Dispatches from my parent’s basement

It’s five thirty in the morning, and I’m awake. My throat is sore from the dry air, and even though I’m lying down, my pulse rate is higher than usual from the altitude.

Yep. I’m back.

Of course there were early the signals - like the Virgin Mary painted on the back of a mini-van I saw on the way back from the airport, the gigantic taco salad I could barely eat ¼ of at the steakhouse we stopped at for dinner, and the fact that Tuesday I both walked around in sandals and a T-shirt AND dodged cold rain rolling in.

I could rhapsodize about the beautiful sky, the sun going down over the mountains in the West, the fact that lilacs are peaking and the smell of them drifts everywhere. But what has been most beautiful in my first couple days back has been being welcomed back into a community, not just my temporal family, but God’s extended family. And knowing, once again, that God is directing the times and ways of my comings and goings.

I got home Monday night. My friend Kelli had been planning to come with my parents to meet me. Instead, she was sitting at a coffee shop in Greeley, getting her beautiful tender heart broken by an amazing Christian brother she had been dating. (Don’t worry, I asked her if I could write about this!). So, Tuesday morning I woke up, called Kel, and we spent the entire day walking around Greeley, talking, praying, crying and reading the Bible together. That evening, she invited me to come to the women’s Bible study group from my childhood church that meets at her house, and so I got to meet four great women and spend time praying with them.

I marvel at the way God brought me home the day that He did, full of “the comfort [I] have received from God” (2 Cor. 1:4), and able to hold up, and be held by in return, a dear friend who has held me up in so many ways over the 18 years of our friendship.

Digging through the boxes of my books that are stacked in the corner of my basement room for something to read last night, I found Dietrich Bonhoffer’s “Life Together.” In the first chapter he says something I have found to be profoundly true in recent months:

“God has put this Word into the mouth of men in order that it may be communicated to other men. When one person is struck by the Word, he speaks it to others. God has willed that we should seek and find His living Word in the witness of a brother [or sister], in the mouth of man. Therefore, the Christian needs another Christian who speaks God’s Word to him. He needs him again and again when he becomes uncertain and discouraged, for by himself he cannot help himself without belying the truth. He needs his brother man as a bearer and proclaimer of the divine word of salvation. He needs his brother solely because of Jesus Christ. The Christ in his own heart is weaker than the Christ in the word of his brother; his own heart is uncertain, his brother’s is sure.”

And not only do we need brothers and sisters to speak truth to us when we are discouraged, but we also need them in the struggles against our own sins. I’ve been thinking lately about just how self-destructive the human heart is. When we are caught in habits and sins and thought patterns that are deadly to our souls, I think that many times we are willing to hurt ourselves in ways that we would never hurt another person. We might continue in a sin that is maiming us because secretly we believe that it is okay because we’re only hurting ourselves. But, once we enter into genuine community, we can no longer believe that our sin hurts us alone. Sometimes this community may even just be the love of one other person, but their love becomes the “check” that can hold us back from sin. This is why secrecy in our sins is so terrible – we think that we can’t approach others to be loved until “I get myself cleaned up.” But in actuality, we won’t ever move toward healing until we invite others into our struggles, because then our love for them, and their love for us, can enable us to overcome the weakness and selfishness that is at the root of most sins.

And so I’m thankful. That this time at home has already been full of prayer and sweetness and pain and reunion. And that this morning, somehow, I find myself on the corner of 11^th and 16^th, at Margie’s Java Joint, since High School the hippest coffee place in town and the only one that serves Allegro beans. In an hour I head to my old school to make a few dollars substitute teaching for the day. I’m back to the place my heart was first lit up by God’s grace and the excitement of His kingdom.