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I recently discovered the song "Airplane" by The National Parks, and it has been a gift. It's simple and marvelous, and you should look it up when you finish reading this.

Here's what it says: "I've been a farmer where nothing grows. Like a sailor when no wind blows. And I don't know what else to try. I wish that I could fly. I've been a boxer with no punch. Like a psychic without a hunch. Just looking up to the sky. I wish that I could fly. I've been a doctor with no remedies. Like an inventor with no ideas. Sometimes I feel so small, wish I could see it all. 'Cause it's like an Everest in my path, and I can't see beyond that. But isn't it strange, how everything can change, when you see it from an airplane?"

I love the wrestle with the expectation of identity within these lyrics, the grapple with what happens when we're supposed to be something but don't have the answers that affirm we are that thing -- the answers the world expects of us, the answers we expect of ourselves. Are we a farmer if we have no crops to show for our toil? Are we a sailor if we are not sailing? Are we an inventor if we don't have any ideas? There isn't yet visible fruit, and we feel the dejection of that.

I've been reading some of my past journals recently. One of the beauties it shows me, and one of the gifts of getting older: It is like flying over fields and cities, seeing patterns of browns and greens and lights, the ways the fences and roads and rivers make order out of open space throughout the years of my life. I see shifts of ebbing and flowing, ways my asked and unasked questions, spoken and unspoken desires, have been answered and still remain unanswered. Happiness and elation come and go and come back again. Sadness and confusion come and go and come back again. And wow. It is all part of the pattern, this zoomed-out view of life God must always see. It is beautiful.

Writer James K.A. Smith once tweeted something I like to think about from time to time: "Sometimes, [my wife] and I are sitting silently reading beside one another, like we've done for over 30 years, and I wonder: What if our singular calling is simply to abide together, enduring, stable, a 'given' that our children can always count on?"

I love this thought -- our calling comes not from the results of what we do, but from the fact that we do it. Our willingness to continue that creates space for fruit to grow if it wants to is the point. Is the triumph.

The Psalmist says it like this in Psalm 131: "Lord, my heart is not proud; nor are my eyes haughty. I do not busy myself with great matters, with things too sublime for me. Rather, I have stilled my soul, like a weaned child to its mother, weaned is my soul. Israel, hope in the LORD, now and forever."

And so, for moments when I don't have a lot to say, when I am all asked out, all praised out, all talked out and can only sit there when I pray, it is OK. God is here, and so am I, and we can live, side by side, reading our respective books, looking at the exhausted ground, standing on the boat in still water, asking for the airplane view, together hoping, being, being.