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come on by and see.
Will be back here soon.
I miss the DR and my teammates. (and speaking Spanish.)
(oh yeah…and the food.)
Spring in my garden is wonderful. New things bloom, everything is such a welcome relief from the colorless greys and browns and and white of winter. Seeing color appear – daffodils, bluebells, tulips – is exciting as new romance. Then the days get hot again, and I’d greatly prefer to leave the garden alone to do its own thing. I do not enjoy getting sweaty and mosquito-bitten and having dirt in my shoes. I would much rather sit in an air-conditioned house and drink tea (iced, now) and knit.
But the house isn’t air-conditioned, and nobody has made iced tea, and every time I walk to the mailbox or pull in the driveway I see the weeds, and it gets so I can’t tell what’s supposed to be growing and what isn’t.
The weeds, actually, grow more quickly and vigorously than the perennials. They often bloom earlier and more often as well. Also, there are a number of perennials which we planted in one area of the garden, which now have taken it upon themselves to self-sow everywhere. I’m looking at you, aster, and you too, milkweed and hollyhock. Joe Pye Weed, you’re elbowing your way right to the front of that line as well. I used to have clustered bellflowers, I swear it. Now it’s asters and milkweed everywhere. The wild geraniums are barely holding their own.
The summer garden is a different creature than the spring garden. Nothing blooms as vigorously in summer. There are long stretches of plain green in between bursts of color and fruit. The early bloomers, so eagerly anticipated, die back. My beloved daffodils and tulips and bluebells leave yellowed, rotting carcasses behind. Cornflowers and Iris bloom and wither, so there is death and wilt and decay intermingled with the bloom and color. This goes on all season now, until finally everything will die back in winter.
Caring for the summer garden is hot, sticky, uncomfortable work. Physical work of pulling out weeds; decision work as to what stays and what gets pulled or moved. Do I let the asters take over? If I leave them this year, will I have anything besides asters next year? How much do I hate the creeping charlie groundcover?
and what are these little things? Did we plant them? Are they weeds? Pull, or let them grow? Decide now, or wait and see?
Always, there are surprises. This pot held a tomato plant last year. This year, it is inexplicably bursting with black-eyed susans. Next to it, springing up out of the weedy dirt beside the steps: Cilantro.
And this rose almost got pulled and trashed two years ago. Because it was dead.
Summer work is not so joyful, nor enticing. It is (perhaps I’ve mentioned) hot and sticky and itchy and uncomfortable and best followed by rest and a shower.
But if you’ll pardon me a moment, I’m going to go clip some roses for my kitchen window, and in a little while some of that cilantro is going in a salad to share with friends.
Years ago, I used to work at a hospital which had both medical and psychiatric divisions. I was the only social worker for the entire medical side of the hospital, so I got to work with every kind of situation which brings a person into a hospital: trauma, oncology, addictions, HIV, but also OB/GYNE, which was a great balance to the rest of it – and also had its own types of crisis. One memorable day I was called to Labor & Delivery, to help the staff with a patient who they were feeling a little overwhelmed with. A teenage girl, probably 14 or 15, was in labor. This wasn’t unusual for our hospital; the complicating factor here was that this particular girl had been brought over from the Behavioral Health side of the hospital, where she had been receiving psychiatric care until she went into labor. Her psych nurses were at her bedside, nervous about her labor and trying to get her to cooperate with the standard procedures; her L&D nurses were also at her bedside, not knowing how to deal with her behavior; the girl herself was writhing and screaming. The entire room was chaotic and the anxiety level was sky-high.
I stood in the doorway, watching the scene, and wondering what in the world they expected me to do to help. The small room was full of staff already. The L&D nurses were saying to the girl, Lay back and lift up your gown, we have to put this monitor on your belly. The psych nurses were saying to the girl, Listen to the delivery nurses, you need to lay back and pull up your gown. The girl was screaming and crying and writhing. I mean, she was really carrying on, and crying out No, No, No, I want to go, Let me go, I have to get out of here. Also, she was laying back and pulling up her gown. Except nobody noticed that, because they were focused on her face, which was shouting No and screaming and crying and tossing and turning.
