The Long Tension (thoughts on Romans 8:18-25)

I feel alive when the trees are dense and dripping branches over everything, when the mountains clamor over themselves and tumble out and upward to close in on the sky. I am calm when winds and rain make their arguments public. The great indoors are great in their own right, but outside feels familiar, like the dead-end dirt road of my childhood. Outside is kindred, and I've often wondered why. I am only now beginning to understand that outside— creation, earth and sky, animal and bird, sun and moon, ocean and ice cap— is familiar and soothing because we share in a holiness, a broken anticipation. We, the people and the planet, share the long tension.

Paul writes of the groaning world, creaking, sighing, gasping and crying with every season. I groan in the chorus; we lift and sing as if the whole world is serenading its lamentable song at the Creator's window, throwing rocks to get Him to come look out, to get him to return to the window he left, so it seems, long ago. We weep and cozy up to each other in the long tension, feeling it together, feeling it alone. Just feeling, and throwing an occasional rock at the window. The long tension is the biting of nails to see us finally tend toward life. It's the tinder of hope flames, and we the creatures and creation are utterly burning with it.

All we have is hope, and that's a mighty good start. This eternity-etched heart beats by hope, beats for glory, beats out longing for resolve, and all the while the tension rope pulls tighter as we lean in to see what happens next.

We continue to live, to fly, to erode, to plant, to bloom, to laugh, to create, to shed, to die, and we remember the curse. How can we forget the curse? It's all around us, and in us. Futility rots the eggs and grows the weeds. The earth shares our half-heartedness at times, asks its own version of "is it worth it?" But we share in futility and hope. Futile crops, by miraculous measures, sprout up in every kind of soil, but the seeds they scatter are hope. Futility spreads hope more than anything. If ever these oils and waters combine, it's here. The creation hopes because of futility, because things aren't as they should be. Hope would need not exist if futility were extinct, if we didn't know what we were missing, or rather, what we are capable of. And we lean in. The rope tightens.

Yes, we share a long tension, the throwing rocks, the edging out of our seats for Him to come to the window and show us what healing looks like. What fulfillment looks like. Until then I will wait outside, and I'll groan my hope song with the world.