Re-setting to heal

This morning I woke up and looked out the window at the gray, cold day in the middle of a gray, cold week*, and felt droopy and weak.  I started calculating how long it would be until the time when I could get a nap.

Then, before I got out of bed, I opened my Bible (app) and got hit right in the face with these verses from Hebrews 12:

12 Therefore lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees, 13 and make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be put out of joint but rather be healed. 

What a perfect passage for these latter quarantine** days.  The sudden cessation of activity was a shock to us all.  The great disruption brought threats -- to our security and our comfortable rhythms -- but it also brought opportunities to re-set.  The removal of our fast-paced lifestyles and packed schedules meant that we had more unstructured time, time to play, to rest, to spend time as families around the dinner table.

No doubt we've created some good habits and explored some new interests.  We've had time to stop and reconsider ideas, and the chance to get creative in how we do things.

But with the paradoxical experience of having less freedom and more time, it is also likely that we've had the opportunity to develop some dysfunction.  We may be slipping into some bad habits or letting laziness take over.  We may, in fact, be becoming rather lame.

Just like a leg that is broken and lame, if it is not re-set, will remain that way permanently, so our spiritual lives may be put "out of joint," according to the writer of Hebrews in the passage above.  If we carry on with the same habits for long enough, they begin to shape who we are.  And if those habits are making us lame, we will eventually not be healed in the right way.

Forty --- or 60 or 70 -- days is a long time, definitely long enough to have new habits ingrained in a permanent way.  Now is the time we need those words in Hebrews 12!  We are weary -- all of us, I think -- and we all may have drooping hands, but the antidote, the cure, is given in the passage.  This is the good news!  We don't have to wait for someone to develop a suspicious vaccine or drug fix -- it is something we already have and control.

The cure, the way to not heal in deformed way, is 3 to do things:

• Lift your drooping hands
• Strengthen your weak knees
• Make straight paths for your feet

When a person is already droopy and weak, telling her to strengthen her body may be received poorly, I realize -- and surely God knew, too -- but it is, in fact, do-able.  She may NOT be able to do it on her own, and may need other people or other resources.  When a person's physical knee is weak, it may need a brace.  Similarly, we may need to be braced up by others, or through the aid of something external to us.  We need to seek out what those braces might be.

Making straight paths for your feet could be putting in "rails" on either side of the path, or actively removing obstacles/rocks from the path.  Again, this might require help from someone or something else.

It strikes me that community is often what we need when we are weak, and yet the lack of physical community is something we are currently strained with.  But there are still ways to reach out and connect with others... they just may take more effort.

As I thought through this passage from Hebrews this morning and asked God in what ways I may be on the road to being "out of joint," I realized that my focus has changed over the last several weeks.  When the quarantine first started our family talked often about how we could try to reach out to others -- making cards for residents in a nursing home, writing messages to our neighbors on the sidewalk, sending letters in the mail, making cookies for the policemen, etc.  But over time, we have petered out, and I find myself less and less concerned with those outside my walls.

Even my friendships have become more of an effort... and I've been putting less of that in.  Days can go by when I don't really have a conversation with anyone besides my family.

So this passage was a wake-up call to me today, and my focus went from "how long until I get a nap?" to "who should I be reaching out to today?"  I don't want the insular and self-centered way I've been living to "set" and become my new pattern.  I don't want that lameness to be put of joint; I want to be healed.

These days are hard and life is confusing right now.  But, to go back a few chapters in Hebrews, "let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together." [even if it must be by Zoom]   We need each other to lift our hands, brace our knees, and make the paths straight, so that we can come out of this time re-set, healed and whole.





*Who has cold weeks in MAY??  Apparently, Pennsylvanians.

** If quarantine came from the word meaning 40 days, and this lockdown is heading towards more like 60 or 70 days, is it time to change the name to sessantine or settantine?