the river

At the water park, we wait in a sunny line on a meandering sidewalk bordered by honeysuckle just past the bloom, holding our rafts, rafts that will soon take us down a waterslide.  As a group, we exude anticipation, a chattering hope spurred on by the whooping sounds of delight we’ve heard all along our ascent.  In the waiting, I can’t help but think of something a soul friend sent me this week, the reminder of a line of divinely inspired poetry.

They feast on the abundance of your house, and you give them drink from the river of your delights.

So far, this day has been one big feast, one long drink of God’s gracious pleasure, and here is the crazy thing:  I felt so hungry the day my friend sent that text, so hungry for the abundance of God, that I went searching for insight, seeking it like hidden treasure, digging into the meanings of the words the poet, David, had chosen.  I discovered that the word there rendered of your delights is actually the Hebrew word Eden, the very name of the garden where Adam and Eve had intimately and experientially known God, so well, in fact, that they even knew the sound of His footsteps.  In Hebrew, eden means, luxury or delight.  Adam and Eve dwelled in God’s Delight.  This then, the river of God’s delights, is the same river mentioned by the writer of the Beginning, who said that a river flowed out of Eden to water the garden.    In the Beginning, the Word might as well have said that the river of his delights flowed forth to nourish the roots of the living.

Hold on tight to your raft, because that thread curves through scripture, corkscrewing like a slide, and in the dead center of the Bible, that same book of poetry, the one my friend quoted, begins with the picture of a person like a flourishing tree, planted by streams of water, water that tumbles from there past the living water Christ says wells up in and flows out of the hearts of those who believe Him, all the way to the plunge at the end, in last book of the Bible, where Revelation also mentions a river, flowing from the throne of God.  By the inspiration of Christ, John nearly finishes his recounting with,

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life.

There is a river, and we who love the Lord live in the river and are nourished by the river and are filled with the river and overflow with the river, the river of God’s delights.  In Christ, we are the river because we have become one with Christ, and we are also that tree, which is always mentioned beside that river.  And what if, I’m wondering now, we were always only waiting, holding the details in our open hands, to take off on a wild river ride?

Adam grins wide; it’s the happiest I’ve seen him in a while, and that is perhaps one of the best gifts of the day.  He can scarcely hold it in; his excitement bubbles over and spreads.  How to describe the sound that he makes, bobbing on his feet while we wait?  What is that sound if not a joyful noise?   Word is, as grace extends to more and more people, thanksgiving increases as well, to the glory of God.  And so, the living water overflows.

We pass that smile, that joy, Zoe and I holding our two-person raft beside us, Kevin and Riley lightly lifting the three-person they’ll share with Adam.  The best way to en-joy everything is all together.  God made joy for sharing, as He made Life.

On the way up the hill, we pass a fork off to the right for those who want to ride in a single-person raft.  That’s a different course altogether; it isn’t even the same river.  Admittedly, we tried it, just to see, but when we went down that one alone, we found that our bodies kept hitting the walls and the bottom.  Our legs were too long, and we spent more time avoiding pain on our own than sharing any delight.

With the fatness of your house they will be saturated, those are literally the Words in that poem my friend sent me, and by the time we make it down the waterslide again we will all in fact be saturated, head-to-toe, our hair dark and ropey-wet, the goodness dripping from our smiles and running down our chins.  The water isn’t just water.  It’s alive and rich with grace.  There’s something nourishing, filling, about the joy of leaning back and letting the river take you where it wants to go.

But bees linger in the honeysuckle along the sidewalk where we wait, sweeping in and out and around as though lost to a desperate search.  Adam catches sight of them suddenly and gasps, losing his smile.  He rears back and away, lifting his hands to shield his own face, projecting the memory of pain as he cries out.

At least for now, shadows lurk along the Way, and evil prowls like a beast waiting to devour. There are two kinds of fear, the reverent awe of God that draws us closer to Him as our refuge, and the dread of pain that isolates and sets us adrift.  Word is, perfect love casts out fear, and He means that second kind.

As a small boy, Adam loved to play outside, would often jump on the trampoline in our backyard for hours, but as he matured, he developed a memory for unexpected and sudden pain—a bee sting, a splinter, a bite from some wandering bug, and began to avoid hanging around outdoors.

Maybe, if we think about it, it’s not so difficult for neurotypical people to understand how Autistic adults become rigidly stringent in their avoidance of pain, even though we don’t experience the same magnification of sensations that they experience.  I once heard an adult man with Autism explaining what he did not have the words to explain to anyone as a young boy, that he had for years demonstrated tantrum-level resistance to speech therapy because the first time he entered the therapy room (barefoot, because shoes chronically hurt his feet), static electricity in the carpet shocked him.  He described excruciating pain that, as a result of this event, he had immediately and forever associated with speech therapy and his therapist.  Maybe we think our association and avoidance makes more sense, but really, it all comes from the same kind of fear.

Adam looks at us, his people, with him in the waiting, with a question in his eyes.

Is it true that even here, even if the bee stings, there’s a greater love?

“It’s okay, Adam,” someone says.  “It’ll be okay.”

I fling a hand carefully toward a swooping bee to distract it without drawing attention, to protect him, and Zoe, who is herself wary of the bees, moves to stand a little closer to her brother.  When Paul wrote that love bears all things, he used the Greek word stego, which means to cover, to shelter, like a roof.  We are loved and so we love, sheltered so we become a shelter for each other.  We are saturated by the river and we become the river, as His richness pours out of our hearts.  It isn’t only that we wait for Him but that we wait in Him together.  Union becomes so difficult to understand when we’re so used to doing everything on our own.

Rafts launch and the warm Summer wind swells again with the sound of joy, and Adam forgets the bees and grins, wild and wide.