Out and in

I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. (John 15:19b)

Out of the world and into myself, I followed an elderly African American couple through the Menards parking lot. They doddered ahead of Dixie and me, hobbled by age and infirmity. Turning around, they worried they were in our way. But they were not in the way. They are the way, their smiles an invitation to come out of the world and into the way of life.

So, too, was this morning’s post from a former student, her eyes alight with the delight I first saw in her when she was five, throwing cream pies in my face at a church fair. Now, she graduates college, and the loving satisfaction I feel is surpassed only by the rapt embrace of my grandson, Ben, on his first day after high school, poignant with tears of joy, relief and sorrow for what he endured.

All of this occurs in the world, of course, but each is a moment when the swirling love of the blessed Trinity calls me out of the world and its benighted values and into the way of Jesus, where only love and loving matters.

Perhaps my hearing improved when I turned 70 (How did that happen?), but the noise of the world I well knew and which knew me is fading into the background, and the inner voice of love, which was always there, sounds clearer and more compelling, making me wish I had been a better listener in decades past.

“Come out,” the voice says. Come out of the anxious tyranny of trying to keep up. Release every attempt to convince yourself and anyone else that you were stronger, smarter or more important that than you are. Come out of the world’s addiction to status, popularity, power and the diabolical need to be right, this cancerous blight on the heart.

Flee the deadly urgency of digital screens cajoling you to care about a million things that don’t much matter. And while you are at it, quit running from the nagging suspicion that you have been an imposter, projecting an image, laboring at tasks and responsibilities for which you were never quite qualified. That’s true of everyone in one way or another. It’s called life. We’re never fully ready for where we find ourselves or what comes at us. So, come out of all this anxious self-preoccupation.

Flee all of this. It doesn’t define you. Listen, instead, to the inner voice of Love who calls you out of this world and into the life of God. It is the voice of Jesus, the living Spirit of Love, alive in the deep, inner center of which you become aware in unguarded moments when you most feel that which you most need.

Times come, moments when sorrow or pain, need or beauty, simple kindness or gentle affection tugs our hearts into the way, the truth and the life of Jesus’ self-giving love. So often, small moments, infinitesimal instances are the most profound, the most pristine. They speak in unexpected ways and unlikely places, like in a parking lot when you realize what life is and what it is for.

 David L. Miller