No Periods, Please

Otis Moss, III said that in the grammar of this life, God alone has the right to employ the use of a period. No friend, no enemy, no human authority including us has the authority to declare “it is finished” about anything or anyone. God alone is Alpha and Omega. We do have at our disposal, however, a range of other punctuation: semi-colons for a pause; exclamation points for emphasis; and commas especially when we anticipate something more yet to come.

When our family moved to New Hampshire, people warned us that the climate is deadly to rose bushes, period. We planted a rose bush anyway, and while our first two winters here almost finished it off, something in its biological imagination refused to settle for a wintry end. It rejected the “period” and chose instead to grow steadily to a current height of three feet. A ninth grader I know well was diagnosed a few years ago with a rare bone disease, and was told he might never play contact sports again – period. Something within his soul, however, rejected the sentence of that “period,” and informed me just the other day that he is looking forward to his first downhill race this winter.

How many young people have wound up addicted, violent, depressed or homeless because a parent or an adult placed a period after their names, instead of a comma? Has anyone ever told you you weren’t worthy, beautiful, or talented? If so, God has taken that period, brushed a little tail onto in, and gleefully promised that much more is yet to come forth from your amazing life. All things are possible with God because God alone has the last word, and if we listen....is indeed still speaking!

Running in Circles

I believe it was Mark Nepo who told a story about walking through a field one day and noticing at a distance a man walking his two dogs. The dogs seemed to be excited by the cool fall air, and were both running excitedly: one in a straight line, and the other in circles. The dog running in circles oddly kept doing just that: running in circles as he kept up with his master. Struck by this unique behavior, he approached the man and inquired as to why the dog would behave in this way. The man simply said that as a puppy, the dog had never ventured outside of a crate, and that even when liberated from his confines into the great outdoors, the dog had never learned any other way to run.

Earlier this week someone I admire referred to his faith as a tether - something which, through the course of his life, kept him from drifting too far off the track or too far into the storms of life. We all need the tether of faith - without it we can lose our way along the path or flounder adrift at sea. And yet, as the story of Jesus and the man who was unable to relinquish his possessions illustrates, it is all too easy to tether our faith to the wrong anchor and wind up running through life in constricting circles. When I tether my faith to any of the idols that give me comfort - possessions, security or self-image - I wind up chasing my tail. It is only in those moments when I have the courage to tether myself to the God of adventure, the One who calls me to "lose my life in order to find it," that I feel like my running has both joy and purpose.