Welcome to Your Barbecue

Sometimes our dreams have to die. Sometimes our plans have to fail and our strategies have to implode. There are times in life, though we don’t like to admit it, when the only proper course for our expectations is for them to be skewered, set over the fire, and burned. At least that’s how one artist described the human condition, “a long and windy road”, folding and unfolding in “subplots and sunburns and fake-out endings,” a place where we’re “free to dream whatever we want to but that doesn’t mean our dreams will come true.”[1]

We all want our plans to come together, that’s natural enough. “For God’s glory” we Christians tell ourselves, though truth be told, most of the time we’re battling our own illusions of grandeur. We all hope and dream and labor with sweat and blood - to succeed, to achieve, to get ahead, to make a contribution. Most of us (whether we’re in the church or the secular world, it often makes little difference) we’ve bought into the modernist promise of progress,control and self-determination.

But what if life is not so predictable? What if our careers, our ministries, our kids, our plans, and our dreams weren’t meant to unfold in such linear and prescribed trajectories? What if God’s plan is twisted into a more convoluted story, one where our little dreams come to die, one where our selfish hopes are exchanged for the unknown, one where the greater glory can only be realized after our smaller attachments have burned away? What if:

The road is long and windy

Full of twists and turns

But before you can rise from the ashes

You’ve got to burn baby burn

I think that’s what it means to follow God, to be true to ourselves, to live into the most authentic human story. For to be human is to dream, and to live is to chase those dreams, but sometimes (and this is the inconvenient truth) those dreams are merely the fanciful delusions and deceitful projections of the false self . There are times in life, and you all know what I’m talking about, when God screams through the torturous twists and terrifying turns, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways.”[2] The present pain signals a time of change (unless we want to stay miserable), and there's nothing comfortable about change.

Perhaps these are God’s gracious invitations to a deeper phase of discipleship. Perhaps these are the moments that define us as followers of Jesus. It may just be that these are the angelic coals of burning light that imprint on our very souls the pattern of the Paschal Mystery – living with Christ, dying to self, and trusting in the power of the resurrection.

“Welcome to your barbeque,” the artist continues:

Where we roast all the dreams that never came true.

Welcome to your barbeque – pig out and dream anew.

So what are your barbecued dreams? Where have your expectations gone up in smoke? And what, if you have eyes to see, is the Phoenix that is rising from the ashes? Let the words of the liturgy comfort us as we "feel the burn":

Christ has died. 
Christ is risen. 
Christ will come again. 
Alleluia.

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[1] ALO, “Barbeque.”

[2] Is 55:8.