I had a holy moment today. And it was just me. And God. And me.
I'm not alone very often. After you get married, you just aren't alone very often. And that's a wonderful thing. But it makes those moments that I am alone even more special.
Today I was alone for a little while. I was able to just shut up for a little while and open my senses to life around me. I feel humbled and awed by both the beauty and the pain in life.
I am losing my words. Let me use someone else's.
I was in Rwanda a few years ago, and a group of us went hiking in the slums of Kigali with a woman named Pauline. Pauline spends her free time caring for people who are about to die of HIV/AIDS. She agreed to take us to visit one of her friends who had only hours to live. We hiked through this slum for what seemed like miles, and as we got farther in, the shacks became smaller and smaller until all we had to walk on were narrow trails with sewage crisscrossing in streams that ran beside, and sometimes under, the shacks.
Eventually we ended up in a dirt-floored, one-room shack about six-by-six feet. A woman was lying under so many blankets that all we could see was her mouth and eyes. Her name was Jacqueline. Pauline had become her friend and had been visiting her consistently for the past few months. As I knelt down beside her on the floor, I watched Pauline, standing in the corner, weeping. Her friend was going to die soon. What overwhelmed me wasn't the death or despair or poverty. What overwhelmed me was the compassion. In this dark place Pauline's love and compassion were simply...bigger. More. It is as if the smallest amount of light is infinitely more powerful than massive amounts of dark. The ground was holy.
I'm sure you have had similar experiences. In the strangest of settings, maybe with people you barely know, you become aware that the ground beneath your feet is holy. It is sacred. There's something else, something more, going on here.
I went to a funeral several years ago and walked into the lobby of the chapel and immediately thought I was the first one there. Then I realized I wasn't the first one; the husband of the woman who had died was there, standing over the open casket. I walked over to him as he stood over her body, put my arm around him, and didn't say anything. Just the two of us in this big open room, looking down at his wife's body. He just kept saying over and over, "She was such a good woman; she was such a good woman." And we stood there together for a while with my arm around his shoulder, and I listened to him repeat, "She was such a good women." The ground was holy.
A young woman in our church gave birth last week to a two-pound baby who died the day after being born. My friend Matt went to the hospital to visit them. When he entered the room, he realized the baby was still there. And the couple was sitting in shock, stunned that this had happened and happened to them. Matt walked in, greeted the couple, and then took the baby in his arms and kissed it.
I wasn't even there, and I can feel the moment. The pain, the anguish, the sense that something else was going on in that room that we only get glimpses of from time to time.
Because it isn't just concerts and surfing and the high points, and it isn't just those beautiful moments int he midst of everyday and mundane, it is also in the tragic and the gut-wrenching moments when we cannot escape the simple fact that there is way more going on around us than we realize.
Rob Bell
Velvet Elvis
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