Lebanon #12: With
by Marilyn Borst, for the team
Sara Miles, an Episcopal priest and an extraordinary theologian of earthy spirituality, calls it “the most important word in the Bible”: with.
Seven or eight years ago I came across her short essay, entitled with those words, and it deeply impacted me. It echoed what I have learned after 111
mission/vision trips: the most significant thing we can do when we travel to encounter God’s work in another place is just to “show up” …to be with.
A few excerpts from Sara’s piece:
Remember, at the beginning of John’s Gospel: “The Word was with God.” And Proverbs: “When God fixed the foundations of the earth…..I was there, ever at play in God’s presence, delighting to be with the children of humanity.” In other words, before time began, before anything else, there was a with. And until the end of time, there is a with, as Jesus promises: behold, I am with you always. With is the most fundamental thing about God.
With. And so we open our worship saying: the Lord be with you. And so we proclaim that the Word made flesh came to dwell with us. And so we call his name Emmanuel, meaning: God with us. And so we bless our gatherings saying: the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of Christ, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us all.
God’s just with us. God sticks with us. Accompanies us. Delights in us, plays with us, suffers and abides with us. In trouble and in doubt, when everything goes perfectly and when things fall apart: God is with us.
I am very grateful for this small but persevering team who was with me on this, our first Outreach Foundation trip, post-pandemic: Rev Jack Baca, Rev Mark Muller, Julie Burgess, and Nuhad Tomeh. As our world readjusts to “new normals” and the airlines and assorted governments try to figure out how to keep everyone safe while moving us from one side of the world to the other, our group encountered just about every travel snafu in the book: canceled flights, delayed bags, documents we did not know we needed until we stood at the check-in desk clutching our CDC vaccine cards and thinking that would be enough (but it was not).
Since you readers have followed us on the road, you know that we all DID eventually reach Lebanon (as did our bags, but not always at the same time!) and spent days full of reunions with our partners/family that were long, rich and grace-filled. Three realities frame those encounters, conversations, and love-filled moments of welcome and hospitality: that Lebanon is in a crisis of epic proportion as their economy is in a free fall and their government is impotent; that our presence was a timely confirmation that they are not on this trying journey alone; that the Church and its ministries in Lebanon are making sure that the Light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.
The Apostle Paul understood this with-ness, writing to the Church in Rome, “I long to see you that I might share with you a spiritual gift to strengthen you---that is, that we may be mutually encouraged by one another’s faith”. Until we can return again to see our partners/family in Lebanon we thank God that our prayers, our technology, our resources, and our determination can be harnessed by the Spirit to keep us close….to keep us with them.