Run(-)On Praise

When I sat down at my desk, I just wanted to see how long I could make a sentence. Like a challenge. This is where it led me.

It’s not a normal day but I treat it like any other and lie there and watch the effects of the sunrise on my eyelids and listen to my family doing morning things; they’re nice morning things, like getting ready for Easter and feeding our dogs and going in to church early to help the kitchen crew get ready for the fundraiser breakfast which is between the ambitious-bird service and the head-screwed-on-straight service, which are identical, and I take up the wish I wished the night before that our family would screw their heads on straight but no, enough of us are ambitious that my vote doesn’t count, and “besides, the family is coming for lunch, and they’ll be here before we’d get home from the late service,” and so my vote really doesn’t count, and I decide that I probably never had a vote to cast anyway, so I put my wishing aside and go back to telling myself to get up and telling myself I’ll get up in just a few minutes, but I’m so comfortable right now, I can’t and so it will be ok if I get up in a minute – it is, but those minutes must have counted against me, because now we have to “really hurry” to get the dressing ready for the family who are coming and I don’t have much time to do any make-up or anything, but then I do it anyway, as fast as I can because if I’m going to be late to church, I at least want to look good, and it makes very little difference in minutes because I move quickly; and there is my brother telling us all we’ll be late, and then that we are late, and then that he can’t wait to live on his own because we’re always late and he never would be except for us, and he doesn’t ever seem to stop, so for the longest time on the way to our Easter morning service, it is so hard to think of the peace and the joy that are just waiting to be taken up and taken advantage of, and then we walk in and I didn’t see any heads turn, and then my heart turns and everything stops, because nothing matters except what we are singing about, and the glorious way God has loved us and chosen us and suffered for us, and purchased us, and given us to Christ, that – unless my heart were deaf – I cannot avoid falling on my heart’s knees and raising my hands and shouting that my God is alive and he loves me, and he is reigning so everything will be ok! and I just want to look at his face and know, and then I do know, and I want to keep looking in his face; and after church each moment seems holy and beautiful, as if I can do no wrong, and we all file slowly and talking into a huge herd pretending to be in line and talk our way through heaven-sent sausage and French toast and sanctifying syrup gluing your silverware to your fingers and your fingers to each other, and your hair to your forehead, and for breakfast the pastor has included grace in his benediction so the only words spoken are conversations about what they did last night and how that worked out, and how much she got done, and what was he working on again? and did it turn out and is it worth trying for myself? and then I call Happy Easter and suddenly the sun and the wind and the blue sky and the green grass are infinitely more beautiful than they were  when I walked from my house to my car before church and I know the afternoon ahead is going to be wonderful, even though something inside me knows it’s not and I can’t really pretend it will be much longer, so when we come home I am less happy, and I do not try to cheer up but I do wish I could be the same person all of the time and how much nicer I would be if that were the case, because if I just got stuck being the right person of the many who are inside of me, I know I could be perfect – but the perfect one is Christ Jesus, and he is not the only one living in me, because I am like every other human on this planet in one way, and that is that I’m human, and it means that even though Christ has the victory over sin, my sin still fights to often, so even though I side with Christ as much as I … can? I lose so often and then I know I’ve failed and I go on failing because failing has made me moody and I think that winning is impossible, even though I’m failing with the very people who gathered to celebrate that Christ won, so there is no more failure, and I become meditative and unhappy in my meditation, so I write it so that I can understand it, and when I write it I find that I can’t understand it so I give up and make an excuse for writing, and say that I was just trying writing to see how much I can cram into one sentence, and it turns out that a lot fits, even if not a lot should, and I wonder where my writing has taken me, and I find that I’m happy again; writing has taken me to a place where I feel the joy of creation and the satisfaction of having achieved something I’ve never done before – perhaps even that I’ve done it well for it being a first time around – and I decide to contemplate, but this time I’m contemplating cheerily and it takes me back to praise; praise for that glorious morning when Christ stopped the people’s contemplating his death and did something about it…basically reverse it so that they’d have something new to contemplate – the indescribable glory of the God who raised him, and unfathomable love which inspired the planning of this action before the planning of the people that necessitated this action, and the inescapable beauty that surrounds this entire day and it’s glorious celebration.

 (I tried reading this out loud. Now each short sentence feels like a needed revival. Gives me time to breathe.)