Torn Sky

Space for the Fake

I’ve always been kind of fascinated by the trappings of other strains of Christianity – the icons and hierarchy of Catholicism, all the things evangelicals do with their hands, and of course, the flashier parts of the Pentecostal church – speaking in tongues, being slain in the spirit, handling snakes (yes, I’m aware that it’s a much smaller contingent handling snakes than speaking in tongues), etc.

Maybe it’s because it all seems so mysterious and “other” from the Lutheran liturgy I grew up with. Not that what other Christians do is objectively any weirder than what we do (my boyfriend, raised in the evangelical-flavored Church of Christ, informs me that responsive readings or anything we recite all-together-as-a-group is super-creepy and Twilight Zone-ish)... but it’s weird to me.

So I really enjoyed reading the Ask A Pentecostal… installment in Rachel Held Evans’ “Ask A…” series. Jonathan Martin writes so eloquently and passionately about his faith, and does so in a way that seems very open and inviting and friendly. I’ve read his blog a few times before, and I always end up wondering if I’m really supposed to be a Pentecostal…

...Because the way he writes about spiritual experience validates my own God-story and the part of  my spiritual life that is rooted in the 12-step community, and sometimes “Faith alone” and “Word alone” can feel like veiled threats about all the things you’re not allowed to believe in, rather than liberating statements about what you don’t have to do to earn God’s love.

But then I always remember some of my less-than-awesome experiences visiting Pentecostalish churches, and some of the things that some of my more Pentecostalish-leaning relatives have talked about, and I’m all, “eh… Jax… remember how you met that really friendly Mormon family at a wedding and you wished you could be a Mormon, but you just can’t get behind the garments and the origin story and the gender roles? This is kind of like that. Face it, you’re a boring, old Lutheran and you’re going to stay a boring, old Lutheran.”

But I do love when he writes: “But here is what it comes down to: you cannot create space for the real without creating space for the immature and even the fake.”

Space for the fake.

That’s such a powerful statement to me. So many of the conversations I’ve had about church and faith are about what’s real and authentic and organic. I’ve heard so many conversations in the 12-step world questioning whether someone “really wanted it,” or whether or not they were in the rooms for the right reasons. In the culture of heavy metal, fake is probably the worst thing you can be.

I move in quite a few circles where Truth and Authenticity are idols with zealot adherents all too happy to abandon kindness and mercy, love of neighbor, to say nothing of the ability to be surprised or moved to wonder, in order to show their fervent commitment to the One True Truth.

Space for the fake.

It’s just such a liberating concept to me, that in order to have room for what’s real to come in, you also have to allow and even expect some of what’s fake. And you won’t always know which is which, and maybe it doesn’t matter nearly as much as we think it does. Space for bad theology. Space for doubt. Space for half-measures and people who are only there to get their court card signed. Space for people who show up for the wrong reasons.

It’s dangerous – because we don’t always know what’s fake, and people can be legitimately hurt by those who come into churches or 12-step meetings or anyplace else in our world saying fake things and making fake promises and just generally being fake or manipulative.

But the idea still intrigues me. It still fills me with hope. Because the truth is, sometimes I feel like I’m a big fake. Sometimes I wonder if I really believe in all this Jesus business. Sometimes I go to the meeting not to be of service to the newcomer, but because I know people will ask if I'm not there, but I'd rather be home playing video games. 

And I wonder if everyone else can tell.

And I wonder if the blanket is about to be ripped off and I’ll be exposed for the big fakey fake that I am. And the judgment and condemnation will be justified, because after all Fake is bad and Authentic is good and Truth matters more than Love.

But maybe it doesn’t. Maybe there’s space for the fake.

On Deleting

The other day, I wrote a horribly depressing blog entry. I was exhausted. I was hormonal. I had a lot of things on my mind.

Good writers are disciplined and write frequently, and professionals coax the muse to produce the words regardless of circumstances… but exhausted, hormonal, and distracted are rarely conditions that deliver a great final product.

So I deleted it a few hours later.

For most of my life as a writer, I’ve written with the capability to easily delete, alter, reformulate, reorder, rearrange, revise, reimagine. Writing on a computer allows me to do this, and I’ve been writing on computers almost exclusively since before I was 10 (except for a few diaries here and there). I take it for granted that I can delete things, and I can’t imagine writing without that ability. The very thought of sitting down to write with a pen and paper, just the physical effort involved, to say nothing of the alarming permanence of ink, strikes me as terribly cumbersome and off-putting.

