of blue sky carried me back to memories of a friend.
They are woven around warm breezes across outfield grass,
the sound of a baseball thudding into a mitt or pinging off an aluminum bat.
Then, other thoughts came on the heals of those memories,
but they were more disheartening.
I knew that his Dad was gone.
I don't remember if he had died or just left the house one day and never came back.
His Mom was loving, but rarely showed her face outside the house.
There was a tension in the rest of the family dynamic.
Pain lurked there.
Just under the surface.
Like something looking for an escape route or waiting for an opportunity to pounce.
I would catch him staring to the ground or at the workspace before him at school.
Motionless.
I would nudge him and say, "Hey! Where'd you go?"
He would shrug and smile, but offer nothing.
I occasionally wondered about what life was like for him when none of the rest of us were around,
and he was alone at home.
I was pretty sure there was an escalation of that tension that we saw.
That the shadow of it all grew into something that at times was overwhelming.
I didn't have a clue how to help unpack any of that.
When you're a kid, getting a handle on your own life is challenging enough.
You're pretty sure that every family has their own junk, but acknowledging that something is "dysfunctional" is a whole different thing.
I don't know that I had ever heard that word until I was in my late 20's.
At one point, for many reasons, our paths separated and never completely came together again.
We pursued different things.
There was college.
Then there was marriage and family.
Vocation has taken me out of state since then, even out of country, a lot.
And then we re-connected just a short time ago, sort of...
But the distance and time between us has been too great to navigate.
I feel like those hurts that I sensed in the "way back when" have calcified.
Now there is a very real, very tangible physical wound in him, that I can do nothing about.
It bothers me that I didn't ask more questions then. That I didn't try harder to figure it out.
But, I also know, in most respects the whole of it is beyond me.
Beyond my wisdom, my strength...my ability to heal.
The weight of that truth alongside the memories, is crushing.
When I think on the many faces of people I have met,
those who I've been fortunate enough to call friend or even family,
and those who have just been acquaintances,
through these six decades of life...
I believe that we all have at least one thing in common.
Peace is what we seek.
Even when we don't know it;
don't say it out loud,
it's the echo of our hearts, in some way...nearly every day.
I saw a young mother navigating her way down an aisle in Walmart; three kids in the grocery cart, negotiating throughout the store as to what items will end up in the cart.
A man at the highway intersection looking for spare change,
with a sign in his hands, that just said, "Smile!"
His face mirroring his admonition.
I hear so many stories of...
Hope reborn, and also, hope dashed.
Someone I know, is today rolling their shoulder away from their present situation,
eyes on a greener pasture somewhere, anywhere.
Another job.
Another city.
Another neighborhood.
Another school.
Another spouse.
Searching for peace.
With these thoughts spilling across my brain like puzzle pieces poured onto a table,
I have come to a conclusion.
There are no "magic beans" to get us what we really want.
Definitely they won't get us what we really need.
And I wish like everything, we could stop approaching life this way.
It's fruitless, and dark.
After these six decades of listening and observing,
mourning with those who mourn,
I want to say that our peace cannot be found in "another anything."
At least not in a continual way, a lasting way.
We have discovered how to soothe its absence by medications; doctor prescribed or self-prescribed.
Those solutions may seem to help for a little while, but they are no cure.
As my days/weeks/months/years tick by I become more and more certain that
the peace we seek comes in a person.
Honestly, I hear the arguments against.
But I have to say they mostly come from mistaking an institution for His person.
Meeting the Christ, is unfortunately not the same as meeting a Christian.
Or attending a church.
It could be, and probably should be, but often times it just isn't.
He is wholly unlike our caricatures of him.
He will not be boxed by anything we have heard about him.
He knows the misconceptions we have had. Even mine.
He knew that we would doubt.
He knew the arguments that we would make; those of us who are searching.
That's why he said, his offering to us was different than what we would find apart from him.
It wouldn't make sense to any of us who were
seeking peace through the given processes around us;
through the equations we tabulated on our own,
through our own devices.
That's why we struggle to find...PEACE.
We look for it in the emptiness of things.
Or from others, whose well does not go deep enough
to satisfy their own thirst, let alone ours.
And for that reason,
Wise men (and women) will still seek HIM.
AND when they do, without distracted intent
His promise is that he will be found, and with him,
all that our heart is desperate for.
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