Kirkepiscatoid

My "Working backwards through the Psalms" daily exercise has brought me to Psalm 60, v.2: “You have shaken the earth and split it open; repair the cracks in it, for it totters.”

Again, we are not talking about God the Cosmic Coke Machine here. We are talking about a God who understands the world will always be broken and parts of us that will always be broken. I tend not to think of God as that cosmic Coke machine where you put prayer quarters in and good stuff comes out; I've spoken of that many times before. I tend to think of God as more of a gravitational force where everything helps hold everything together, and God provides the electrons. To me, God’s very nature is relational, i.e., covenental.

As long as there are broken people inhabiting the world, that relational nature causes the world to be broken, too. But the power of God being God adds a dimension to the relationship that allows these broken aspects to still be held together. Ok, if you read this blog, you know I have a very strange but fairly understandable power of analogy...and you are going to laugh about the analogy I’m going to use...it’s like an episiotomy.

When I was on my clinical rotations, we would sometimes make a decision to do an episiotomy because the circumstances were such that making a controlled tear was more desirable than letting nature take its course--the baby's head was bigger than we gave credit, the labor is getting long and Mom-to be has a narrow birth canal, things like that.

We made a decision that having a "planned tear" carried less risk than an unplanned one to avoid an unplanned tear potentially ripping the anus or urethra, to avoid risk of future incontinence, or potentially narrow the introitus or involve the clitoris and make future sex more painful. Then after delivery, it was usually the medical student or intern’s job to sew it back up (Usually with the husband/boyfriend leaning over your shoulder and going, “Put an extra stich in there for me, doc, heh heh.” I’ll never forget one woman’s response to her husband’s remark—she yelled, “Just sew the damn thing shut!” )

But the fact remains we made a decision to make a rip of our own to save a more treacherous, unpredictable rip later, and then sewed it back up.

Our world is always going to have unpredictable risks of ripping, from the day we are born to the day we die. My weird world is certainly full of them. Sometimes I think these rips can also rip through my own scars and risk ripping open my old scars again and again and again. I am starting to wonder if those painful and difficult moments we feel in God’s presence are simply episiotomies...controlled tears that God will sew up again, cuts that we do not really want inflicted on us but we know in our heart they are for the better, and are there to lessen the likelihood of more unpredictable cuts that are harder to fix and result in more overall damage. Interesting thought.