Glorious Convalescence

I'll admit to a bit of recklessness in employing the phrase "glorious convalescence" to describe the time we've had since Loree's departure.  Not all of how we have grown and healed has come easily or been seamless.  There are some whose injuries still impinge, some who still limp, some who are still not happy.   So please understand that I do not mean to say that there isn't any more healing to occur, any more forgiveness to be granted, any more coming home to celebrate.   

But it matters to me that we begin to think and feel and move and have our being into a tomorrow where God already loves us.  So please understand as I invite you to walk to an edge I am visiting for the first time myself. 

God has been good to us.  And as much as there are still hurts to be healed we have a story albeit brief, that confirms the truth we proclaim as people of the resurrection.  

So how do we move now that our muscles have rested and perhaps have lost a little of the former strength of which we once boasted?  How do we take to this new exercise, this new role that is and -- perhaps just as much -- is not like what we were used to doing?

Think of Keith Marshall, he is a good man.  He worked and for himself found a place next to Todd Gurley that was serious and that required real effort.  Better than Batman's Robin.  Then the injuries came.  Almost permanently.  Now Gurley is gone and this good man is "third string" behind younger, quicker stars.  

We think in terms of what might have been.  And when he crosses into the end zone we celebrate in bittersweetness.  He garners an applause now moderated by nostalgia.   

Can I say that I hope for a future for this good man that might be missed if it is measured only by his vita ante acta?  If I could guarantee it I would but even Keith -- perhaps especially Keith -- will have to trust that he has a meaningful and worthy tomorrow made even more so by what he is NOW becoming, not by what he "could have been."

Here in Madison we are learning to trust God in a new way, too.  Not by forgetting what was or what happened but by honoring the possibilities that God is even now putting before us.  

If our measure of today is that it match the best of our memories or worse that it erase the realities through which we have been formed then our convalescence may not be so glorious.  Indeed it may not be a convalescence at all.  

But a greater glory with a strength we have not yet known,  awaits us because with our injuries, God is calling us to become something new.