I suppose I would do it if I had to, because I can’t imagine not writing at all. But it’s interesting to me to reflect on how the tools I use to write influence my writing, and what happens when the cracks show – like when I post a blog entry and delete it, because I’ve always had the power to delete things – but then people email me to ask why they can’t read it because they got a notification saying I posted something, or one of the 3 people who did read it before I deleted it brings it up in conversation.

Anyway, I’m a little less exhausted today, and I don’t feel quite so hormonal. I still have a lot on my mind, but it’s not weighing quite so heavily or pushing down on my soul quite so insistently.

There’s space. There’s breathing room. There are possibilities. There’s time – maybe not enough of it, maybe not ever – but yes. Some time.

This weekend, I’m looking forward to maybe watching a lot of Mad Men, reading, being around my sweetie, and not really having any big plans at all.

You?

 

What I Really Do

Short, but sweet. I want to discipline myself to blog more often, but there's no way I can do that if I always sit down and try to write 1,000+ words.

This interweb-meme-thingy has been all over your Facebook for the last few weeks or so. I assume that’s true because it’s been all over mine, and these things tend to come in bursty, over-enthusiastic waves, marked by a pattern that quickly moves from clever, funny, true thing to funnier, truer thing that relates more directly to my life to wow, there sure are a lot of these things heh heh, to Sweet-Mother-in-Heaven-does-everyone-still-think-these-are-funny-they’re-so-over!

I’m talking about the “What I Really Do” pics. There are, like, a zillion of them.

I think the reason this particular interweb-meme-thingy has exploded so much is that it speaks to a deep truth of the human experience that we desperately need to express, but we’re afraid we’ll sound like big sticky balls of emo if we say it plainly:

My life is terribly complicated and I am a many-layered little onion. I have a nagging suspicion that even the people closest to me don’t really understand even the surface of me, the simple truth of what I actually do with my days, to say nothing of the deeper truths about me like my passions or my fears.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the whole thing is just a funny commentary on how perception is so frequently different from reality, although I suspect it wouldn’t be nearly so ubiquitous if it wasn’t striking at something that goes pretty deep.

More Than Conquerors

I read Romans 8 again this morning.

Like any good Lutheran, I’m always drawn back to Romans, and this part of the book of Romans especially calls me back over and over, always revealing more and more.

A couple of things.

8:6 – “To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.”

I have struggled with “body issues” since 4^th grade. Over twenty years. I remember when I got my 4^th grade school pictures and a family member commented that I “better be careful or you’ll get chunky” or something to that effect. And it’s true, in that picture I have chubby cheeks and a bad perm and that weird asymmetrical squinty thing my eyes do when I smile for real.

So that’s where it started.

My weight has yo-yoed a lot. I’m not sure if every woman can tell you her highest and lowest weights for the past twenty years, but I can. 99 pounds in junior high, then up to 127 in high school, down to 119 when I went to college, up to 146 when I moved back home, up again to 169 which seemed gigantic when I moved to Fargo, down to 130, up to 170, back down to 114 where I see pictures of myself and think I look too skinny – then up, up, up to 220, down to 143, and back up to where I am now...

...and I suppose I’ll just say it even though posting my weight on the Internet feels like a tiny bit of death…

...up to 181, as of yesterday morning.

To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.

I saw The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo over the weekend, and for whatever reason, Rooney Mara’s character Lisbeth elicited a weirdly strong reaction from me. During the last part of the movie I couldn’t even follow the story because I was focused in so closely on her – her transformations, her body, the way she looked so effortless in both heels and badass boots (that’s just not fair my mind screamed – that she gets to be both the classy pretty girl and the rad tough girl and she also gets to be punk-rock gorgeous while eating nothing but Happy Meals!)

I don’t know why I reacted that way – I have thoroughly enjoyed plenty of movies with attractive female actresses. But for whatever reason, a bunch of my stupid self-judging, self-obsessed, self-pitying junk got birthed out into the light… again… and I suppose that means I have to deal with it… again.

To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.

So I was reading Romans 8 again this morning, and it occurred to me that every time I let that stupid liar voice come up again that tells me I’m too fat, that tells me I’m getting too old already before I’m even 35, that tells me I’m not pretty enough because I have asymmetrical eyes and bad skin… I’m setting my mind on the flesh.

I think so often the American-Christian tendency is to read Paul’s talk about “the flesh” as being about obsessive lust, but maybe another aspect of “setting the mind on the flesh” is, well, thinking so damn much about my flesh.

Maybe the sinful, destructive, deadly thing is believing the liar scratching at the door of my Enneagram-Type-1 soul that I’m not good enough for a million different reasons. And maybe Romans 8:1 is right, that “there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus,” and I suppose that means I have to stop condemning myself so harshly if God has already made the call.

