Two Hallways

February 11, 2010

In my town there is a hospital.

In this hospital there is a maternity ward.

That ward has two hallways, or wings if you will.

These two wings house two very different things.

One side is for the mothers who just gave birth and are holding happy bouncing babies and are recovering with their new bundles of joy.

The other wing is for mothers who aren’t. It is for mothers who are recovering without their children and aren’t holding new babies.

The hospital tries to keep the wings separate and tries to keep each side from each other but no matter how hard they try each wing knows the other side exists.

As a father and pastor I have experienced life on both wings. When the phone rings and all I know is a room number I know what it means. Depending on the wing it is either unspeakable joy or unspeakable sorrow.

If we think about it, we live all of our life in these hallways. At any given time our phone can ring and we find ourself going to the wing on the right or the wing on the left. We may try to pretend that the other side does not exist and we try to push it out of our mind but when we hear the giggles of joy and the sobs of sorrow we become deeply aware of the other hallway.

It is in these moments of suffering and joy that we have two options.

We can ignore the other hall. We can turn up the music, get lost in our own feelings, keep pretending no one is there and that the world is really about us. Yet this view just makes our world smaller. It makes the world about us. It makes everything shrink around us and eventually we come to believe that the world, and God, revolves around us.

We can enter into the pain and joy of the other wing. We can admit our own circumstances and acknowledge how we feel without demeaning them but then we enter into someone else’s life. We see their joy and we rejoice with them, we see their suffering and we take on their suffering and we suffer with them. This is how our world gets bigger, when we enter into someone else’s joy and sorrow our world gets bigger and we experience more joy and sorrow than we could ever imagine because it is no longer about us it is about someone else. This is what Christ did. Jesus knew what it was like in both hallways. Jesus rejoiced at His creation and felt the sting of death when His creation abandoned him. Jesus enters into the world He created to show us what it means to enter into both hallways and live life with those around us.

We have a choice to either shut out the rest of the world or to enter into the rest of the world and say “I am with you” the choice is ours and no one can make it for us. Yet, when we make that choice our world either shrinks or gets bigger and we determine if our circumstances will control the size of our world or if our world is made bigger by the others in it.