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Living Where We Are
Jeremiah 29:1,
4-7
20th
Sunday After Pentecost
14 October
2007
We live an awful lot of our lives
waiting with a vague sense of hope for something to happen. We wait for quitting time or payday or our
big break. We wait for the doctor of the
mailman or Prince Charming. We wait for
the big game, the next election. We wait
for the housing market to turn around.
We are waiting for things to change.
What do you do in the
meantime? What do you do when things are
not yet what you want them to be?
Maybe what you do is resist. You push back at your circumstances. Use your energy trying to get the world, your
life, your church, your family, to be what you wanted it all to be. You try to change these things by sheer dint
of will. You intend to shape those
around you into what you think they should be.
You rant, you rage, you resist.
Sometimes, some small change does happen. A lot of the time, things just stay mostly
the same.
Or maybe what you do is wait. You do not actively try to make things
change, you simply wait for them to. So
you do not plant yourself down in the life you have now, you wait, instead, for
your real life to begin. I know a woman
whose husband left her 3 years ago. She had to move out of her house. When she moved into her new place, she did
not unpack, she did not hang things on her wall, she did not call this place
home. She was there only temporarily,
she told herself. Just till she could
get on her feet, get out of debt, get a new man. She waited for her real life to begin.
What about you? Are you waiting? Are you raging? When there are things in your life that are
not turning out the way you had hoped, what do you do in the meantime? What do you do with the things you cannot
change?
We live in a society that believes
in change, and especially in the kind of change we call “progress.” Our culture tells us, if you’re not happy
with your life, change something – change anything. Your job, your house, your spouse, your name,
your nose. You can change any of
it. You can change all of it, at once,
if you want. People might laugh and call
it a mid-life crisis, but you’ll be the one laughing last as you zip around
town in your new little car. Who of us
hasn’t been tempted to change the most fundamental facts of our lives?
One day you look around at your
life and you realize that things have not turned out the way you had meant them
to. You are not where you thought you’d
be at 37 or 49 or 62. There are
relationships you can’t get back. People
you have loved are gone. Your own youth
has slipped away and will not return. You
cannot get any of it back. One of my
sons speaks regularly not only about growing up, but also about how he will
“grow down” and be a baby again, and he looks so sad and confused when I try to
explain that none of us will be babies again.
It is a sad fact for all of us – there is no going back. There is no doing over. Some of what we wanted in our lives has not
happened and never will. All of us live
with disappointment and pain. All of us
live under the reality of things we cannot change.
Jeremiah wrote a letter about such
things. His letter was to a people in
exile. Their homeland had been invaded
and smashed. Their temple had been
destroyed. When the fighting and the
killing and the chaos had finally died down, the people were taken captive,
hauled out of their homes and marched to
To them, Jeremiah wrote a letter,
about living with the things you cannot change:
“Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their
produce. Take wives and become fathers
of sons and daughters, and take wives for your sons and give your daughters to
husbands, that they may bear sons and daughters; and multiply there and do not
decrease. And seek the welfare of the
city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf; for
in its welfare you will have welfare.”
It is a surprising word for
difficult times. What do you do in the
face of things you cannot change? You
settle in, you put down roots, you tend to relationships, you learn to love the
details of your meantime.
There were other prophets, false
ones, self-appointed ones, who had been going around telling the people that
things were about to change. Fueling
false hopes with false promises. Such
words would only serve to keep them sighing over the land they longed for,
spinning their wheels while they waited for their real life to begin. Jeremiah would have none of it. “Do not listen to the dreams which they
dream,” he told the people. “Things are
not changing anytime soon. You are going
to be here a very long time.” This is
your life.
It sounds like a harsh word for
people in difficult circumstances. But
the hard, true word at such a time turns out also to be the most hopeful
one: Face the facts, come to terms with
the things that cannot be changed. Then
live the life you have, not the one you wish for. Live where you are, not where you wish you
were.
“Build houses and live in them;
plant gardens and eat their produce,” comes the word from God. Is there a more life-affirming act than
this? Build, live, plant, eat. Make a life, right where you are. Nourish that life, right where you are. Quit waiting for your real life to
begin. Quit putting your life on
hold. Quit raging against everything you
cannot change, quit dreaming about someday, and start living the actual life
you have.
