by Ashley Hales
Shivering in this northwesterly wind, I sit on the edge of dirt and pavement: this juxtaposition between organic and man-made. This concrete worn and utilitarian next to the unadorned simplicity – almost vulgarity – of the dirt. We are stuff just as these. Stones pulverized and fashioned into meaning. Organic material who hide behind makeup and jewelry and our bios. But we’re all just dust and ashes. All here to serve a God so much bigger and more incomprehensible than ourselves. A God who hung the stars in galaxies we haven’t yet discovered; a God who created atoms and molecules and things we can’t comprehend. For what? For the joy of it.
For delight. (That’s what Henry James taught me – the delight in language, in the glory of the small pieces forming intricate beings called sentences that curl and twist and in which we live and move and have our being).
That there is something about glory that fills and moves spaces; that it is self-assured in its perfection because it is perfection that comes from humility, from sacrifice.
For a Kingdom that breaks through these cracks in the sidewalk or speaks to me out of the dirt, is a Kingdom that is not about utility. It is a Kingdom that glories and dignifies the small, that notices the simple – that says a hair or a sparrow are currency in this Kingdom.
In college there was a singer-songwriter who sang a song based on Isaiah 55, “You who have no money, come buy and eat” and it made no sense to me then. This Kingdom where glory comes in brokenness, where glory breaks in through the stuff of dirt and sidewalks, where glory is a free meal.– where glory fills the ordinary with good things – this, this is where I want to live.
It is only here, in this Kingdom of concrete and dirt, where I am fully free. In this moment there is life, life more abundant and full and overflowing than my degrees or accomplishments. And it comes inching towards me as an offering while the thoughts about all those people who I am responsible for, for the pain and heartaches and miscommunications come racing in. But I’ve been given this moment.
It, too, is an offering of dirt and concrete. And it, too, is delight.
Connect with Ashley Hales: