Contemplation on Song of Songs 2:8
It starts out the same as it always does. Silly me! I think, half laughing, looking down at my foot, caught in a snare I forgot to look for in this forest I walk through every day.
The snare is always the same loop of wire. Made of doubt and my fear of separation. Threaded with my worry that I’m outside the belonging, rather than safely tucked away inside the pocket of the One who keeps me with him always. The wire is cleverly hidden under leaves of abandonment, dug into the dirt of a little hole carved by my uncertainty that He even exists at all.
I tug and I struggle a bit, thinking at first it’ll come loose – sometimes, very rarely, it will – if I remember what I’m supposed to remember.
What was it I was supposed to know? My brow furrows as I try to remember that one thing that feels true – that will snap me out…
But this time the wire cuts deeper, and my skin starts to ache with a bruise of loneliness that spreads all over. My falling into this snare wasn’t just one misstep. It started a few weeks ago when I let a little thought start plaguing me with accusations and I lost sight of that truth I’m supposed to remember. That accusation was a hiss and a horrible shadow – and listening to it made me lose my way. It even followed me into my dreams and hissed at me there that maybe God was different than I thought. Maybe I was a worse kind of person than I imagined myself to be. Maybe I was worthless and so was all of history.
I tried to banish it, but like a patient hunter, Doubt tracked my logic circles, followed me doggedly through my efforts to lose it. Logic circles are part of how I get caught in snares. Even when I sense the direction I’m getting pulled down, my brain is helpless but to try to follow them to a conclusion.
My brain is arrogant that way. It thinks it will figure out something if it just tries hard enough. It follows those logic circles like a hound with its nose to the ground and I can never very successfully stop it. Unless…
What was it I was supposed to remember?
I pull and tug at the snare, my eyes scanning the hills of history for help from my little meadow in time. Looking to find that Silhouette with his long, confident stride, coming to rescue me. If only I could spot him rescuing someone else I would remember.
But the snare is cutting through my faith in the One I love beyond reason. Those hills of history look bleak from my snare and so very vast – and the lives that are piled on them become an indistinguishable mass of what feels meaningless. The cosmos is just too big. How can I make sense of it? Find him there in all that hopeless history?
My gaze grows frantic, searching through the valleys of despair, the ones where Christians were martyred over and over. Where they jumped into the fire and pain in eager zealousness. I don’t find any comfort in their denial of life. Where is he? I wince at the places on the horizon where schisms pop up like cliffs of separation over stupid arguments and legalism and malicious rumours about each other.
Through it all, painted onto that landscape – the hills of history – is a God I can’t recognize. They keep adding to a caricature of him – turning his face away, brushing colours of black wrath over his brow and purple disappointment onto his gaze. He’s becoming something alien and unapproachable in all that death over and over. In all that intelligentsia and the boxes they draw him into to contain him, to understand him. To be right about him.
I stop fighting the snare and tears stream down my cheeks at the idea that I don’t know him at all – that Love is just a wish. A hope that’s silly. And childish to boot.
Blame fills me up – there’s not much else to do when you’re caught. Get angry at the ones you think made the snare. It’s either my fault or theirs that the snare exists and neither of us is very appealing at the moment.
But, then a humming drifts over the hills and down into my meadow… and it’s in that familiar, low, rumble of contentment I’d recognize anywhere.
It’s faint at first, I catch a few notes of it (barely) in the words of a teacher telling me about hope being continually laid out and reserved in safety, like a stockpile of purpose – a well thought out plan for good – one that ends in beauty and is held always for all those who belong as family. (Colossians 1:5) He can see positive trajectories in history, ones that I can’t remember. I’ve memorized that all belong. Not just some. At what he says I realize I might not feel it, but I know I was convinced of it yesterday.
Then a cherished friend comes and sits with me, bringing that hum closer with her light hand on mine. Reminding me I’m not alone or outside. Both of us stare for a minute into the records of our family abuse (because sometimes that is what Christian history looks like from a distance or a snare. A religious, awful mimicry that is abusive rather than holds to authenticity and relationship.)
Her quiet company is like a jewel of hope. She holds my hand without judgement for my struggle, or doubt, or despair, she doesn’t blame me that I’d fallen into the snare so easily. It’s enough to loosen my foot just a little. Give me room to breathe.
The memory is niggling now, he sent help ahead of him this time and it’s why I can hear his hum before I see him. I listen to that humming get closer. I notice the richness of that voice even without words. The way I know the timbre of it well – the way it wraps around my heart and squeezes gently like his hand on my soul. Beyond reason is the true part of it. That I love him without words.
And then he’s there, suddenly, bounding across the hills, his silhouette clear and oh so heart-stoppingly familiar. Striding right for me in that quick way he always strides towards my distress.
My throat is closed entirely as I just sit and wait. There it is – that thing I was supposed to remember. Not a thing at all, really. But a being. Him. Jesus. The one who scoops me out of all my snares.
The one who deals in grace always because grace is a part of him. The one who holds truth always – because he is truth. And he always mingles them together – those two things. And that mingling… it morphs into his steady faith for me when I don’t have any.
Jesus is the One who I’ve watched bound over the hills of history before, plucking up those who feel lost and alone like Tamar and Rahab, like David, like Ruth and Esther. Like Saul and Jonathan and Elijah. Pulling them out of their snares and dusting them off. Placing them safe in his family tree.
And then he’s there, in front of me, eyes twinkling as he crouches down and releases the snare. Snatching me up into his arms where I’m safe and oh so loved. “Silly girl.” He teases, as he tips my nose with an affectionate finger, “the cosmos and its history is my domain, my job to worry about and save – not yours. All you’re supposed to do is look at me and number all the ways I love you.”
Oh yeah. That’s what I forgot.
That he loves me like that.
And blame isn’t for me to hold onto or point out.
That he and his Dad and Holy Spirit will figure it out – those hills of history. That I can rest in his arms and study his heart while he does it. Number the ways he shares himself with me. That when I see him, when I keep watch of him and listen to his heartbeat… love pours into and then out of me like a waterfall – because his love is so powerful and vast it won’t stay still in me. It can’t be contained in just one place, and it gives me so much comfort to feel it overflow – the way his Love is always moving in both directions at once – pulling me into his heart and tugging me out to you, wanting to fill up all the empty, thirsty places in us both until we feel Love everywhere.