Maybe you remember Jack Nicholson’s
Oscar-winning performance as Martin Udall, a man suffering with
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and struggling to keep his life in the kind of
order who wants it to be in. After
barging into his psychiatrist’s office demanding to be seen, he stops in the
waiting room and looks around at the depressed patients waiting there, hoping
some treatment will change their lives.
He looks around at all of them and asks them, “What if this is as good
as it gets?”
What if it is? What if the circumstances of your life,
whatever they are, what if this is what you get? What if your life is not going to get
“fixed”? What if the basic facts of you
– your family, your job, your opportunities, your limitations, your liabilities
– what if all of these things are not going to change in the fundamental,
sweeping ways you’ve been hoping? What
if this is the life you get?
Build, live, plant, eat. Inhabit your life. Show up and live it.
And while you’re at it, tend to the
relationships you have, and create new ones too. “Take wives and have sons and daughters,”
Jeremiah says. “Take wives for your
sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and
daughters.” God knows we can’t go it
alone in this life, especially when we face hard and unchanging
circumstances. Make family for yourself,
wherever you are. Take a spouse and have
kids and grandkids. Or simply connect
yourself, in profound and ongoing ways, to a community that can be family for
you. It could be two or three friends. It could be the people you live with, or the
people you work with. It could be this
church. Whoever the people are in your
life, give yourself to relationship with them.
Don’t let your grief over what can’t be changed cut across your
fundamental relationships or your fundamental need for relationship.
God’s word through Jeremiah then
expands, beyond self, beyond family, beyond immediate personal
relationships. “Seek the welfare of the
city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf; for
in its welfare you will have welfare.”
Here sit these refugees, homesick for their beloved
Your neighborhood, your church,
your school, your city, your nation – learn to love it, seek peace for it, pray
for it. It could be that the only peace
we get is the peace we seek for the place we are. We don’t get Utopia. We don’t get
That woman I know, whose husband
left her, has lived for the last three years in a house with bare walls and
unpacked boxes, in a life with unused rooms.
This summer, she decided to quit waiting for the life she thought she
wanted and start showing up for the life she has. So she started unpacking. She started decorating and calling this place
home. She is living where she is. And she has discovered she’s kind of happy,
she actually kind of likes her life.
What about you?
Some of you are living in tough
times right now. Things in your life
have broken, and you know they will not be fixed anytime soon. Maybe it’s a relationship that has fractured. Maybe you have a job you hate, or a regret
you can’t shake. Maybe you are drowning
in your debts – financial or otherwise.
Maybe you’ve been waiting a long time for something to happen, and it
looks like it’s not going to anytime soon.
Maybe your hope is busted.
Jeremiah has a word from God for
you. Build a house, and live in it. Plant a garden, and eat from it. Do not be so
afraid of settling for less than what you hoped that you refuse to settle into
your own life. Live the life you have now. Quit waiting for your life to begin and put
down your roots where you are. Quit
waiting for the people in your life to be what you wished they were, and tend
the relationships you have now. Learn to
love the contours of your circumstances now; seek the peace of the place you
are, and pray for it.
No matter where you are, no matter
what the circumstances of your life are now, you do have a future, and a good
one. “I will visit you,” God says
through Jeremiah, “I will fulfill to you my promise and bring you back…. For I know the plans I have for you, says the
Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future and a
hope.”
One day, there will be an end to
your waiting. There is a future from wherever you are. But even now, God hears you. Even now, God is at work in whatever
circumstances you find yourself.
In our own lives and in our world,
there are things we can change, and things we should change, and things we must
change. But “everyone of us is captive
to something we cannot change.”[i]
God is at work in all of our captivities.[ii]
The question isn’t where God is in our lives. The
question is where we are. Are you living the life you have now? Are you letting yourself root down and be
nourished here, now, within the context of the life you already have? Can you let go the wishing and the pining and
the raging that keep you from showing up for your own life? What do you need to accept, what do you need
to let go of, in order to more fully live the life you’ve got now?
Build your house and live in
it. Plant your garden and eat. Tend your relationships. Live where you are, and learn to love where
you are, and seek its peace, and pray for it.
Surely that is enough for now.
Surely that is enough for a lifetime.
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