Grind

Millstone to wheat, driven by some sickly mule, rolls inch by inch pressing down on what was in a former field. The heavy disc, scarred and scratched from years of performing the same service ever-so-carefully consumes all the innocent wheat chafe in his path. And the mule, blinders on, tied by nothing more than a fancy string to this old grind house, shakes its feeble legs, watches its coat waste away, all because it doesn't understand the simple complexity of knotsmanship.

Sometimes it feels like we can be either one of those three: millstone, mule, or stalk. We either are doing the grinding ourselves, pinned to a wheel turning around and around, not earning enough nor understanding our real worth. Or we are the mule, held by what we see as an insurmountable force, impossible to escape, at least in your own mind. So you are bound to what appears to be slavery, pushing forth whatever persons can't see the value in their own labor. Or you are the grain, like a farm girl tied on the railroad tracks, kicking and screaming and hoping and waiting that rescue will come, but that train is getting closer and those wheels is spinning harder. You are the victim, your fate set before you in your fellow brothers and sisters of the wheat field, their destiny crushed out before them.

But what is the truth in all of this?

The truth is that work is good. It is a good thing for a man to labor and to labor well. Nothing can compare to sweating on your brow, to feel your forearms tighten and tense with each and every move you make, to watch the dirty run between your legs as the shower water chases it to the drain. If a man is not careful, he can find that he loves work, that it empowers him and satisfies him in a way that nothing else can. And this is true and this is false.

Another truth in there is that we do have roles to play, roles laid out to be. "Everything that happens supposed to be, it's all predetermined can't change your destiny. Think I'll sit back and wait and see and I'll get to where I'm going."(Conner Oberst) Yet you can't just necessarily just wait around for it. Destiny and fate does not move to and fro seeking solitary and sediment people. Those people that wait on it have found their destiny and it is to become like the Thinker Statue, always posed in thought, wondering. But our roles are proactive, unlike the victimized wheat that cries out for help. If you play the victim long enough, then maybe that IS your role, but a role none the less sad and lonely, only joined by others that always believe they are the victim to this world, to this mill house. We are not chained to these roles forever, so take heart! Their will be a day, perhaps it has already come, where we shall be freed of the roles that the world has placed on us, and the role of victim, criminal, or foe.

One day the Grinding will cease, and the house will be destroyed, whether by revolution or time, vines slowly growing up the sides of its wheel housing, wood splitting and splintering. Termites, those slow and tiny little bugs, the guerrillas and rebels that will help release your soul. And future generations will pass by, wondering what that old building lurking in the distance used to be, and why it is so haunting still. It is where we give ourselves to work, where our souls are sold for so little and our only benefit is bread.

But thanks be to the Vine and to the Termite, the small and steady growing and feeding parts of nature that tear down those false buildings, that release the entrapped animals, that twist around the mill stone, causing it to seperate from the grind wheel and roll out the door to freedom, that carry away bundled wheat in the heat of the day, for it to fly and flee as the wind wills.

Like Children Dressing in Our Parent's Clothes

This world is awful.

War. Famine. Prostitution. Boy Soldiers. Child Molesters. Pestilence. Tornadoes. Earthquakes. Heartbreak. Death.


What good in this world could we ever put in any hope in? When things are stripped away and down and out, what is there left to hold on to?

We are a broken race, a destitute people. I can feel the mighty, yet small, hand of the world tensed back, waiting to destroy every single bit of me. Every inch except for the last one, the one that Valerie talks on in "V for Vendetta":

Our integrity sells for so little, but it's all that we really have. It is the very last inch of us, but within that inch, we are free.

And with no reason, that shaking fist is held back, for sometimes reason I do not understand. Maybe once or twice, it has been allowed to press upon me, and the weight behind it, and the ensuing pressure enough to break most bones, to snap them in half, for marrow to seep out. Yet we hold on, we stand fast.

Most of us knows what it is like to be heartbroken, to be wounded. We are, like I mentioned earlier, a broken people. We cover it up, mask the bruises with rouge and eyeliner and coats and ties, and we tell ourselves in the mirror that, "everything is okay, everything is fine." But it is not okay and it is not fine. Look at us! Wandering like zombies, shuffling our feet towards some dream, towards some manufactured princesses and cookie cutter houses. They are all cliffs, really, all just holograms and mirages waving in front of us on hot gravel at the edge, bidding us to do its will, to take another step forward and another step out. We, with scars from our heads to our toes, with lashes from past beatings, with knife wounds in the back and open chest cavities where our hearts used to be, we can feel the breath of the hot day, simmering and sizzling our lives away, but there is something deeper, an old magic, a deeper yearning like a cool breeze, a mountain snowcapped in the distance. A place that we feel alive at.

A place that makes us feel so small, yet so large at the same time. John Piper says of this: nobody goes to the Grand Canyon to improve his self-esteem. Why would they go there? The reason is that deeply written in the human soul is that we were not made to be made much of, but to make much of God.

