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| Early in my stay in Louisiana, the first of the packed boxes. |
LOUISIANA
Boxes, none of them empty.
Boxes filled with books, kitchen supplies, the knick-knacks from the junk drawer in my dad's desk before he and my mom left their Louisiana home in April 2020, never to return.
That wasn't the plan. We were still living under "two weeks to flatten the curve," and the plan was for my octogenarian parents to remain in North Carolina, near family, until it was safe to go back and resume their lives.
But pandemic fears and restrictions dragged on, and there were health problems and ... well, my parents' warm, spacious, inviting home ended up sitting empty for nearly a year.
In February 2021, I traveled to Louisiana to empty the house so we could put it on the market. And there I filled boxes. So many boxes. And those boxes, along with so much furniture, were loaded onto two moving trucks with two different destinations.
Some of it went up to my parents' new home in North Carolina. Some went to my sister's house, a block away from them. Some went to charity. Most of it came to me, to my house--which is now full, fuller than I ever imagined it would be. Full of my parents' furniture, full of their books, full of their knick-knacks that no one had use for but I couldn't bear throw away.
Yet, although I appreciate the warm feelings and the nostalgia that have settled permanently in my house, I can't help but feel a certain emptiness. My house is full, but so much of it now is now out of context. My parents' stuff belongs, yet it doesn't belong. Life has changed much in the past few years, and my house is now like a crazy quilt, nothing matching, yet everything still somehow holding together.
Is that fullness?
GEORGIA
Over the past few months, I have walked the trail at my workplace, memorizing Paul's epistle to the Ephesians (ESV). I struggled to commit the long sentences, with their multiple phrases and clauses, some of which seem to circle back on themselves before taking a whole new path, to memory. They were so . . . full. Sentences bursting at the seams. Just when you think Paul is coming to an end, ready to take a deep breath before moving on, he adds another phrase, and then another . . . and then yet another.
Some would call this poor writing. I myself once thought of it as poor writing. But as I memorized, I began to see how Paul's style--phrase over phrase, building, adding, crazy-quilt like--reveals, in its own poetic way, the fullness that he writes about--the fullness of God's love, the fullness of Christ, "who fills all in all." And when I recite these sentences aloud, I get a palpable sense of that fullness, that abundance.
I don't know if Paul was trying to be a 21st-century poet when he wrote this letter. I'm pretty sure he wasn't. But I love how his joy and his urgency, his vibrant love for the church, and the fullness of Christ that he was experiencing literally overflows into his writing--even when it sacrifices, maybe, a bit of clarity at first glance, and instead imparts a sense of . . . well, fullness. More-than-fullness.
Doesn't God's love do that? It doesn't make sense, really, if you think about it. And yet it flows and overflows, even though we don't deserve it. And it never ends, even when we feel tired and sad and empty and we can't make sense of anything. Even then, he loves us and blesses us. Even then.
A PRAYER
During this Lent season, I pray that you--and I--will know that fullness, even as our lives feel upended and increasingly out of context, as hope sometimes proves elusive, and as the world seems to fall apart around us.
For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. -- Ephesians 3:14-19
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