I've been reading this book called The Attentive Life and although i find most christian books weighty and a struggle to get through this book is speaking life to my soul. And raising up reflections long thought forgotten. It would help if I had a consistent space for reflection but as it is I reflect when i have things to reflect about.
Right now i'm in a season of reflecting over the past 22 months of the SP internship and my time here in Oakland. And i think about why i don't send more regular updates and to be honest it's hard to share on a very multifaceted experience. I don't want to share how dangerous this city is because i don't want people to think Oakland is a place to be feared. And the reality is that everywhere we are there is danger. But today as i was reading this book i felt drawn to the to the author's story of C.S. Lewis:
One day C.S. Lewis stood in a dark tool shed where he had gone to look for something. A broad beam of sunlight was slanting in through a crack in the top of the door. As he looked at the beam with dust motes dancing and floating in it, the shaft of sunlight captured his full attention in the darkness.
Then he moved so that the beam was falling directly on his eye. Instantly the whole scene changed. Looking out through the opening above the door he could see up through the green leaves moving on the trees to the blue sky beyond and, millions of miles away the sun. It came to him then that there are two ways for looking: looking at and and looking along. "Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam," he wrote, "are very different experiences."
Just so he realized there are two ways of looking at life: looking at the dancing and moving events, the happenings and surroundings of each day, and looking "sideways" so to speak "along the beam" - to see not only what is happening but why, and what it is that gives meaning to the happenings of our lives.
It seems that God has made us with the capacity to look both "at" and "along" our lives, to see what is in front of us and what is beyond us, and to find that the two are not opposed ways of seeing but belong together.
I feel like when most people hear about the violence , poor government funding to our programs and education, poverty , and prostitution in our neighborhood most only look at it. But this story has given me a third category that in some ways is mostly what this internship is about. Understanding WHY things are the way they are and lamenting about tensions we hold for our neighborhood.
Oakland is full of experiences that don't just feel hard but are just plain wrong like getting your purse snatched in broad daylight. Or your husband beating you because he knows you won't call the police (among other things) since you are undocumented. But then there are the "Lydia's" on our corners whose hospitality to us re-locators/ strangers has brought a togetherness beyond what words can express. How do we both look at and along i don't know but i'm determined to find out.
To be honest for me this touches on not just the "inner city life" but also the experiences of my life that have left me holding the tensions of longings not yet fulfilled.. It's a hard thing for me to hold tensions because a part of me still longs for the pretty box of life with a bow on top. I'm not very good a letting go and letting god, and in the activeness of following God i convince my self that if i really want something I need to make it happen. And in some ways that's true - you can't just sit in a corner and expect your hopes and dreams to come to you through osmosis. There is a tension of "being still and going/growing".
To be still involves a lot of patience and trust - two things i'm not very good at. To do this I need faith that God is who he says he is and he will do what he said he will do - residing on faith which as Hebrews says "Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see." Yes i'm not very good at being still and holding my longings before God knowing that some may be answered in this lifetime and some may not. But i am a broken person living in a broken world trying to figure out how to be a Kingdom of God type person. I need to keep reminding myself that there is Hope at the end of the Valley of Baca and as much as Satan tries to convince me otherwise i don't need to know when that Hope will come because "I am still confident of this: I will see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living." That goodness may not be in the way i expected it to be but as i look sideways along life there is a deeper meaning that is waiting to be unfolded.
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