Thrown Under the Bus With Joy

When I began the new thing, I closed my eyes and picked a book and my finger landed on Philippians. And this was what I invited five women to begin with me.

We are twelve women now.  We've been through Philippians, Mark, Ruth, Esther, Romans, Ephesians and John.  Somewhere in Ruth is where it began for me -- the need to not just study and discuss, but to teach.  And somewhere in Ephesians I remember exploding in frustration that I didn't have the opportunity to do so.  Because by teach I really meant preach and those spaces are usually filled by experienced and commissioned people.

Patience.

This summer, as we breathe in sabbatical rest, we are joining another community in weekly worship.  I'm treating it like Lent:  if I give up something (time with my community) then I take up something (time in another community).   And it refreshes me to see other people walking in the way of Jesus.

Our first Sunday with them, being recognized by the pastor there, my husband was asked to teach in their series called Teach Us To Pray.  He politely said, "Well, I'm on sabbatical."  And to this I said, "Oh, but you love to teach.  You should do it."  Because I know that he does.  Because I know that when he doesn't teach he gets restless.  Because he gets to do work that is life-giving and I feared a little about what would give him life while he was away from preaching?

But I also know that in order to rest all things must stop.  And so I apologized later and inquired, "Did I commit you to something you don't want to do?"  He said, "We'll see."

The next week we returned to our interim community and he began the conversation again, but he said, "If you still want someone to teach, Debra can do it."  And I laughed.  It's not the first time he's thrown me under the bus.  He did it last summer, when we were in India, suggesting I take some turns at teaching church planters because he knew that I could.

How joyfully I took that responsibility off of him! That thing I'd placed on his shoulders in the first place was now firmly on my plate.  That thing that I'd been wanting to do, and he knows -- oh, he knows, was now opened to me.

I had the luxury of six weeks to read and think and pray and practice.  The first version left my lips while walking along the Pacific at sunrise on a drizzly Oregon morning.  When my voice was overpowered by the waves, nearby dog walkers oblivious to my vocalizing, I could move from thought to thought, circle back, start again, scratch it all.   I could practice my own application.  I could pray the way I was going to teach others to.

The last time I rehearsed it I was in my backyard in a quiet corner preaching to the fence, easily flowing thought to thought, grateful passion, submitting to God's grace.

And I discovered some beautiful things about teaching -- that it's actually not about who is hearing me in the way my ego would have me believe.  Teaching is a progressive internal exercise:  it's a turmoil of Midrash, a wrestling and refining. And as such, teaching does more in me than it does in anyone else. (How many sermons have ever changed your life?).

I know how I feel when my children repeat my teachings; when they've internalized something I've longed for them to grasp.  How pleasing it must be to the Father to hear his children say the things he's been saying all along. Teaching is a sacred time when I get to say in God's presence all that he's taught me.  And he can give me that knowing nod, that we're quite possibly actually getting somewhere.

Teaching is my confession.  I do it with joy.

Here it is.

Reading Geography

Gritting my teeth preparing five people for a two-week road trip.  But the end of the matter, the carrot I pace toward, is that for 3,300 miles I can open a book and give it all my attention.

I picked up Me Talk Pretty One Day as soon as we were out of Denver and placed my bookmark halfway in by Arches National Park.  On the road to Pocatello, after a stop at Bridal Veil Falls, I finished it.  Mostly.  I got the picture and passed over some of the end chapters. There wasn't anything new there.

After exploring caves and spatter cones at Craters of the Moon I finished writing a sermon and pushed through to the end of A Praying Life, something I'd started long ago and never finished, but it was applicable to my talk.  The next day I took notes in my journal as we moved into Oregon.  It's the kind of book you can put down for a while and come back to and find your place, because it can meet you where ever you are. It's the kind of book you underline.

When the rain began in Pendleton, I picked up The Writing Life and it was perfect for taking in a bit and looking away at the greening landscape, the breathtaking River Gorge, diving back in again, feeling my heart beat harder as the Columbia moved us closer to home.  Or where home once was -- those feelings are still there and writing is part of home.

When I finished it, we were driving through the dimness on Sunset Highway, evergreens holding us in on both sides.  And I knew I couldn't keep it.  I knew this one had to be passed on.  And when we arrived at Seaside, I wrapped it in a napkin topped with wildflowers and released it to it's rightful place in my aunt's library on the Sound.  Here's to a new life.

In Seaside I picked up The Spirit of the Disciplines and knew it would require all of me, so during the days of playing cards, and taking naps and walking back and forth to the beach more than once or twice, it stayed on the coffee table asking me when its time would come.  After the ocean, my friend, because the ocean is what the journey was all about.

When we drove away, bonfire and sunset behind us, new day dawning, we wandered back through the trees, into our old Vancouver hometown, drove by the house where my youngest was born, got my mother-in-law settled at home and visited with friends in Portland for the night.

But the next morning it was time.  Once we'd stopped at Multnomah Falls -- five years since we'd breathed her misty, mossy air -- the book and I spent some eight hours together on the way to Twin Falls.  And I dare say it changed my life.  Pencil notations where it spoke my heart, and shifting in my seat when it squeezed me.  We give up so easily to true and lasting change... the body matters... the kingdom is now.

Twin Falls to Grand Junction and I closed the last page.  This one needed to process.  And after a day of the longest family hike to date in the dust of Colorado National Monument we headed out on our last leg toward home. I made more notes and it was so rich I couldn't even bare to rewrite them all.  This one won't be sent away, this one will stay close.  Like blood.

