The last weekend before the Monday

You know which Monday I mean. You might also know the sinking sadness I feel as it approaches.

I couldn’t sleep for weeks, and now I can’t stay awake. It’s weird. I feel my brain reaching for quiet, assurance that the rumors of our demise have been greatly exaggerated. Cool heads prevail, right? Keep calm and carry on.

But the reactivity and extremism on all sides are difficult to navigate.

And, I can’t find my group. I don’t seem to belong anywhere right now.

So most of all, it’s a lonely time.

I ordered something in preparation for whatever is coming. Don’t scoff when I tell you what it is. I get that a lot of people are deconstructing, and this isn’t meant to evangelize or proselytize, or any “ize” at all. It’s just an is.

I ordered a Bible. Even though I have a zillion Bibles. Too many.

Even though I have had a strange relationship with my Bible since about 2015.

For a long time, I couldn’t read it without getting in knots.

They changed the Bible App I used, and now it’s awful. I’m sorry, but it is. It used to be the Bible. That’s it. Now, tidy people pop up smiling on the main page, reading stuff, teaching stuff. It’s full of “make your own verse art,” reading programs, theme studies. It’s exhausting. I don’t want any of that.

Opening that app feels like touching a bruise.

I’m also exhausted by interpretative chaos that swirls around me.

Imagine being a musician and hearing every song on the radio played off key and off tempo. That’s what it’s like to be deeply trained in secular literary criticism and then listen to modern people talking about the an ancient text with utter confidence and low accuracy. Angry people. Dominant people. People who are slapping at phantoms and sometimes following them.

And I get it. I do. So many people have been bullied until they have exploded raging mad out of corrupt religious systems. Many others have been scared and maneuvered by corrupt leaders until they don’t know up from down. And more have seen the name of God used in vain over and over to accomplish the will of evil men. I can listen to individuals roaring in pain and feel sincere empathy.

Writers are told over and over again they are the nursemaids of the culture. We are only to look inward to tend outward.

But the fatigue is forcing me to admit that I’m not just a caregiver—I’m also a human who experiences fatigue and sorrow and loss.

And this human is lonely. And this human stands at the doorway looking out into the world that feels utterly foreign. Maybe I’m still having my colonoscopy and this is the drug dream. Maybe I’ll wake up in a few minutes and realize it couldn’t have possibly come to this.

Still, despite a sorrow over American evangelicalism that brings me to tears, even now as I type this, I cannot help but thirst for the Bible. I started reading Isaiah several days ago, and for the first time in a long, long time, I felt solidity. The words roared off the page.

Here is is. Here is what I’ve been missing.

I don’t mean what power mongers have done with the Bible.

I mean a message that lambasts the wealthy and the corrupt while welcoming the brokenhearted, the lonely, the weary, the small, the displaced, the powerless. A bruised reed he will not break. That verse is coming in a few chapters, but I feel it now, already.

The tenderness of the God I love. The complex One. The anchored One. I thirst for what I find there like an infant crying for milk.

It is something spirit-to-spirit.

It is also how I know that what is happening around me now is dark and troubling.

All is broken. But all shall be well.

I’m wrecked from war. I’m unclean. I’m tattered. I’ve fought the wrong battles in the wrong ways. I’ll probably fight the wrong battles in the wrong ways again tomorrow.

Still, I thirst.

The Bible I ordered is beautiful.

An extravagance in a time of uncertainty.

An anchor in a storm.