To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.

I don’t know if there will come a time when these “issues” go away. I hope so. I’m so tired of the liar at the door keeping me locked in, keeping me from truly seeing you, keeping me from being the complete, free and powerful person God calls me to be in this world.

Craig Koester, in speaking about the book of Revelation, says that evil rages fiercely not because it is powerful, but because it is wounded and losing and dying.

I think that’s true.

^8:31 What then are we to say about these things?

I say yes, and I say the liar at the door is getting flustered.

In the words of Ryan Adams he’s “angry like a salesman who just can’t make a sale.”

If God is for us, who is against us? ³² He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else? ³³Who will bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. ³⁴Who is to condemn?

Not me. The Spirit dwells within, and it is getting harder and harder to look in the mirror and believe the liar.

It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us. ³⁵Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?

Not even nakedness. Not even the fear of being caught naked, the fear of being seen for the flawed and vulnerable and imperfect person I'm pretty sure you can already see anyway.  

³⁶As it is written,

‘For your sake we are being killed all day long;
 we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.’

³⁷No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.

More than conquerors.

More than conquerors.

More than conquerors.

Like a drumbeat, like a heartbeat, it echoes deep, deep, all the way down to the truth that was there all along. A truth louder than the lie when it finally bounces up into reality. A truth that will not be ignored or dismissed. A truth that laughs in the face of the liar, then scoops you up in its arms to hold you close, then takes your hand and says “let’s do this thing.”

³⁸ For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, ³⁹nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Amen.

On Dancing, or, "So It Turns Out That that Evil Pastor from Footloose was Wrong After All"

The drums, the drums… and the dark… and the disregard for whether or not I look good. The freedom of anonymity and the safety of my beloved’s happy gaze.

I watch the drunk girl with her Ke$ha posturing and the guy who grinds on her in of-all-things-to-wear-to-the-club, really, pajama pants and it all seems so staged and fake and Jersey Shore-sad and desperate but maybe beautiful because of that… and good for you, pajama pants and all, because even the lamest among us long to be loved.

For years I danced almost every weekend, a blur of big, ravey Jncos and glittery makeup and shady boys with shady intentions and jungle and drum n bass and happy hardcore. As much as it was about the hormones and the alcohol, it was also about the freedom of being young and wild and beautiful (though I never really felt that way) and reckless.

And maybe even more, it was about the freedom from constant self-consciousness and fear of judgment, the two things that have been bearing down on me for my whole life right up to this very day.

And then like a needle scratching across the vinyl, I stopped. I got it into my head that the way I danced attracted the wrong kind of attention, that I could just walk away from it, that it wasn’t grown-up or ladylike or Christian or whatever.

That’s so much crap.

I think it’s true that faith can be tremendously liberating – it has been for me in many ways. But just as often, we find ways to use faith as a convenient excuse to reinforce our pre-existing insecurities or fears or prejudices or politics. I am as guilty of this as anyone.

And saying that I wasn’t going to dance anymore because it wasn’t ladylike or Christian or grown-up was convenient and sounded better to me than the truth, which was closer to “I’ve gained some weight and my body is changing and I’m mostly afraid of looking ridiculous and I never really learned how to do this sober in a way that feels natural.”

I’ve been slowly, meanderingly reading the book of John since Christmas, grappling once again with what it means that God showed up with a body, that the Word became flesh.

Not took on flesh.

Not pure light-and-spirit putting on awkward, clumsy body like an ill-fitting, unfortunate coat.

But became flesh –

- and what that says about God’s regard for human bodies, human bodies being us – because I still have trouble reconciling “I am a body” rather than “I have a body.”

Because if I confess that the clearest and truest truth about God is not words on paper or a vague and nebulous sense of Spirit but Jesus the man with skin and teeth and glands and maybe even parts that jiggled and sagged, then I can no longer hide behind the idea that somehow crawled into my head that God disapproves of bodies or God doesn’t want me to dance, because a God who became flesh surely didn’t mean for us to sit primly in the bleachers until we could be tidily spirited away to heaven, gazing as the dancers float across the floor, the way I spent entirely too many Friday nights in junior high. Longing to be down there, waiting desperately for an invitation instead of simply joining in or God-forbid getting out of my head long enough to notice that there were kids who felt even more left out than me and extending an invitation of my own.

I still struggle with feeling awkward when I dance. Part is being sober. Part is the echo of years of American-Christian-Puritianism and Midwestern-Norwegian stoic culture. Part is that my body doesn’t move quite the same at 33 as it did at 18, so I have to find new movements.

But I can lose myself in the rhythm for whole minutes at a time. 