I was still standing in the doorway, several feet away, so I could see her whole body. A room full of skilled and trained nurses, trying to get her to cooperate. One terrified and panicked girl, in labor, doing everything she could to express her fear and pain, but even so, doing what she was being asked to do. She WAS laying back, she WAS lifting her gown, and no one saw it, and no one was there to reassure her, meet her where she was, tell her she was doing the right thing despite her fear. A room full of nurses, trying to engage rationally with a frightened psychiatrically disordered teenager in labor.
If we look only for outward and verbal agreement, for those around us to say calmly out loud, Yes, Yes, You’re right, you’re so right, I will do as you ask; we may very well miss what is actually happening despite all the fear and noisy protest. Messy, wild, loud, groaning: birth.
No longer winter in my garden. Lots of things are growing now. Daffodils, tulips, windflowers, scilla. The winter aconite has shown its sunny face and fallen back asleep. My Virginia bluebells, dearest to my heart, are in full bloom. Even the autumn-blooming asters and echinacia have sent up foliage, to soak up sunlight and feed the roots and start their long-term plans.
Also, I have dandelions, and ragweed, and garlic mustard, and thousands of tiny maple tree seedlings. These things are growing just as rapidly and lushly. The ground is warm, the rain falls, the sun shines, and all the seeds sprout and seek to grow strong and bear fruit and replicate themselves.
My garden is meant to be a place set apart. That which grows in my garden is meant to be beautiful, to serve a purpose. If the garlic mustard grows, it will crowd out everything else. It will drop seeds, some of which will grow right away, others of which could lie dormant for years waiting an opportunity to grow. Letting one garlic mustard plant grow could mean losing the entire garden. If the maple seedlings, tiny now, are allowed to grow, they will demand all of the space and water and nutrients from the soil. They will shade the garden and grow so tall and wide that they will split the walkways, crowd the house, and the garden will be unrecognizable. And each of these will drop countless more seeds, intending to grow even more maple trees or garlic mustard plants.
I’ve heard it said that the best fertilizer for the garden is the gardener’s footprint. That is, all of my best hopes and desires and intent for my garden will mean nothing, if I don’t spend time walking in it, watching it carefully, learning to recognize the differences between my returning perennials and the invasive weed and tree seedlings.
I have to get the root of the weeds. If I pull too quickly, or when the ground is hard and dry, I’ll only strip the leaves, but the root will remain. The garden might look prettier for a while, but nothing has really changed underneath. Sometimes, pulling the leaves off but leaving the root, means that the roots continue to grow deeper and broader into the dirt. I can’t always tell this from the sprouting leaves, but if I do get it pulled, I can tell that this is a weed I’ve tried and failed to eradicate before.
The best way – the only way I know – to keep my garden as a place set apart, a place for beauty and purpose, is to spend time there, watching, looking closely, keeping the ground watered and easy to work, learning the plants which grow there, and pulling the weeds. They’re so much easier to pull when they’re small. Some of the big ones, the ones I ignored or neglected or didn’t spot soon enough, get deeply enough rooted that it takes a shovel to get them out – and that also digs up the flowers which grow around them.
And so I’m going to my covenant discipleship group today.
One year ago, I participated in a Lenten study centering around the idea of “calling.” The essence of the study was that we all are called, each of us, to some participation in God’s purpose. Calling is not just for clergy, for the ordained, for those who go to seminary and receive blessings and ordination services and robes and stoles. Each of us is called.
As a part of that study – and in recognition that God calls us not because we are perfect but because we are God’s – we each took a blank sheet of paper, and wrote on it our faults. Not our skills, which we might be tempted to think of first as that which God might use. But our faults. I wrote my faults, in faith that God works through our weaknesses and imperfections to give voice to God’s greater grace and strength.
