Without Running Shoes

Without Running Shoes--September 13, 2016

"Now Jacob looked up and saw Esau coming, and four hundred men with him. So he divided the children among Leah and Rachel and the two maids. He put the maids with all their children in front, then Leah wither children, and Rachel and Joseph last of all.  He himself went on ahead of them, bowing himself to the ground seven times, until he came near his brother. But Esau ran to meet him, and embraced him, and fell on his neck and kissed him, and they wept." [Genesis 33:1-4]

Grace starts over, yes.  But sometimes the new beginning that God's grace creates leads you right back to where you already were--right back into the midst of the familiar, the well-worn, and maybe even the things you were trying to get away from.

Just ask Julie Andrews.

In her famous role as the governess for the von Trapp family children in The Sound of Music, Andrews' character Fraulein Maria runs away from her position with the children and back to the convent where she began the story, because she wants to avoid the conflict in her heart about the Captain. She wants to escape from what is difficult, and she thinks that starting over as a nun will allow her to avoid having to face him again (because, as you surely know, she loves him).  But her Mother Superior gives her wise counsel: "Maria, these walls were not meant to shut out problems.  You have to live the life you were meant to live."  And furthermore, the Mother Superior tells Maria, "You have a great capacity to love. What you must find out is how God wants you to spend your love."

Ah, there's the rub. That's the question, after all, isn't it--how does God want me, want you, to spend our love?  And would we dare to go where God leads us if the new beginning God is sending us into is not a back-door way to run away from something challenging, but actually a mission right back into the daily grind of what we call "ordinary life"?

Julie Andrews (well, her character) has to learn the hard way that, indeed, God is all about new beginnings... but they do not necessarily mean running away from what was difficult or familiar or "old."  Sometimes the starting over happens right where you were already--by going back to what you had wanted to run away from.

All of this is to say that, yes, grace is about starting over--but starting over is not at all the same thing as escaping from the tough stuff because it is tough (and on a side note, this is one more in a long list of reasons why "rapture" theology, with its convenient but non-Scriptural notion of Christians being whisked away to avoid suffering  before Christ's coming, misreads the Bible).

So for a moment let's set aside Fraulein Maria, the von Trapps, and Mother Superior. And instead, let's see the way grace starts things over in the life of Jacob and Esau.  Jacob was a born runner--he was the cheat and the crook who always had a getaway car. After he had swindled his brother Esau and conned his dad out of the lion's share of the family estate, he had high-tailed it out of the old homestead to lay low for a while with a long-lost uncle... and then after he had burned every bridge he had with uncle Laban, Jacob was left with nobody left to alienate.  He had hurt everybody around him. He had cheated most and lied to all.  And he had faced up to each of those situations by turning heel and running in the opposite direction. You have to figure that Jake put a lot of miles on his running shoes back in those days...

 Until God got a hold of him.  Literally--God had to wrestle with that runner all night, and God finally punched ol' Jake so hard in the hip that the father of the Twelve Tribes of Israel walked with a limp afterward for the rest of his life.  And when Jacob could no longer run, he was finally ready to go back to his brother and risk seeing him again. 

In other words, God sets things up for Jacob much like Mother Superior puts it to Fraulein Maria:  grace is not a wall that shuts out your problems.  Pretty much as a rule, grace is not a wall... period.  And now that Jacob has run out of aces up his sleeve and tricks to play, he is left with no choice but to go back to his brother and risk the possibility of a new beginning... right back where he had started.

No more running.  No more bailing out when things get hard or weird.  No more breaking his promises or fudging on his commitments.  No more leaving.  The new beginning for Jacob was a return to the water's edge where he had once burned bridges to start a new construction. 

And what a new bridge it is.  What a new beginning.  Something--maybe his awareness that he has hit rock bottom and doesn't want to endanger his family as well--gives Jacob courage enough now to go to the front of the line and risk what Esau will do to him. Esau his brother, of course, who had wanted to murder Jacob for all his scheming the last time they had seen each other.  Esau his brother who had not only the right and the inner rage to kill him, but a modest army of 400 men at his disposal by now and who could have wiped out his brother Jacob and family without breaking a sweat.  That Esau, when he sees his conniving, jerky brother coming, breaks down in tears and runs to him in an embrace.  There is forgiveness.  There is reconciliation.  There is hope.  There is definitely a new beginning, and for certain Jacob had not earned it.  There is nowhere to run, because there is no need to run any longer... and Jacob has no more need for his old running shoes. This scene is grace, pure and simple.

Jacob has been given his brother back.  His children have been given their uncle!  The heartache and bitterness of so many years can be unclenched and released.  All of it made possible as a free gift before Jacob could earn it or prove himself.  In other words, grace.  But that grace-filled new beginning came exactly through a return back into the things that were difficult, the relationships that were strained, and the long list of things Jacob had been running from.

That's how it is with grace.  Grace is not a vacation to a sunny beach where you get to ignore or avoid the things that are tough about daily life.  More often, grace is the burst of energy that sends us back into the situations and relationships that were hard to deal with yesterday, to the people we had not left things on good terms with, or to the problems we still don't have solutions for... and yet with an undeniable newness that lets us face them and "spend our love" there, rather than running away one more time.

Each of us has spent time running before.  Let's just be honest about that.  Maybe you do it long enough and you forget what it was like to have the courage not to bolt anymore when things get hard.  Maybe you keep running and you think it's the only possible strategy. Maybe you get so used to leaving behind wreckage in your wake that you can't bear to go back and face the places you messed up, when it always seems easier to just run and go somewhere else.  But Jacob's story pushes us--it tells us that God indeed is a bringer of new beginnings... that often send us right back into the thick of what we were hoping to avoid.

You know the question for today: what you must find out is where God wants you to spend your love.  That's where your new beginning is waiting--even if it feels like it is right back into the ordinary "stuff" of daily life, rather than a mission halfway around the world.

Here's to starting over without running shoes.

Lord Jesus, let your grace start us over again... right where we are, in the midst of daily life with all its difficulties and disappointments, to find newness is yet here.