I wanted to let y'all know: this blog isn't going to be all doom and gloom. You just caught me during a bad week. :)
Life is a mishmash of happy and sad. One of my favorite movies ever contains the line, "Laughter through tears is my favorite emotion" and that's pretty much smackdab where I'm sitting most of the time. Life's rough. But it's also glorious.
My summer vacation almost always includes a nice, lengthy stay at the Oregon Coast. I center my entire year around this time at the beach--as soon as we leave one year, I'm planning for the next. My entire family goes, and we rent a house that's on the beach and just relax and beachcomb and eat crab and drink wine and find sand in awkward places. And we LAUGH. This year's trip has been abruptly cancelled. Rough. Roughroughroughroughrough. It ticked me off. Because when I went to go make my OWN reservations for a place on the beach: nothing was available. So I spent about a day feeling sorry for myself because my vacation had been taken away from me.
But you know what? For the first time ever, it means the family I'm directly responsible for creating will go on a vacation without aunts and uncles and grandparents in tow. We can go where we want. Do what we want. Eat what we want.
And one of the best things? We're going to introduce our girls to the wonders of Lutheran Outdoor Ministry, by spending the 4th of July weekend up at Camp Lutherhaven with some good friends of ours. Lutherhaven is intrinsically wound around my understanding of my call to ministry. If I had a spiritual epiphany in my early years, odds are good it happened at Lutherhaven. I'm SO excited to get to share this with my girls. Plus? We're tent camping. I'm not sure how this is going to work with the whole potty training/peeing at night in a dark outhouse over a big, dark hole thing, but perhaps we'll just get a bucket and a lid and call it the nighttime potty.
And, the four of us have reservations at the beach after Christmas. So I'll still get my time in at the beach, during the better beach-combing season.
All this blather is to say: as crap as life seems sometimes, it's not all bad. Sometimes, in the midst of some of the worst things, God comes and says, "Hey, kiddo. I want to show you something new."
*Alternate title "Every Cloud Has a Silver Lining...Eventually"
Sunday, June 20, 2010
Saturday, June 19, 2010
Not to belabor a point, but...
My kids' fish died the other night.
Poh, a betta named after the Jack Black character in "Kung Fu Panda" had been struggling for days, so it was good that he finally went. But it's breached a whole new world for my two-year-old, who spent the next day asking, "Will you die, Mama? Will Daddy? Will Sissy? Will I? Will Grammy? Will my coloring book? Will my bed die? Will my lovie die?" Poor little kid. She's not quite as blase about death as I try and be. She reacts the way we all do, but are too smooth, polished, and urbane to show.
Being a pastor is hard work. Anyone who says it isn't is either 1) lying or 2) not doing it right. My whole image of myself as a pastor is one who stands in the gap--the gap between life and death, the gap between heaven and hell, the gap between brokeness and wholeness, the gap between knowing and believing, the gap between fear and peace, the gap between knowledge and belief. It's never easy to straddle two worlds, but that's what pastors are called to do every day.
Wednesday night: I was done. I was tired of the tears and the fear and the pain and the saddness and the waiting and the uncertainty and the death and the life--all of it. I was tired. I was done. I wanted a beer. But my day was nowhere near done enough to declare Miller Time.
I was sitting in my office, trying to find SOMETHING to do that would keep me from just crawling under my desk and giving in to the tears that were thisclose to the surface, when I glanced out into the courtyard of the church. And what I saw there caused hope to spring fresh in my heart, laughter instead of tears, joy instead of despair.
What did I see, you ask? Some heaven-descended dove with an olive branch in his beak and a rainbow spanning the sky? A voice booming from heaven, delivering a message that gave me the strength to go on?
Well. Not in so many words. :)
I saw three good men, standing around a barbeque grill. Two were cooking. One was "supervising". They were (so far as I know) unaware of being observed. They didn't do anything amazing. They flipped some burgers. They had a conversation. One was wearing an apron. Absolutely nothing spectacular, just being themselves.
And that sight is what brought joy into my heart, a balm to the sad weariness of my day. Three men. Flipping burgers in a church courtyard.
I always tell people that God uses the ordinary to accomplish the extraordinary. Water? Bread? Wine? Men flipping burgers? All can be salvific when placed in the hands of the Lord. Nothing is too mundane for God to scoop it up into His hands, and with a twinkle in His eye use it to change the life of His children. To bring them home. To ease their hearts. To give them the strength to carry on.
Thanks be to God that we're not in this alone. I'd have given up long ago.
Poh, a betta named after the Jack Black character in "Kung Fu Panda" had been struggling for days, so it was good that he finally went. But it's breached a whole new world for my two-year-old, who spent the next day asking, "Will you die, Mama? Will Daddy? Will Sissy? Will I? Will Grammy? Will my coloring book? Will my bed die? Will my lovie die?" Poor little kid. She's not quite as blase about death as I try and be. She reacts the way we all do, but are too smooth, polished, and urbane to show.
