Dear members and friends of Redeemer,
On the drive home the other evening, I passed through a stretch of road where the trees had grown together overhead, their branches weaving into a canopy so thick it felt like a tunnel. For just a moment, the world narrowed. The wide, busy road became something else, enclosed, shadowed, almost still, even as I kept moving.
I’ve been thinking about that moment ever since.
Since Holy Week, life has been moving at a rapid clip. The sacred intensity of those days, the vigil, the cross, the empty tomb, carried its own momentum, and somehow that momentum never quite let up. We moved from Easter day into the weeks that followed, and the calendar kept filling, the needs kept coming, the world kept spinning. Before long it stops feeling like a season and starts feeling like a current.
Life comes at us fast. And when it does, there’s only one choice in front of us: hold on tight or let the velocity overwhelm us.
That’s what the tunnel reminded me of. Not because it slowed me down; I was still driving, still going somewhere, but because for a few seconds, it simplified my field of vision. The canopy overhead did what so much in our world struggles to do: it gathered everything in.
Maybe that’s what we need more of. Not an escape from the road, but moments where something gathers us in. A prayer. A shared meal. A Saturday evening or a Sunday morning where the light through the windows hits a just the right spot. A community that says, “you are not driving this alone.” There goes that road to Emmaus again.
The tunnel ended, of course. The road opened back up, and the world came rushing in again. Breathtaking. But I carried something out of it, a quietness, brief and real. A reminder that even in the middle of everything moving fast, grace has a way of arching overhead.
May we have eyes to see it.
Blessings,
Keith+