Lenten Reflection - Day 26: by Pastor Nathan Swenson-Reinhold

READING: Psalm 107: 1-3, 17-22

Many streams, one river. I can’t ever get over just how complex our world is. From the variety of our planet’s ecological systems, to the particularity of the cultures that shape the human relationships on this planet, it can look like there is very little to hold us together.

NASA astronauts often report that their first trip into space is a deeply moving and spiritual experience. From 250 miles up, certain realities become clear that simply aren’t clear on the ground. We’re one planet. One ecology. Ultimately one relationship and not a billion, with a common destiny held together by our interconnectivity on this beautiful space suspended marble called Earth.

I know in my own journey, that how my own story is connected to a larger story hasn’t always been clear. I’ve often thought of my own waters as distinct, flowing in their own manner, in their own way towards an unidentified ocean.

My earliest years began in the church. As many of you have heard I walked away from the faith of my childhood soon after my baptism at age 11, mostly because the pat answers of that particular church couldn’t handle the complexity and splendor of the world around me. You were either in or out. The world I experienced wasn’t generally black and white…instead varying shades of gray. I knew then what I know now, that if there is a God, s/he is more than capable of rolling with the gray of the world. After all, God created this world and all that’s in it.

But I still struggled personally. I struggled because I had it in my head that faith was a sort of race. You trained for it, and then ran in it, and it was ultimately marked by a test. You could either pass or fail. For those who failed, eternity wasn’t pretty. The surprise for me, and the thing that brought me back into the life of the church, was the discovery of GRACE…the reality of the love of God that refused to let me go. In grace I discovered I wasn’t graded on some sort of point system, or by how well I performed morally or ethically or some such. No, the gift of God’s love was given to me carte blanche regardless the shape my life might take.

This was news almost too wonderful. It turns out that there is only ONE river, and we all flow through it. The forces of the world want to divide and conquer us...make us think that the ebb and flow of our lives are unique and separate and disconnected. But this couldn’t be farther than from the truth. The task of faith is waking up to a single truth: our lives already, surprisingly, flow in and through God. There’s only one game, and the rules don’t damn us. In the river of God, they free us.