Barn Raising

Sometimes I struggle. I struggle to see God working in this world. There are times when all I see is the horrible realities of life all around me. All I see is the brokenness of humanity. It is during these times that I have problems seeing what is right in front of me... of seeing God’s love in the midst of the crap. It ebbs and flows... I always believe, always trust... but sometimes I wonder where God is in all of this. I wonder if God is really here or gone missing. Most of the time I wonder if I’m just missing what is really here. But there are definitely times when I struggle to preach the gospel because in many ways the words I speak sound incredibly hollow. How do words take away grief? How do words give hope? I ask myself these questions sometimes.

Now is not one of those times thankfully. Now I can see the ways God is working in the midst of everything. Not great things in matters of scale, but small things here and there remind me that we aren’t alone. We have not been left alone. Something that reminded me of this is something I recently read by Anne Lamott. In her book, Traveling Mercies, she has a section entitled “Barn Raising.” She talks about her friends who have a daughter recently diagnosed with Cystic Fibrosis. She talks about walking on the journey with them from diagnoses up through the time of the writing. Life is not easy for them, in fact it can be downright difficult. Yet she and the rest of their friends continue on the journey with them. Somewhere along the way, she realized that she (and the rest of their friends) could not take away the pain they were feeling. But what they could do, she describes as building walls around them. They can build walls that form into protection. This is what she writes:

Except that we, their friends, all know the rains and the wind will come, and they will be cold - oh, God, will they be cold. But then we will come too, I said; we will have been building this barn all along, and so there will always be shelter. (pp. 153-4)

That’s grace. Crap will happen... but there are people there to walk with you and to build barns around you when you need it. People to cook you food, people to take care of children, people to listen, people to hug, people to cry with you. God builds barns all around us when we need shelter, and uses our friends and other people around us to do it.

Kate