overflow

They call him their Adam, these souls walking through the doors into the gathering place where Adam usually stands to welcome them on their way into worship, and, finding his spot blank because he has left his post for a moment, will miss him, will walk over to Kevin expressly to ask, where’s my man Adam today, and this like an echo of God’s reorienting question to the first Adam.  Where are you?

Because where we are relationally always matters–presence matters—more than we think.

If only Job’s friends had known.

If only we knew.

In ancient Hebrew worship, priests were instructed by God to place fresh loaves of bread on a table in the tabernacle every day, the Bread of the Presence, representing the daily sustenance of God’s presence, of His intimacy and communication with His people.  The Hebrew word paniym, there translated presence, literally means face, as in, may He make His face shine upon you and be gracious to you; may He turn His face toward you and give you peace.

We linger around the table after Sunday lunch, me sliding limp as though on my way to a forced Sunday afternoon recline; Adam repeating sounds that sound like nonsense over his plate before he forks in a bite; Kevin grinning, his eyes sparking with wonder, telling me about the way people seem to have connected with our son who disconnects.  Riley stands at the refrigerator, filling her glass with water.

“They say, ‘I miss him,’” Kevin’s saying, shaking his head, “and I tell them, ‘Well, he should be back any minute.’  I don’t know what it is, but every week this happens, and every week, it’s different people.”

Riley has finished filling her water and presently has begun a precarious journey back to the table, her steps careful, her eyes locked on the brim of the glass, on the water ebbing and flowing like a tide as she walks, threatening to slosh right over the brim.

Kevin pauses, watching her, then finally says, “Miss Riley, I just can’t convince you not to fill your glass to the very top, can I?”

Something sparks in my mind, but I can’t quite connect it, me inclining to decline toward the recline, something in that glass of Riley’s always nearly over-full, something about an inevitable spilling, of sustaining things like water, like daily bread, like the Presence of God, because the only way I can explain these connections Adam makes with other people at the church door is that something’s spilling right out of him on his way to the Table, while he paces a small circle, wearing the carpet, repeating his pre-recorded hellos.

“Whaat?” Riley says, as though this overfilling unto overflowing hasn’t been an ongoing conversation between her and Kevin, not looking up from her glass and that water threatening.

Kevin smiles at me again, that grin that makes me want to sit up and take his hand in my own, continues on with his story–

“And then whoever it was from the week before will come through after he’s back, and say, ‘Oh, there you are, Adam; it’s good to see you.  I really missed you last week,’ while Adam stands there looking bewildered, looking unsure about even who they are, exactly, just maybe laughing a little before going on with his ongoing baseball commentary.”

Adam’s echolalia, maybe for years, has mostly been about baseball—strikes, batters, outs.

I watch Riley finally settle her glass on the table.

I’m still waiting for the connection–the living water, the daily bread, the overflow of presence, bringing blessing.  Maybe, if it’s true of God, He’s made it true of those becoming like Him?  Could it be that we overflow too?

All through scripture, God’s describes His people like containers filled with Him, with living water, filled and not just to the brim, but overflowing beyond capacity.  The Greek word used in the New Testament to convey this idea, perisseuo, literally carries this connotation, filled to overflowing. Word is, we vessels who well up with God overflow love, hope, thanksgiving, peace, joy, though before now, I’ve not given much attention to what that actually means.

May He turn His face toward you and give you peace.

If the home is deserving, let your peace rest on it.  Jesus talks about the peace He gives us like it’s a thing we can then give away, leave behind, or take back up.

Apparently since Christ there’s been a new kind of flood, a swell and splash of living water that gives back, by way of the indwelling of God, some of what the old one took away.  Word is that our intimate knowledge of God perisseuo overflows, that is, fills us completely, every empty spot, then keeps on filling until it spills forth from us.  We get to stay full of Him and still give Him away.

“Hnhh,” Adam says, gushing and grinning a little sheepishly before returning to his self-generated verbal white noise in an attempt to regulate his own central nervous system.  He’s always more keyed up at Sunday lunch because being with people—presence–requires so much of him, but he hears.  He’s following our conversation.

