It's About Time

I remember the first time someone called me a "lady".  I don't mean, young lady, or ladies and gentlemen.  I was about 25 years old, and I was coming out of a store when a young girl and her dad were entering the store through the same set of doors.  The man said to his daughter, "watch out, don't run into that lady."  Yikes!  When does a girl become a lady?  And why is it still so vivid in my mind?  The word lady, the feeling of being unknown as that lady by which the world would see me now... not a girl, not a young person, not a college kid, just a lady?  It freaked me out, But the realization, after sitting with it for some time, was a welcome one.  I was a lady, and it was time to act like one.

I think the modern day church is starting to realize that she too is a lady now.  It was all fun and games at Plymouth, the shore-lined adrenaline to turn the tides, fight the frontline battles, start schools, build bridges or let them burn without turning back, dip and dunk, preach and pray, here there and everywhere, all in the name of liberty without a simple look in the rearview mirror...sails flying, banners waving, flags held high the American protestant church was born to be radical, to set free, to cry out, to make bandage the wounds of this world.  Yet, what shadows she now finds herself a mist, what walled up rooms, what small confined spaces, what mannerless abandonment left to throw-up, her hands, her skirt, her majesty punk-rocked and chain worn childless and adorned with ash- she is a lady now...

This lady full of graceless interactions, a prideful inheritance, born of a barbaric lineage, spoiled of an unknown privilege, carries with her the indelible hope of the unborn child. The promised babe of Christmas morn unpackaged and yet pristinely wrapped, timeless and completely unexpected.  Birth itself a scar that leaves the fold in doubtless wonder.  The cry of the wind turned right, the sun in place and the moon to pull the stars to their rightly positions, the waters that creep along the earth, the spheres of ice and dry land, the forested plains and peaks where snow lies, each scream through the night as the pulsing continues, the rise of heat, the drop of water, the blood that sheds from battered days... This lady walks to and fro under the moon-lit sky, heeding the night's mystery to bring forth her babe under the stars each one promised as the watcher waits in peril.

If the Church is a lady upon the birthing stool, the world is in marvel awaiting her first born breath.