Last night for a few minutes the conversation turned to Ebenezers. Monuments set up, places of remembrance, piles of ordinary stones marking extraordinary situations.

We're on our way and it seems to be the theme of our friendships recently. I picked up a friend from the airport the other night and we talked about places we've left behind and the places we're headed and how still Zion is in our hearts. Yesterday as we kayaked toward the sunset we three asked the question, "Why not?" And surely, why not? At the end of the night, peppered with worship and laughter and a campfire he closed his prayer saying this: we know we're on our way to eternity, but God, eternity starts here, now.

We're on our way, but we're already there.

I have set an Ebenezer up somewhere along the way, it doesn't matter where, but its placement confuses me sometimes. I thought I left it here, but then maybe it was there, perhaps it was in this situation, or maybe there. Until someone asks and I throw my hands up and say, "I don't know! I don't know what or where the goodness of God is! I don't know where I left it and I don't know if I can find it again."

But today I read about Samuel's Ebenezer, his monument of God's faithfulness and I love this. I love this:

Then Samuel took a stone and set it up between Mizpah and Shen. He named it Ebenezer, saying, "Thus far has the LORD helped us."

Thus far has the LORD helped us. Up to now. At this point. All the way to this moment. Thus far.

But we're not through yet.

And I am reminded of Psalm 84: Blessed is the man whose strength is in you, who have set their hearts on pilgrimage. Another version says, "in whose hearts are the highways to Zion." And yet another says "whose hearts are the way you travel."

We are vagabonds at heart. Setting our sights on eternity, but starting now. Setting Ebenezers along the way, making Thus Far part of our spiritual vernacular.

We haven't arrived, but He has and so we're on our way.

It's settling in, the furious sound of silence. I stand at our dining room window last night and look out on Elm Street. It's 10pm and usually the sidewalk is littered with people heading downtown, the street is still one line of cars, the police station across the street keeps a steady revolving door. It's springtime in Potsdam.

But then in one day, or week or two, it all stops. Four universities have finals, graduations, commencements, awards, and a trail of taillights is seen in every direction. We hunker back down to boring old New York State license plates and quiet streets.

I love summer, don't get me wrong, God is more real to me in the summer. People are more real to me. I am more real to me. But this summer feels like a sucker punch in my stomach. I promise her I won't cry the other day, even though she says it's okay. She's always telling me it's okay to cry. But I hold the tears back until Sunday morning, worshiping, listening, hugging girls who live on the other side of the world, hugging people I won't see again on this damp earth.

At breakfast the other morning he said people are replaceable and winced a second later for my certain glare. But it plays over and over in my mind this week. Who is replaceable? Whom have I replaced? Who will be replaced?

I sit on my ideals, horde them like riches: people are not replaceable. There are piles of ache in my heart for all the people who haven't been replaced.

I read the end of John 14 this morning. I'm sad to see it go. So were the disciples:

"You've heard me tell you, 'I'm going away, and I'm coming back.' If you loved me you would be glad that I'm on my way to the Father because the Father is the goal and the purpose of my life."

If we loved Him we would be glad that He is on His way--because the Father is the Goal and the Purpose of His life. I love that.

Because we're standing here expecting a crucifixion, we're standing here with baited breath, waiting for certain mourning. We're the ones left standing at the foot of the cross, at the bottom of the ascension, puttering around earth for the next few thousand years. We're left, while He pursues the Goal and Purpose of His life.

But what if that's our Goal and Purpose?

I'm adding another ideal this spring: that we were meant to pursue the Goal and Purpose of our lives. If it is here, in Potsdam, NY, I am happy for that, because that's where my heart is serving and I want to be joined. But if it's elsewhere, Korea, Pennsylvania, Rochester, Waco, New Hampshire, Albany, San Francisco, Chattanooga, Virginia, Ohio, China, Turkey, India, if that's where its found--so be it.

I love and so I am glad.

The Father is the Goal.

I grasp for the tenor of my heart, fingering the flesh and the feeling, the Spirit and the Living. I find nothing. I take measured breaths, an intermittent gauge, a test.

The scales are leveled: nothing weighs nothing.

I mean and I purpose and I try and all I find at the day's end is a lot of nothing. I hold my breath, maybe good things come to those who wait. Maybe they don't, but what if they do?

I know to spit out the What Ifs of yesterday; they left sourness in my mouth, coldness in my heart, but I took comfort in the What Ifs of tomorrow. I used to think that disappointment was the cause of my melancholy, hopes that never saw fruition, dreams that never woke up. But today, while I take the pulse of my life, I find that Hope Deferred is Hope Suspended, Prolonged, Delayed, and this is why the sickness of my heart.

Gathering too much manna for today, I horde tomorrow's supply, stretching my hope too thin: it can't sustain.

It isn't meant to.

Today's portion for today. Hope Suspended, held taut between today's unbending reality and tomorrow's nebulous future, makes the heart grow sick.

