We sit in the dark at the end of the day, a weary band of followers - – a gaggle of scragglers and wanderers, really -- struggling with eyelids and wakefulness and this plea to pray.
We’ve come to the garden. All week, each night, we’ve lit a candle, sat at garden's edge, and someone sleeps. Tonight, two.
O the deep, deep love of Jesus, begins a voice in the black and us awake, prodded by flickering light, we finger for words in the night. Our singing doesn’t wake; the sleep is deep.
I sing but I can’t fathom a soul crushed to the point of death. A grief that could kill. How deep is His cup.
And when the rest have gone to bed, the fourth son and fifth child, six-year-old Malakai, he crawls onto my lap, facing me, and asks that question he’s asked, all angst, all of 238 times, “But how do I become a Christian?” I’m awake enough to say that I think we should pray for clarity and understanding because yes, we’ve worked our way to the edge of that chasm 238 times.
But maybe it’s me: I know the answer and yet clearly I don’t. Am I not spending it all, my life, pursuing the whole of that answer? So I tell myself.
We pray for lucidity and then he asks, “Could someone write it down? I can’t remember it.” His anxiety's palpable. A garden agony.
“Sure." I stroke his cheek, trying to calm. "I could write down how for you. You’d like to read it later?”
“No, so I can pray it.” For the first time I understand the last 238 times. He’s been trying to memorize the sequence, the steps across the cross-beam, the way across the abyss.
He cups my face in his hands, searching.
“What about an echo? Could you pray it and I echo it?” I wonder where he’s heard that word, how he knows you can pray like that. I can see the gorge, the worn log back, hear the reverberation off the walls.
“You’d like that?”
His eyes light. In candlelight, they're brighter than flame. He nods, smile spreading, and my blood, heart, surges. We're at the brink.
“You know what it means? That it’s giving your whole life, that you’re called to obey Him because He owns you? That you’re letting Him buy you with His blood.” Scarlet drops wrung out in the dark of a garden.
His wild eyes probe mine. Walking the beam terrifies.
“I can never sin again?” His voice is pitched.
“Oh, Son.” I pull him close. We’ll walk it together.
“Does Mama sin?” He nods, too vigorously, and I bury my head in his chest and he strokes my hair and I whisper. “Jesus loves us. He’ll always wash away our sin, if we’ll let Him. He knows what we’re made of; just dust. But it’s about loving Him and feeling the same way about sin that He does. Do you want to love Him?”
He pulls my face up to his and makes the vow. “I do.”
Yes, that kind of love.
So begins the next love song in the dark. “Jesus, I am sad because I sin.” And he follows me across, chin trembling. “Jesus, I am sad…” And the night cracks open with grief. Sobs wrack his shoulders, this hematohidrosis of the soul, and I can feel the vice of flesh pressing tight across my chest. He’s not alone. I struggle for the next step, the next words.
“My sin has separated me from You.” He tries but he can’t even choke out the words, pain caught in his craw, and the agony of sin falls salty and wet. I hold this weight of sorrow in the garden.
We cry. This skin hurts.
Through a blur of repentance, both of us, I creep farther across the canyon. The wood holds. “But I come back to you through the Cross, through the blood of Jesus shed for my sin.”
He pulls himself together, grabs hold of hope, pulls himself along the words. “I want Jesus’ righteous blood to buy me and wash my sin-stains whiter than snow.” His courage-voice grows stronger. “I want Jesus’…”
A soul nears Home. The stars dance with the angels. He squeezes my hand.
“Be my Lord, Lord Jesus; I want to be Your Child.” He’s sure now. “And let me live in your love, obedient to Your will, our hearts beating together as one. Amen.”
His words run. I can feel their embrace, the tilt of the galaxies, and he grabs me too.
"I'm a Christian!" He's ecstatic and I know the wonder afresh and joy falls and the words too, "Welcome home." In pitch of Gethsemane’s Garden, we’ve wrestled the dying, death of first Garden, and crawled out of Eden by way of the Beam.
Christ's will is done and I blow out the candles. We sleep in light.
of the struggle between God and Satan, and as such it must become
the center of our hearts too.”
~ J.Heinrich Arnold
125x125-30days.gif)