Dearly Beloved, Grace and Peace to you. I had a colonoscopy last week. It was uneventful. The most serious result of a routine colonoscopy is usually an onset of bad puns. I will spare you. I recovered in a room with a few others, in beds each with a curtain around it. The way they do a colonoscopy is to blow your intestines up with air like a balloon so they can look around. When they’re done, you have to, well, deflate. It doesn’t come as easily as you’d think. A nurse came around — I could hear him go from bed to bed — encouraging each patient to pass air so they could go home. Some of the patients didn’t speak English so he had to use some sound effects to make the point.
There we were like a half dozen race cars in our little stalls trying to rev up, one by one. I couldn’t believe how hard it was to fart given how hard I was laughing. Usually that really works.
So, you might ask, what’s my point? I’m not sure I have one; I’m just reveling in how funny it is to be human. Do I need a better way to start the day?
But there are some lessons here. 1. God allows us to move on. God has so arranged the body that it can absorb serious indignities, deal with them, and then move on. And the same is true of our souls. When I talk about baptism with kids we explore water and its lessons, and we talk about rain and tears and baths… and if there are junior high boys we end up talking about pee — and I say, “Aren’t you glad you can?” God’s grace enables you to take the good stuff out of life and let what’s toxic go. Baptism promises: sin is forgiven, mistakes are rinsed clean, shame is washed away. When I invite kids to design baptismal fonts a couple have added flush handles.
2. Sometimes we have something in us — a gift, a grief, a wound, a rage, a Word — and it really needs to come if we are to live fully. Tend to what’s in you that needs to come out, and let it out.
3. Sometimes you need to do something humbling, or even humiliating, to move on. Nome of us is exempt from the indignities of being human. Like Naaman, we just need to get over our pride and be human beings, who are, after all, funny creatures. Poot.
4. This too shall pass. Deep Blessings, Pastor Steve
__________________ Steve Garnaas-Holmes Unfolding Light www.unfoldinglight.net
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