I wrote my faults. I wrote: I talk too quickly. Opinionated. Proud. Social moth (drawn to the brightest lights, the hottest burning fire, in any circle of people). Distractable. Undisciplined. Impatient.
Over the past year, I would have added more to the list of my faults: Fearful. Too much in need of praise and reassurance. Spotlight hog. And in November, I mentally added several more specific faults and shortcomings: Ignorant of my faith history. Unpracticed and unable to speak about my beliefs and traditions. Lacking a sense of my own journey and purpose. Biblically only semi-literate (at best). Most damning: Never been to seminary. Untrained, unprepared, anxious, nauseous, painfully self-conscious, terrified.
I named these as my faults and shortcomings, because in November my pastor asked me to jump off a cliff. In all fairness, he didn’t know it was a cliff. It probably didn’t look big or threatening to him at all. I knew what it was, though; it was an endless fall, a fiery furnace, the lion’s den. My pastor asked me to join a conversation about discipleship, and to lead a discipleship-focused ministry.
I barely knew how to articulate any difference between “discipleship” and “being a good church member”. I showed up every Sunday, sang in the choir, did my share of church work and went to study groups. Wasn’t that the point? Wasn’t I doing all the right things? …And yet. When I heard others speak of the greater mission of the church, the transformation of the world, I could feel something deep within me respond. Sometimes, that something squirmed in discomfort. Sometimes it leapt for joy. Always it reminded me that I was missing something – a deeper path. Discipleship. An intentional, disciplined (disciplined? me? did you see my list of faults?) living out of the faith that I could at that time only barely speak of.
A deep breath. Sleepless nights. Prayer and reading, and hard workouts to burn off the nervousness, and long walks to clear my head of the circling swirling fears. Deciding to claim and cling to God’s promise not to leave me alone – and yes, I will jump off that cliff, I will walk into that fire, I will grab hold of that snake’s tail, with God’s help and my pastor’s support, I will begin and I will lead a discipleship group.
It started with one conversation, over coffee with a friend. Then a second conversation, on a walk with two friends. I’m going to start this. I don’t know what it will be like. Will you join me? Yes, saying yes, out of trust and out of friendship, and I believe out of their own shared sense of something deep within calling them to more. Weekly, we meet now. First one group, now a second, meeting before we had a full plan, trusting that we would learn along the way and that it was better to start than to put it off until we were “ready”.
We meet, weekly, in homes so we can have privacy. We open and close with prayer, taking turns in who leads. Our covenant follows Wesley’s General Rules: Do good, Do no harm, and participate in the means of grace – prayer, scripture study, worship, communion, and fasting. The questions which guide our conversations are variations on a core theme: Where have you encountered God this week? How do you feel God may be calling or pushing you in the week to come? With what are you struggling? In what ways are you living out our covenant? How is it with your soul? If the conversation stalls or falters, we look more deeply into our covenant: what does it mean to do good? What harm might we be doing, without being aware? What good is being left undone? Which parts of Jesus’ instructions to us are we failing to live out? I am regularly inspired and humbled by my covenant partners; each one has their own journey and their own challenges; each one brings something unique to the conversation. As the facilitator, I seek always two types of balance: a balance between sharing my own journey and keeping the focus on the group as a whole, and a balance between personal growth and missional focus for the conversation. I believe God calls us to look outside ourselves, beyond ourselves – thus, our covenant groups are not support groups. Our goal is not to feel better about ourselves, but rather to more closely follow Jesus – to follow him into the world, to the side of the poor and the sick and the lonely and the lost, to forgiveness and mercy and service and selflessness. To follow him to joy, not because we cast our cares aside but because we share each other’s cares.
