Building Strength For Life

“In sum then evil is solemn, good is gay. Evil means starvation, good glows. Evil imprisons, good sets free. Evil is tired, good is so full of vigor. The one says “Let go, lie down, sleep, die.” The other, “All Aboard. Kill the dragon, marry the girl, blow the pipes, beat the drums. Let the dance begin.” Lewis, Spencer’s Images of Life

When I was old enough for the girls to be allowed to go to the bathrooms by ourselves, one of my friends turned and told me over the drying towel dispenser, “Kate, if there was a TV show about your life I would watch it.”

And the fact is my life is a wee bit ridiculous. 30 years later, I'm sitting here with five kids another on the way- semi permanently in four, four and under mode - with a puppy and five cats. The only summation of the season is, as Aslan said, ”you haven't told the first joke, you are the first joke.”

In the last couple weeks we caught an unending bug, enjoyed a visit from my in-laws who braved the bug on our behalf, and my oven mildly exploded and has yet to get the care it needs. These are unique plot points occuring within the whirlwind that is our first multiboy,multisport season and just before it started most events shifted by one day, so I have a weird form of timelag where I can’t keep track of what day I’m in.

This is a great comedy - all the pieces, all the random parts, the canoe that was affixed to the top of my Suburban for a week, point to someone putting together the story board of my life and saying, “You know what would be really funny…”

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It is in these seasons (and they seem to comprise my life), that the temptation is to grab the breaks and scream stop and beg for a day in bed. This is actually one of the tremendous perks of having just had a baby, but that is only a once a year event at the moment.

It dawned on me recently that we are weight training for life. Eternal life.

Life that is abundant, glorious, effulgent, and this almost guarantees heavy baskets.

As we wade through these very full, tight to bursting years, the point is not to learn how to carry the least weight, but to be trained up for the next heavy load. Gloominess, sourness of spirit, incapacitates us to carry those loads.

We are supposed to consider it all joy when we encounter various trials. We are supposed to cast the burden of our sins on Christ and run. And the loads will get heavier because fruit is heavy, but becoming dower is not being sober minded. Laughter is repentance.

We also have to learn to carry the fruit and dance faster, build more hustle, lean in, and live. We are made for life.

Now we don’t know what the world would be in its unfallen state, but we know there was no death in the garden. We don’t know what seasons would have been then, but we know that they would have leaned lifeward. Imagine with me grass that never died. The seasons change and transform, but we tend to mix death in as a necessity when in the beginning, it wasn’t. So we are training for deathless days, eternal life, and we are the kind of people who are relieved when fall hits and the bugs die and the grass stops growing. We are relieved we can spay our cats, and dogs, and selves, but all of this shows us how we still can’t handle the vigor and vivacity of life.

In our rhythm of earthly life we tire of light. We are glad when the day ends, when the play ends; and ecstasy is too much pain.

We are children quickly tired: children who are up in the night and fall asleep as the rocket is fired; and the day is long for work or play.

We tire of distraction or concentration, we sleep and are glad to sleep,

Controlled by the rhythm of blood and the day and the night and the seasons.

And we must extinguish the candle, put out the light and relight it;

Forever must quench, forever relight the flame.

Therefore we thank Thee for our little light, that is dappled with shadow.

TS Elliot . Chorus From the Rock

We are still much like Chesterton’s policemen in the Man who was Thursday, chasing down Sunday for all the riot he is causing only to realize he is Sabbaoth. The riot is life more abundant, in it is rest itself.

We hear about the problem of evil, and in my circles people want you to explain why good should exist at all, but we rarely talk about all of the ruckus good requires. In fact, often we are tempted to see Pan bringing in the wild creatures, Bacchus and Silenus with the grapes and dances, and turn to Aslan to insist this is wicked and should stop. I want to stop it, too, when Pan is a two year old bringing in two cats, Bacchus is the five year old pouring milk for tea, and Silenus is turning on sea shanties to start a dance with the rest of the tots.

For some reason life requires much more of us than we want to live and so we feel the constant pain of the slowly unnumbed limb. And when one wakes up, God starts poking the next. We are made alive, to stand, walk, dance, and run - whether we want to be or not.

So we should live and bear full lives and the world will wonder at this because their sages can only tell them to "Let go, lie down, sleep and die."

Go and don't grow weary of doing good.

"Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity. " - Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

“For the universe as they conceived it is a great dance or ceremony or society. Our virtue is reliant on partaking of it.” - Lewis, Spencer’s Images of Life

Further Up and Further In