God is Not Cheesy

My Senior Recital, May (photo by Mark Boerger)

How can I describe what I have experienced of God?

He is not cheesy. He is rich and complex and so "other"-ly. He is the fulfillment of all of those longings that we have in our soul that go more personal and desperate than the longings for sex or cake or Netflix binge-watching.

I am sitting at my dining room table, and reading Psalm 119, the section called "Lamedh". I look over my left shoulder and read, "Your faithfulness endures to all generations..." (verse 90a), and then I look over to my right, past the Chromebook on which I'm typing, and I see our oriental rug, and Barrett's blow up pool toys, and the boxes I have been packing for our move, and the hill out our window that is eroding and revealing its red dirt innards.

And I think about how we really are just passing through. After us, other people will take over this space, this three-year home to us. And then after they leave, more people will probably make it their home. And isn't that really how this whole world is for all of us? We are all just passing through. We do not yet have a permanent home.

Then I read in verse 91 that "all things are [God's] servants." What does that mean? I know that Christians are called to be servants of God, but what does it mean that every blade of grass, and every sunflower, and every article of clothing that I wear is God's servant? That is mind-blowing.

And it makes me think of the semester I spent in Tuscany, Italy on study abroad, in the spring of 2003, and how we would be on one of our Wednesday field trips, going from our hill town, Castiglion Fiorentino (Ca-sti-YOH-n Fyoh-ren-TEE-no), and we'd pass fields full of huge yellow sunflowers, covering the ground like stalks of cotton in Texas.

I love how the faces of sunflowers actually follow the progress of the sun every day. Did you know that? It is as though they are stretching as tall as they can out of their strange dependence upon and slavery to the dirt, and reaching their bright faces as close as they can to that bright ball in the sky, which they resemble, with their round faces and flashy radiating petals, almost as though they were made in the image of this light source with which they are so obsessed.

It seems that they are straining to get near it, following the sun's movement in a cycle, watching and waiting for it in the darkness, readying and positioning their faces for that first ray of morning when their Almighty will appear again.

May I be a sunflower.