Well, this evening finds me sitting in a familiar leather chair sitting next to a familiar large window watching the sun sink down beneath a familiar line of trees. For the past six and a half years, I have named Clemson, South Carolina, home. Both my boys were born here. My wife Miska and I bought our first house here. Here, in this little college town, serving as a pastor amid this community, I have discovered more of my voice. I have made deep friends. I have become aware of more of my foibles and my idiosyncrasies. Here, I have wrestled a few more of my demons. I have prayed and laughed and cried and hoped and doubted and believed. A lot of life has been lived in this place, with these people.

But now I must go.

And this fact is closer to the truth of where I am – I am a mess of wrenching emotions because in a matter of hours, we will be pulling out of town, moving to Charlottesville, Virginia. We are excited, but we are also sad. We are eager for what new season lies before us, and we feel deep sorrow for this violent severing about to occur. Soon, we will disconnect from the community and people we have known, from the people and the place that have been our home. Yet we go to a city that has called our name. Such a strange paradox, this leaving and going. We surrender one good so we can embrace another good.

A couple days ago, my youngest son Seth (4) explained to me what he was feeling. “Daddy, I don’t mind going. I just don’t want to leave.” That sounds about right to me. If only we could enjoy all the good that comes from going without having to endure all the pain that comes from leaving. But, of course, we can’t. One requires the other.

Abraham had to leave his home without knowing what was in store. Paul had to leave position and power. Peter had to surrender control. Thomas had to surrender doubt. Moses had to surrender fear. Mary had to surrender reputation. The widow with the mite surrendered her last coin. Jesus surrendered His full self, His very life.

It seems that in the way of the Cross, there is no arrival without a departure. There is no freedom without surrender and repentance. There is no Resurrection hope without Dark Friday. There is no joyful greeting without a sad goodbye.

I pray I see God’s hand at work in all of it. I pray the same for you.

Sometimes I think about the kind of man and father and husband I hope to be. Sometimes I think about my many foibles and sins and plain ‘ol human qualities that throw a kink in my desires. Sometimes I wonder how my life would be different if I’d made this choice or that. Sometimes I wonder if anybody will read my books after I’m dead. Sometimes I’m too hard on myself. Sometimes I need a dose of humility via a reality check (a service my wife Miska often happily provides). Truly, my thoughts about myself can roam any which way.

I will say, though, that living with two young boys who have no problem “calling ‘em like they see ‘em” keeps my ego in check. Just the other day, Seth (our 4-year-old) told me plainly, “I don’t like pastors.” Well, okay then…

In our therapeutic and self-absorbed culture, it’s easy to make the case that we think about ourselves entirely too much. We ogle over our image in the mirror. We constantly revisit the stories in our narrative that either make us the hero or allow us to be the victim. We regularly Google our name to see what the cyber world thinks of us - or we additively check back on our blog posts to see who has commented about how fabulous our words were (speaking of which…but I digress). These proclivities can signal the self turned dangerously inward, a little thing the Bible calls selfishness or, worse: idolatry.

However, these impulses can also point to the fact that we were made to have our identity and value lavishly affirmed. We were made to be delighted in and seen and to have our best, truest selves pulled out in the open for all to enjoy.

Over and over again, Scripture affirms our true, deep identity, our true self. We are beloved. We are children of the Father. We are in Christ. We are held in the palm of God’s strong hand. We are beautiful in Jesus. We are strong and brave in Jesus. We are cherished by God, just as Jesus is cherished by God. We are chosen, singled-out, called by name. We are the ones (you and me) with whom God has entrusted His central work: being the people He uses to bring His Kingdom to come on earth, even as it is in heaven.

Thinking about ourselves can actually be an affirmation of hope and faith, whenever our thoughts echo the heart of God.

I can only imagine how this mammoth tree stretches beneath the soil. How wide and deep must the root system extend? This tree has withstood many storms, many fierce winds, many boys (yes, like my own) climbing and jumping and inflicting havoc. Still, there it stands. Unshaken. Anchored to the earth. A fixture of strength and grace and vigor.

