letters from barabbas

i have not seen this day before

If I could, I would break into flower.
If I could, I'd no longer be barren.
This day is filling up my room,
is coming through my door.
Oh, I have not seen this day before.

Oh, mourning dove, we'll go up to my roof.
Oh, mourning dove, we'll go into the sky.
This day is filling up my room,
is coming through my door.
Oh, I have not seen this day before.

And the cars are a stream running by me,
bending away to a place I don't know.
This day is filling up my room,
is coming through my door.
Oh, I have not seen this day before.

I used to think of this song as a simple expression of joy. A release in the tension of a very dark album--the bright spot. But perhaps it is not strictly so. I have not seen this day before: "It must be a sunny day, a good day for once," I thought. But maybe it's just another day, one we haven't seen yet. And whether it is sunny or stormy, it is here, and we haven't seen it before, and it is filling up our rooms whether we want it or not. Jump in the stream and fill it up (surrounding the stones gracefully, if you are able), because you have no other choice.

I've been thinking a lot about how God works--how wrong it is to assume that God ought to do good things for us, though He often does. The "How could a good god let bad things happen?" dilemma is getting old for me. The Israelites were on a wild ride with an incomprehensible Guide, who had a plan though it often didn't seem so. The indication of any sort of plan didn't make it seem any better, at least. "Step in that river? What, and drown?" "Slay that whole village over there? Where is Your compassion?" "Four hundred years of captivity? Do we really deserve that?" They went with the flow, did as they were told, yet there seems to be the sense that the Lord, omniscient and all-powerful though He was, was always weeping with them. He was on their side--so who could be against them?
Yet they wept, and He wept with them.
And if His Spirit filled the tabernacle, and our hearts are now that tabernacle, then He must be filling up our rooms right now, and so the day with all its tears and all its small surprises really is coming through the door.

If I could, I'd no longer be barren. Who knows whether this day will change that? But what choice is there for me but to live it?

I'm not trying to preach this. I'm not hoping this will comfort anyone's pain. But I'm hoping that typing these words out and publishing them on the internet will somehow make them real for my life. It's a last-ditch effort to go into the sky, you might say. Because all around me people are dying and losing their faith. And in many ways I'm doing both myself, because maybe that is what it means to be alive.
I have not seen this day before. And the Lord is for me, and weeping too.

# posted by David : 1:27 AM