I find things I can express and ways to be for which words are inadequate.

And I feel a kinship with the others who have also dared to step onto the floor, also awkward, also imperfect, but drawn to the drums and the dark, and I think to myself, “I won’t judge if you won’t, or at least I’ll try not to, and for just this little while I'll try not judge myself either.”

And in the movement the Spirit that dwells within finds its freedom to fly so much more than when I held it safely in my hands from the sidelines.

That Jesus and Religion Video Guy, and How I'd Rather Just Read Tolkien

So, I was a little surprised when my last blog entry got 3 times more hits than all of the previous blog entries I’ve ever written combined. I’m grateful that something I wrote could have such an impact on so many people, and if you are reading this blog because of that particular entry, well, hi there! I mostly write about spirituality/religion from a not-terribly-orthodox Lutheran perspective, my own life and foibles, how much I like using words like foibles, films, books, et cetera. I never write about politics and I don’t really see the point in debating for debates’ sake, although I’m happy to hear what others say and try to better articulate my own perspective when necessary. 

So this video with the guy who loves Jesus but hates religion that everyone is posting on Facebook.

 

Sigh.

It mostly reminds me of Tony Jones' Writing a Book About How RADICAL Jesus Is? Please Stop Boring Me. 

There have been some good responses written by others, so I’ll just link to them… one by Becca Clark, who I’ve never heard of, but she does a good job teasing out the pros and cons, and one by Nadia Bolz-Weber that was apparently written at the request of the ELCA. She is pretty much the closest thing the ELCA has to a rock-star pastor right now, and one of the people that always draws me back to the beauty of the church when I start getting too annoyed with the ugliness.

It’s not that I hate the video… I don’t. But I don’t really love it, either. There are parts of it that are really beautiful and parts that make me go “huh?” and parts where I want to say, “Well, wait, actually…”

For one thing, I’m so desperately tired of the “spirituality vs. religion” or “relationship vs. religion” thing. There was a time I said, frequently, “religion is for people who are afraid of hell, spirituality is for people who have already been there.” How arrogant. As if all people throughout all time, religious or not, don’t go through hell in some way, and as if the only possible reason a person would feel drawn into a community gathered around certain ideas about God would be fear of hell.

For me, at least for the last 6 or 7 years, it’s spirituality and religion, like the two contact lenses I put on my eyeballs each morning (and isn’t that a weird thing to think about, if you really think about it) that allow me to see clearly. If I leave one of my contacts out, everything looks weird. If I leave them both out, I’m blind as a bat. But with both in place, things look right. So yes. Both-and. That’s the only thing that works for me. Your mileage may vary.

But more than that, I think, was that as soon as I saw the video for the first time, I knew it would be reposted. A lot. And I knew that the inevitable “backlash” blog responses would come, and so on, and so much of what I see online lately feels to me like so much preaching to the choir and I’m just really bored with it.

It might be time for one of those Facebook breaks people talk about, I’m thinking. Just for a little bit. 

And what perfect timing to do it, since I need every spare minute because I’m reading The Lord of the Rings again! The first time I read it was 12 years ago, when I took a Fantasy & Science Fiction class at NDSU. I took that class because I had enrolled for a Women’s Lit course and realized I’d already read all of the books for it, some twice, and I really didn’t want to read Kate Chopin’s The Awakening *again.* I saw that a Fantasy/Sci-Fi course was offered and thought, “Isn’t that stuff pretty much romance novels for boys?” And I took the class and found out I was so wrong, so wonderfully wrong.

The first time I read LOTR, it was in the last years of my drinking, which really took off and took over after I moved to Fargo, even though I somehow managed to stay in school and even do some darn good work while I was there. I can’t say I was particularly spiritual or religious then, and so a good deal of the beauty of LOTR was lost on me. I liked the story enough, and I really love the movies, but the richness of Tolkien’s writing and the depth of it were mostly lost on me.

But it’s so beautiful now. He treats the problem of temptation and sin and the human condition with such real consequence, while at the same time always treating his characters with such grace and mercy. Gollum is maybe the ugliest and most beautiful thing in the world, and ever since I saw this scene from The Two Towers early in my sobriety, I feel a special kinship with him:

 

Aww. It still makes me tear up. The inner conflict and the giddy tense nervousness near the end when he’s finally free… it just, like, nails it.

I also see in the Smeagol/Deagol story echoes of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, and the whole thing really just has so much depth and weight and grace and beauty to it, more than most books I read. It’s the end of the week and I’m not about to write an in-depth theological study of it just yet (mainly because I’m only 1/3 through the first book), but suffice to say, it is filling my soul with good things, and that’s always necessary.

