Psalm of the Spider

tiny lightning green spider

round abdomen

spiny head

front forelegs reaching sensing

splayed back legs twitching rushing

behind it a

shining filament trailing in the air

shiver of light

a puddle

just a sheen of water on the asphalt

pooling from a narrow line of liquid

streaked through by wheels of shopping carts

pause

the urge to cross

where?

why?

measure the strength of the tiny spider desire

by how long it waits

front forelegs reaching stretching

at the meniscus of the water

glimpse the angled thread

stir the tiny spider will

the rush

the skitterflash

the miracle

it’s on the other side

was it the wind?

did a cart wheel

pull that invisible web?

did the angels

shrink down

to cup their hands into steps

for eight pin-dot feet

and the rapid

levitated

crossing?

oh nebulae lean in

oh quarks lift up your heads

oh anxious human

shifting on stiff legs

glasses fogged by masked breathing

feeling the spring wind

funneled through the parking lot

where the line stretches

six feet by six

look close

is the same as looking wide

listen small

is the same as hearing deep

swing round

to the rhythm of the dance

and the measure of your desire

is found in the waiting

and the stirring of your will

rushes the miracle

and the hands of the angels

move your feet across the water

for

the maker of the spider

is the maker of the world

and the world revolves in wonder

so much bigger—and so much smaller—

and there are other eyes than yours

who never see the spider

but see the real and manifold radiance

of the stories they are living

crossing

branching

weaving

still and moving

and if the essence of the spider,

sweet nectar of the moment,

can be found and sipped

in all the moments in the history of time

and all the spaces

of a living breathing world

then will we not all walk

around as drunk and spinning

laugh and fall in the grass

and feel the

amplitude of life

let me show you

The Hadal Zone

There’s a website called neal.fun. On the website is a “game,” where you can scroll down from the surface of the ocean, all the way to the deepest part of the Mariana Trench. Along the way you see the different creatures that live in different zones.

You descend from the upper regions into the twilight zone, where the water is getting deep enough to block the light from penetrating the water. Then the midnight zone, where everything turns black. You keep descending into the abyssal zone and finally reach the hadal zone, which only exists in the ocean’s deepest trenches.

In the complete dark, in the freezing temperatures, in the immense pressure of ten thousand meters of water pressing down on them, creatures live their lives. The grenadier. The chiton. The snailfish. The cusk eel. The hadal amphipod.

Strange creatures with strange names and even stranger appearances. The transparent skin. The lack of eyes. The feelers and nubs. They live and move and do their version of breathing farther below the ocean’s surface than Mount Everest stretches above it.

I think about us and our souls. Do we have trenches? Do we have strange depths that can go completely unexplored our entire lives? What shadowy creatures live inside our hearts? And what would they do if they were ever brought to light?

It takes courage to plumb the depths. In 1960, two men descended in a submarine, braving the crushing pressure and the freezing cold, all the way down to the Challenger Deep, the bottom of the Mariana Trench and the deepest point of the entire ocean.

What kind of courage does it take to dive into the depths of the soul? Is there anyone who can go all the way to the bottom and survive?

1 Peter 1:8b-9

From Peter the Disciple.

To the Exiles.

I have seen him. I have walked behind his dusty feet over mile after mile of parched road. I have eaten with him, laughed with him. I drank wine with him (oh what wine!). 

I can never forget the look in his eyes. I would be right in the middle of arguing with James over the right way to patch a net, and I would look up and meet his eyes by accident, and they would blow straight through me, as if he could see my guts and everything I had ever said or done.

This is why it gets me: You’ve never seen those eyes. Yet you love him. 

It takes my breath away, and at the same time, it doesn’t surprise me at all. He’s the kind of man who can capture the whole world with a word. He captured you, and he set you free. You’ve never seen him. You love him.

And though you don’t see him now, you believe in him. It wasn’t a passing love you had, that blew away with the first autumn winds. It was a love that deepened into trust. So that even though you never saw him when he was here, you believe he’s alive. You believe he’s coming back. He’s your rescuer, and you are confident that he is powerful and true.

Isn’t it a joy to have such a one coming for you? It is the most joyful thing to believe in someone while feeling the safety that comes from knowing your belief is well founded. You are resting secure on a place that will not drop you or let you be put to shame. And so since it is HIM you believe in, you rejoice with an inexpressible joy. 

Do you know the value of that joy? Do you feel the momentum of it in a world that is so laden with sadness and pain? It is a force to be reckoned with. It lifts, like a balloon, and everyone can see the effects whether they realize it or not.

It’s funny. Waiting in joy, with certain belief that rescue is coming...it’s a little bit as though you were rescued already. And although you still live out each day of your exile, so that not a single second of actual time is shortened, the experience of exile is changed. You are not saved yet. The final revealing of the Beloved, when he rides in on the white horse and wipes away every tear, that is not here. But knowing it is coming, knowing He is coming, it brings a kind of rescue for the heart, a salvation not yet of the body but of the soul.

