Should I Stay or Should I Go

It is ever hard to leave the space you occupy when challenged to take up a new thing. Even if you consider it might be God who is calling you, leaving the familiar for the unknown is daunting. Think about this: If called by God to take up a covenant, a holy agreement, it means you are asked to leave something as well. In the experience of the ancient people of God, they were pressed to choose faithfulness referred to in their great spiritual calling— “Hear, O Israel: The Lord your God is the only Lord. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. Love your neighbor as yourself.”

To choose this relationship was to leave loyalties to local gods, the deities of people in their regions. In the same way, when Jesus asked people to follow him, they left what they knew, to move into what they did not know and would eventually discover. The matter of choice is fascinating in how it sends you onto a particular path and away from other paths. Here are odd lines of verse I jotted down years ago, playing with this idea:

Hello/Goodbye: The Irony of Volition

Saying yes can shut down
vast possibility—It's a trade-off
to gain by choosing
is to lose all not chosen
Saying hello is goodbye to those not greeted
It’s the risk of investment
in the one receiving your hello
Saying no opens up
unfathomable possibility
Closed is the avenue declined
the vast scope of potentiality lies open
There is pain in choosing
with the hi and bye that
ensue in decisions
It is the costly irony of freedom.

DWP+ October 2010

Yes, in their selection to follow Jesus, his disciples turned away from familiar ways. Almost half of them said goodbye to fishing in the Lake of Galilee. One left the tax booth. They all stepped into something new in the covenant Jesus proposed.  In the course of their learning, they discovered he was asking each of them to take up their cross and follow. He named the loss, saying, the one who seeks to save one’s life will lose it. To lose one’s life is to save it.

I want to help us stay with the agony of choosing Covenant with God, because not to realize how tough it is means we are not engaging it at all. Here are two new poems, from this morning, owning how natural it is to cling to what we know, and how frightening it is to launch out:

I Would Stay with All My Heart

I anchor myself in place on the
ground: My center of gravity low
Curled—my body is egg-shaped
Don’t make me move or lift me away!
Forehead on the ground
I wish my head was all lead.
Knees shins and feet flatten
as heavy parallel skids
Why not iron? Heavier still
I press palms against the dirt
in front of me
Push fingertips into topsoil
Gripping so tight I force grime under my nails
Wishing my hands sunk in cement
to harden, securing me surely.
What’s wrong with staying right here?
It’s always been right for me.

 Frightening Leap into Covenant
This perch feels so safe
My feet pinned to it comfortably by my weight
Just a lean and muscles springing
would send me to some new spot:
Straight down, or out and up,
on to new places
My arms look and feel like arms, not wings
My bones feel heavy
my body, bulky not lithe
I hear you say, “I will be your speed and lift
you, my airborne sojourner.”
Your proposal meets my tiny slice of excitement
mixed with massive loads of fear
Nothing about the circumstance convinces me to leap
I am left only to trust you, to believe your promise.

Should I stay or should I go?  Jesus calls us. Let’s go.