Tea + Meaning

Why on earth are we here?

Photo captured on this rare, blue-sky morning, minutes before we sat down for tea.

“I don’t understand why God needs to be adored by us. What kind of a God needs to be worshipped?” she asked from her seat at one of those institutional folding tables every church in America is required to buy in bulk. I could not believe she had the guts to say it out loud, and in a church, no less. She had my attention.

Her name was Becca and she would come to be one of the most beloved friends of my lifetime before her death at the age of 67, six months prior to the pandemic.¹

That beige church classroom from ten years ago would end up being the site of my greatest spiritual devastation. But before the come-apart, it was the garden floor of my awakening, where I learned from Becca that faith and spiritual formation can look like asking the strangest, unseemliest, dragged-across-the-basement-floor-est questions out loud.

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I’ve been pondering the meaning of life. (A little it’s-finally-sunny-here cheer for your Friday!) I can’t pinpoint one particular thing that has me scrambling for impossible answers, though it turns out a chronic foot ailment probably has something to do with it, along with regular ol’ aging and the slow crawl towards an empty nest. Life is still busy, but it isn’t as urgent as it used to be. We grow accustomed to treading water, trying to stay afloat across slow stretches of time. In a blink life spits us out onto dry land but I can’t help but ask, how are we supposed to walk steady when our legs still ache from kicking?

I read an article late last night about the growing momentum toward flip-phones. Ditching our Smartphones might be the great secret of life in 2024, they say. I read about the bliss of it all, and the need to print recipes and directions ahead of time. I thought of my mom, who just got her first Smartphone two months ago, and how her voice shimmers when she talks about how it has connected her to her teenaged and young adult grandkids, how she sends me funny selfies now for no reason, how she doesn’t feel anxious driving to her volunteer work at the nursing home thirty miles away.

The article was tied up with a bow made of shame. Oh, how the kids have suffered our divided attention. In that moment, if I could have time-traveled back to 2012, I’d have driven straight to the Elkhart County landfill in my pajamas, plugged my nose, and hurled my phone into the pit. So much time, wasted. So much meaning, squandered.