John 14 is my dwelling place this week. Learning to ask and not fear, abide and not run, helped by the Holy Spirit, not thinking I must be Its helper. He says that if we ask anything in His name, He will do it. He doesn't give timetables, we are human, bound by time and circumstance; He is God, free of constraints and tomorrows. He gives grace to the doubting, though: Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; or at least believe on the evidence of the miracles themselves.

This comforts.

And so I find evidence around me. I pick up clues from my world. I catch myself believing in the evidence because the hope that there's more is too grand, too big, too overwhelming for today. I pick up white flakes that sustain my hunger, abase my desire. The taste is secondary to the provision.

He provides, that is enough.

Holy Spirit, Helper, help me now to believe. To place the evidence on the scales of my heart--to weigh them heavily against the nothing of their counterpart. To know that You are present. You are here. You are speaking. You are providing.

And that You have, too: given evidence for today.
And that You will, too: give bright hope for tomorrow.

Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.

There is an unexplained sadness cloaking the cherry blossoms and fresh green this spring. I habitually stand on the edge of change and make decisions: will I stay or will I go? Will this sadness lead to death or life? Will I make the right choice? Because death isn't always the end, sometimes it's the thing that's needed for resurrection to occur. And sometimes life is the right choice. Sometimes it's to face change with sheer determination, will-power and not much else and just plow through it.

I say to my friend last night that I'm never sure if we have just enough grace to walk through a season and then either the season or the grace is gone. Does that make sense? We're Americans and we're Christians, so we'll plug on, roughing the harshest of seasons and pioneering through the driest of lands, counting on a shred of grace found somewhere, under the next rock or hard place. It's got to be here somewhere.

But what if it isn't?

What if the grace has gone and it's time to move on? The hope that the grass is a deeper green and lusher quality on the other side isn't a very good way to live life: if we're making grass the goal. But what if the goal is Further Up and Further In!?

I remember being nine or ten years old and my mom reading aloud from Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia. I never knew until a decade later why The Last Battle gave me goosebumps under my grandmother's afghan:

The difference between the old Narnia and the new Narnia was like that. The new one was a deeper country: every rock and flower and blade of grass looked like it meant more. I can't describe it any better than that: if you ever get there you will know what I mean. It was the unicorn who summed up what everyone was feeling. He stamped his right fore-hoof on the ground and neighed, and then cried: "I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason why we loved the old Narnia so much is because it sometimes looked a little like this. Bree-hee-hee! Come further up, come further in!"

I love that. I love that.

Because here we are wandering around this representative kingdom, looking for shards of grace, shreds of comfort, something, anything, that looks like what its supposed to look like.

But we won't find it. It's not more grace we need, or more friends, or more hope or plans or goals: it's a deeper country, one that smells strangely familiar, like our current one, only so much better.

That's our real country. That's where we belong. Here? This sorrow? This season? This moment of change? This lifetime of unsettledness and fear and uncertainty? Mere shadows of the real thing.

You have a problem, she said, sticking her cold feet underneath mine and handing me a box of tissues. We do things in order here: comfort, necessity, correction.

And after it all I agreed with her. I never denied that there was a problem and that it was mine, all mine. Problem: I don't trust God. Didn't I just say that?

Problem: I consider a matter and decide that God has already decided the outcome and it's not my preference, whatever that is. I'm no pessimist when it comes to others' lives, I think all sorts of grand things about them, but my own life, it's small and inconsequential whether what I want happens. I think that, I really do.

Along with being a boring God, my God is also always proving me. He is always setting the bar just too high, out my reach. Always asking a bit too much, more than I can stomach. He's withheld all the good things I want and gives me all the good things I don't care about. He is a God of relentless pursuit, always nagging me to get up, give more, be more, be less, sit down, shut up, and wash my hands, for His name's sake!

And I always feel proved. Not proven. Never having come through the fire, emptied of impurities and free of all dross. I feel constantly shifted and strained and mixed back together again. As if everything I do will never add up to one complete, thoroughly tried, clean piece of gold.

I've still been listening to that same song all week. "Jesus, Jesus, how I trust you, how I've proved you o're and o're." And I'm reading about Gideon besides. I read about him over and over again. Here was a man who was proven, yes, but more-so, he proved. He said, God, You are who I think You are and I'm willing to give it all, do it all, walk in that land and claim it with only 300 men, but first, do this for me. Then this. And this too.

I think that we're not supposed to test God, but maybe we are. Maybe the only reason I feel tested all the time is because I haven't once tested Him. I've never pulled a Jacob, holding on until He blesses me. I've never demanded like Jabez, using strong verbs and big requests. I've never laid down a fleece like Gideon and expected, really expected, a miracle. I've never prayed for three nights in the belly of a fish, really believing that I'll make it out of there alive.

I've never asked for more than I'm absolutely sure that I'll get.