Sometimes you see something that you just can’t unsee.  And no, I’m not talking about that scene in episode 3 of that Netflix show you thought was harmless…until suddenly it wasn’t.  No, what I’m talking about is one of those things that you see that you know means more than simply what you are seeing.

I’ll guess you’ll be the judge of that.

There was this brief rainstorm in our parking lot the other day.  Not more than about fifteen minutes of precip.  But I guess it hadn’t done that in a while because all of these birds materialized and descended on this newly-formed mud puddle—really a pot hole—in the gravel.  Suddenly, birds.  Splashing and playing and drinking and bliss-ing in this mud hole.

And I thought, What if these particular birds knew about ponds and streams and lakes and rivers?

In other words, what if they knew they didn’t have to settle for the mud puddle?

What if we didn’t?

Because sometimes I get the sense that we are walking around settling for whatever moist pot hole we come across.  Settle for it as the depth of life.  Settle for it as all we are capable of.  Settle for it as the best we can do.  Settle for it as the true depths of thriving and reality.

One early follower of Jesus described it like this, “If there is a natural body, there is a spiritual body.”

Now, on the surface of that sentence, we can thank the Greek philosophers for throwing us off the scent.  What it sounds like this ancient sage is saying is that there is a physical existence and an immaterial existence.  But you have to remember, this sage isn’t grounded primarily in the Greek teachers.  This is a very Hebrew rabbi.

The words that this sage uses bear this out.  The word for natural here is the word psychikon, which is translated elsewhere simply as “life”: that which we all share, which we all can perceive on the surface of things.  The word spiritual is the word pneumatikon, which means spirit.  It is not less physical than the “natural”.  Both are speaking of physical bodies.  No, pneumatikon is more physical, more connected to what is unseen yet profoundly foundational and necessary for deeper life.

A natural existence takes things at face value, settles for what is in front of it, thinks the surface of things is the whole thing.  The spiritual existence sees the sacred in all that is in front of it, because it knows there is so much more than what it can see or touch.

This early Christian teacher names these two ways of being, encouraging us not to settle for a drink and a splash in the mud puddle in front us, but rather to consider digging down deeper for the endless underground stream that feeds and quenches all of life.

And this particular text is in the context of a larger conversation about death.  And in the face of death, there is also fear, and there is also grief.  And what this teacher says is that in the face of these specters, we are being invited to move beyond what we thought could sustain us—the puddle most easily accessed in front of us—down deeper to the River that will really carry and hold and enliven us.

The ancient Greek Scriptures also try and get at it like this: “Do not grieve like the rest of men…”

Because when some face disaster, or are stripped from the illusion that there isn’t any suffering, or that they will be sheltered from loss, the response is “Oh, I knew it was just one big mud hole…and then you die.  I knew it.”

Grief leads to bitterness.

But for others, grief leads to an awareness that their resources are actually deeper than they realized.  For these, grief opens a door to a reality that there is much more undergirding and quenching and resurrecting us than they had previously thought.

“Do not grieve like the rest…” is an invitation to allow our grief to push us past an existence that settles for the shallowness in front of us, to dig for and ground ourselves more deeply in the Spirit of Life that has been buoying us up the whole time.

It doesn’t mean we don’t grieve.  It means that when we grieve we anticipate the great Ocean of grace, love, and peace we’ve always been meant to draw from and rest upon.

The goodness of grief…is that it can take us there.