We might talk about parenting, or our jobs – but not as we might chat with our social friends; we talk from a perspective of faith. We talk about forgiving those who have hurt us. We talk about strained relationships, and issues of justice. We talk about composting and recycling and what we spend money on and what we eat (or don’t eat). We experiment with fasting…and surprise ourselves with what we learn. We learn to experience worship as worship, not as Sunday Morning Social and Choir Hour. We aim for a closer relationship with scripture and a more regular prayer life…in a variety of ways. We ask each other to hold us accountable for certain things we struggle with. Sometimes we take small steps. And sometimes we take bold steps – like exploring prison ministry. Not because we want to or know how, but because Jesus told us to visit the imprisoned, and we can see that this is one big area where our larger church falls short. And always we strive to make it more than just talk, to ask and encourage and nudge each other so that it is our lives and our community which are transformed, not just our words for one hour each week.
In a congregation, especially a large congregation such as the one we share, it is tempting to say “the church should do something” – clothe the naked, care for the children, feed the hungry, visit the sick. And it may be true, but for “the church” to do a thing involves meetings, committees, budget, and often dissension from those who think “the church” should be doing something else instead. As disciples of Jesus, once we see ourselves that way, we are free to act on the needs we see, to respond to the hurts we encounter, to reach out to the lost and the estranged and the lonely without having to drag an institution behind us. As part of a discipleship group, we can remind each other to keep our eyes and hearts open, and encourage and support each other to take the first frightening steps in new directions. With a covenant to strengthen us, we grow in faithfulness.
Some things that our participants have done, that we likely would not otherwise have done: Brought food to shut-in neighbors. Offered to help shovel snow after a blizzard. Trained to volunteer at a community homeless shelter. Written letters to prisoners. Prayed for bosses who fired us. Ordered food for strangers protesting for justice in another state. Chosen to eat differently, more sustainably. Listened more carefully to someone who is hurting. Developed a practice of reading the Bible, nightly, with a young son. Talked and wrote about our faith with less hesitation, with friends and on our blogs and Facebook.
Our groups are young, in months and in maturity. They are small – eight members, one leader. We have much room for growth. But we are here, we are learning, and we are growing in faithfulness. I envision a time when our numbers will increase, when others see what we are about and join us, and each member now becomes a future leader. I envision other groups, gatherings of people who are not sure of their faith, wary of the church, not ready to enter a covenant, but who crave a place to talk and explore and learn; I believe our covenant participants will be gracious and nurturing mentors for these wandering souls. I give thanks now for my weaknesses, for my faults, for my never having been to seminary, for my impatience and my impulsiveness; God is using these very flaws to give shape to my leadership. And I give thanks for my pastor who asked me to jump, and for my covenant partners who took the leap with me.
We are all called. We can all grow in discipleship. Who will go with you on your journey?
Prerequisites: None required. Strongly recommended: Reading and familiarity with William Willimon’s This We Believe, in preparation and readiness to lead discussion on Wesleyan faith and practice for Lenten study, beginning this Monday evening. Also, reading and understanding of John Wesley’s article The Character of a Methodist, as provided by Carol in preparation for same. Also, knowledge and familiarity with Scripture, both Old and New Testaments, and readiness to interpret Wesleyan faith and practice in its context. Also, prayer. Preferably without ceasing.
Assignment: Using all of the above sources, as well as personal experience, reason, tradition, and church teaching both local and institutional, integrate Christian practice into daily life. Be prepared to discuss whether there is a contradiction between (1) Wesley’s insistence that the distinguishing marks of a Methodist in no way include opinions of any sort, nor peculiar words or phrases, actions, customs, or usages, and (2) the existence and content of Willimon’s book describing the distinguishing marks of a Methodist. Keep in mind the examples, both positive and negative, from the lives of Christians you encounter, and that you are also an example to your fellow students. Be prepared to be challenged on this point, as well as on all other points.
Required elements in this assignment include loving God; loving neighbor; the active practice of doing good in any and all ways; the avoidance of doing harm in any and all ways; and the cultivation and regular maintenance of practices enabling faithful living: prayer, worship, communion (as available), searching the scriptures, and fasting (please include research on a variety of practices, along with your references).