With this picture in mind, I read Paul’s words to the church in Colossae with fresh imagination: “So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him…” (Col. 2:6-7) Further, Paul said, the life that anchors itself in the reality of Jesus Christ (crucified, risen and reigning now as Lord over all) possesses the same deep-rooted reality as Clemson’s grand oak: firm and strong (Col. 2:5,7).

This is no easy work, though, is it? It is immensely difficult to stay rooted in Christ when there are so many other powers and passions and interests and worldviews that pull at us to plug into their soil. It requires much tenacity to dig deep into Jesus when sin or fear or weariness or loneliness tempt us to believe that other soil would offer us something better.

But why, I wonder, do we find this task so hard? Does an apple tree sweat to keep from pulling it’s roots up and hopping over to another orchard? The azalea bushes in my front yard don’t constantly wrangle back and forth (at least so far as I’ve seen) about whether they prefer my yard or the neighbor’s. The ground from which they pull their nutrients is where they belong. This soil (and only this soil) fits who they are.

I think Paul would remind us of similar truths. Jesus, if we have been joined with him in his crucifixion and resurrection, is our true identity (2:6,11-12). The Kingdom of God is our true realm, our true soil. Our task is not to grit our teeth and hang tight to Jesus. Our place is simply to stay home, where life and hope pour freely from Jesus into us.

Bizarre annoyances are nothing new for Facebook. How many times must I hit ignore in response to a barrage of loony requests? No, thank you, I don’t want to be a pirate or join in a snowball fight or poke anyone with a broccoli stalk or plant a geranium in someone’s (virtual) garden. However, this motherly intrusion unnerved my friend on quite a different level - his virtual reality collided with real life in disturbing ways.

These collisions and the dilemmas that accompany are everyday occurrences now. How much personal information do I reveal in my blog? What kind of online persona do I take on? Who exactly is my friend? The more our life develops on the virtual plane, the more we will struggle to stay deeply entrenched in fundamental human realities: our true self, flesh-and-blood relationships, particular people and places.

Unfortunately, even with all our “connections” and social networking and even with the glut of self-revealing blog posts, we are a generation often lacking deep roots. It is too easy to resist friendships that require us to show (or give) our unmasked self. It is too easy to live on the surface, rarely sinking into a specific neighborhood or a particular community long enough to truly know or love it. We transition so fast. We have so many options. If one site or person doesn’t suit us, well, we just hop to another.

Against this trend, we have the way of Jesus. Jesus came into this world, taking on all the beauty and limitations of a human body (“The Word became flesh…” John 1:14a), choosing to inhabit a particular space and a particular culture (“…and lived among us.” John 1:14b). Our old Christian word for this truth is incarnation, being “embodied in the flesh.”

For thirty-some years, Jesus worked his craft and traveled the land. He served his clan and learned in the synagogue. When it was time for his voice to go public, Jesus’ first mission was narrow. Jesus first came for the people of Israel (Matt. 15:24). Certainly, the mission grew from there, but Jesus intentionally began with the people He knew.

Jesus’ incarnation calls us to get specific: to know a city, to know its ills and idols, its joys and glory; to know the names on a street; to know a friend’s full story. Jesus instructed us to go into His world in His way. What place are we to inhabit? What people are we to live among? Even if our time in a spot is short, we can give our full self, engaged and present for whatever time we have. Virtual reality, good as it might be, is not the same as incarnational reality.

If we wish to understand [a place] it must not be as tourists or inquirers, it must be with the loyalty of children and the great patience of poets. G.K. Chesterton

Truthfully, though, I had little idea what those words meant. I didn’t know the kind of desire and pain and hope and disappointment that came along with such a simple declaration. We usually grasp the gravity of our profound experiences later, as we actually begin to live them.

This seems particularly true for the few faithful women who wept at Jesus’ tomb that first Easter morning. Jesus’ body was gone, and the women feared foul play. But a strong, radiant angel appeared and spoke earth-bending words. Jesus is not here; He has risen (Luke 24:5-6) This declaration gives us immediate truths: death has no hold on Jesus; and in His triumph, Jesus has won life and forgiveness for us.

But there’s more…

If you had to define God in a word (of course we can’t – absurd, but if we could…), about the best we could do would be this: life. Likewise, if we had to define Satan in a word, about the best we could come up with would be this: death. Death (Satan) aligned against life (God).

