Moving
from one place to another is much more about emotion than about packing up the things of life that hold a spot in the
house. The emotional aspect of transition
is much more difficult to unpack. After
the call, then there is a process by which each person must accept the
move. In many ways, it’s like the
process of dying. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross
promotes these five stages of dying which I think are the same five stages of
transitional moving: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. No one goes through these stages at the same
pace; sometimes we even go back and forth between them. But after what I perceived to be the call to
the Australian Lutheran Church, I found that the transition was very much like
a dying process for me. In order for new
life to occur, something old had to die.
And
it was a part of me that I really wanted to keep alive.
After
months of agonizing over the decision, of trying to keep it secret from the
congregation that I was serving, and after hiding it from even my own
consciousness, I began to get angry with my wife, my kids, the congregation,
God, it didn’t matter. The United States
was where I had grown up and I needed the comfort of the American accent and
the (mostly) accepted understanding that God is real and relatively well
liked. My anger at my wife was nothing
that she did, but simply the uncontrollable fact that she was Australian. It’s not like I just woke up one morning
after twelve years of marriage and said to myself, “Jeez, I just realized that my wife doesn’t have the same accent as I do
and maybe she would like to live near her home for a while.” When we are asked to step away from
ourselves, our first instinct, unfortunately, is to strike out at those closest
to us rather than to face head-on our instinctive difficulty to trust.
I
knew that it was coming and yet I resented her background because it made me
dis-comfortable at that time. For
nights, she would be unable to fall asleep, eyes searching the dark ceiling
until 2:12 a.m. wondering if we had made the right choice. Then, she would succumb to sleep praying for
her husband. At 2:13 I would wake up,
startled from sleep by the rampaging thoughts that we were making a
mistake. And, if we were making a
mistake, certainly it was Christine’s fault because there was no way we’d be
moving to Plainland if she wasn’t
Australian.
At
least that’s what I thought.
But
I was mad at God, too. I liked being
comfortable. When we find ourselves in
dis-comfort, life becomes a black hole of self-pity and all of our energy is
used trying to figure out how to escape the malaise of the inevitability of
change. I spent an inordinate amount of
time saying stupid things to God like…
All right, I’ll do this for
you, but you better make life even more comfortable for me when we get to
Plainland.
Or
All right, God, I’ll be the
martyr, I’ll pick up the cross for my wife and move all the way to the other
side of the planet, but you better change my wife so that she constantly
praises me for the awesomeness that I embody for her, because I did this for
her
(never mind the fact that she had uprooted fifteen years before to live in my
country) and you’d better send some
people to the church that really appreciate me as the awesome pastor that I am
and have them feel like they need to stroke my ego by telling me so. That’s what you’d better do if I do this.
And
then, God ignores my complaints, ignores my ignorance of the bigger picture,
ignores my foolishness and simply says, “Go in whatever strength that you have
and I will be with you.” “In your
weakness, I am made strong; we’ll do this together.”
I
was weak..
It’s
not like I recognized God’s words to be uplifting or even harbingers of
joy. It’s not as if understanding brings
about happiness. When we hear God’s
call, that’s when transition begins. My
emotional detachment was moving past anger, past the stupidity of bargaining
with God and into the stress of depression.
I sank deeper and deeper into myself the more photos I saw packaged and
placed into large cardboard boxes. I
knew that I wouldn’t see them for four months (that’s how long it takes to
transport belongings across the Pacific), but I wasn’t prepared not to see them
for fourteen months (that’s how long it took us to unpack all the boxes). I didn’t get to see the visible
representations of who I was, where I’d been and what comfortable life was like
(at least my fallible recollection of it).
When
we finally did open the remaining boxes of our belongings, the ones with the
photos in them, the amount of time to hammer nails into the walls took quite a
bit longer than it should have. It
wasn’t the hardship of actually finding a stud in a wall, which never happens
for me. I usually end up frustrated by
the fact that I’ve made the wall look like a Lite Brite[1].
With
each photo that we lovingly placed on the wall or on top of a cabinet, a flood
of memories washes over us and we were reminded of where we came from and what
life was like. Spending time remembering
is one of the most important parts of transition. In our contemporary Western culture, we are
constantly in a rush to get to new information, fast information – forget about
the actual details of the story, just let me know what I need to know in order
to operate.
But
the ancients didn’t have that fascination with speed. Half of the importance of telling a story was
setting the scene – remembering what that time was like, who the people were,
how they behaved under pressure. The
snapshots from the Bible give us a collection of pictures of how God interacted
with his people. And with each portrait,
we are given a new understanding of how God changed it all in the person of
Jesus. In studying the Bible, we begin
to recognize not how much is lost in translation
(although that happens) but how much is lost in transition. What we notice
in the book of Mark, where I’ll focus, is the way Jesus shapes the world view
of the Jews, the gentiles, the disciples and future believers. The greatest transition of all.
From
fear to faith.
[1] A
Lite Brite is basically a plastic box with a Christmas light in the back. Covering the front is a hard plastic mesh
where a template with a picture is placed.
After pushing colored plastic pieces through the template and the
through the holes of the mesh, the light is turned on to reveal the picture in
glowing form. I got one for Christmasoncet.
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