For Minot

“The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past.” – Faulkner

Every media outlet in the world seems obligated to do a year-end roundup of important things that happened or important books or movies or albums that came out that year… I usually like year-end lists; on the artsy lists I learn about things I missed, and I’m reminded of things I loved. On the news lists, I think, “That can’t be six months ago, it seems like just yesterday,” or “That was only six months ago? It seems like ages.” Sometimes both.

But this year, those lists were incomplete. This year, those lists were wrong.

My hometown, Minot, North Dakota, was hit by a flood at the end of June unlike any other in its history – unlike any flood that most communities will ever see.

The dread started at Easter, when I visited my parents’ house and already the river that runs through their yard was rising. But real danger seemed far-off. I’d seen the river high a few years earlier. It rose, it crested, it fell.

The dread continued in May, when my parents came to Minneapolis for my graduation. We spent time together, we ate at my favorite restaurants, we visited the Science Museum, I heard a great sermon and donned a robe and someone important put a hood around my neck that I had to return an hour later. In between, my Mom used my computer to check the river levels  multiple times a day on the Internet, and told me they had a friend checking the house every three hours to make sure their septic system didn’t back up.

And then in June, friends and family who live in Minot started posting on Facebook about mandatory evacuations – first a false alarm.

And then not a false alarm.

I started watching the local news channel’s live stream for hours every day. I prayed. I kept checking Facebook. I felt like I should be in Minot, but I couldn’t be, and anyway what could I do to help, really? My gifts mostly have to do with words, not engineering or disaster preparedness or how to lift sandbags for 16 hours without collapsing.

My parents evacuated.

And the river rose. And crested.

I watched the local news feed as they flew over the town and surrounding area. I tried to locate landmarks. I found myself hypnotized by Facebook photo albums, focusing on street signs, timestamps, descriptions, trying to remember the way the river winds through town.

I saw pictures from the street where my childhood church is. The river was down the block. Then a few feet closer. Then in the parking lot.

After a few days, I stopped watching the news feed all day. I was finishing my final seminary class and just starting my current job, and I told myself that I had to focus on those things.

I was struck with waves of guilt – it was wrong for me to turn off the local news feed when so many hundreds of people I loved couldn’t just turn off what was happening in their lives. I ping-ponged emotionally between feeling helpless and feeling like I had to focus on my own responsibilities and feeling like I had an obligation to watch without turning away because after all, they couldn’t turn away.

But another hard part was feeling like this was all happening to so many people I cared about, seeing how my Facebook wall was covered with updates and laments and little glimmers of hope and everything in between in the weeks following the flood…

…and it seemed like no one around me was paying attention or even knew it was happening.

There was some national news coverage, for a day or two, but not much – a few aerial photos, and then nothing. They prayed for Minot for many weeks at worship services I attended, and I was grateful for that. When I told someone at my new job where I was from and what was happening there, he shrugged. Hadn’t heard about it. Offered a mumbled “that’s too bad,” as he walked away to focus on other things.

I went back to visit on Labor Day weekend.

I’ve always had a weird connection to houses that I see in my day-to-day life. I’ll feel a special affinity for a garden gnome, or a little Victorian cupola, or the way a porch looks so inviting. In my own neighborhood now, I have the Mayberry House, the House That Looks Like California, the 1955 Driveway, the Hippies With a Pile of Plastic Pink Flamingos, and many, many shoddy, slapped-on-looking additions that warm my heart.

I didn’t realize how many of those connections I still had in Minot until I drove around near 4^th Avenue Northwest. And I saw the little blue duplex with the round porthole windows. The long, low ranch house with the ferns that looks so 60’s. The dark brown house with turquoise trim, so unashamed of its ugliness.

Hollow. Dark. Port-a-potties on every corner like periods at the end of tragic sentences.

House after house after house after house after house. Block upon block. Haunted and empty and wrecked and the tears were rising with a tightness in my throat. The thing that came to mind, and I mean in no way to minimize anyone’s suffering, was rape. A violent taking and a violation of trust. A devastation that can’t be undone. And blood and sweat and tears everywhere, poured all over the only place that I’ve ever lived long enough to really call home.

My mom and I visited a family friend, and walked with her through the husk of her home, where I had spent countless teenage hours hanging out with friends.

She showed us where their FEMA trailer would go and worried about whether their dog would do okay in such a small space.

She showed us a statue of the Virgin Mary that had mysteriously washed up in their home.

She told us about the red tape. There is a lot of red tape.

In October, I went back to Minot again to preach at the church where I grew up, Christ Lutheran. The church no longer had carpet or pews or heat or plumbing. It was their first time worshipping in that space since June, and I was humbled that this community who had been through so much would even bother to listen to me, someone who’d watched it all from the comfort of a couch 500 miles away.

