Faith Maintenance
I only recently discovered that “the doldrums” is an official nautical term, referring to an area around the equator where there is little to no wind for sailing. Sailors often avoided this area for fear of being stranded without supplies in the middle of the ocean. But the stillness, lack of movement, and sparse activity on the sea led to the word gaining a new meaning: boredom. I’ve always had a sense that the weeks following Christmas and New Years are our life’s doldrums. Little activity. A much slower, steadier pace of daily living. A general lack of excitement compared to the holidays. Mid-January is just boring.
That doesn’t mean life doesn’t go on. We’ve returned to our jobs by now. Kids have returned to school to face dreaded finals. College students are moving back into dorms to face another semester. We spend far too much time here in Iowa focusing on salting our driveways and debating the best time to give our cars a rinse down, even in single-digit temps. We might find ourselves looking for tasks indoors like replacing lightbulbs or swapping batteries in smoke detectors. We’ve entered a maintenance mode for our lives this time of year: not particularly preparing for anything, not much to clean up this far after December. We’re just… chugging along. We’re in the middle of the doldrums as we wait for the hope of Spring.
Our faith life has these flat periods, too. Not every single moment or experience of faith is going to be as exciting as Christmas, or a baptism, or Easter morning. Mountain-top encounters are a rare occurrence. In those days and minutes in between, we do maintenance on our faith, too. We keep up or restart habits that might have slipped in the busyness of the holidays: personal prayer, journaling, time spent with friends. We might reorganize the cupboards of our souls and focus on building up a new practice or mind shift to help keep us on course. Maybe faith maintenance is just showing up on Sunday and listening to the same Bible reading you’ve heard a hundred times before, knowing when the punchline will land, knowing the outcome of God’s promise, and still reaching out one’s hand for bread and wine, Body and Blood.
Just like an oil change, a pantry restock, or checking in on neighbors and calling our mothers, faith, like any relationship, requires maintenance. Jesus certainly understood this. Throughout the gospels, Jesus would wander off and exclude himself on a mountain to recuperate and pray, fill-up his relationship with God. But these moments didn’t last long. The disciples, the crowds, his critics, they always went out looking for him and managed to bring him back to the energy and rowdiness of life.
That’s where it feels like life, life together and life with God, is at this current moment. Not on a break, but in maintenance mode. Moving along until the weather breaks, the temperatures rise, new seasons and new plans fall into place. It might not be the most exciting, but there’s contentment and refreshment in the doldrums. A time to refuel and refocus for all that lies ahead.
Daniel Eagan
For the job. Maintenance. Of. Garden
Audrey Keeney
Thanks for this good messsge!
Deborah Lamp
Maintenance: that is a good way to think about it. We all need to step back in maintenance mode to get plugged back into our lives. Thanks Pastor Mac, very interesting and a good reminder!
Deb
Connie King
“reorganize the cupboards of our souls”–what a great line. I need to do a bit of this–throw out accumulated junk, and get the cupboard back to what it was designed for.