Advent 5: Tent-camping
Advent 5: Tent-camping
I am in my tent. It’s 7pm on the 1st of December, and it’s 60 degrees on a clear starry evening. It’s a good night to enjoy the farm and not just work the farm, so I am sleeping down by the pond this evening.
I have always loved tent-camping. When I was in my twenties and plenty confused about life and love, I abruptly left law school and traveled the country with just my tent and jeep for six months. I learned a couple of things about tent-camping.
The first thing I learned is you meet all kinds of different tent-campers in the campgrounds. At one campground in Key West, Florida my neighbors included backpackers from Oregon, a retired couple from Oklahoma, bankers from New York, and a track team from Nigeria. Each night we gathered around a campfire to trade stories and share experiences as if we had been doing that our entire lives.
The second thing I learned is that you are a little vulnerable. Your backyard is my front yard so there are no fences and you can’t avoid one another. That means you do get great conversations with the best belly laughs, but also drunken fights and bark-all-night dogs. Anyone can steal your stuff and they also can hear pretty much every conversation you have.
All this to say that shockingly, God appears to be a tent-camper!
When John tells his version of the Christmas story the Greek literally says “the word became flesh and pitched a tent amoung us.”
Eugene Peterson has translated it as “the word became flesh and moved into your neighborhood.” I might have liked that when I lived in the city, but the original Greek has more meaning for me.
Are you lying in a bed so depressed that you think it will never get better and you will never get up?
God has pitched a tent next to you.
Does anxiety race first through your mind and then your body so that your nights are full of twist and turn and twitch and you can’t sleep a wink? God has pitched a tent right beside you.
Are you crying silently in grief and sadness? Is your grief too deep for words? Maybe it is even buried so deep you don’t even notice how it affects you anymore. God is in the tent next to you.
Does she drive you crazy? Does he make you so mad? God has pitched a tent next to them too.
One day on that six month camping trip I was hiking up near Durango, Colorado in some thick woods. If you know me you know I have no sense of direction (one of my nicknames is actually “wrong-way-Barry”) so, yes, I got lost. Day turned to night, I had no flashlight and this was back in the dark ages before GPS and even cell phones.
The more I tried to find my way out of the woods in the pitch black the more fearful I got. With my monkey-mind, I actually imagined at least seven ways I would be eaten alive in the wild and about twenty ways the obituary would be written. And then I heard voices. I listened some more and found those voices on a trail. It was a family headed back from their campfire.
They offered me a flashlight and some left over Hershey’s bars from their s’mores. I kept following them and we kept heading in the same direction and it turned out that they were staying in the same campground as I was. Just a few tents over.
If you are having trouble with all the religious stories at this time of year, try this one on—when you are lost and scared, One will show up with just enough light for the road ahead, and just enough manna for the journey, and then will not leave you. God has pitched a tent right next to yours.