And then I went back again for Christmas. There were more FEMA trailers around town, many more. A whole village of them not far from my parents’ house, which had thankfully been (mostly) spared, although their outbuildings and property were hit hard. There was heat in the church, although the future for that building remains uncertain as I write this.

And then the year-end lists came from all the magazines and websites and news shows.

And no one said a word about Minot.

I’m not saying I expected the flood that came through my hometown to be number 1, or even number 2 or 3. A lot of devastating things happened all over the world, and some of them affected many more people than the flood in Minot did. I am troubled by the attitude I’ve sometimes seen in smaller towns that is suspicious or derisive of anyone or anything from a city of over 200,000, that thinks people in big cities are all uncaring jerks who don’t care about the “real” America. That’s not true, and I don’t think that that’s what happened with the year-end lists.

I guess I don’t know what happened.

I’m not saying that what happened in Minot was the most important thing that happened in the world in 2011. But it was the most important thing that happened in my world. And it was the most important thing that happened in the world of hundreds of people I know and care about.

And damn it, it may not be number 1, but it sure as hell belongs on the list somewhere.

If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?

If a river rages through a town and destroys thousands of homes and breaks thousands of hearts and leaves behind millions of dollars’ worth of damage and millions of tears and the national news media ignores it, does it matter?

Ask the families who celebrated Christmas in a FEMA trailer.

Ask my mom, who has to help figure out what to do with a devastated church community in between figuring out ways to remove toxic crud from hundreds of feet of vinyl fencing.

Ask the block after block after block after block of empty houses that still sit dark and hollow, six months later.

Haunted. Empty. Wrecked.

They will tell you the answer you need.

The Ripple, the Whosoever and the Tedious, Tedious Waiting of it All

Ah, the Advent season. That time of year when some churchy types take great joy in reminding everyone that it's about watching and waiting, not shopping, darn it, and some other churchy types take great joy in saying “it’s Merry CHRISTmas, not Happy Holidays!,” darn it, and we all take great joy in eating too much sugar and listening to the Beach Boys’ “The Man With All The Toys.” Or at least we should.

I’ve been lazy about blogging, mainly because my job is taking up a lot of my creative energy. That’s a good thing – when I started this job, I didn’t think I’d get much of a chance to really be creative at all, but lately a lot of what I do is creative and challenging and fun and maybe even theological and all of that good stuff.

Last week I presented a case study on Communications & Culture Change loosely based on David Lose’s work in the whole “Tell a Better Story”/belonging & purpose area, along with Guy Kawasaki’s Enchantment and Seth Godin’s All Marketers Tell Stories. It was fun to have a chance to do something a little more challenging and something related to the things I’m most interested in and passionate about, and my ideas were really well-received… so much so that I got to present it all over again for a group of executives this week (who also loved it), and then again today for a smaller group of people who couldn’t be there the first time.

If you had told me a year ago that I would be passionate about shaping corporate culture and genuinely see it as a great opportunity to do ministry, I probably would have laughed.

I used to say, “I got tired of working for the Man, so I’m going to work for the Man Upstairs.”

As if the church is the only place to do that.

Silly me.

I have had so many amazing conversations lately, so many little joys and signs of light in my days at work, and so much of a sense that a) God wants me to be right where I am right now, and/or b) when I decided to hold off seeking a pastoral call because it didn’t work with where my personal life is at right now, God was like, “Oh yeah? Well then, I’m going to have to go ahead use you here. How do you like them apples?”

God is also a big fan of Matt Damon in my head, apparently.

Anyway, it all has me thinking that for each of us, the ripple in the water of the universe that we make is inevitably so much bigger than the boundaries we try to draw around it. And the body of Christ – the “corporate Corpus Christi” if you will – the “whosoever,” as I like to say – is so much bigger than the group of people who call themselves the church.

And the God who became a human just like you because He loves you like a fool is already using you for something surprising today, and is planning something miraculous right now, no matter what you think is on hold or broken or not quite how you planned it to be. 

I am still very much in an area of watching and waiting in so many areas of my life... and doesn't *that* get terribly old and tedious? But isn't that also most of what life is? It seems like for 33 years I've almost always been watching and waiting for something, so maybe it's less about getting to whatever you're waiting for and more about enjoying the journey.

At least that's what everyone's inspirational posters on Pinterest seem to tell me.

And also what I suspect is true, even though I still kind of hate it.

