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Still here

 
August 11, 2010  
  

 

 If I could, I'd keep the things I most love near to me forever.
 
I'm a packrat, a hoarder, although not in the traditional I've-got-stuff-stashed-everywhere sense. I save up moments. Memories. The truer-than-true kind that make my nose sting and my eyes fill up with tears. Moments when God seems so scary-close that my heart breaks a little at the awareness of Him.
 
stack of platesYesterday, or a year ago, or half a lifetime past, with the remembering they come close again. Like yesterday, as I stretched to set a just-washed plate on the last shelf in my kitchen cabinet I can reach without a step stool. As I placed my hand on the counter top for balance I remembered the evening, two years ago, when Erin Calloway stood on the same counter and placed my unpacked plates, one by one, into my new kitchen shelves. The evening when an army of women who love God and love me, too, brought salads and themselves, and unpacked my belongings with me until the wee hours.
 
Erin's in Arkansas now, and I'm alone in my study tonight, but in the moment of remembering, the girls are all still here. They're near. Very near.
 
I spent the weekend just passed in Nashville, with a rag-tag group of Christ followers who express their love in fleshed out ways: in word and song and food and art and God-ward thought. It was good, the weekend, but it flew by fast. Too fast. Yet as I write these words I can see their faces, hear their music, remember their laughter. And they're here. Still here.
 
Back in January, on a bright, cold afternoon, I hiked a trail I've hiked a dozen times or more, but this time not alone. At the top of the trail I sat on a flat rock overlooking a river with a new, strong-shouldered friend and we told our stories, or parts of them, for an hour or more. As the wind blew and the words swirled around us I wished I could make the sun stand still...make those moments last. I knew then that they were precious...and remembering them tonight is almost as good. They sped by too quickly, but they are here, now. Still  here.  
 
"The physical presence of other Christians is a source of incomparable joy and strength to the believer," wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer. ""The believer feels no shame, as though he were still living too much in the flesh, when he yearns for the physical presence of other Christians. Man was created a body, the Son of God appeared on earth in the body, he was raised in the body...Christianity means community through Jesus Christ and in Jesus Christ. Whether it be a brief, single encounter or the daily fellowship of  years, Christian community is only this; we belong to one another only through and in Jesus Christ."
 
Jesus' life, death and resurrection mean this: If I've loved you in a moment, I love you still. If you've been with me for an hour, you're with me still. If my heart has broken at the beauty of a fleeting afternoon, that beauty's with me, still. His beautiful breaking is putting us together, forever, still.
 

"Father, I desire that they also, whom Thou has given Me, be with Me where I am, in order that they may behold My glory, which Thou hast given Me; for Thou didst love Me before the foundation of the world...I have made Thy name known to them, and will make it known; that the love wherewith Thou didst love Me may be in them, and I in them."  (John 17:24,26, NASB)  

 

 
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 "Speak what you feel, not what you ought to say."

�Leigh McLeroy, 2010
Summer songs from Allen Levi
 

leviGeorgia singer-songwriter Allen Levi is posting a series of newly-recorded songs this week on his blog--a song a day for seven days. They're better than a big glass of sweet tea on a hot August afternoon. Visit, listen, drink deep. There. Wasn't that good?
Have you been to the Rabbit Room?
 
The "real" Rabbit Room was the spot in Oxford's Eagle and Child pub where Inkings C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield and J.R.R. Tolkien lifted up pints and each other's ideas. The "virtual" Rabbit Room is a collective of writers, singers and thinkers who gather to continue the conversation. It's a cozy place. You might like it.