Bridges

Bridges in my city most often cross over dry washes. A even a "wash" is a misnomer. Rarely does a wash wash anything. It's a dry riverbed that sometimes will flood in a heavy rain. Otherwise it stays dry most of the time. But we need bridges for those occasional rain storms. In my church there are a lot of stories about before the bridges over the dry riverbed were built. At times, our part of the city was cut off from the rest, requiring long detours to the neighboring cities (now suburbs) to cross the seasonal swell of rain water.

I was thinking about bridges last week when I read some scripture stories about Jesus. We're often obsessed with getting to the other side of things we are concerned with, or - especially these days - getting people on the other side over to our side. There was a lot of that with Jesus. Pharisees watching him, plotting, waiting to find him on the "wrong side," then pull up the draw bridge and condemn him.

As a child, there was a large footbridge that crossed a deep ravine at my grandparent's house. At the bottom of the ravine was a small creek that drained out into Lake Michigan. My brother and I use to love to run back and forth across that bridge, throwing rocks and sticks into the green leafy forest below. We could cross that bridge and go to the large, old and kind-of-mysterious house of some friends of my grandparents that had an old swimming pool in the back yard...sometimes it had some water in it, sometimes it didn't. I think it depended on whether it rained. It was quite an adventurous place for a young child.

It seems that more often than not these days we're not much interested in crossing bridges. We want and expect that everyone should come across to our side. We are on the right side afterall. Who in their right minds would want to stay on the wrong side? But, really, I don't think Jesus was very interested in which side people were on. He seemed more interested in the bridge itself. Being the bridge. And I think that's what he may have wanted us to be as well.

For him, stories about common things like seeds, wheat and weeds, fishing, birds and flowers, were bridges to get over the dry fears of people's close-mindedness. Food and feasting was a bridge to connect people across deep ravines of culture. Healing was a bridge. The Sabbath was bridge - even though the Pharisees thought it was a ravine that could not or should not be crossed.



This painting is by Marsha (Sasha) Porter, called "Bridge of Sighs." I think it was painted after the collapse of the bridge in Minneapolis-St. Paul a few years ago. It caught my attention because it reminds me of what happens when we ignore our bridges. They crumble and cause chaos. People die. The same is true when we ignore our bridges. If we're too concerned about bringing people over to our side - which of course is the right side...the bridge only becomes a means to an end. Our own end. Because, the important thing isn't getting everyone over to our side... but the adventure of exploring the worlds beyond ours, running back and forth, being able to cross back when we need some familiarity, and being able to get to places and meet people we could not know before. I'd like to see us strengthen our bridge-building skills a little more.