But aside from the waiting and the waiting and the waiting that makes up so much of our terrifyingly short lives, I also feel like I'm learning to be more authentically and expansively myself, to feel less of a desire to apologize for my imperfections even while I pray that they might be transformed to serve others, to listen for what God is calling me to more and more, and to be less cemented in all of my preconceived ideas about what that is supposed to be. 

Happy Advent! 

Eyes Wide Open

Autumn’s chill showed up this week, like a slightly annoying neighbor who wears too much coral-orange lipstick saying, “Remember me? I’m baaack!” The only possible comfort to be found is in those two glorious words…

…hoodie weather.

I wish I could wear one every day, a size 2XL, swimming in it like a blanket with my ridiculous multicolored striped pajama pants and a pair of clean white cotton socks.

But that’s hardly “business casual,” and so I’m grateful for my two capey, sweatshirty Bobeau wraps, lovely garments that feel as forgiving as a hoodie but look drapey and flowing and fabulous.

I’ve been paging through the SoulPancake book and lamenting the fact that it’s so full of really thought-provoking questions and I never take the time to sit down and write or really think about them. I also want to blog more consistently, but don’t always feel like I have anything terribly interesting to write about.

You guessed it. Two birds, one stone.

So when I don’t have anything else I want to write about, I want to try blogging through some of the questions and quotes in it, completely haphazardly and not at all in any kind of order. Which I think is the way they’d want me to do it anyway. I’d also be really curious to hear other people’s answers.

Here goes.

What one eye-opening experience should every person have?

My mom has talked with me a few times about how she’s never been through a breakup. She and my dad have been together since she was a freshman in high school, they got married when she was 18 (She’s always quick to say that she was “almost 19” – as if that makes it more normal!). And heaven knows she’s seen me go through my fair share of breakups (probably more than my fair share… for a long time I had a bit of a “broken picker”).

It’s so strange to me that there is this huge chasm in experience between me and the woman who is one of the most important people in my life, and definitely the most influential female. She’s never gone through a breakup, and I’ve never been even close to going through an almost-40-year marriage, although I hope to share my life with someone.  And as awesome as it is that my parents’ marriage is lasting in a world where so many fail, I really can’t imagine what life would be like if I’d never been through a breakup.

Not just any breakup. The gut-wrenching kind. The kind that brings with it buckets of tears and the searing terrible fear of being foreveralone and carries along a crate full of records by the Smiths and the Cure and Tori Amos. The kind where people around you don’t know what to say to you and you know you’re making them uncomfortable. The kind that hurts not just emotionally but physically. The kind that changes you, the kind where you learn the real meaning of the phrase “if you’re going through hell, keep going.”

I’m in love. And I hope I never have to go through a breakup again. But my breakups have brought out the best in me, too. It was in the middle of a rapidly disintegrating relationship that I found my way back home to the church, and it was in the wake of that breakup that I discovered my sense of call to ministry. I didn’t date for 3 years, and I developed better friendships with women and also found ways to have genuine friendships with men that weren’t just about flirtation or my ego. It was after another breakup that I lost about 70 pounds.  

It’s maybe an indicator of how much I still have to learn about being in relationships, but I’m really good at going through breakups.

I know that it’s okay to be sad, even devastated, and it’s okay to let yourself cry as much as you need to cry.

I know that for a long time it seems like you’ll never have a day that you don’t feel the loss like a gaping emptiness, and then one day you’re okay being alone.

I know that it’s the absolute best time to start a self-improvement project. I know that it’s okay to embark on a self-improvement project purely out of spite or the hope that they will see you and regret breaking up with you, because you’ll improve anyway and the spite will go away on its own.

I know about discovering how much you enjoy your own company and realizing how awesome you really are.

I know about finding out they’re already (seriously?!) in a relationship with someone else long before you even felt almost ready to date. And I learned that you can get through that, too.

It’s not that I think breakups are great. I think they’re one of the most painful things we endure, especially if they come with the realization that the other person never had the golden promise of a forever future together in their imagination the way you did.

But they’re definitely an eye-opening experience.

And as much as they hurt, they’ve also always been the context in which I grow the most. They’ve been the context in which I am reminded of all of the other wonderful types of relationships there are, like friendships and familyships and even surprisingly-compassionate-co-workerships.

And they’ve been the context in which I discover who I really am, where I can confront honestly what I did and didn’t do wrong, my own part in the disintegration of the relationship, my fragile human failings, my jealousy and my fear of confrontation…

…and where I can also acknowledge that I tried my legitimate-damnedest to love and was not loved in return, and in that revelation find the ability to forgive myself for being hopeful enough to get hurt, and the ability to forgive the other person for being human.

I want to always be hopeful enough to get hurt.

