Into My Room

Many of us are familiar with the parental instruct, "Go to your room and think about what you've done".  To those of us hunkering around my age that instruct may seem a little mild, especially on those occasions when in our minds the offense requires a couple of good whacks across the backside! In my day my parents' displeasure was communicated immediately, and 'thinking about it' happened not in the comfort of my room, but in the trauma of repentant (or sometimes angry) tears while the the backside was in recovery mode.  In these days of criminalized corporal punishment, I still hold a healthy respect for the way my parents dealt with discipline.  And I cheer for today's parents who still command enough authority to send misbehaving ones up to their room to think.

In these last weeks Covid-19 has wreaked havoc worldwide.  Among the newscasts and websites providing up-to-the-minute medical and political updates, along with anecdotal trauma especially on social media, my wife discovers a smarty little saying in Facebook.

Indeed. Indeed.  Even among the desperate and heroic thoughts and actions, here is an invitation to think.  Think not only about survival and vaccines and vocational and financial or military solutions (President Trump, please get real!) but think about what got us here... and perhaps about what needs to be changed.

Sleeperthink was my previous blog.  I have changed it to Thoughts from my Room. The sleeper of my truck was the place of creative thinking during the most recent 20 years of my life when I was a long-haul trucker all over the highways and bi-ways of U.S. and Canada.  It was a place of insight, often creative, sometimes hilarious, and occasionally profound.  It was also a place of spiritual recovery for this burnt out preacher. Although coming from the workaday vantage of a humble (yes occasionally proud) trucker usually typed at the end of about ten hours or 800 km of driving I am amazed at the energy and the enjoyment and, yes, creative insight in those emergent' sleeperthoughts'.

Which nobody read!!  Somehow that blogsite did not catch.  Everywhere, whether in churches or in watering holes or coffee shops, people clamored for conversations and trucker stories from this preacher, but the Sleeperthink blog site remained a jewel in the ditch.

Thoughts from my Room is the new blog.  It is in fact a continuation of same.  It is thoughts, many originating during those highway years, but now including a wider vantage. By now they come from an older me or dare I say, elder?  The recovery and joy of the open highways will still be included in some posts but also there will be new insights and experiences of this retiring and perhaps more opinionated one!  Apparently my societal critiques are becoming a little more strident - and of course causing occasional embarrassment to family and irritation to fellow church members.  Not only those trucker years, but also thoughts from one who has difficulty retiring!

"Go to your room" is a necessary and appropriate Coronavirus prescription for this preacher-trucker and probably for everybody else at this time.  Elizabeth O'Conner once entitled a book of hers, Journey Inward, Journey Outward (1975).  I read that book and found it very helpful in the very peak years of my pastoral ministry.  Also I am reminded of Elijah in 1 Kings 19. After all the drama and confrontations with Queen Jezebel and the priests of Baal (read 1 Ki 18) and even after his great victories and adventures he wants to know the Presence. He discovers it finally when he learns to stand quietly at Horeb. The inner journey cannot be ignored. I wrote from my sleeper because I had to.  I write now for the same reason.  I understand Elijah's need.  You spend the first half of your life making your mark, and the second half reflecting (sometimes fussing) on the mark you have not made; so says Richard Rohr in Falling Upward (2011).  Somewhere in there is the reason why I had to and still have to write!

My knowledge of the Presence of God requires going to my room, standing or sitting or laying quietly.  The days of snappy writing from inside my truck are over, I guess. But thoughts from the room may still be useful.  Please stay tuned.