As a child, my brother Lance could bend walls.

Like most gifts, it was part brilliance, part compulsion. I’d often find him standing with his nose tucked into the corner of our cold maroon living room, dragging his soft hands across the stucco surface, preparing. Searching.

Eventually, he’d find whatever secret he was searching for, and go spinning into motion. He would drag chairs on their heads, screeching in protest. He flipped helpless tables end over end – feeble legs popping under the strain. He’d remove the glassy marrow from our end tables, strewing their skeletons across the floor. Couches were stripped of their covers; bookshelves emptied of their learning. All the room’s inhabitants conformed to his will until he was sated. Satisfied with his work, he would raise his hands once more to that chipped paint. And he would climb.

Doorknobs were molded into footholds under the weight of his imagination. Cheap faux-maple cabinets were hewn into ladders that carried him up through the ceiling and into rooms only his eyes could see. Walls would bend, would buckle or be erected, his creative capacity – limitless.

Many children get lost in their imagination. Lance did not. He was never lost, because he never left. The physical was simply fodder for his mind. A tool to be used. To be improved. The brilliance of his imagination was only matched by his mastery of the physical world. Nothing was his match. These gifts found him creating for himself a super-reality far superior to the ethereal dreamland of his peers or the colorless prison of his parents.

One day, he was playing in our back yard, bending the fences and the trees, when he tripped. Lance never trips.

But this day, he did. In our backyard, there is a retaining wall made of old wooden railroad ties, and he had been sprinting across them like a cat along a fence top. He had reached top speed when his foot broke through a rotten tie, and he flew off toward one of the Birchwood tree that dot our property. He hit his head on the blunted branch, and immediately began to bleed.

The cut was less than a quarter inch from his left eye. It bled for an hour, and he mended. He’s fine now – changed, perhaps, but safe. Every now and then, I still find him climbing up doorframes and into his imagination.

He was very nearly blinded that day, but that quarter of an inch was enough to preserve him. A quarter of an inch is a great enough distance to survive. It is far enough to heal. And it is also big enough to forget. To forget the story and the pain and the lesson altogether, even. In fact, I’m sure he has forgotten. Anyone would.

…

When I came to Emmanuel, the people here reminded me of Lance as a child. At Emmanuel, I saw people with powers. God-given powers to build and to change and grow. I saw people whose unique blend of faithfulness and whose courage was different than anything I had ever seen before.

But I also saw an awful lot of walls.

In the two years since, Emmanuel has become my church. There have been some incredible, beautiful things that have come with my new home. There have also been struggles and miscommunications and everything else that comes with being family. It certainly hasn’t been clean – there has been plenty of dry rot and cuts and anger. Plenty of pain. Plenty of frustration. And we’ve also had a great deal of healing. Of mending.

But I think, deep down, we’re afraid that we’re still bleeding. We’re still a little shaken by the trauma of our past, and we don’t have our bearings, and we don’t quite know how bad the cut is.

There are a lot of things that I don’t understand about our Church’s accident. I don’t know why God chose this particular path, nor do I know exactly where God is taking us. But I do know this:

We have not been blinded. And we will get better.

…

I have a new title now – I’m the Church Development Coordinator. That means I’ll be a part of shaping our Sunday services to meet the needs of our community and the needs of our family. I’ll also be working on getting a spiritual support system in place for our leadership who desperately deserves one. It’s a big job, and I desperately need help. In the next few weeks, I’ll be building some teams of people to help me coordinate the service. If that’s something you’d like to be a part of, you need to talk to me. Really.

It’s easy to forget the magic of dreams, sometimes. Especially in hard moments like the ones we’ve been through. But we can’t give up on them. Because, God has called us promised us something beyond suffering. God has promised us something to hope in.

Last week, Josh Phillips shared a passage of scripture that reminded me what we’re clinging to. Its Romans 5: 1-5, and it says,

“Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God.  Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.”

Hope does not disappoint us. Incredible.

We can’t be afraid to dream again. We can’t be afraid to climb. Powerful things have been happening at Emmanuel, and while we have some work ahead of us, we can trust that God will continue to deliver on His promise. He will continue to teach us to hope.

Now, we’re going to face some changes. Not everything we try will work. Our Sunday Services are going to be beautiful, they’re going to be difficult and they’re going to be better. But most importantly, our Sunday Services will keep on going.

Together, with God’s help, we can overcome this pain. We won’t forget what’s happened. We won’t overlook our scars. But we must remember that we have survived it. There is space between our pain and our hope, yet. The distance is not great, but it is enough.

God can redeem the things that hold us back and lock us in our grief. Slowly, He molds them. Slowly, He shapes them.

Slowly, the walls are bending.