Dear Inner Circle,
It’s taken a long time, but I now believe in miracles. Do you? It all depends on where you’re from. Most of us think that a miracle is when the impossible is made possible. While this isn’t quite what I’m talking about, I have been there when a tiny, cooked meal seemingly multiplies just as a dozen hungry mouths descend precisely at dinnertime or when someone turns their life around, seemingly overnight. There’s another kind of miracle, though: it’s smaller, far more demanding, and far less obvious. It’s the one where, regardless of our efforts and even prayers, things don’t change, people stay the same, circumstances refuse to yield, and the real miracle is that we don’t give up, and it is our hearts that can change.
There is one here who is a gift to us all. We have known him for years, and he has seen many friends come and go, yet his pain and trauma are so deep that surviving at times is the only worthwhile metric. It is nothing short of magical to witness the way our people’s hearts refuse to give up on him over many years, refusing to collapse or condemn him to a state of hopelessness and despair.
Normally my social media feed is flashing pics of miraculous weight loss transformations, so it was a pleasant change to receive a message from him, boasting about how he’s gained 16kg in three weeks, and is thriving in a beautiful location for a lengthy stint at healing and rehabilitation. His progress is a gift for our hearts, reminding us to never give up, to never stop loving, and to never take a moment of a person’s life and call it the whole movie. We talked on the phone, and he mentioned that he was motivated to recover in order to come back and help me with the music for our chapel services. Since I took over after our guitarist moved back home, there’s been a decline in quality – he isn’t lying.
It is tempting to look at a world in so much pain and miss the beauty. It is easy to look into the face of overwhelming need and be led to despair. “What can I do? I am but one person,” serves little practical value, placing the “me” over the “we,” overplaying the doing over the being. A pearl of great price lies elsewhere, one in which we live the question, “Who are we to be?” For all of us who have known and been through the long loneliness, we have unearthed that the only solution is love and that love comes with community. One of my heroes, Dorothy Day, and the movement she began in the slums of New York nearly 150 years ago knew this truth well. My friend’s call was a reminder that when faced with despair, those of us who believe in miracles need to not give up, to not clam up, but to do what it is we can do, no matter how small, and to have enough faith in the belief that no act of love and kindness ever goes unfelt.
Thank you for being part of our Inner Circle,
Jon
Rev. Jon Owen
CEO & Pastor
Wayside Chapel