Due: Daily. In-person examinations weekly, on Sundays, Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, and most Saturdays. Formation of study groups is highly encouraged and may in fact be necessary for successful navigation of this course.
Extra credit: Demonstrate, with and without discussion, whether Christian practice is in fact integrated into daily life, or the converse.
Please be advised: Likely outcomes of participating in this course include not only intellectual challenge and growth, but more notably joy, deepened love, heightened frustration levels, anger, strengthened community, intense need for forgiveness and to forgive, confusion, differences of opinion and potential for heated discussion, weeping, grief, peacefulness, torment, sense of mission, life disruption, misunderstanding, being used (by others in ways you will not enjoy), being used (for good), feelings and actual experience of not fitting in with the rest of the world, unexpected travel, spending and being spent, and participation in the Kingdom of God on earth. Also, a lasting discomfort with owning more than two silver spoons.
In which I have sympathy for Peter.
The Pharisees and Sadducees have got it all wrong. …Again. They want proof, signs, measurables. Jesus answers them, but not the way they want; he knows that the proofs being demanded of him are based on altogether the wrong questions.
The disciples, relieved to not be the Pharisees and Sadducees, take comfort in their close relationship with Jesus. The disciples want to do the right thing, to get it right, to follow and learn and stay in the circle of Jesus’ love. When they hear his warnings and urgings, they respond quickly – but they, too, get it wrong. They are focused on, distracted by, their own failures, their fears of falling short. They forget what they themselves have witnessed and learned, because of their worries about their own inadequacy.
When Jesus asks them to take a stand, a risk – to name aloud who they believe him to be – only Peter gets it right: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”
Ahh, Peter. The same Peter who, just two chapters earlier, asks Jesus to command him to come walking across the water. When Jesus calls him, Come, Peter steps out of the boat, walks a few steps, and then sinks in fear.
Peter wants desperately to get it right. He wants desperately to understand, to get not just the answer but the reason behind the answer. He wants Jesus to command him, to call him, to count on him. This, Peter, is the disciple who first knows and names Jesus as the Messiah, the Son of the living God. What swell of emotion must rise as a wave inside of Peter at Jesus’ response! “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter [Petros], and on this rock [petra] I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.”
Peter got it right! He knows who Jesus is! He has found, has named, Messiah! O, Glory Halleluia, Messiah is here, right here, and Peter is with him! O, anywhere Jesus calls him to go, Peter will go. Anything Messiah commands to do, Peter will do. He is in the right place, with the right person! O, the joy and celebration!
Time to get to work! There is so much to be done! Oh, the urgency he must feel, mixed with the joy. Fighting against pride, swimming with certainty, ready to take on any army, ready to change the world.
Peter feels especially close to Jesus. He hangs on every word. He positions himself to be always close, always ready, always there for his Lord. And ahh, it is time now, he sees Jesus gathering the others, he knows Jesus will continue to teach them. Peter listens carefully, eagerly.
…Except that can’t be right. Jesus is talking about Jerusalem, yes, they expected that. But not this way…suffering? Being turned over to the elders and chief priests? Being given to those very same authorities who never did understand him, who still demand proof and measurables and toeing the line? That makes no sense. They’ve only just begun to understand who Jesus is – they’ve had so little time with him, and every moment is so precious. If he goes under the rule of the authorities, he’ll be crushed.
Peter shakes himself; he can’t be hearing right. Jerusalem, yes. The authorities…and suffering.
And death. Messiah’s own death? Peter is horrified; this is wrong! It must be wrong. They have waited, have prayed, so long for this time to come – the time when Messiah would walk among them and lead them. Now that time is finally here, and Peter knows it. He has felt the swelling of his soul, the bursting open of his heart, the scales falling from his eyes, because of this man. This Jesus, this is the one man who above all must be protected and preserved; Jesus alone can do what must be done to bring about God’s kingdom.
