Let us go over to the other side

 

Faith– is the Pierless Bridge     by Emily Dickinson

Faith– is the Pierless Bridge

Supporting what We see

Unto the Scene that We do not–

Too slender for the eye

It bears the Soul as bold

As it were rocked in Steel

With Arms of Steel at either side–

It joins– behind the Veil

To what, could we presume

The Bridge would cease to be

To our far, vacillating Feet

A first Necessity.

I really love this poem.  I love how it has this circular message about faith taking us farther than we could see or imagine, but if we knew where it was that we were going in the first place, we wouldn’t need such faith to get there.  Sometimes it’s as much about the faith it takes to make the journey as it is about where we get to.  When I stumbled upon this poem, I knew it was something that God had shown me, because it fit right in with some other things in my life at the time…

Several months ago I was being harassed at work for not having any decorations in my area.  The space that I inherited upon moving into my new position was two large, dirty white walls with a million holes in them, a red desk with a pink chair, a bunch of boxes turned sideways with papers stacked in them as make-shift file cabinets (that have been there for years), some more random boxes with other people’s crap (sandwich bags? come on…) stacked on top, and some more boxes stacked about 10 high (4 feet maybe) that held our department’s supply of envelopes.  My concern was obviously more with all of the boxes and trash that were cluttered around my area.  Everyone else was concerned with the white (if you want to call it white) walls.  So, after begging my boss for a nice table with a shelf underneath for storing the envelope supply (which I finally got after almost two months of asking), after swapping for a less broken and less pink chair, and after a co-worker boldly moved the trash pile to the person’s office that it belonged to (my boss), just about the only improvement left up to my power was decorating the walls.  So I perused my file of pictures and picked out some that I liked, went shopping for some frames and stuff, and got to work.  I found these wrought iron words that say “faith” and “dream,” which I just got because I thought they were cool, but they turned out to be a perfect fit.  I ended up doing all black and white, and I find it quite ironic that even though there is no color in my collection, the content of what I put up along with the presence of God in it all really brightens the space.  People really respond to it.

To me it ended up being kind of a prophetic display and representation of my life at the time.  At church my pastor had been preaching about the verse where Jesus and the disciples are in a boat in the Sea of Galilee, and there is a storm, and Jesus is sleeping but the disciples are afraid.  He tells them that they have little faith.  Then in Mark 4:35 he tells them, “Let us go over to the other side.”  This is a word for all of us– that Jesus wants us to have faith and to go to the other side.   On my wall at work I ended up putting a picture (see below) that I took of a Jesus-time boat in the middle of the Sea of Galilee, and I put the word “faith” underneath it.   Next to that I have these pictures of a bridge that I took on a foggy day in Newport, Oregon, and the bridge disappears in the fog. (See my header and the picture above.)   You cannot see across to the other side.  Then I found this poem, which when I read for the first time, the picture in my head was of the one I took of that bridge. 

The message of these two things seems to be the same:  We need to have the faith it requires to get to the other side.  We need to be ready because we are going over to the other side.  But the key is to have faith to get there, because if we knew what was on the other side of that bridge (or sea) and if it was easy to get there, would we even bother?  That is what this poem speaks to me about. It is a pierless bridge- we cannot see what is supporting it.  It is also a peer-less bridge because as it says, we cannot see across it, and what it connects to is veiled.  If we could even imagine where it was taking us, then we wouldn’t need faith, and the bridge would cease to exist, because the bridge is faith.  If there is no bridge, then where are we going?  So, like I said earlier, it seems to be as much about the faith it takes to go on the journey as it is about where we get to.  This might have all seemed like a long and round about way to get to my point, but to me it reminds me once again that God is evident and orchestrates every little thing in our lives.  Even if it is in something so small as decorating a wall.  It’s obvious to me that of the hundreds of pictures I could have chosen from, He had me pick those specific ones so He could speak to me through them, just like He led me to read that poem right then.  No little thing is too small for God to use.  When he repeats the same message over and over, I think we should pay attention.  So, Father, please prepare us and show us how to have enough faith to go to to the other side. 

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