Jesus in the City
Part of me would like to pack up and leave for Northern Colorado, or even Wyoming, which my friend Matt says is a backward state even though he grew up there. Part of me really would. But I seem destined to live in the city and look for God’s glory seeping through cracks in graffitied walls, reflected in a mosaic of broken glass—and really, life is like this anyway. I guess in a way, the agrarian dream of rolling hills and a happy blue creek in every backyard died with Eden. Instead, we have to look more closely for God’s handprints at the scene of this crime, the Fall.
God doesn’t walk with us in the cool of the evening anymore, or maybe he does—but you have to pick out his voice from the hum and drone of traffic and the loud voices of people leaving the bars. God still speaks, but in our current world, his voice comes through over the static. We are surprised by shards of vision, sharp pieces of awe and wonder that break the surface of our souls when we least expect it.
Jesus lives in the cities these days, where life is complicated, and all the sweetness you could ever hope for in life is mixed together with pain. Beautiful artwork emerges slowly, quietly in this urban wreckage, but Christ is here, so we know that in the end the debris will fade away, the rubble of lives will be cleared off. People will be put back together. I don’t know just when this will take place but I’d like to be here to see it happen.
Tuesday, December 05, 2006
Urban Christianity - Urban Missions
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5 comments:
I too have felt the pull to move away from the urban centers and into the great wide open, where one's nearest neighbor is miles away. Yet the only problem for someone like me, who has been called to minister, is that it removes me from the closest concentration of people one could find.
Man! I love what you wrote here. Maybe it's because I grew up in a city and find it beautiful despite the grimness. Maybe it's because of the underlying theme of bitter/sweet-ness. Maybe it's the images you conjured up with your words. Either way, I'm lovin' it.
Guess who's moving to the heart of the tree covered hills of New Hampshire? Guess who is going to live 1 mile from the nearest gas station (which, by the way, is in the middle of no where)?
Oh, and guess who is moving to a place where the temperature will stay below zero for more than a month? POOP! Ok, I lose (sort of).
Here's a poem I wrote on just that topic when moving from a suburban/countrified setting to a big ugly city. It's not true, of course, but it's true:
Country Girl
Here’s too much size to fit the sonnet’s space,
more variety than metered rhyme can say,
and all created flora fauna filled with grace
from one arising, risen, living Son of Day
and Daylight, Lord of gathering and solitude,
Who walks the windswept hilltops under tattered skies
to mend the fence-fields, prays in million-mile woods
and deserts, stooping down to fit inhuman size.
But how can city slums be filled with Him?
Where mildewed pews and bloodstained homes cry out,
where traffic violence vies with back-street sin:
how can a fresh-air Savior serve these crowds?
I know Him here and fear to leave this place
to walk on concrete and in masses miss His face.
Being a country girl who has lived in DC for the past year and a half, I can understand the feeling of longing for wide open spaces, and solitude. I found that finding peace within a city so large was very difficult. I also found that my true need for peace was more of a need to talk to God. He, after all, is the Prince of Peace.
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