Julie R. Neidlinger: Lone Prairie Blog

Restoration for a moment.

written by Julie R. Neidlinger 0 comments link this post

Awaiting a plate of food.

"A miracle in healing is not the conjuring of some magic, nor a disruption in the created order, or something supernatural. Rather, healing exemplifies the redemption of fallen creation, the restoration of the created order, the return to the usual, the normative, the natural."

-- William Stringfellow, A simplicity of Faith: My Experience in Mourning

Instead of providing a little snack for the children during the four-day children's crusade, we provided a full meal at noon. The story isn't in our change of mind or heart or in the logistics and reason for doing it. I'm not going to make a fishes and loaves analogy, either. The story is the miracle of small things and all things, the restoration Stringfellow talks about, and how we see through a glass darkly.

The usual question I ask and hear on these trips to Nicaragua is why I am so blessed in the comforts of earthly life and why our Nicaraguan friends have to struggle and do without. How can I throw $3 away at Starbucks and how the same amount might be a day's wage on the farm in Nicaragua?

I have no answer. Never have.

"It would be easy to wallow in 'why'," I said during one such discussion. "I could focus on the inequality and question God into my own spiritual oblivion, and be none the wiser. It doesn't change anything and only keeps me from changing."

The big, obvious prayer for a miracle would be that God would lift the poor out of poverty, restore justice, and perhaps, if I dare admit that I think it, punish me for having a comfortable life of spotty service to Him that I've done nothing to deserve.

He will restore. The last will be first. Blessed (even if I don't see it) are the meek, the humble. The weak are strong. In death there is life.

I don't get it, not really. Even during one of Cecil's last morning devotions, when he characterized these kinds of paradoxes as "dynamic polarities" -- Total free will and totally predestined! Jesus, totally man and totally God! -- I knew I could only grasp the understanding that such a concept existed while not really grasping the concept.

I would not have eaten the food we prepared for the kids because I don't really know hunger in the realm of not knowing if I'll get to eat again. All I saw was the chicken that landed in the huge pot of just-finished boiled noodles, and the barely-washed plastic cups and forks with a suspicious, greasy residue after multiple days of use.

The food went out of the kitchen, the kids ate and drank noisily, and they left with full stomachs. That's the story, the little commonplace miracle of hunger subsided. It was the restoration, momentarily, that I wait to see in a large scale when I wallow in "why, God, why" instead of seeing the small works of His hand, the small works that mimic and point to and are part of something larger. Does it really matter if I don't see the larger? Does that change the situation or the need or the call to obey?

The real question, maybe, isn't one of the easy, obvious why -- why are things unjust in this life? why don't you do something, God? why do I have so much and others so little? -- but instead, why do I continue to see the abnormal injustice as the normal and miss how the miracles, big and small, are a peek on the other side of the dark glass?

I keep thinking there's another way to see the inequality and the injustice and the concept of restoration according to God's plan, but after too long, I easily fall back into the laziness of wallowing in why. It's pretty tough to function in semi-understanding, and a lot easier to ask unanswerable questions that make me feel miserable and blind me to the small miracles.

You know what? I don't know why. If you can't stop asking it, at least pass around a few plates of food and get in on the moment of restoration before it fades away.