Lent: Serve

It's the poor one's idea of wealth to spoil himself with luxury and to fill his life with gaudy baubles; the truly wealthy spend their wealth to change the world around them for the better.

The weak envision strength as the opportunity to belittle, bully and humiliate their opponents. Those who have strength are confident in it and see no need to waste it on detractors, and use their strength instead to lift up those who can never repay them.

Those without talent boast endlessly about their accomplishments, and those with neither vision nor capacity to lead surround themselves with craven admirers who croak their praises all day long like a chorus of toads.

The most successful ventures are made possible by people whose contributions we never see. The news commentator whose show bears his name would never make it to air if someone didn't empty his wastebasket each week. The billionaire would have no corporation if it weren't for the hourly workers he's left struggling to make ends meet. The state dinner and G7 conference would have foundered without people working in the kitchen, chopping carrots, grinding pepper and plucking chickens.

Who are greatest and the most important? Don't look in the halls of status and power. Learn to look instead in the lowest of places, for the battered wife holding it together for her children, for the custodian mopping the floor everyone walks on without a second thought, for the nameless waitress who brings you pancakes and coffee in the morning.

Look for those who serve and escape notice entirely, and be dazzled by how close they are to heaven.


Copyright © 2020 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Lent: Command

The Lent photo prompt for today is "command." We think of that as a verb, like God commands us to do something, or maybe as the command itself; i.e., "I am a jealous God. Do not put sausage links in your nose." But command is also a position or status. Jesus is in command.

In the book of Revelation, St. John of Patmos records a vision of the Lamb on a throne next to the throne of God, surrounded by four living creatures and a host of angels. There's been a lot of silliness written and spoken about this passage, but it's pretty straightforward: Jesus is on the throne at the center of the heavenly court. He is worthy to open the scroll and declare the will of God. Those four famous horsemen ride out when he wants them to.

Today popular preachers see that as Jesus enacting judgment on wicked people in the final days of the earth, but the ancients understood it differently. They saw that changes come, sometimes dramatic changes, but they're changes that come ultimately to advance God's purposes. The wicked may flourish and rule the nations for a while, but in the end it was God who placed them there and it is God who will remove them.

Things are unsettling, and it's okay to be concerned by them.

It's okay to feel the weight of what's going on, and to wonder what kind of future we're leaving to our children.

It's okay to be preoccupied by political corruption and by the cruel spite that guides our president, to be troubled by the news and the rumors that swirl around.

It's okay and it's normal to feel trepidation over a situation that seems to be getting worse and more uncertain all the time.

It's even okay to feel abandoned by people who said they were going to be there for you but then who weren't.

Don't feel bad when these things upset you. That's only normal.

But we walk through darkness and troubled waters holding the hand of a God who knows the way of old. The path is seldom easy and it isn't even always safe, but by faith we know the shore it's going to.


Copyright © 2020 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Lent: Wilderness

There used to be a forest here. Oak and hickory grew side by side as they brushed the tips of their fingers against the underbelly of heaven, while wolves and foxes hunted their prey through the shadows of the understory. Meanwhile the river nearby hid colonies of bivalves, played host to flocks of waterfowl and schools of fish navigated its waters.

The place was alive.

That's all gone now. The river is so polluted that we have signs warning against eating the fish. There are still birds, but they no longer darken the sky for hours at a time as they fly overhead. As for raccoons, they nest in the storm sewers instead of the hollows of trees.

We call ourselves the Garden State, but our chief crop is asphalt.

In the ancient world, cities were places of strength and security. They marked the evolution of the human mind, and provided the laboratory where we rubbed shoulders with one another and together grew our languages, politics, religion and philosophy. Wilderness was that desolate expanse between here and there, where jackals and demons lived. You went there at your own risk, because no one would be there to rescue you if the monsters came.

The city still holds a lot of the allure it did in years past, but I can't help but wonder as we pass through the city, alone in our own manufactured bubbles that keep us from one another, our private cars, our earbuds that say "Leave me alone" and our smart phones that keep us from seeing each other. I wonder if we haven't replaced one wilderness with another far lonelier than any the ancients knew.


Copyright © 2020 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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The Ash Wednesday holocaust

It started that June with a spark.

The spark found a dry place to take shelter and it grew, and grew. And grew. Before long it was a raging fire, consuming deadwood, undergrowth and everything else combustible that it could find. No one worried at first. Fires are a part of the life cycle of forests, and the National Park Service had a policy of letting them burn themselves out.

But as the fire grew, people started questioning that wisdom. Homes and lives were threatened, and before long the fire had created its own weather system, sucking in air to keep itself going, and triggering lightning strikes that caused still more fires.

That summer more than 25,000 firefighters from across the United States traveled to Yellowstone to contain the fire. By the time the fire drifted quietly to sleep, lulled by the soft winter snows of November of 1988, more than 1.2 million acres in the greater Yellowstone National Park area were in ashes.

As the winter passed, fears grew that the park -- the oldest in the nation -- had been destroyed. It wasn't just a horrible forest fire. It had been a holocaust.

Ashes are the gray ruins of beauty. Stream flowers in your hair and you look as lovely as a dryad in the spring. Streak ashes on your face and you're just filthy. Grass rolls when the wind blows, and trees sway; but ashes just spread, covering everything in a fine layer of bitter.

Ashes mark the end of things. They're the funeral, the dissolution of life's chemistry, the final debasement. Oh, look, it's a pile of ashes! Was this a cedar tree, a house, or Aunt Sally? Can't tell. Move on, move on.

Except a phoenix, when its end comes, will burst into flames, crumble into ashes, and then emerge as its own chick.

Tragic ending. Beautiful beginning.

So it was at Yellowstone. As spring came in 1989 it brought with it an explosion of new life. Ground that hadn't felt sunlight in decades brought forth a new arrangement of plants, fueling an explosion of insects and the birds that ate them. Rivers teemed with fish. Wildflowers and wild grasses burst from soil laden with new depths of carbon, so that herds of grazing animals swelled in number and grew fat.

There is a lesson here.

Today is Ash Wednesday, the day we come together and recall the things that we have endured, together and as individuals.

The consuming fire was intense. It was more than we were ready for, and we thought it would destroy us. When we stood in the ashes left in its wake, we thought it had, and we wept.

Have faith. The ashes are only the beginning. In time we will find ourselves transformed and made into something more beautiful than we can remember ever being in the past.


Copyright © 2019 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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