As a result, we are in a world drowning in death. Have you noticed? Do you see death in the eyes of children whose families have been ripped to shreds? Do you see death in the wars that rage and in neighborhoods submerged in hopeless cycles of poverty? Do you see death in your own heart when fear will not loosen its grip, when the accusing voice will never shut up, when your emptiness or your sin will never leave you alone? Are you drowning in all the death?

Drowning in death, what is our hope? If the Kingdom of Death has us in a stranglehold, what is our hope? The only possible remedy is preposterous – that God would come and dive into our cesspool with us, take into His own body all of the rage and the assault of death and extinguish it in Himself. This unthinkable rescue is precisely what Jesus did.

When Scripture announced Jesus trouncing death, the pronouncement asserted something even more cataclysmic, more total, than we imagined. This is the stunning revelation: in Jesus’ death and resurrection, Jesus broke “the power of him who holds the power of death” (Hebrews 2:14). Along with securing human forgiveness, Jesus’ resurrection shattered the tyrannical power of evil, every smidgeon of it.

Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death… [The Troparian of Pascha]

One afternoon, when our youngest son Seth was two, he loudly declared, in broken toddler English, “I God.” Seth does have a strong sense of self - and for that, we are thankful. However, if he makes a life-habit of such pronouncements, he will, of course, be living the grandest delusion.

According to Psalm 90, citing a prayer of Moses preserved for us by the author of the Psalms, if there is any one reality (and there are many) that delineates us from God, it is how vastly different we relate to time. We humans forever live under time’s heavy heel; God doesn’t.

Moses’s prayer tells us that God exists from “everlasting to everlasting.” (Ps 90:2) That’s quite a line; but frankly, I don’t have the foggiest clue what it means. My entire frame of reference is bound to days and years and seconds and centuries. I can’t even begin to account for a reality that essentially pays the calendar no mind.

To further punctuate our humble situation, the psalm reminds us that when our days are done, our body merely disintegrates back to dirt, ashes to ashes and dust to dust. Worse, Moses suggests that seventy or eighty years are about the most we mortals can hope for. How do we respond to this bleak picture?

Do we let fear overwhelm us, believing that our life is meaningless and empty?

Do we live for the moment, grabbing whatever of life we can stuff down our face?

Do we worry? Do we deny? Do we just turn off our brain and do whatever we like?

Moses responded differently. Moses prayed.

Here, we face the temptation to roll our eyes and mumble, “Well, of course, what a nice Christian cliché. Pray about it.” I have these feelings myself. However, my dismissive reaction reveals that my understanding of prayer is neutered and tame and dull.

For Moses, his prayer was not a trite plea to God mumbled without any authentic grappling with the dire situation. Prayer was his way of reordering himself to God’s reality, of seeing his world and his life for the mess they truly were at that point in time – and asking God to do something about it. Prayer is the posture of asserting that we are desperate for God’s redemption – and that if our God does not move on our behalf, then we are truly doomed.

So Moses prayed: God, teach us to number our days. (Ps. 90:12) To number is to take inventory, to sum up the reality of our predicament. And I love Moses’ motivation for his prayer: so we may gain a heart of wisdom. He wanted to rightly assess his earthly time not so he could hoard it but so he would know how to use it, how to live from his heart, how to live for causes and truths that deeply mattered. Moses wanted to know how to give his days away with a wise brand of recklessness.

We do not count our days like a miserly geezer stuffing all our minutes in an old coffee tin and shoving them under our mattress. We take stock of our days so we will recognize our days are too fleeting to spend our time wrapped in an illusion. We count up our days so that we will live prayerfully, hopefully trusting in God’s power to use our hands and our voice and our short stretch of time to join God’s redemption of his world.

As we live this prayerful way, we stay attuned to the hurt and the pain all around us and attuned to the many ways God is working against those evils. Some pray while painting. Some pray while feeding the hungry. Some pray while nursing a malnourished orphan. Some pray while loving their neighbor or giving themselves to their job, working with honor like Adam and Eve did in the Garden of Eden. Some pray while writing poetry (like Moses in Psalm 90). And some pray with plainspoken words.

How we pray and how we do God’s work in the world is not the primary concern. That we pray, that we spend our days doing God’s work in the world – that must grab our full attention.