Notes from my Knapsack 8-12-21

Notes from my Knapsack 8-12-21

Jeff Gill

A night in Granville
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A few nights ago, I watched night fall over Granville.

To be fair, I've seen this happen many times: from my back patio or front porch, up on the Denison campus atop the hill, along Broadway during the street fair from the vantage point of a french fryer or on the rockers in front of the Avery-Downer House.

After all, the sun sets every day. Even indoors, we notice it, as the lamps go on and the windows dim and begin to reflect interior light more than daytime shining in.

And we have a lovely variety of places we can be in Our Fayre Village to see that happen. I fondly remember the bicentennial year and the long dinner table through town, the changing of the light and the move from meal to dessert to friends singing on nearby stages (hi, Mary Borgia!).

What made the recent experience I had somewhat unique was it was a weeknight, no particular events in train, just a Tuesday, but a special day in that old friends we'd not seen in person for years were passing through town on their way back to a distant city, Granville conveniently being about midway.

I made my way to Day y Noche, grabbed an outdoor table, explained to the server we might be a while (not knowing how right I was), a promising a tip to balance it out. My wife came along, then our friends within the half hour, and we had dinner, and talked. Let's just say all four of us do well in the talking department, and there was much to catch up with. Wine and margaritas and water with lemon kept us into second rounds, and our meal went from nearly too hot to shady with the sun passing north of the streetscape to the sky starting to purple up.

As will happen, after settling up and nearly closing the place, we jumped over to Whit's before they did the same, and with frozen custard in various forms in hand, we grabbed some public benches. Our conversation or conversations went on apace.

In the sky, the swifts in their irregular and swooping way, filled the dusk overhead and then slowly filtered out of the aerial display, replaced as they went to their elevated beds by bats getting up and out for the night. Both the wing profile and flight paths of bats are more jagged, certainly distinctive. Clearly by day our downtown attics and chimneys and Prospect heights older tree hollows have large numbers of sleeping bats, because there were mobs out as the stars began to come out.

Did I mention we talked? Of things past, and things to come, dreamed of and implausible, nearby and likely. The usual. But at a certain point, as the restaurants closed and the streetlights were all on, we realized the street was empty. All the cars were gone, save mine across the way. So we talked a while longer.

Just before midnight, we agreed it had to end else we turn into pumpkins, so they walked back to the inn, and I my spouse to her car. Then I strolled back down Broadway. No cars, empty even of traffic: I could have walked down the double stripe. It was as it usually is, beautiful, but in a new way to me. I got to my vehicle and interrupted the silence by starting up and driving home, but the next morning, the peace of that scene was and is still with me.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's closed a few joints in his day, but not recently. Tell him when you know it's time to go home at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 7-31-21

Faith Works 7-31-21

Jeff Gill

Enough is all you need

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After the last few weeks, I had a couple of people ask me if I was referencing a book that came out a couple of years ago titled "Enough," by noted Methodist pastor Adam Hamilton. My answer is "no," but clearly after posting the last column in this series, I need to get a copy and compare notes!

It doesn't surprise me that a perceptive and pastoral writer and teacher like Hamilton would have already been all over this topic, because as a minister, it's a reality of life we see in many forms, all around us. The congregation I last served knew of my references to the problem in my occasional comments from the pulpit about storage units, and how they had popped up like mushrooms in rainy summers all over the landscape.

One of our church leaders commented to me that she now couldn't drive past a row or fenced lot full of rental storage spaces without thinking about those sermons, to which a preacher can only say "mission accomplished!"

But I want to talk about something deeper than the highest pile of stuff, even though the stuff is the more visible, blatantly obvious part of the problem. This time last year I was shuttling to my childhood home in Indiana which my sister and I were working to clean out and sell for our mother, and we were getting rid of a lot of stuff. Dumpster loads uncounted, even with myriad Goodwill and other places to pass along what could still be used.

And I wrote a column or two then about warning older parents to check with their adult children about how much of the stuff they were saving for them, and whether they really wanted it. In the last few weeks, I've had three conversations with people who told me a) they didn't like my column then, b) they clipped it, and c) they did after much deliberation have those conversations with adult children.

Sometimes tears were involved, with their kids and with me. Some of it provoked gales of laughter. But all three ended with a large amount of pitching. Stuff isn't love, but we can confuse the one with the other in all sorts of ways.

Which is where this gets real. And getting real, for me, means getting theological. Buckle up for the sermon, friends.

Love is not earned.

This to me is the heart of the Christian Gospel, the good news we point to in the person of Jesus Christ. Love is not, cannot be, is never going to be earned. That's not how love works. Love is a gift, it is grace, a gift freely given, but it's not purchased, it's not obtained by force fiscal or physical, and it's not earned.

The lie this world tells us is that love is indeed earned. By effort, by good works, by our deserving it or achieving it by what we do. If we do the right things, we get love in return. And more complicatedly, love must be given if we have done what we think we need to do to deserve it. The fault line, the crack that is sin at work in the world, is the belief that runs right through the human heart telling us that we have to earn love, even as we understand the beauty and glory of love just clearly enough to realize we can never earn it by our own actions.

You can, however, earn stuff. Plenty of dollar stores to make even more stuff accessible, or you can go on the internet and get the pricey stuff to jolt our endocrine systems for a moment into thinking we got the moral equivalent of love. Or you can keep working to do good things and hope the next piece of goodness we perform will get the job done. That way, however, lies madness, or at least a pile of compulsive behaviors. 

The message of Jesus, from a certain angle, is about how we are each and all essentially loved, loved by God, so much that . . . you may know a Bible verse here. And with that love firmly established from the manger to the cross, we have no fear of the tomb or the storage locker. Because we know in Jesus that we are loved, and that is enough.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's still throwing out stuff. Tell him how you know you're loved at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.