pacific coast
As you step into the ocean, salt water flecks onto your face and floats in the air like a mist. The full body of a wave hits you the wrong way, and you're knocked under it, you are rolling and rolling, backward under the white and blue, eyes opening and stinging and shutting. But you almost savor the stinging salt that coats the back of your throat.
There is something... almost holy in that power. There is longing in reminiscence, when you almost hear the groaning tide again, like putting your ear to a shell.
It reminds you of the hand of God. How relentless His power is, and love. His wild kiss.
salvation mountain
Sometimes what we label naivete is really a guarded treasure, something that very few possess.
It can be boldness. There is a profound connection between childlike innocence and childlike faith.
95 degree heat in the morning, your skin slick with sweat, standing in dead air. But there's a sea of color, imagination and songs to God crafted out of adobe, hay and paint. A mountain in the middle of the desert, half-used paint buckets everywhere, an old man lying still and asleep on a table in a cave of scupltures-- all made from scraps. His face is childlike, even in sleep. This is his life, and he must feel like he has the most important job in the world. The more people that see his mountain, the more people will know that God loves them, that God is love.
park in downtown phoenix
My brother and I sat under a tree to hear the story of a man who had lost everything, house burnt down, friends dead, family gone, clothes stolen from a dark corner of the city. It's a modern day, urban retelling of Job.
But Gavins had so much; he still claimed to have so much. He had a backpack. He also had a Charles Barkely book, which he used to illustrate his notion that "books are incubators of knowledge". He bragged about his speed-reading, which, when attempted out loud, sounded much more like a very rudimentary reading level. Micah and I patiently listened to his broken, word-skipping recitiation of the first chapter. But that wasn't what I really heard; what I heard was the voice of someone who had been swept into head-shaking empathy because of a simple story about a basketball player doing charity. (I guess Charles Barkely meets kids for the Make-A-Wish foundation, and there's a story of him meeting a comatose boy recorded in his autobiography, which Gavins told me 'gave him tears'.) It was a very nice story, and the line that made Gavins look up at me, with wet shining eyes, was about how we take life for granted. A homeless man was teaching me about taking life for granted. He tried to give me his book a few times, but I wasn't able to take it. I wish I could have given him something, but maybe all he wanted was someone to listen to his story.
He cried about that same story over and over. He would cry thinking about the boys and girls Charles Barkely visited who had cancer, who were on their deathbeds. "I don't have much, but at least I have my life, you know?"
He had scripture memorized and buried just beneath the surface in his heart for God to speak through, ancient, perfect words. At one point I started quoting that verse where Jesus says, "just look at the lilies, how they neither toil nor spin," the one that says not to worry about tomorrow, and as I stumbled over a couple words, he completed it with ease. He told me to read Isaiah 55, and I did. Everyone should read Isaiah 55. We were handing out water that day, and Gavins told me to read a chapter that goes to the root of what we were doing, or what it should have been, anyway.
He had survived a rough life on the reservation, an always drunk family, always drunk friends, his best friend stepped in front of a car and was killed, there was a bullet somewhere in his own chest. A medicine man brought him back to life when he was a dead baby.
Some people live out a life illuminated with storytelling, myth forever holding their memories together. But he still knew where all good things come from, tangible or not. He still knew that God is holy, holy, sovereign, loving, everything, Elohim.
"God is taking care of me."
My brother and I walked to the other end of the park, through the drunken heat of Phoenix and in between people sleeping under trees everywhere, stinking and wearing clothes from how long ago only God knows. And on our faces were huge smiles as well as the look of almost-disbelief-but-complete-belief.
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