Peter’s grief and fear are now as strong as his joy had been. He speaks to Jesus, privately – privately, because Jesus knows Peter gets it, Jesus will surely listen to Peter. Tears in his eyes, dread in his heart, Peter tries to warn the man he loves and depends upon: “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you!”
It is Peter’s love which speaks, his love and fear, a fear born out of the joy he has been living. He wants to protect this man. He would give anything, to protect him. How can Jesus speak so freely of going to his own death?
How can one protect a person who insists on walking toward their own doom? How can these things be held in a heart?
Jesus’ sharp rebuke must surely have stung Peter, stunned him. He is only trying to help, to do the right thing, to protect Jesus, to serve the ministry. And this makes him a stumbling block?
This is the moment, Matthew reports, that Jesus tells his disciples (with Peter, eyes stinging, head reeling, heart breaking, standing off to the side) “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”
Peter’s cross, I think, is his love for Jesus. Later, it will be more – Peter will indeed become the rock on which the Church is founded. But at this moment, the moment between knowing the joyful truth and knowing the hard road to come, the cross Peter bears is the depth of his love for the man he cannot protect and still does not fully understand.
Always, there is grace. Six days later, Jesus brings Peter, along with James and John, up to the mountaintop, where they witness Jesus transfigured, dazzling, joined by Moses and Elijah.
What has happened in those six days? What struggles have burdened Peter’s heart? What thoughts have chased their tails in his mind? Has he kept his distance from Jesus in that time, needing days to think, to heal, to become ready to trust again? What words might have passed between them? Words of forgiveness? From whom to whom? Words of reconciliation? Words sharing pain? Or perhaps no words at all; perhaps Peter has spent those six days trying to carve sense out of the hard exchange by himself. Perhaps he has been waiting for a word which has not come.
We will not know. We do know that at least by the time the three witness the transfiguration, Peter has either recovered or forgotten all in the wonder of this shining moment. He is himself again: Ready to jump in, ready to serve, first to get something right, and first to get the rest of it wrong. Ahh, Peter.
But Jesus came and touched them, saying, “Get up, and do not be afraid.”
Well, I have lost you. And I lost you fairly;
In my own way, and with my full consent.
Say what you will. Kings in a tumbrel rarely
Went to their deaths more proud than this one went.
Some nights of apprehension, and hot weeping
I will confess; but that’s permitted me;
Day dried my eyes. I was not one for keeping
Rubbed in a cage a wing that would be free.
If I had loved you less, or played you slyly,
I might have held you for a summer more,
But at the cost of words I value highly,
And no such summer as the one before.
Should I outlive this anguish – and men do –
I shall have only good to say of you.
– Edna St. Vincent Millay
because I love the poem, and I want to post it here.
That’s all.
This is my garden, today.
It is full of dead things. Things that used to be beautiful, used to be alive, used to give joy and fragrance and to bear bloom and seed.
Today, it does none of those things. The blooms have faded; the stalks carry no nutrients. What remains is dry, brittle, breakable.
It is buried, in snow and ice. Frozen.
But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope:
beneath the snow, beneath the ice, beneath the ground, the roots are growing.
There are plants which cannot grow without a period of cold to prepare them. There are buds which cannot bloom without a season of rest. There are roots which cannot be eradicated, no matter the extremes of temperature, nor for that matter the efforts of a homeowner who tries to eliminate them. (Grass roots. I never understood the power of that term until I tried to dig grass out of my garden. It is impossible to get all of the roots. It’s also impossible to get rid of catnip, or lemongrass, or anything in the mint family. Or trumpet vine. We’ve tried for fifteen years to kill that trumpet vine and it keeps coming back. Tom has finally developed a love for it and just relocates clumps of it…now we have trumpet vine everywhere.)
There are also seeds which cannot burst open without fire.
The garden which can be seen in winter, is not the true garden. Spring will come, in God’s time.
(digging, planting, weeding, and watering still help.)
Step One: We admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable.
