Then be the last one
Or, The Narrow Road
Hi friends,
I’ve been feeling increasingly out of step lately, more and more like a dinosaur or an anachronistic hold-over of a pilgrim on the narrow road. I’ve joked that I’m the last of my kind, but all the jokes don’t make it less lonely. Some folks do treat me like I’m quaint or precious and so more easily dismissed: me, with my love of Jesus and the Bible, me with my prayers and my deep belief that goodness and words still matter, me with my insistence on the unequivocal welcome of God’s love for everyone. Those side-eyes are earned, I suppose: earnestness is my base-code setting and our world is more comfortable with cynicism and snark these days. But I do feel at times like the last one standing.
Joan Didion famously said, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking” and today’s Field Notes definitely falls into that category.1 I wish I could promise a tidy resolution today but alas, I’m still figuring out what I think on this matter.
Why? Because I feel like I am on a very narrow road and quite alone at that.
I’m also trying to understand how to move through this moment in time, how to follow Jesus well, perhaps even how to heal what is being broken around us, while being relentlessly honest about the demand of that.
First, a sidebar: There is an old saying that when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. At this stage of my life, I do wonder how often I approached the ways of Jesus before I was truly ready for the teacher himself. Because when you do that - when you want the lesson without the embodied teacher - you end up with half-understood principles and cobbled together best-practices and take-aways for personal enrichment that can be easily corrupted rather than true transformation, let alone friendship with God.
Perhaps I’m not alone in this: we do try on things even from the scriptures, like a child trying on clothes that are too big for her, and then parade around like we belong in the outfit, certain in our opinions and our proclamations and our decisions without any experience in lament and complexity, compassion and grace.
Some aspects of scripture are meant to be lived into, rather than forced to fit before their time. The doors of understanding stay locked until love or grief or sometimes both have handed us the key for safe passage beyond.
Or perhaps these teachings from Jesus are the multi-faceted prism that we understand, one shaft of light at a time, until the whole of our understanding is illuminated. Either way, we require time and age and experience to refract the light of God’s love into the once-dim corners in our understanding.
Basically, it turns out that I cannot really understand a thing until the Spirit decides that now is the time for the thing to be understood, if you will. And even then, my understanding will be limited. At some point, I will learn humility about this. I hope.
But as I become more settled into this middle of my life - even properly middle-aged, if you will - I’m finding much more compassion, dignity, gentleness, and room in the ways of Jesus than I ever imagined possible. I’m finding more wisdom in the words and teachings of Jesus, more life, more possibility.
Jesus is, as always, the way, the truth, and the life.
So I wonder if there are some teachings from Jesus that we simply can’t understand until we’ve lived a while longer. All of this is to say, I think I’m beginning to understand something old all over again. (In my experience, the Holy Spirit is gentle but relentless in this way.)
An astonishingly efficient teaching from Jesus in the book of Matthew has been haunting me lately. The phrases from these particular verses are with me these days, waking and sleeping. I keep circling them, trying to understand something that feels important right now. You may remember these words, tucked inside of the Sermon on the Mount:
“Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.” - Jesus (Matthew 7:13-14 NIV)
I spent an astonishing amount of my life believing that this was a salvation message, and a highly personal salvation message at that. Fine, whatever, that worked for a time, I guess. And maybe that’s right.
Other times, I’ve interpreted this as a Moral vs. Immoral Behaviour caution. That interpretation was particularly popular when I was a teenager: your friends who drink beers and listen to secular music and let boys slide their hands under their shirt? Wide road! Destruction! Beware! While those of us who listened to music that was both positive AND encouraging or went to youth group religiously or kissed dating good-bye, well, that was a narrow road of righteousness. Congratulations etc. etc. you have your reward.
I’ve read a dozen takes on that passage myself in the past few months: one sees the narrow road as one of contemplation, another as an invitation to lament, one as a pathway of justice, another as updated purity culture virtues vs. vices, on and on. It turns out that there are as many ways of interpreting Jesus’s words on what is the narrow road and what is the wide road as there are Christian TikTok influencers with ring lights.
I suppose this is just another take.