Being a pastor is hard work. Anyone who says it isn't is either 1) lying or 2) not doing it right. My whole image of myself as a pastor is one who stands in the gap--the gap between life and death, the gap between heaven and hell, the gap between brokeness and wholeness, the gap between knowing and believing, the gap between fear and peace, the gap between knowledge and belief. It's never easy to straddle two worlds, but that's what pastors are called to do every day.
Wednesday night: I was done. I was tired of the tears and the fear and the pain and the saddness and the waiting and the uncertainty and the death and the life--all of it. I was tired. I was done. I wanted a beer. But my day was nowhere near done enough to declare Miller Time.
I was sitting in my office, trying to find SOMETHING to do that would keep me from just crawling under my desk and giving in to the tears that were thisclose to the surface, when I glanced out into the courtyard of the church. And what I saw there caused hope to spring fresh in my heart, laughter instead of tears, joy instead of despair.
What did I see, you ask? Some heaven-descended dove with an olive branch in his beak and a rainbow spanning the sky? A voice booming from heaven, delivering a message that gave me the strength to go on?
Well. Not in so many words. :)
I saw three good men, standing around a barbeque grill. Two were cooking. One was "supervising". They were (so far as I know) unaware of being observed. They didn't do anything amazing. They flipped some burgers. They had a conversation. One was wearing an apron. Absolutely nothing spectacular, just being themselves.
And that sight is what brought joy into my heart, a balm to the sad weariness of my day. Three men. Flipping burgers in a church courtyard.
I always tell people that God uses the ordinary to accomplish the extraordinary. Water? Bread? Wine? Men flipping burgers? All can be salvific when placed in the hands of the Lord. Nothing is too mundane for God to scoop it up into His hands, and with a twinkle in His eye use it to change the life of His children. To bring them home. To ease their hearts. To give them the strength to carry on.
Thanks be to God that we're not in this alone. I'd have given up long ago.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Death has been working overttime lately.
I am involved in 3 funerals this week, and a freakishly high number of my pastoral cohorts are also balancing the normal demands of their ministry with the valid needs of parishoners grieving losses expected and unexpected.
A young man in my congregation, recently graduated from high school, has enlisted in the Marine Corps. He is being sent to basic training (when did they stop calling it "boot camp"?) a month earlier than we had expected. The congregation had planned on doing a special sending liturgy for him before he left...but now that he's going to be gone so fast, he won't be able to be there for it. I feel cheated of the chance to invoke every particle of protection around him that I can, even though logically I know that my prayers for his safety are efficacious whether he's in California training to be a soldier, or standing right in front of me in the safety of our sanctuary.
This is so much about what life as a person of faith is, and frankly: it sort of sucks. Part of me wants the "Happy Happy Joy Joy Shiney Happy People Holding Hands" style of a life of faith. But my life is and always has been distinctly cruciform. Why do I love Good Friday more than Easter Sunday? Because most of the time, I feel like I spend my time with my eyes riveted on that hunk of bloody meat that is my Lord. I crave the feeling of rough and splintered wood beneath my cheek. I seek to bathe myself in the blood and water flowing from his side.
People mock me for this. Think that as a Christian, I ought to be more focused on Easter, and the joys of the Resurrection. And maybe someday: I will be. But right now? There's just too much death. Too much suffering. Too much fear. Too much pain. Frankly, I'm more comforted by a full cross than an empty tomb.
At least the Cross gives you something to hold on to.
I am involved in 3 funerals this week, and a freakishly high number of my pastoral cohorts are also balancing the normal demands of their ministry with the valid needs of parishoners grieving losses expected and unexpected.
A young man in my congregation, recently graduated from high school, has enlisted in the Marine Corps. He is being sent to basic training (when did they stop calling it "boot camp"?) a month earlier than we had expected. The congregation had planned on doing a special sending liturgy for him before he left...but now that he's going to be gone so fast, he won't be able to be there for it. I feel cheated of the chance to invoke every particle of protection around him that I can, even though logically I know that my prayers for his safety are efficacious whether he's in California training to be a soldier, or standing right in front of me in the safety of our sanctuary.
This is so much about what life as a person of faith is, and frankly: it sort of sucks. Part of me wants the "Happy Happy Joy Joy Shiney Happy People Holding Hands" style of a life of faith. But my life is and always has been distinctly cruciform. Why do I love Good Friday more than Easter Sunday? Because most of the time, I feel like I spend my time with my eyes riveted on that hunk of bloody meat that is my Lord. I crave the feeling of rough and splintered wood beneath my cheek. I seek to bathe myself in the blood and water flowing from his side.
People mock me for this. Think that as a Christian, I ought to be more focused on Easter, and the joys of the Resurrection. And maybe someday: I will be. But right now? There's just too much death. Too much suffering. Too much fear. Too much pain. Frankly, I'm more comforted by a full cross than an empty tomb.
At least the Cross gives you something to hold on to.
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