Breanna Dillon's Blog
Ache / 05.11.09, 02:04 PM
So although I have yet to officially begin Mission Year (start date: August 27…Woohoo!!), I figure that some of the family members/ friends/ professors who have received my Mission Year launch announcement may already want to check up on my blog and see what’s going on in my head and heart. And I figure that before I start the program I should let people know a little bit about what has brought me to this point and what sort of things push me further forward into this program and beyond. For anyone already my friend on Facebook or MySpace, the next few paragraphs may be nothing new to you. For anyone else, I hope you can glean a few glimmers of hope and/ or a few morsels of food for thought from what follows. I wrote what I’m about to post during my last semester at Lee University (fall 2008). I was reading for one of my favorite Lee classes, The Prophets (i.e. Old Testament prophets/ prophetic books), and was moved to write, reflect, vent, express, whatever you’d like to call it. What follows is what ended up on paper during my study time and on social networking sites later :) Hopefully you connect with the ache I try to give expression to… the groaning Paul speaks of in Romans 8.18 and following…the groaning in my heart, in humanity’s collective heart, and in all of creation. I hope to post more of my reflections and such in the next few days so that anyone who would like to know more about me—or who just wants to find an interesting something to read—can (hopefully) be satisfied by way of my Mission Year blog spot :) But enough intro. On to the body proper! :)
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“Ache”
The more I study the Bible, the more I study the Old Testament prophets and the prophetic voice of Jesus himself, the more I ache. I ache for the world. I ache for the church, many times represented by communities Ron Sider rightly calls “one-sided disasters.” I ache for the world, for all of creation, as I wait for its redemption (Romans 1.18-25). I ache because I am privileged. I have not known the pain of a parent who cannot give me food. I have not sold my body to sex-hungry men in order to feed myself, my siblings, my children or in order to evade death or punishment at the hands of brutal pimps. I have not watched my nation, my town, my family ravaged by daily bombs and the woes of war. I ache not because I wish to experience these things or am unthankful for having been spared such atrocity but because others have experienced and do experience such devastation and I cannot feel the pain which they deserve no more than I do.
I ache because I know another world is possible. I ache because I say this yet I am blind. I ache because every nation looks to its own interests while Christ cries for his church to transcend national and partisan boundaries and bring his disjointed limbs back together as his true body. I ache because I see friends—white, middle-class, privileged friends—who ache as I do, yearning to forsake the comforts of this world as Jesus instructed the young ruler to do in Luke 18.18-22. I ache because I see duplicity, hypocrisy in myself. I ache as day after day I gaze in the mirror to put on makeup and admire my pseudo-beauty while people die. I ache as I strive to be desired and long to be noticed but finally realize it’s all a bunch of futile garbage…meaningless…stupid…worthless in the face of the world’s pain and those who cry every night for a bit of rice to stave off hunger or clean water to keep their children from dying or peace in the midst of violence and hate and injustice or deliverance from the hands and bodies of strangers who strip away their dignity night after night after night. I ache. I ache.
I ache as people spit in the face of my Savior, saying there is no God who made or cares about this now broken world. I ache as I see the scars in Jesus’ hands, feet, and side, as I come to realize that those scars are for the redemption of this broken life and that, in the face of such love, so many still do not want to know the God who would humble himself in humanity and look us in the face. I ache because the church has so many times failed to reveal the full splendor of this King to those who, were they to see Christ in his true beauty, might confess him as indeed the Savior of the world.
I ache as I long for more than what so many view as heaven, for more than my tradition seems so often to tell me is the grand prize. I ache for a greater vision and implementation of love and justice and righteousness and redemption among my brothers and sisters who call themselves by the name of Christ. I ache for something to break within me every day…for Jesus’ words to mean something…for the whole, “If you want to be my disciple you must take up your cross and follow me” thing to birth death and resurrection in my soul and in the soul of anyone who would be so bold as to read the words of the most self-destructive book in the world.
I ache because I don’t ache enough. I ache because none of us ache enough. I am broken, but not nearly as broken as I must become. And it hurts.
I pray that whoever reads this will join in my pain. I pray that you will become so uncomfortable you cannot bear it. I pray that as you read the words of Jesus and the prophets—as you read all of the words penned under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and preserved for us in Scripture—that you become ever-increasingly broken and burdened. I pray that something inside of you begins to burn, that something of the power of the Holy Spirit would rise within you so that you would no longer have eyes but be unable to truly see, ears but unable to truly hear. I pray that you ache with the pathos and passion of God that wells up within Scripture and preeminently in the person of Jesus Christ, he who came to live and breathe and die and rise among us, preaching the good news to the poor and to all. I pray that, until every tear is wiped away, you would not cease in your brokenness over creation. And I pray that in the midst of it all, your hope and trust in the God of love and the power of redemption through Christ would defy logic and bear the weight that only such supernaturally-born vision can.
May our love be strong. May our hope be real. May our faith never fail. May we ache ‘til kingdom come.
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