Over the past couple of weeks some crazy stuff has been happening in my life that has caused a fog to roll over my brain.  I haven't been able to write without assistance from movies, books, or events to provide perspective and direction to my thought. 

When life gets rough this "thinking malaise" happens to me.  I can write about communities after watching some movies, but I just cannot sit and think about community---too much other stuff on my mind.  Or too little.

When life gets rough everything starts blending together and I enter this "spiritual comatose" when I cannot be silent but cannot really think either.  It's like my brain keeps yawning and hitting the snooze button.

When life gets rough I begin to notice more that I take my soul for granted sometimes.  When life isn't rough I think I have a good prayer life when my mind is racing and connecting theology to spirituality to life to the kingdom in one great prayerful dance of choruses, phrases and petitions.  Now I need to learn never to take for granted the times when I cannot concentrate, my brain is turned off, I suck at "beautiful" prayers, but my soul is quietly humming an imperceptible note of exaltation.  I don't know what it is, but something is stirring inside me, something that will never abandon me, a wind that never stops blowing, a fire that will never die.

When life gets rough I wonder why it hasn’t been rougher.  And all I hear is a whisper in the window panes, a branch moving on the tree outside, and I look out the window only to see nothing with my eyes but One with my soul. 
When life gets rough I begin to feel the Presence beyond my presence, the glimmer of an already/not yet life that is brimming in the deepest part of my being, the song that is on the wind, the whispers in the trees, the groaning of a pregnant earth, the groaning of my heart. We are all waiting for something we can taste, like bakers who have tasted the cookie dough and are waiting patiently for the morsels to be fully baked.

When life gets rough I stop seeing my reflection in the mirror and begin to see dimly through it into the life to come when all will be new.  I can make out the forms, the rough images, the coarse angles of a brilliance I am not yet able to describe.

Why am I still here, where life is rough, unhewn, crude, and coarse?  Weeds are growing everywhere.  The yard of the cosmos is in disarray.  The crabgrass is sucking the life out of the wheat, yet the harvest is coming, the fire will be burning, and ash and chaff will give way to an indescribable wonder that we know somewhere in our hearts yet not in our minds.

We have not seen it, we cannot sense it, but there is rumbling in our souls.  We are all quaking, groaning, trembling: invigorated by the power coursing through this world unbeknownst to us, intervening, interjecting, and holding it all together while we think it is falling apart.  We cannot see it, we do not sense it, we look everywhere and see nothing and our hope seems empty and our clocks keep ticking on as if this will go on forever and ever without an “Amen.” 

But it's there, waiting, coming.