Be like Locust Street
“Be like Locust Street, always working on yourself.” That was the text to the first Quad Cities-themed meme I saw after moving here.
Surely it can’t be THAT bad, I thought.
Two years in, maybe there is some truth in that meme.
Just this week, as I was hanging out with some amazing St. Paul people who came to the building to help with Karibu Market, our twice monthly food pack with our friends at Tapestry Farms, multiple people came in and declared that getting to the church is so hard with all of that construction on Locust.
The progress is so slow, can’t they just go faster?
It seems natural for us to expect expediency though, right? Our world and lives can move rather quickly, and we can forget that not everything can (or should) go at a break-neck pace. Sometimes we need to be intentional, take our time, and grow.
I think the most frustrating part of road construction is the detour that you have to take in order to accomplish even the simplest tasks. The five minute drive to the grocery store now takes 15 because you can’t cross a simple creek, for example.
Detours on our daily routes are frustrating.
It makes me wonder about the detours of our lives; whether spiritual, faith, or just everyday lives. Living an active faith is hard enough, even when things are going great. But what happens when things happen and we have to adopt new patterns and directions, when we are forced to take a detour that we don’t want to take.
Like loss.
Or Grief.
Or a layoff.
Or a breakup.
Or…
In a world of quick fixes and easy answers, one of the hardest things we have to do is realize that for so much of our lives, we are not in control.
Healing takes time, reconciliation takes work, communities mature slowly and we only realize that in retrospect, the detour is what continues forming us to be who God needs us to be. All of us are kind of like Locust Street, aren’t we? Works in progress.
And while there isn’t much comfort in that, there is some freedom. Not the freedom that says you must always be trying to make yourselves better, but that God has placed people in our lives that constantly reform who you are, people and experiences that open your eyes to new and different ways of living, of faith, of life.
Detours in our faith are ok even as they are frustrating. But we know that God continues to be at work in us, around us, through us. We will never be finished or complete in this life. But we know that the perfect grace of God will be there, even in the worst detours.
