I’ve had the joy of an ongoing conversation with a gentleman whom I’ve never met except through Face Book. He began reading my daily musings and has a relationship with my daughter Chelsea as the grandfather of her boyfriend Sam. Will is a graduate of Georgia Tech and is very proud of that and my utter devotion to the University of Georgia has not interrupted these discussions. Our institutions hate one another but then again most institutions, business’ or churches do.
We’ve talked about a lot of things and it is a dialogue that grows richer as we keep at it. The latest installation was yesterday when he summarized all of the things that we’ve discussed over the last few months and offered subjects yet to be explored. And his sign off gave me pause.
He wrote “Selah!”
I haven’t thought of that word in years. I learned it in Seminary where I took several years of Hebrew (which is much easier to master if you take a rum and coke to class in a large Styrofoam cup).
Like everything in the couple of hundred words that make up the ancient Hebrew language, it can mean more than one thing. As a word it means “stop and listen.”
“Let him who has ears hear,” as Jesus put it.
It is also a musical sign used in the Psalms between lyrics symbolizing that a break is needed. Pause! Consider whatever it is that you have just read or sung or done. Contemplate what is coming.
Will’s use of the word came out of nowhere and stopped me dead in my tracks. Selah?
Really?
That is my freakin life right now!
The work that I have done in the past is done. The love that I held in the past has moved on. I talk with my closest friends about what may be coming. My life has hit the pause button as I struggle to understand and put in place what has happened in my past while figuring out the future at the same time.
Selah indeed!
I suppose that I really am standing on holy ground right now spending most of my time on my beloved back deck, the Breakfast Club, Shirley’s sad little holy dock, and at the Bored meeting. These are the places and the people with which I experience Selah. I am stopping and listening; trying to make my ears hear unspoken things; listening for God to sing her songs.
Will has shared with me a life changing experience that he had in his life when he was my age that was just as radical as the things that I am going through now. Aside from telling me about his past, he is also letting me know that it’s all going to be alright. I’m doing the right things at this moment in my life. It is going to get better.
Will is a southern boy, born and bred who was once exiled to the foreign lands of Ohio and New Jersey. He now lives about a half an hour from me and I have no doubt that we’ll get around to making “the word become flesh” and moving from Face Book private messages to dinner and drinks together.
So that is enough. I have to get back to the serious work of pausing and listening.
Selah!
