Pushing Past Ooginess

This past weekend Kelly and I went to my grandparents' 60th wedding anniversary celebration. Sixty years! I might not ever go to another one of those again--congrats, Oma and Opa, on a marriage that has stood lots of the tests of time.

Kelly's mom came down for the weekend to watch our slightly-sick kiddo's (she is wonderful). That meant that Kelly and I got to go a whole 27 hours without singing "The Wheels on the Bus," having our three year old boy ask to see his own poopy diaper ("Whoah! Big stinkies daddy!") or passing graham crackers to screaming kids in the back seat.

This also meant that we got to sleep in for the first time in what feels like centuries. And after nine and a half hours of coveted sleep on Sunday morning, I felt like absolute crap. Sluggish, dazed, and flat-out more sleepy.

What this does not mean, of course, is that I shouldn't ever sleep in again or that my body doesn't need more sleep. What one sleep-in morning revealed was that my body craves sleep, and that I probably need about a week of nine and a half hour sleeps before my body recovers from all the ways that I abuse it.

I thought about this as I was driving home and thinking about my students. An alarming number of them report to me that they absolutely must be busy all the time because they do not like what goes on in their minds or their souls when they stop. They feel oogy when they stay still, so they keep going and going and going.

This is like trying to pour concrete over a swamp. Eventually, unless you drain the swamp, the swamp will win. For some of us, there is plenty of initial push-back when we sit still for very long. Lots of us have medicated ourselves enough to try to cover over the soul-dissonance that's occuring deep within us.

But until we learn to push past the ooginess, there is no real wholeness. Repentance, redemption, freedom, joy, forgiveness, love...these are not things found in cover-up and escape. These are only found if we're willing to take the longer, harder road of working through the initial angst of our bodies, minds, and souls to the joy found on the other side. This is the way of Christ. And until it becomes our way many of us will simply be stuck with our own noise and very little peace.