At last I’m able to look back without longing at the walking days – there was a blockage in my spirit that did not permit of writing. A frustration caused by the emotions of completing the walking. It was so necessary to rest and reflect at every level before starting to write and today I feel as if I could write forever – the first time since before the summer.
The emotions were unexpected in their ferocity – grief, pride, a degree of pain, a feeling of separation from team and purpose, loneliness – all these rose up to overwhelm me as we finished. They were given extra weight by the death of Andre Young from Saffron Walden on which I posted a little while ago. I could not have written a recorded account of where and how we walked at that time, I felt so sore we had been so robbed of a young life. And I do not forget yet.
In the last days of walking the county, I had many texts of encouragement and love. I and the team were touched by how friends supported us with their prayers – I know at cost to themselves sometimes. So, what have we been contending for?
Farther Up and Farther In!
Suddenly Farsight the Eagle spread his wings, soared thirty or forty feet up into the air, circled around and then alighted on the ground.
‘Kings and Queens’ he cried ‘we have all been blind. We are only beginning to see where we are…Narnia is not dead. This is Narnia.’
‘The Eagle is right’ said the Lord Digory. ‘That was not the real Narnia. That had a beginning and an end. It was only a shadow or copy of the real Narnia which has always been here and always will be here; just as our own world, England and all, is only a shadow or copy of something in Aslan’s real world. You need not mourn. All of the old Narnia that mattered has been draw into the real Narnia through the Door…’
The new one was a deeper country; every rock and flower and blade of grass looked as if it meant more. The Unicorn summed it up. He 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. Come farther up, come farther in!’
The emotions were unexpected in their ferocity – grief, pride, a degree of pain, a feeling of separation from team and purpose, loneliness – all these rose up to overwhelm me as we finished. They were given extra weight by the death of Andre Young from Saffron Walden on which I posted a little while ago. I could not have written a recorded account of where and how we walked at that time, I felt so sore we had been so robbed of a young life. And I do not forget yet.
In the last days of walking the county, I had many texts of encouragement and love. I and the team were touched by how friends supported us with their prayers – I know at cost to themselves sometimes. So, what have we been contending for?
Farther Up and Farther In!
Suddenly Farsight the Eagle spread his wings, soared thirty or forty feet up into the air, circled around and then alighted on the ground.
‘Kings and Queens’ he cried ‘we have all been blind. We are only beginning to see where we are…Narnia is not dead. This is Narnia.’
‘The Eagle is right’ said the Lord Digory. ‘That was not the real Narnia. That had a beginning and an end. It was only a shadow or copy of the real Narnia which has always been here and always will be here; just as our own world, England and all, is only a shadow or copy of something in Aslan’s real world. You need not mourn. All of the old Narnia that mattered has been draw into the real Narnia through the Door…’
The new one was a deeper country; every rock and flower and blade of grass looked as if it meant more. The Unicorn summed it up. He 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. Come farther up, come farther in!’
(pp146-155 The Last Battle by C S Lewis)
As we contended for the completion of the vision of the wheel, it was about creating a firestorm to draw the edges of the wheel closed. And it was always about going farther up and farther in. (There is much detail not posted here that may unfold later.) Although we didn't see it until close to the end, it was always about carrying Christ in us, the hope of glory, as we searched out and tried to pull through the real county from Aslan’s real world...have we done that? We found doorways to that world as we walked but we still wait to see…we could go so much farther in.
Finally, a comment on the poem – should I, shouldn’t I? I think I will.
It was born of constant sightings of stunted windmills as we travelled the land – there were so many and although some still have sails, they no longer turn. If the purpose of prophetic poetry is to ask subversive questions of the status quo – then I do so humbly in the tradition of Jeremiah (12.1 & 4.19-22) and Gerard Manley Hopkins (Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord). I wrote mine to ask why the mill houses of Essex were no longer productive. You could not do better, if praying for the people of God in Essex, than to meditate on those verses and GMH's poem!
1 comment:
I hear your heart cry, always a sadness when a great project that has taken up so much of one's life comes to an end.
You are still crrying Christ within though and He knows the next step. Blessings.
Did you know by the way that you can set your blog for comments tocome via. E-mail so that you always know when someone has commented without going into your blog?
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