Vapor and Legacy

Tension was created in me this past week. At first, it sucked. But as I mulled and prayed…I sensed Christ leading me somewhere new.

We were at the beach. Holly and the kids, my two sons and my daughter, and the kind of ordinary that is so full it almost hurts. Sand and sunscreen and someone always needing something and the sound of the water doing what the water always does, indifferent to the smallness of the moment and the largeness of what I was feeling inside it.

And somewhere between watching my kids run toward the waves and watching them run back, the thought arrived uninvited and settled in my chest like something that had been waiting for the right moment to land.

This is fleeting.

Not in a morbid way or in the way that collapses joy into grief and ruins the afternoon. In the honest way. The Ecclesiastes way. James 4:14 way. “What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.”

A vapor. A single breath. The kind of thing that is real and present and then gone and the world keeps moving as though it was never there.

I was holding my family in my eyes… really holding them, the way you do when something inside you knows you should pay attention; and the fragility of the whole thing pressed in. The human existence and experience is a strange and tender thing. We are given this one irrepeatable life and the people in it and the days of it and the moments of it; and they are going. All of them. Always going. Even when they are right in front of us running toward the water.

And I felt my conviction about God: my pastoral certainty, my theological formation, the years of wrestling with the texts and the people and the hard questions…shrink slightly in the face of the sheer reality of loving these specific people in this specific life. Not because I stopped believing. Because the love got louder than the theology for a moment. And I let it.

The Tension

I want to sit in the tension rather than resolve it too quickly. Because I think the church has a habit of spiritualizing what should just be felt first and understood as we go. Even though I don't like feelings because they...well...feel and it makes me all weird inside. But this is one I knew I had to sit with.

The fleeting nature of human existence is not a problem to be solved with the right Bible verse. It is a reality to be inhabited honestly. You are going to die. The people you love are going to die. The days you are living right now, these specific unrepeatable days with these specific unrepeatable people, are going. And no amount of theological sophistication changes that.

What I have been holding this week is the tension between two true things.

The first true thing; this life is a vapor. Fragile. Odd. Passing faster than I am usually paying attention to notice. My children will not always be at this age. My wife and I will not always be at this stage. The beach trip that felt ordinary will one day be a memory someone is trying to hold together against the dissolving of time.

The second true thing; the vapor is holy. Every day is a new thing. New joys I have not yet felt. New hurts I have not yet survived. New longings that will open up places in me I did not know existed. New graces I did not know I needed until they arrived. The fleeting thing is not therefore meaningless. The vapor carries weight precisely because it is brief.

These two things do not cancel each other. They braid together into something I can only call the texture of a life actually lived rather than managed from a safe theological distance. A saori weaving of lives together to form something all together different and lasting. Where the different fabrics intertwine and make something beautiful.

The Sacrament of Pouring Out

Somewhere in the middle of this week the word sacrament kept arriving.

Not in the formal liturgical sense, though I do not want to evacuate it of that meaning entirely. In the sense of something ordinary becoming the vehicle of something sacred. The beach becoming holy ground. The running children becoming a sermon I was not prepared to receive. The ordinary afternoon becoming the place where I was confronted with the full weight of what it means to be here and to love people and to know that being here is temporary.

And I thought about the cross.

Christ poured Himself out. That is the language Paul uses in Philippians 2 “he emptied himself, ekenōsen.” The self-emptying. The deliberate, voluntary, total pouring out of the divine life into the human moment. Nothing held back. He didn’t manage the risk of full presence. Complete pouring out.

And I think the calling, my calling as a pastor of Pisgah Methodist Church, as a husband to Holly, as a father to my children, is the same in kind if not in degree. The sacramental life is the poured-out life. The life that does not hoard itself against the fear of the vapor but gives itself into the fleeting days with full presence and full intention.

Because here is what I am beginning to understand about pouring out.

The poured-out life leaves something behind. Not in spite of the emptying but through it. The vapor does not simply disappear, it becomes part of the air. The life given fully into the people and the calling and the ordinary unrepeatable days does not vanish when the person does. It extends. It multiplies. It becomes the ground that the next generation stands on.

This is the theology of legacy. Not legacy as achievement or monument or reputation. Legacy as the grace upon grace that John 1:16 describes “from his fullness we have all received grace upon grace.” The fullness of Christ poured out became the grace upon grace that fills every subsequent generation. The emptying produced the abundance. The cross produced the resurrection. The vapor became the permanent thing.

What I Leave

I have been thinking about what I leave. Not in an anxious way, like I used to. Nor in the "grasping at permanence that is really just fear of the vapor wearing theological clothing" way. In the honest, quiet way that the beach forces on you when the water is doing what the water always does and your children are running toward it.

What do I leave Holly? Not a legacy of achievement or a reputation in the community or even a body of work I am proud of. I hope I leave her the evidence of a man who saw her clearly and loved what he saw and kept choosing her in the ordinary days when choosing her was simply the texture of the life we were living rather than a dramatic act of will.

What do I leave my children? The same thing my father could not fully give me and the same thing the men in my life have given me in his place: the specific, embodied, present evidence that they are worth the full weight of a father’s attention. That they are seen. That the days of their childhood were holy enough to me that I put down the phone and ran toward the water with them.

What do I leave Pisgah? The evidence that the gospel is not a system to be managed but a life to be lived. That the pastor who stood in the pulpit was the same person who sat in the hospital room and the same person who wept at the graveside and the same person who laughed too loud at dinner and the same person who got it wrong and came back and tried again. That the pouring out was real. The legacy in Christ is not what I accumulate. It is what I give away.

And the giving away, the sacrament of the poured-out life, outweighs the pacing of a future without me. Not because I am important. Because what was poured into me by the fullness of Christ (grace upon grace) is what I pour into others. And what was poured into them gets poured into the ones after them. And the vapor that was my life becomes part of the air that the people I loved breathe long after I am gone.

This is the hope that meets the fleeting. Not the denial of the vapor but the faith that the pouring out matters. That the ordinary unrepeatable beach days matter. That the specific love poured into these specific people in this specific life extends beyond the life that contained it.

The Water and the Moment

I watched my kids run toward the waves and run back and run toward them again. And I thought; this is what I want my life to look like from the outside. Someone running toward the thing with full energy and full presence and full joy. Not managing the distance and not protecting against the getting wet. Running toward. Pouring out. Giving the full weight of the living to the living.

The vapor is real. The fleeting is real. The mortality is real and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

But so is the grace upon grace. So is the fullness of Christ poured into the emptiness. So is the legacy that outlasts the life when the life has been poured out rather than hoarded.

So it is with the holy ground of an ordinary beach afternoon with the people I love to no end.

I am holding the tension.

And I am running toward the water.

From his fullness we have all received grace upon grace. (John 1:16)