The Practice of Getting Lost: Wilderness
April 14, 2024 • William A. Evertsberg • Exodus 2:11–25
What’s your Midian, and did you ever have to spend forty years there? Fill in your own blank: forty years in Flint, forty years in Fayetteville, forty years in middle management, forty years in retail, forty years waitressing, forty years working for someone like Steve Carell in "The Office", forty years in a tedious marriage, forty years in a wheelchair, forty years tending a disabled child, some unexpected caesura in the middle of your intricately choreographed life?
The Greatest of These, I: Patience
September 10, 2023 • William A. Evertsberg • 1 Corinthians 13:1–4, Exodus 14:5–14
That’s what Paul does in First Corinthians 13 with the simple, common concept of love, breaks it up into its constituent elements and the first rainbow color of love is Patience. If we love someone, we will be patient with his foibles and failures. If we love everyone, we will be patient with their foibles and failures. BECAUSE—now, listen to me; this is very important—BECAUSE, as someone put it, BECAUSE “we must display to others the same patience God has shown to us in our creation and reconciliation. How could we offer to our fellow creatures less than what we ourselves have received: ungrudging patience continually renewed?”[1] Yes? [1]David Baily Harned, Patience: How We Wait upon the World (Boston: Cowley Publications, 1997), p. 159.
The Unnamed, IV : Pharaoh's Daughter
February 12, 2023 • William A. Evertsberg • Exodus 2:1–10
This is one of those classic tales you find in every age in every land among every people in every language where the oppressed humiliate the oppressor. In these prototypical tales, the enslaved are smarter and craftier than the powerful, like in Hogan’s Heroes where the POW’s keep outwitting the Nazis who are supposed to be in charge. Or the Roadrunner who is supposed to be prey is way shrewder than the Coyote who is supposed to be the predator. Or did you ever see that great film Django Unchained where Jamie Foxx and Kerry Washington make fools of Leonardo DiCaprio and Samuel Jackson? With these kinds of stories, the disenfranchised poke a finger in the eye of their oppressors with their infernal whips and chains.