Practicing Resurrection
“So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute … Give your approval to all you cannot understand … Ask the questions that have no answers. Put your faith in two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years … Laugh. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts … Practice resurrection.”
- The Country of Marriage by Wendell Berry
I’m turning these words of Wendell Berry over in my head, over and over again and then going back to Jesus’ words from John 12, “The man who loves his life will lose it…” and I get this puff of air caught somewhere in my chest. It’s full of what is hard to stomach about this terrible advice I hold as truth. It’s full of hesitation of what I know I should do and all I want instead.
But I go back to these words of Jesus and Berry and wonder again and again at the freedom that lies here.
I see not everything has to make sense to me. I see what seems like foolishness, is actually worth living for. The loss of all that want frees me to grow into who I was intended to be.
To not understand, but sink down into fertile soil because that is the way to eternal life, is an adventure.
To consider all I know (and it’s not as much as I think), to follow Christ anyway into the resurrected life, can seem like failure to a world that clings to facts, to knowledge, to what is seen. But as Berry suggests, I can laugh. And as Christ declares, God’s name will be glorified.
So how will I live? In the safe world of facts and the fearsome world of opinion?
No – live like a wheat seed, sacrificially covered in the rich goodness of truth, waiting for the promise of something it cannot see. Refuse to live a life all for yourself, unsure of what you will look like, how much fruit may come or how you will benefit, not paralyzed by fear– live a transformed and resurrected life, live for the One, live to declare the glory of our God.