Hanging Around With her Pants Down

She wasn't much older than I am. She might have even been my age. Sometimes it is difficult to discern age when face bears the deep lines of living on the streets, of mental illness, of the hopelessness of this world. She was standing there with her pants down on the corner of Burnside and 6th. She wasn't completely naked. She was wearing a black thong and waving her arms around when a kind woman walked up from behind, her mouth saying something like "Let me help you," and her gracious hands pulling up this woman's pants before the signal turned and the Good Samaritan walked across the street.

My light turned, and I, just another 'normal looking' thirty-something mother in jeans (pulled up over my underwear), my GAP shirt, and my Suburu Outback, drove on. But the woman with her pants down went with me. She was in my mind as though we had traded places, and I was the one on the corner who needed a stranger to pull up my pants.

Do you ever wake up in the morning groggy? Or have those days when even two cups of coffee can't pierce the sense of blahness hanging over you? I do. In fact, so regularly that I mark them on my calender because, strangely enough, they seem to come on cue every month about two days before a regular monthly visitor. It is on these days that I am convinced that hormones are the pits. My mom says, "Yes, but you'll miss them when they are gone, Caroline." Perhaps. But the power they hold for two vicious days until the hormonal cycle changes and all is again right with the world is downright irritating. Sometimes I feel slightly on the verge of insanity. I feel like I should be that woman on the corner instead of this preppy mommy in a station wagon driving her daughter to swim lessons.

Are we really that fragile? Are our minds so tender that a mere hormonal shift causes all the craziness in my heart to well up and out so that everything seems just a little annoying and tears might pop at any moment? Yes, this mind is that tender. We all are, in fact. We desperately need help. We need someone to come up behind us and pull up our pants.

This fall we are hosting at our house a small group from church to study the Gospel of John. We began last night studying the first chapter. As Jason taught on John, I reflected on Pat's sermon on Genesis 1. He pointed out that from the beginning God forms creation and then He fills it (for example, he seperates the light from the darkness and He fills it with the heavenly bodies- the sun, the moon, etc..or He makes the waters of the earth and He fills it with swarms of living creatures). There is a literary structure not only to the creation story but to God's story of redemption. He is forming us and He is filling us with His life, His Spirit, His glory as we walk through the darkness of this life. And then last night Jason guided us through the beginning of John which bears remarkable similarities to the first chapter of Genesis. "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth" (John 1:14). We also looked at the purpose of the book of John which John says is "that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name" (John 20:21).

It is days like this when life feels so fragile that my feeble, weak faith reminds me that I am not as self sufficient as I like to think that I am. I am desperately needy and not far from the street corner with my pants hanging down.