The classic first Step of the traditional 12 Steps of AA. The First Step, because for so many, there’s no facing the need to change until all has crumbled around them. Men, the founders; accustomed to power, to authority, to control, to managing their own lives. Facing and admitting powerlessness was absolutely transformative for them; accepting help from others began to bring radical change to their lives.
Years ago I heard William White of Chestnut Health Systems speak on their addictions programs, and how they’d found the traditional 12 Steps seemed strangely ineffective for some populations – specifically, for low-income women, women who had experienced crushing poverty, abuse, possibly prostitution, the child welfare system. Addictions counselors would wait and wait for these women to “hit bottom”, astounded that the repeated insults to life and self did not bring them to a place of readiness to take that first Step. What the counselors were so slow to realize, is that these women did not “hit bottom”, because they lived at the bottom. Admitting powerlessness was not transformative for them, since they had never experienced power. Life had always meant powerlessness, and had been unmanageable from the beginning.
For women who lived in powerlessness, the transformative experience, the one thing which began to bring change into their lives, was Hope.
The chance to actually have a little power. The taste of choices, and the ability to act on those choices. A glimpse of vision that their lives could be different, could become better, could ever be manageable.
Matthew 16: 24-25: Then Jesus told his disciples, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.
It’s horribly bold of me to reframe Jesus. Yet I am coming to think that to lose one’s life, one must first in fact have a life. One must be engaged in the world, share its pain, share its struggles. Have connections which endure, through trial, through testing, through pain and betrayal and difficulty and sickness and health. Through joy and concern. To minister to the world, one must be in the world. Not just watch it, from a comfortable safe distance.
How can I say I love, and yet go unscathed? Am I so willing to give, because I have nothing to lose? I skim on the surface, I pick and choose, I take the easy road. Forgive me.
God makes connections where there are no visible reasons to have connections, but God has a plan. God has reasons we cannot see. I need my life to be interwoven. With Deborah, with Andrew, with my sisters and brothers in Waverly and in Geneva and in Taurage and in Jarabacoa and in Bangkok and in Arbon and in places I do not know. My compadres. My co-parents, my family.
God has given me a flexible sense of family, all my life. This is part of who I am.
I do not know who else I am. I instigate gatherings. I create spaces and places and times for people to meet and connect and share stories and become intertwined. I watch the connections form, grow, lead to…something, or something unknown. I wash dishes. I knit, gifts and remembrances and well wishes and prayers. I listen.
And sometimes I hold back. Sometimes I push or pull or ask or nudge, and then listen and watch. I seek to shape, to open, to invite, to comfort, to accompany. Do I have a journey of my own? or is it my path to accompany others?
“To deconstruct – to tear down, in order to rebuild.” This is not my path. I integrate. I shift. I reframe. Am I deceived?
How can I think I have the gift to lead, when I have nothing to share?
is it my gift to be hollow?
Where charity and love prevail, there God is ever found; brought here together by Christ’s love, by love are we thus bound. Forgive we now each other’s faults as we our faults confess; and let us love each other well in Christian holiness.
Bill preached on being connected, on being part of a wave, on being unable to be ourselves if we are alone, not thinking we are the only marble in the pot – unchanged if we are separated. And afterward, Jack came and kissed me. How odd, that we are part of each other, he and I. I think only in God’s kingdom could this be so.
I need to regain hold of myself. In order to lose my life, I need to claim it. Not to be blown by the wind, nor to be distracted by others’ visions of me; not to fritter it away nor to sacrifice it without knowing what it is. I have let myself go – I need to reclaim myself – or to claim myself. To live inside my own skin. To know what it is that God can use – or, if not to know, at least to continue to train. To have something, to have a life, which can be used. To be more than only what others hope I might be. More than hollow. More than reflective. More than a moth.
Means of grace. Brokenness…being torn down in order to be built up. Deconstructed. O, God.
When the revenant came down, we couldn’t imagine what it was … Incarnation.
djennerosity 