1 Peter 1:8-9 Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, 9 obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.

1 Peter 1:8a

From Peter the Disciple.

To the Exiles.

Jesus Christ will be revealed one day. No one knows when that day is coming. Not even Jesus himself knew when he was on earth. Only the Father has hidden in his mind the time when history will be ended and the king will return to claim his people and his throne and the whole world will be made new, this ravaged and infected world.

Though you have not seen him, you love him.

So strange to love someone you cannot see, and have never seen. But here’s the miracle: you do. Somewhere along the line, Jesus Christ entered into your field of mental awareness, and you were captivated. You love him. Man of sorrows, you love him. Healer and teacher, you love him. Prince of Peace carrying the two edged sword, you love him.

In the time of your exile, his love can nourish and sustain you. But also your own love for him: although far less, and only there because his love came first—still your own love can bring light to your heart. It is good to have someone to love. Someone other than yourself and your own life. Someone to give to. Someone to sacrifice for.

In exile, when the ugly side tends to come out of you and others, when fear morphs everyone into distorted shapes of themselves, still this remains a spark that can blow the whole forest into flame: you love him.

1 Peter 1:8a Though you have not seen him, you love him.

1 Peter 1:6-8

From Peter the Disciple.

To the Exiles.

You rejoice, exile, in the new life and the living hope that God has given. You rejoice in the inheritance waiting in heaven for you. The end of the road is leading somewhere good. Good beyond imagining. The happy ending of all happy endings.

But how do you get there? How do you walk day by day along the road through the minutes and hours of your exile?

In the end there might be joy. In the moment there is fear. Uncertainty. Anxiety. Panic. An exile asks, “When will it end?” “What will happen to me?” When you are in exile you are cut off from something important and life-giving: A home, maybe. A group. A person. A purpose. There are tears.

Many difficulties arise in exile. In the moments of day-to-day life—washing the dishes, putting on clothes, stopped at a traffic light—you can be hit by sudden memories, bringing up feelings of longing or guilt or sadness. Your eyes glaze over, and you are not where you are, but you are where you were, or where you wish you were. 

You bear the weight of that longing or grief, and it makes your hands heavy as they lift plates into the dishwasher. It makes the colors of your clothes fade so that you cannot choose what to wear. It lifts your foot off the gas pedal, so the car drives more slowly and aimlessly, because are you really going anywhere at all?

And then at times you see a decision in front of you: to do this, or that? To come or to go? To work or to rest? And in the moment, the fear closes you in pressing on both sides like a vise, squeezing, driving, narrowing the whole world into this one moment, in which you must do the right thing (if you could only have the wisdom to know what that is and the courage to carry it out), or you and everyone will perish.

To the exiles, you are grieved by various trials. The difficulties of circumstance that bring inconvenience or suffering. The difficulties of the heart that color every view and often seep enjoyment out of life.

It is only a little while. Do you know, that when the end comes, you will look back on these days and months and years as if they were a passing dream?  Not only that, but the trials you endure, the suffering that makes you cry, is making something wonderful.

Your faith. Believing without seeing. Your faith is more precious than gold. Think of the weight of gold. Think of how it shines. How it has value to build, to buy, to give. You have that gold—but better than gold. It is inside of you, the faith that cries out in desperation to a God you cannot see. The faith that steps with courage out into the unknown. The faith that lies back and rests knowing that there is a Father there to hold you.

Your faith is being sanded down, purified, compressed, shined up, cut like a diamond—it is already sparkling through the darkness, and just wait until you see the brilliance when it is all done.

And in the end, when Jesus is revealed once and for all to every person on earth, he’s going to take that diamond that is your faith, and he will hold it up for everyone to see, and they will exclaim and admire and feel the great worth of your faith.

The exile is making that faith. Day by day as you go through the suffering, it is building and revealing that faith. Even on the days when you break down and it feels like you have no faith at all, those are the very days that you will look back on in the end and say, “There. That was the most valuable time. That made something beautiful.”

1 Peter 1:6-8 In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, 7 so that the tested genuineness of your faith-more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire-may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.

1 Peter 1:3-5

From Peter the Disciple, to the exiles.

In exile, your whole life is disconnected from not only where you were but also where you had been going. 

Back at home, you looked down the road into the future, and you could see where it was taking you. You built up skills and accomplishments up to this point. You had history in your relationships that you expected to carry through. You couldn’t see the future; but you saw other people walk the road ahead of you, and you banked on following them.

Then the exile. You were cut off from that home, that life. Your future path took a sharp right turn, and now you’re facing off into at best a cloudy unknown and at worst a systematic dismantling of everything you care about.

Will the exile end? Will the path turn back and join up with the straight and certain dream that you had at home? Or will it march you off and away, farther and deeper into...whatever this is...this place you never wanted to go, this land that is so very much not what you had imagined.