We are a broken people, charading and moonlighting in silly capes and cowls, but there is hope, there is love. And that love can fill us up, can unwrinkle those old crow's feet, can loosen that scar tissue up. It can break down the walls of doubt and misery and lifelessness that have encamped themselves in that place where your heart used to reside. It is a love too big and too bold and too bright, so bright that it should consume everyone and everything in one bold white light, but it does and it doesn't.

But how can we, dusty and discarded, carry such love inside us? " 'But I'm so small I can barely even see how this great love can be inside of me?' Look at your eyes they're small in size but they see enormous things." (Aaron Weiss)

We in and of ourselves could house no such thing, but it diminishes itself somewhat, it came down in the form of man, a second Adam to our first Adam, bled and dead, and breathed life in us anew. Diminished but still perfectly magnificent. We can take in the scope and breadth and depth of a mountain with our small eyes. How much more so can G-d, perfectly grant us His Sweet and Perfect love through His Son?

We are a broken people, we've tripped over our own feet too much, and made a mockery of anything that could be considered sacred. We have tipped our own scales, but in this, there is a beauty and a plan. And we, in our own ignorance and blindness, miss such sweet things. We are broken, but we can be healed.

Lean, brothers. Lean, sisters. Wake up, Oh Sleeper!

To the Broken,
Our wounds will be bound and healed by Love.

Status Whoa

I was asked last week why I only had one pair of shorts. I simply replied, "Because it's the only pair I need." I think the retort was taken almost ridiculously, like "How in the world can someone only have one pair of something?!"

Good question.

Why do we own what we own? What's the necessity behind our articles of convenience? Why do I have a flat screen TV? Why do I own video game consoles? Why do I dress like I do?

Gah, there are so many roads to travel down with this idea, there could be more to talk about than I could even exhaust. Somewhere right below American consumerism, there is a wolf and he is black and invisible and clever. And he lives in you and he lives in me. It is that part of us that wants to devour technology, fashion, automobiles, every thing that tells us that we've quote unquote "made it." There is a credit card for people who can spend over some insane amount called THE BLACK CARD. There are dinette sets made for every demographic possible, and catalogs 600 pages thick to help moisten the palates of the working class and nonworking class alike. And we get sucked into it. We like it, we want it. We(I) want those new shoes, those sweet jeans, that cool album, and the list can go on and on and on.

But it is wrong. Our status is not dependent on what we look like, who we dress like, what our houses look like, and what car we drive. That is the status of people who need masks and who cry out for mercy and for love. The world wants to tell us that we are fat and unattractive and unloved and disgraced unless we get those things necessary for popular survival. I'll give a dollar a day for a child in Africa and call that mercy and call that giving. But how dare I! And I'll spend the rest on super sizing my meal or buying a beer. There is a balance of frugality and decent stewardship, but I think we go overboard one way or the other, telling ourselves we are really better than we are.

There was once a man who had a sandwich sign that said, "What's wrong with the world?" A man saw it, and the next day wore a similar sandwich sign beside the first sandwich-signed man. His was the answer to the question posed:

"What's wrong with the world?"

"I am."

In every realm of the world, in ever sense, we are fakers to some extent, wishing and wanting people to accept us because we do this or that. Because we are too good or too bad, or somewhere in the middle. And everywhere people wear clothes that identify them with a certain subculture of people, whether they mean to or not. And I judge those differently from me, like I am some superior Nitzche master race. Like I am some Wagnerian man. But I am not. I am afraid, I am alone, I am sad, I am poor. But I pretend some of those things don't exist, and the rest of it I find my position and my status and my acceptance in something better and bigger than what the TV or what my friends or what some woman could say to me, could whisper to me at night. I am loved unconditionally and for no reason by G-d, through Jesus Christ. He sees me as perfect and beautiful and strong and as a man and as a leader, so even when I don't feel those things, I can strive to remember those small words that he whispers in between hurricanes and volcanoes. And those will send me through, will push me past, will help me hold on.

So my final thought is this: Your status in this world, what this world calls you, what you have made yourself into, it will all fade away, whether quickly like a falling building or slowly like a dying star. But it will be gone, and you will be left alone. "Every living thing dies alone," Roberta Swallow says. I'd say she is pretty close to the truth. In the end, none of us are doctors or patients or priests or brothers or fathers or soldiers. We are all just humans, stripped away of everything temporal. And that is when the infinite will takeover. So, I suggest if you are tired of what this world calls you, even though you might be physically beautiful and popular, still this world will call to you in a way that you will never measure up to, there is One who calls you all good things and ask in return for nothing. You don't have to dress the part, you really don't. You don't have to act the part, you don't have to look like anything at all. All you do is just be. Soak in what it is to be loved unconditionally because G-d came down as Man and died for you and for me.

That's all the status we need.