I want to know that I tried my legitimate-damnedest to love.

I want my heart to break open and open and open until the pieces scatter and the light inside pours out on everything that does and doesn’t deserve it.  

 

The Most Real Thing

I haven't blogged for a while... that's usually how blog entries start when a person blogs again for the first time in a long time, but then it ends up being their only blog entry for another long time and so on... I hope that's not the case. I miss blogging. I miss the conversations it sparks, and on a personal level I miss how it lets me sift through my brain, giving me the space to let my thoughts form more fully and completely and find a home, or maybe to let them go if they're no longer helpful.

As usual, I digress.

I didn't blog for a long time because it was summer and I was busy and I was doing a lot of discerning and for a while I didn't want to write about that here and then for a while I didn't know how... But now that seems silly and the dust is mostly settled and I can just say the thing plain...

After a lot of thought and prayer and conversation I'm taking a step back from the call process temporarily. For a year or two, probably. My boyfriend and I have talked about the long term - quite a bit - but we've only been dating 11 months and 1 day as of this writing. And when the reality of being far, far apart in a blizzard-prone state stared me in the face, I flinched, and I realized that I don't want to subject such a relatively-new relationship to the stresses of being long-distance, of being a solo first-call pastor all alone in a place I've never been, etc. I was lucky enough to find a job in the Twin Cities as a Proofreader, and I've talked with my Bishop and my Candidacy Committee contact, and for now... I'm waiting. I still feel called to ministry. But I also feel called to share my life with someone, and you can't always control when that someone comes along.

There are times when I'm doing marketing stuff in my gray little cubicle and I read another Facebook update about someone getting ordained or doing pastoral care or officiating a wedding and I stop and go, "What on earth am I doing here?"

But most of the time my work is okay, and I'm good at it, and I have a Lutheran understanding of vocation that helps me not feel like I'm squandering the gifts God has given me. I still love living in the Twin Cities, and I'm hoping that by being conscientious about blogging again and getting more involved with the congregation I worship with, I can feel more like I'm involved in something where my own gifts are being used to chip further away at the cracks where the Kingdom shows through. 

Anyway... yesterday I was at church, and it was okay... I love Mercy Seat, I love the worship, I love the pastors, and I'm betting I would love the people if I would stop being so shy and bother to hang around after worship for their fabulous food-and-book-centric events. (I love food and books! Why have I not been staying and getting to know these lovely folks who also enjoy these things?  Weirdo.) So yeah. I was at church, and it was just kind of okay. I wasn't really "feeling it."

I know there are people out there who are all, "feeling spiritual doesn't matter," and make fun of those people who earnestly talk about being spiritual but not religious, but the freedom to be "spiritual but not religious" in a 12-step community allowed me to experience God when I needed God and brought me back from complete hopelessness, so I get kind of annoyed at those people who find "spiritual-but-not-religious" experiences so worthless and meaningless. There are people who find the church profoundly, even actively unwelcoming, or who don't relate to what we do in church, or who have had really bad experiences of the church in the past, and who the heck are churchgoers to say that we have the monopoly on experiencing God anyway?

So yeah... I like that "spiritual feeling." I have been doing this long enough to get through those periods when I don't "feel it," but a big part of that is reminding myself of the times when I do. And I wasn't feeling it last night...

...until we started singning "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing."

There may be a day, someday, when I can sing that song in worship without getting choked up and overwhelmed with gratitude and whatever that hard-to-pin-down "spiritual" feeling is, but last night wasn't it. 

It doesn't do that to me when I sing it by myself, around the house or in the car or whatever... but it gets me every time if I'm singing it with other people.

I may not know on a day-to-day, minute-by-minute basis what the heck I'm doing. A lot of times working in marketing feels at-the-very-best-neutral in the grand scheme of things. And I've always been prone to daydream through sermons. And I don't always "feel it." 

But when I do, it's the most real thing.

More real than the ultimate meaninglessness of cubicle life where it's always about "taking it to the next level" and your job never involves sitting around and chatting and eating pie. (I miss that part.)

More real than the petty insecurities that hold me back from living fully in community, even when I really want to.

More real than the doubts that sometimes creep in about whether or not I really deserve to share my life with a man so fun and forgiving and genuinely kind, who challenges me and surprises me.

It's the most real thing. So I hold onto that when it doesn't feel real. And I hope that in some small way the words I write or speak can maybe help reveal the most real thing for others. 

 

Oh to grace how great a debtor daily I'm constrained to be
Let that grace now like a fetter bind my wandering heart to thee
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, prone to leave the God I love
Here's my heart oh, take and seal it, seal it for thy courts above.