Sitting in the Mud with God

It was kind of a bad day on Tuesday...

One of our faithful members here at HTLC, Karen, was arriving at the church office to take care of just a few of the many projects that she has her hands in.  As she got out of her car and was walking up to the door, Karen slipped on some mud, fell, and pulled the muscle in the back of her left leg.  Now, why, you may be asking, is there mud in Arizona?  Well, it just so happens that on Sunday and Monday (the two days before), we got a deluge of rain such that you would have thought we should start building an ark.  That's how it happens here in the desert...we can go weeks and even months without so much as a drop of rain, and then, all at once, we get almost half of our yearly total.  The torrential rain combined with a layer of fine dust left over from recent haboobs (it's a real thing...check it out!!!) made this insidious little patch of slippery mud appear in the corner of the parking lot.  It was this unfortunate convergence of God's good gifts (rain, dust, and church parking lots) that conspired against Karen and landed her on her butt - wearing white pants no less!

Now, Karen won't disagree with me if I tell you that she's not as young as she used to be.  So any kind of fall needs to be treated carefully.  There was no evidence that she had hit her head, and a broken bone seemed unlikely, but her inability to bear much weight on that right leg prompted a summons of our town's fine paramedics.  They arrived in short time and gave Karen the usual inquisition and battery of vital sign checks before determining that, indeed, her leg was probably not broken, but that she should probably have it looked at, and that either they could arrange transportation to to an appropriate facility or she could have someone take her.  I don't know whether she considered the opportunity to spend additional time with these very good looking public servants or not, but she chose the later and declined the ambulance ride.

Long story short (or no longer than it already is)...she had an MRI done, they found a torn hamstring muscle, and she has to go easy on in for a while.  All in all, good news, considering the plethora of alternative outcomes to such an incident.

I got to thinking, though, about falling.  We are creatures that, by whatever confluence of divine intention and evolutionary choosing, have come to assume that standing on our feet is normal.  To fall down is bad - not only for the risk of personal injury, but also because it renders us outside or away from our most proper posture.  To fall down is to capitulate to some force over which heretofore we have demonstrated a significant dominance - be it gravity, stiletto heels, or our own clumsiness.  Metaphorically, we also use the disgrace of falling to describe the state of our soul in relation to God.  To sin is to fall - like Adam, Eve, and all of humanity before us.  Theologically we consider "the world" (a figurative reference more than a literal one) a fallen place.  And we pray to God, "Do not abandon us to the pit!"

But I'm not so sure that on our butt, in the mud, recognizing that pain (not to mention humility and disgrace) courses through our bodies just as easily as shouts of joy, isn't exactly where we need to be - at least sometimes.  With deference to and compassion for Karen and the discomfort that she experienced on Tuesday and continues to live with as her muscle heals, we fool ourselves to think that we can walk through this world upright, proud, strong, and whole, immune to pain, and in control of our lives.

We stand on our feet not because it is our righteous and holy place - determined by divine and natural will, but because of the grace of a God who has reached into the mud and lifted us up.  It is God's desire to give us this gift.  But before God lifts us up, God sits there with us for a while - staining her own white pants, clutching his own wrenched muscle, and lending the very voice of God to our pleas for help.  Such is a God who hurts with us, cries with us, is humiliated with us, and dies with us.

We should think about this when we encounter all of the less than "upstanding" people and situations in our world: homeless people, unruly teenagers, murderous dictators, those who live on the "other side of the tracks" or who argue on the "other side of the aisle," border crossers, less-than-ideally-functional families, organizations, countries, or individuals, welfare recipients and welfare abusers, the sick, the weird, the haughty, the lonely.  Did I mention enough categories so to include all of us?  'Cuz I can keep going.

Karen came to church on Tuesday and fell.  And God fell with her.  To fall isn't a bad thing.  True, it hurts...but when we fall we find out who we really are.  And we find out who God really is, too.

Maybe Tuesday wasn't such a bad day after all.