I Dream of Jesus

Dear TEAMS, 

Our friend’s  beautiful green eyes started to well with tears, and by reflex her fingers went straight under them to sop up the tears.  I’d been talking with her about her husband’s death while her two small children played around us in the after-church fellowshipping, while the gymnasium is cleaned up and everything put away.  We were oblivious to everything but our conversation and Mom radar, pinging out frequently to make sure her kids were fine.  She was confessing how hard life basically was in this her first year as a widow.  “I just wish he’d come back.  This wasn’t in the plans,” she quietly stated.

I mentioned something to you all about it at dinner today, after E kindly asked after her.  But as I sit on the sofa in our big room now, I am trying to convey in one tiny blog post the absolute, complete, confusing-and-castrating powerlessness I felt this morning.  

I am old enough that this rare feeling is no stranger to me, actually.  In fact, most people who have truly been present in their days will blessedly and dreadfully experience a depth of vulnerability at this level at least a couple times.  It is usually brought on by external circumstances and people, born of evil intentions that violently ripple outward at the final earthly action the intent spawned.  You have been privy to some of my life experiences that have caused this, and I don’t wish to outline them in this oddly public-yet-secret forum.  Even you, as young as you are now, experienced it on 9/11/2001.

When I was younger, I watched too much TV and one of my favorite shows was I Dream of Jeannie.  Larry Hagman played an astronaut who found a genie’s lamp on a beach where he landed after a splashdown in the ocean (which was a routine ending of a mission of space travel in the Sixties, incidentally).  When he rubbed it to clean it off, the Barbara Eden character (Jeannie) came out and granted him a wish.  Somehow, he took her bottle and her back to his home in Cocoa Beach, FL and for several seasons led a complicated life with a genie named Jeannie.  

However, this is what you really need to know about that show:  whenever Jeannie wanted to grant her Master’s wish, she would fold her arms in front of her with her elbows away from her chest, and do a hard blink with her eyes.  Blink!  His modest den became a throne room in Versailles.  Blink!  The phone cord would unplug itself from the wall.  Blink!  A seven-course meal would suddenly appear in the kitchen.

At my tender age, I actually thought if I tried hard enough I could Jeannie-blink things and physically tried it throughout my single digits.  I tried it on my very messy room, to clean it up.  I tried it when I had to fold the laundry basket.  I tried it when I saw someone I loved crying.  And I tried it when everything I deemed safe began to unravel and fall away like ash.

And today in church, I wanted to try it again.

The comfort from all of this for you, my dear Children, whom I love more than my own life itself, is that we actually have access to a Greater Power to set things aright in our lives than some measly little blinking genie.  Because, as sure as I know that water is wet and sunlight is bright, someday everything really will be okay for our friend and her family.  At the end of her life, she will have had more days of joy than of missing her husband, and she will see how God’s plans for her life worked to her benefit and welfare, and she will probably experience greater lasting love than the 10 married years she had.  None of these things will be instantaneous, a la' a Jeannie blink.  But come they will, because through Jesus we serve a loving, kind, good, merciful, and compassionate God whose Father’s touch is more knowing, efficient and thorough than a magical genie, and whose Daddy’s heart loves greater and with more hope than a story could ever tell.

Love,