In exile, blessed be the Father. Let me show you the path in front of you that the future holds, the path that the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ has laid out for you, stone by stone.

He laid the path according to his great mercy. All this that he has made for you, he made in perfect alignment with his natural character, a character that gives food to the hungry, that takes the murderer’s head out of the noose, that plucks a low and miserable creature out of the mud, washes it off, clothes it in gold, and places it next to him at the dinner table. That mercy, that is the driving force, a great and powerful force, which caused and causes the heavenly Father to move and act.

What was the action that he took? He brought you to a new life. He caused you to be born again. “I feel alive,”—that is what he makes in you. But not only the fleeting feeling caused sometimes by being in love or by having exciting work or by seeing the sunlight on the branches of a tree in the morning. More than that, he makes you to be born to something. You are alive TO something: in fact you are alive to TWO things.

First: you are born to a living hope—a lifting of the eyes, a lightening of the heart, a reason to endure great suffering, a wish or a guess or a hunch or a certain assurance that after all that is wrong is over, there will be something right. Everything will be right. Because the impossible happened: a man died and then came to life again. 

If Jesus Christ died and then came to life again, then isn’t it possible that everything that is dead; everything that is tragic and traumatized and broken and beyond help; everything molded and spoiled; everything tainted and poisoned—isn’t it possible that every single one of those things can also be brought back to beauty and newness, purity and holiness and glory?

The hope for all this is not just an idea; it isn’t wishful thinking; it isn’t naive. It is a hope that is alive in heaven, seated at the right hand of the throne of the Father, proof in person that even exile, even the collapse of the card castle of your life, can be brought to a happy ending.

Second: you are born to an inheritance. What could be more than the hope, than the person of Jesus alive and the reality he both represents and is? Still, you get more. 

The buried treasure. The mansion on a hill. The prudently invested capitol that will bring in a living wage until the end of your days. Whatever it may be: an inheritance. It can’t be destroyed or scattered. It bears no hint of guilt to come along with it. It will never be used up. The law of diminishing returns does not apply, and the inheritance kept in heaven for you will taste as fresh and rich on the millionth day as it ever did on the first.

It will be revealed. The hope. The inheritance. And the salvation. When the time is complete and the years all roll up together into the end, it will all be revealed.

Do you see the path in front of you? You in exile, you walk this path. This is the future your Father has given. And as you walk that path, you will go through troubles and darkness. But you have a great protection from evil: God’s power, made real through faith. The power that raised Jesus from the dead. The power that made heaven and earth. That is the power your faith lets you access, so that it can guard you day by day as you walk into the future. 

Exile, you are cut off from the path you were on. But do not be afraid. Bless the Father for bringing you to a new path, shining.

1 Peter 1: 3-5 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, 4 to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, 5 who by God's power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.

1 Peter 1:1-2

From Peter the Disciple.

To the exiles.

Exiles are the ones who are not at home. Maybe you’ve moved to a new city. Or you’re finding yourself distanced from a group of friends you were once close to. Maybe you’re growing up, and you cannot be the same as the child you used to be. Maybe you’re caged by anxiety, and you don’t feel free to let your real feelings show at your work or at school or at home.

Your exile doesn’t feel right. It shouldn’t be this way. People need connection. They need homes and families. And families should be places where everyone can be themselves and show their true feelings and experience acceptance. And yet here you are.

But your exile was not a surprise. You are an elect exile. You were known by God from the beginning. You were made by him and chosen by him. And he knew that one day, for a while, you would be scattered, driven out, and alone. 

He uses your exile. He takes the pain and the struggle, the feelings of isolation, and he uses them to purify you, to turn your heart more towards him. His Spirit is in you, constantly doing his good work to mold you into the person he sees that you really are. 

And in your suffering, you follow in the steps of your Lord and teacher, Jesus Christ. He was an exile too. He left his home with the Father and came down to a foreign land full of broken people. He did not experience acceptance from them but rejection and isolation. He embraced that isolation to the fullest, letting himself be cut off even from the Father so that his blood would cover us all for forgiveness and for cleansing. And he called to each one of you and said, “Follow me.” So you follow him. 

And as you follow, sometimes you stumble and fall short. You make mistakes, as we all do. Small mistakes. Big mistakes. So may grace multiply over your failures so that like a four year old learning to roller skate you can crash to the ground in the middle of safe hands waiting to catch you, hug you, and pick you back up again. And may peace compound so that even in your anxiety and fear you can be content each moment with just the way that you are and just the way that you feel and with everything that you’ve done and haven’t done, because your Father is content with you, and more than content, but overflowing with love.

1 Peter 1:1-2 Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, To those who are elect exiles of the Dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia, according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, in the sanctification of the Spirit, for obedience to Jesus Christ and for sprinkling with his blood: May grace and peace be multiplied to you.