This is the thing, I’m thinking, about being a container, about being a clay pot: all that overflowing happens outside and beyond awareness.  A glass doesn’t consciously decide how high it will be filled, nor when its contents will spill, nor how or when it will be poured out.  You can think on this and almost see God’s hand doing the pouring, God’s mighty hand overfilling the glass.  This perpetual spilling of God’s goodness is not of ourselves; it is His gift.

Could it be that a young man with Autism who loves Jesus gets to overflow a blessing too, just by showing his face at the church door?

Because you would think it would take something more than the awkward angle he lifts an arm and waves a little too deliberately from up close or leans his body toward them, his eyes sliding to the side, to say hello and welcome, his deep young-man voice overemphasizing the wrong syllables, his tangled tongue spitting the words out on a slide, making verbal comets with long, wispy tails out of standard phrases.  You would think it would take more than the silent, hand wringing way Adam responds to any questions for which he feels ill-prepared, which amounts to most, or the way he moves from side to side, as though participating in some kind of dance, or the echolalia spinning into the hand he cups over his mouth between greetings.  You would think, anyway, that maybe he would make them smile, being so obviously different and yet standing there willing to welcome, but maybe not that so many people would miss a connection with a young man who disconnects enough to walk over and ask where he might be, to let those words overflow their hearts:  I miss him.  Where is he?

Could it really be him that they miss, or maybe more like the twisting union of him and God, the way that God overflows even him?

The economy of that sentence is of course more human than divine.  I should be astounded, truthfully, I am, that He would choose to overflow even me, because what I’m seeing, really, is that overflowing blessing isn’t at all about our eloquence, our social intelligence, our effort. It really isn’t about us.

Of course, these souls, they’re also people overflowing with God, receiving an outpouring from Him that splashes blessing on us, too. But this is the truth: In Christ, we overflow as unconsciously as we breathe.

Expressed another way, Paul wrote that we who are in union with Christ are everywhere the fragrance of the intimate, experiential knowledge of Him, asserting that our impact as a consequence of this knowing exposes the spiritual condition of the people experiencing us, this happening by nature, the metaphor suggests, ours and theirs, and not by any conscious initiative of our own, except that we have chosen to put on Christ.

Our bodies fail, and He calls Himself the strength of our hearts.  Our hearts fail, and He describes Himself as bigger than our hearts.  This has become all the more important to me as I age and recognize in myself a chronic misuse of agency, and also as I keep loving exceptional people who put on God the only ways they know how and yet struggle to take hold of the agency that comes naturally to me.

God does not need us to be able, to feel able.  We need only be in union with Him.

A question haunts our hearts, how will I make good of my life?  How will they?

And the answer for all people, regardless of circumstance or station or human ability seems to be the same, that God is the fruit-bearer, the creator and cultivator, the designer of good, the perisseuo filler of human beings, and He is not limited in skill or scope.

He overflows.

But LORD, I’m not good with words, Moses once objected, standing in front of bush burning holy with God and yet not destroyed, as though Moses not being able could ever stop the Almighty One from using him.

To which God only replied, Didn’t I make your mouth?

How can it be that I, or you, or Adam, could overflow with the goodness of God–us thinking I’m not able; I’m not good–except that He who made us, who made our mouths, our minds, our arms, our hearts, decided that it should be so, that He who is infinitely more should not only indwell us but speak through us, overflowing from our hearts in a language that may be understood by all?  God, by very nature, cannot be contained.  So, why should He not overflow the boundaries of me?  Of course He would bring love and joy and peace, would let it spill right out of Adam too, because God has always loved unlikely lives.  In truth, He has always chosen them.

“Hnnh,” Adam says again, and the gush of joy tumbles into rapids of laughing grace, and he exclaims, oh my, like a shout of thankful praise, reaching for me next to him, watching him, still sliding down in my chair.  I smile wide, in fact; I can’t help but smile, because I feel it now, like the river, splashing, that overflow of love.