(14) Life Inside

   (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for Life Inside, originally shared on May 14, 2020. It was the fourteenth video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   We’re at a point now in the Coronavirus pandemic where, based on studies in China and Europe, children may only be 1/3 as susceptible to the virus as adults, but their immune system may or may not react to it in a way that causes a disease.

  We have also started to learn that there are long term consequences of the coronavirus having to do with heart and kidney issues, and who knows what else will come.

   We also are finding out that, like both of these things, there’s a lot we don’t know.

   How does a person get 4 negative tests and then come down with the coronavirus? Why do some people who are exposed to the coronavirus come down with a light case or heavy case, or nothing at all under identical circumstances? Does the virus mutate, or can people get the same virus twice? Is it OK to reopen, and under what circumstances?

   We are also referring to the virus as C-19. I guess that’s its nickname. I don’t know if this virus should have a nickname; too cute.  The Sludge or The Grim, maybe then more people would take it more seriously.

   Meanwhile, as places gradually open up to a new normal, safer at home restrictions may continue for some time, and when we go out it will be to a different world than the one we remember from not very long ago.

   I saw a meme some time ago that said, “To put things in perspective for those of us feeling a bit stir crazy already – Anne Frank and 7 other people hid in a 450 sq. ft. attic for 761 days, quietly trying to reman undiscovered to stay alive. We can all do our part to keep everyone safe and spend a few weeks at home.”

   So, we’ve been at home for more than a few weeks now, but we have a long way to go to reach 761 days.

   Home will be at least out base camp and, for some, our exclusive residence for awhile.

   Even those who are not older or who have underlying health conditions, will be working from home most if not all of the time.

  We are isolated, but then, as Sally observed, Jesus went off by himself a lot.

 *Luke 5:15-16

    We have a long Christian tradition of isolation for reconnection with God and the work God would have us do.  We have a long tradition of going away to focus and connect. We have a monastic history (some more severe than others). Some of us remember Bible Camp in our youth or retreats as adults.

   For some of us, “life on the inside” refers to literally being in prison.

   Are we experiencing our isolation as a prison or a place of liberation and growth? Of tension or of peace?

   Fun fact: the Greek word, the language of the New Testament, the word cardia, from which we get the word cardiology or cardio, also means “inner self”.  Heart can be mind, character, etc.

   It depends, I suppose, on whether or not we believe we are ever truly alone. Whether we believe freedom is the ability to do anything we want, or liberation from all that holds us back from being our true selves, beloved and died for by a gracious, living God.

    All of us have mountain tops and valleys in our lives, but both are places of encounter and vision. The mountain tops allow us to see the big picture; it is the valleys of life where the soil is fertile, where change takes place and we grow.

   We are sometimes with people and sometimes isolated from them, but both are places we encounter God.

   This time is an opportunity to focus on our interior lives, to decide who we are apart from the expectations of those around us. To remove those layers of social expectations and indoctrination, and open ourselves to the freedom of living as God made us.

   We all have times when we feel like an extrovert and when we feel like an introvert.

   We mostly live from the outside in. We live as we are expected to live. We believe as the world leads us to believe. Now is a time that we may live from the inside out, to allow the presence of God within us to shape who we are for the world.

   The key is a living relationship with the living God.

   How do we have such a relationship? We humbly ask and open our hearts to receive it.  

   How do we restore or grow in that relationship? We humbly ask and open our hearts to receive it. We keep the relationship alive by communication: prayer, Bible reading, and acts of mercy and justice. God’s mercy and justice. Not what we do because that’s the way we’ve been taught, or that’s what our political party says, or that’s what’s popular. Those are external things, how we appear to others.

*Matthew 23:25-26

    It’s when we allow God to work on our interior lives, that we find that the way we are seen by others changes. We move from ritual to relationship. It becomes visible.

   Sometime you hear people say, I don’t need to go to church. I feel closer to God in nature, or on the golf course, or at the beach. I almost universally hear that from people who have experienced church worship as a ritual, not a relationship.

   Christians feel God in other places, too. That’s a feeling, not worship, not a relationship. Those things require a lived connection, a community living a relationship they have all first received from God in the relationship they have been given with one another.

   Work Gloves are different because they are worked and shaped by pressure from the outside. They are changed to the shape of my hand on the inside. This is how God shapes us. From within.

   The Bible, Prayer, acts of mercy and justice that really are mercy and justice and not the cause of the day: feel good opinions and easy activities that are easily forgotten, change us. How? Prayer (listening)Paul Yongi Cho, the pastor of the world’s largest church, in South Korea, was once asked by a visitor why he thought he had been so successful. He said that he rose early in the morning and prayed for several hours. Several hours, the visitor exclaimed. I couldn’t think of enough things to say for several hours. Neither can I, said Pastor Cho. That’s the point. Listening, pondering or meditating in God’s presence, Bible Study, acts of mercy and justice in the name of God shape us because they all depend upon God.

   Many of us have time to be apart with God. But, a singular focus is also a time to be with God.  Vocation is also a time to be with God. Doing God’s will for the sake of others is also being with God.

   Being with God is what gives life, opening our hearts and being with God.

    Cut this geranium flower from the plant, it looks good for awhile. I can preserve it in a way that makes it look good for awhile longer, but it’s dead.

   We can make an artificial geranium flower look good longer. But, we can’t make it live.

   God can make us live again. God reconnects us to the source of life. The living water that is God, that shapes our hearts, even the stone cold ones, by God’s unrelenting grace, if only we allow God to shape us from the inside out.

   Life inside is, in a sense, the only life there is. It shapes us for the outside life, the life of action. That’s the order of things, to be sure we are acting in accord with the will of God and not our own.

   At the climax of the play “Murder in the Cathedral” T.S. Eliot writes, “The last act is the greatest treason. To do the right deed for the wrong reason.”

   Even doing good by our own definition and for our own glory is not a source of life, but of death.

   We are made for relationship with God that is expressed in our relationship with one another.

   This is a time when we can focus on our primary relationship, and allow that relationship to produce the acts of mercy and justice that are its natural expression..

   This is the first time we are told that the best things we can do is to stay home. We can still find ways to help and care for each other.

   Living water powers a water wheel that turns the grinding wheel that makes flour for bread. This is the time to let God use our life inside to form our interior selves, our living relationship with the living God, like washing the inside of a cup to make the outside clean. o This the time to let God use our life inside to shape us into someone God can use. With the streams of living water that are God’s self, the presence of the living God.