Reflections on Joel 2:13-14
Frank lived 12 miles outside of town on land that had been in his family for three generations, in the house his father was born in, the home he grew up in, a worn but beautifully simple white farmhouse that sat just off a gravel road. The house featured a generous front porch with a porch swing that had fallen out of use. And there was a mature willow tree in the side yard that fed off a small pond that was home in the summer to a family of mallards. The backyard was home to not one, but two sheds. One in good repair, built by Frank not long after his mother died and he had made her house his own. The other looked as if the wind would knock it over. The roof was bowed in the middle. The one and only glass window was long ago shattered and never replaced. The right hand door hung precariously on one rusted hinge balanced on a loose screw. The whole building leaned slightly to the right. It was built almost fifty years ago by Frank’s father with the help of his then eight-year-old only son. It wasn’t pretty when it was new. Frank’s father use to tell his wife … “it isn’t pretty, it’s functional.”
Frank was not a farmer. He was an electrician. The land surrounding the house had ceased to be a farm when his father contracted emphysema at just sixty-five. Frank wasn’t interested in anything that interested his father. He certainly wasn’t interested in plowing the fields or milking cows. When the land and the house became his, he let the fields go and tore the barn down … but not the old shed.
He moved into that house with a wife, the love of his life. Her name was Emily. Before long she was expecting their first child. He painted the bedroom, that use to be his as a child, a nice, neutral, soft yellow since she refused to know if it was a boy or a girl. Turned out to be a boy. And Frank quickly painted the room blue. He said yellow was no color for boy. She disagreed, but didn’t let on.
Frank named his son William for no other reason than he liked it and no one in his family had it. Emily was good with that too.
One April morning, Emily woke up a little later than usual. Frank was already off to work. She was surprised that little William hadn’t woken her from his crib. No crying this morning … maybe the little guy was turning a corner. Only it he wasn’t turning a corner, a developmental corner. He was dead. He died mysteriously in his sleep at just three months and 6 days old. Sudden infant death syndrome they called it. Emily and Frank were devastated.
Frank took William’s crib and put it in the old shed next to the rusted Schwinn bicycle that use to be his means of escape when his father was drinking. On the wall above his old bike hung the leather strap his father used to use on him when alcohol and disappointment got the better of him.
Years went by and another baby just didn’t come. Nights spend side-by-side laughing on the front porch swing were replaced by the strained silence of evenings spent apart in different rooms. In those days Frank’s temper was easily triggered. He never got violent with Emily. She was not afraid of him. But one night he threw a dining room chair at the wall, which broke his mother’s antique vase while in flight. The wall was repaired by dinner the following evening, but the broken chair was tossed in the old shed knocking over the rusted Schwinn on its way. And there it stayed.
That was almost thirty years ago. Emily passed away in April seven years after the baby died. They said it was an aggressive strain of the flu, but Frank knew it was broken heart. His heart was broken too and he didn’t know how to fix it. He gave away Emily’s things, but took the box she hid under the bed, the box that held her treasures … the letters Frank had sent when they were courting, the cards he had given her over the years, the copy of their marriage license and Williams’s birth certificate, a pressed flower from her wedding bouquet and Frank’s dog tag from time spent in the army and he wrapped the box in a black plastic garbage bag, sealed it tight with duct tape and put it in the old shed on dusty shelf next to his one and only pinewood derby trophy, a reminder of the only positive thing he and his father did together.
In the years since Emily’s passing Frank remarried. He met Carol at the grocery store, aisle three … canned vegetables. She was three years divorced and a little soured on relationships, but he found in her someone he could be silent with and she found in him someone she could trust.
As she worked to turn his house into theirs, she suggested one day that Frank knock down that eyesore of a shed it the back. “What do you need two sheds for anyway?” she said. And with a look that Carol couldn’t interrupt, Frank closed his eyes for a moment and turned and walked away.
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The prophet Joel speaks a timeless message. Unlike so many of the other prophets, Joel doesn’t place his message within a historical moment … there are no chronological markers given … no King’s reign mentioned. The context here is generalized … the location … anywhere … the circumstance … disaster. Joel’s message of repentance and return to God is a messaged targeted to those who have befallen disaster and don’t know what to do next, how to move on. It is written to those whose future is uncertain, whose hopes and dreams have been laid to waste, whose hearts have been broken and who don’t know how to heal. To all of us the prophet speaks on behalf of the God … “return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; rend your hearts and not your clothing.”
The heart is a complicated place. It holds all our greatest joys and deepest disappointments. The heart is home to our hopes and our fears, the best of who we are and the worst. The heart is where our wounds heal or fester. It is where we harbor resentment and burn with anger. It can overflow with love and it can sing with joy. It can hold our pain and break with heartache. It can be filled with light or be made heavy with sorrow. Darkness and light can co-exist within its chambers. We can follow our hearts or choose to ignore them. Still they beat with the truth.
The heart is home to the truth about us. It is all in there. All the good and all the mess, filled with the stuff we treasure and the stuff we despise. Like an old shed, it is where we store a lifetime of fallout for better or worse.
The prophet Joel gets that. God gets that. And so this timeless message reaches out to us through the pages of scripture, finding us on Ash Wednesday, a day that marks the beginning of Lent, a season of reflection, of truth telling, of repentance and healing. A season where we see the truth about ourselves reflected in such stories as the betrayal of Judas, the denial of Peter, and most clearly in the death of Jesus Christ. It is a season that demands from us honesty … not a showy rending of our clothing or even a display of ashes smeared on our foreheads for all to see. This can’t be about pretense. Hypocrisy not accepted. The work of Lent is honest and vulnerable. It is real and truthful. It is painful and beautiful. It is a rending of the heart … a tearing it open and examining the contents. It is truth telling and spring clean, dusting the shelves and taking good long look at what we have stored there … unwrapping our memory boxes and embracing our trophies. It is dealing with the junk that has piled up, a result of our own denial. It is making peace with empty cribs and rusty bikes and a faded leather strap. It is courageous work, for surely it will stir up stuff … feelings, emotions, old wounds and long forgotten joys. We might be afraid that we won’t like what we find, that what is hidden in the recesses of the heart is unseemly and renders us both guilty and unlovable. We might fear that what we find requires of us work … life work … work that requires change or apology or maybe even the need to cut ourselves some slack.
This is courageous work and it is not to be done alone. Rending of the heart is done in the presence of God. “Return to the Lord, your God … return to me with all your heart” writes Joel. Tear it open … offer it up … take a long hard look as your peek over God’s shoulder. It’s all right. God is “gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.”
And we can come in this season of Lent to Jesus … “all who are weary and carrying heavy burdens and I will give you rest. Take my yoke and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble of heart and you will find rest for your souls.” (Matthew 11:28)
That sounds so good. Too good. Who can dare to believe that opening yourself up, offering your heart and the secrets it contains, being that vulnerable will result in … rest and peace, love and healing, acceptance and forgiveness? We can … we can dare to believe, because that is the good news. That is story of our scriptures.
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I don’t know what Frank did. Whether he tore down the old shed, emptied it of its ghosts, made peace with his past and we gave himself permission to be happy in his present. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t … the rest of his story is unwritten. Just like ours. Will we or won’t we heed Joel’s call. Will we or won’t we return to the Lord with hearts rended?
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