It's fairly quiet here in late October, but the weather has been lovely. I've been able to sit on the balcony in the warm sun as I read, looking up occasionally across the dunes to the water beyond. There are a few people on the beach, largely hidden by the dunes, but the pool right below me is deserted. There is almost nothing to distract me save an occasional dragonfly buzzing by. And so I've had to create my own distractions.
I have been getting a lot of reading done, but I've done less well with another piece of my time here. I told some folks I was coming here for "a time of study and personal retreat." For a pastor, the term "retreat" carries some significant spiritual connotations, the expectation that my time here would include some very deliberate time of drawing near to God. But it feels more like I've been hiding.
That thought didn't really occur to me until today. This morning was the first chilly one, and so I had been reading on the couch inside. At one point I got, refilled the coffee cup, then stepped out onto the small balcony for a moment. I stood there, leaning on the railing, and for some reason, the story of Elijah fleeing into the wilderness and ending up at Mt. Horeb came to mind. (If you're not familiar with it, the story begins at 1 Kings 19.)
In the story, Elijah is fresh off one of his greatest triumphs, but there is also a threat on his life. Considering all the wonders God had just done through Elijah on a different mountain, Mt. Carmel, it is a bit strange the Elijah falls into such a deep funk, but he does. He journeys into the wilderness, sits down, and asks to die. Eventually an angel provides food and prods him to travel to Horeb. There he finds shelter in a cave, but his depression seems little improved.
My own back story and situation have little in common with Elijah, but still the image of emerging from the cave struck me as I leaned on the balcony railing. There was no violent wind, no earthquake or fire. There wasn't even a "sound of sheer silence," what older translations rendered "a still, small voice." The sound of the waves was enough that no one would call it silent, but is was still. And I could not help but wonder if God didn't pose the same question to me long ago spoken to the prophet. "What are you doing here?"
What am I doing here? What am I up to? I'm on study leave, of course, but the question is bigger than that, just as it was for Elijah. I imagine it's the sort of question we are all meant to wrestle with at times. Perhaps we even need to be in a bad, depressed, uncertain, confused, or similar place for the question to have the required poignancy. Just what is it we are up to? And along with that, what are we supposed to be up to?
Elijah snaps out of his funk when God gives him work to do and sends him on his way. I suspect that God's "What are you doing here?" question is always connected to a calling, to what it is we're supposed to be doing. It's easy to imagine this being only for larger than life characters such as biblical prophets, but I'm convinced it's equally true for pastors and every other sort of regular person of faith. I wish God would be as obvious as in the Elijah story. Then again, maybe that's just the story's way of making its point clear. Maybe Elijah struggled to hear God a much as I do. After all, he got depressed enough to run away and want to die.
What are you doing here, James? And what are you doing, whoever and wherever you are? I think there is always a command that follows the question, a call to "Go." And somewhere in that "Go" is what it means to be fully alive.
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