July's List
Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
Traveling Mercies:  Some Thoughts on Faith by Anne Lamott
When God is Silent by Barbara Brown Taylor
The Journals of Jim Elliot by Elisabeth Elliot
The Open Secret by Lesslie Newbigin
Kingdom Journeys: Rediscovering the Lost Spiritual Discipline by Seth Barnes

A Future Not Our Own

I was over at Heart Of the Matter last week with this piece.  If you haven't checked out Heart of the Matter we're a community of homeschooling parents and writers who offer ideas and encouragement.  Take a few minutes to see what we're all about and leave comments.  http://heartofthematteronline.com/ 

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In my first days, with backbone and grit, I looked far above the heads of my three-year-old train-fan and my drooling, nursing newborn, far beyond the aged cedars that fortressed our Sierra Nevada home, down the corridor of time to an occasion where we’d all, erudite and enlightened, together learn Steinbeck, economics, Cold War politics, and German. I couldn’t wait for the harder math, the college courses at 15, and the polite, self-assured young men I would raise. I was way ahead of them, imagining a future that was essentially a fiction because it was my picture and not theirs.

I’m truly sorry if that sentence was harsh because, of course, it’s good to have a long-term outlook, to envision the end of an endeavor, to speculate and invest and drive the ship out to sea. But in those days of finding my feet as a home educator I felt I had to defend everything, to be everything, to design and regulate everything in a way that honored and validated all that I would invest. And in the process I drew a picture that was all about me.

What I’ve learned in the ensuing years is that I am a guide toward a future that only they can drive. I help move the talents of these children toward the success that suits them (a la Howard Gardner). I light their fires of learning (thank you, Mr. Yeats). I give them opportunities to learn outside of a classroom (complements to Mr. Holt), to pull from them what they have to offer as their “midwife of abundance” (blessings, Mr. Palmer) and to encourage them to self-educate to the point of compassion (nodding to you, Ms. Mason). Who they become, in the end, is not up to me.

We bury ourselves in grand visions and then live with the pressure of living up to them.

We check-mark our way through the scopes and sequences and weigh ourselves down with comparisons between our child and the child in that school building.

We sometimes forget that we’re not teaching a curriculum, we’re teaching a child.

We lose sight of the day-to-day in deference for the some-day.

But what our children really need to know is just the next thing. What they need to know is that being a student is far more important than being a teacher. What they need to know is that someone believes in who they are becoming. And what we really need to know are all the same things.

So, that future which is more and more becoming my present, looks very different from the one I imagined. It’s no less grand and fulfilling, but it uses different colors and textures and even images with three sons now featured instead of two. It required different techniques, both pouring it on and scraping it off. It took a direction I couldn’t see until I pulled it out of the canvas like Michelangelo on a commission. The master builder determines the completed piece; I am just the worker.

Do the next thing, remain a student and live like God believes in who you are becoming. Paint that picture and see how it turns out.

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In memory of Oscar Romero (1917–1980)

A Future Not Our Own

It helps now and then to step back and take a long view.
The Kingdom is not only beyond our efforts,
it is beyond our vision.

We accomplish in our lifetime only a fraction
of the magnificent enterprise that is God's work.
Nothing we do is complete, which is another way of
saying that the kingdom always lies beyond us.
No statement says all that could be said.
No prayer fully expresses our faith. No confession
brings perfection, no pastoral visit brings wholeness.
No program accomplishes the Church's mission.
No set of goals and objectives include everything.

This is what we are about. We plant the seeds that one
day will grow. We water the seeds already planted
knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces effects
far beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of
liberation in realizing this.
This enables us to do something, and to do it very well.
It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning,
a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord's
grace to enter and do the rest.
We may never see the end results, but that is the
difference between the master builder and the worker.

We are workers, not master builders, ministers, not
messiahs. We are prophets of a future not our own.

The Challenge of Invitation, Part 3

He was so immersed in the life of the Church...that he occasionally forgot that the life of faith was not always the same thing.  -- Barbara Brown Taylor, Leaving Church

The October breeze blowing chill against my coat, I nearly run to the edge of the moonlit lake.  Before me, lamplight reflections writhing on the water.  Behind me, inside the warm church, a conference of people finding private corners and comfy chairs to sit and ask the same question:  "What do you want from God?"  I charge outside; can't even answer his question unless he's present with me. I touch the things he's touched, look him square in the face as if he lived on the moon.

I say the first thing that comes:  "I want to be heard."

Right away, I want to take it back.  Do I really?  Couldn't I choose something that sounds like less of a tantrum?  How long have I walked this path now, eyes on the moon all these years?  Hasn't he heard?

It's the cry that comes from the invisible:  When the growing-up church devalued and gave women only fifteen minutes of pulpit time and never a deacon role.  When the older brother constantly beat down his sister's ardor.  When the seminary said, "It's good that you're here to support your husband in his ministry."  And now when I've begun to find my voice there's no invitation to use it.

The conference had just walked us through our lives, year by year, stepping in all the seasons good and empty.  We mapped them out:  names, roles, events, experiences.  I noted the people who'd invited me in college, family, seminary and even in church after church.  I paused, pen poised for the next, but there weren't any more. The names stopped.  The mentors were gone.  In the past ten years, no one had significantly spoken into my life.  I hadn't been heard for days and weeks and years.

The invitations had stopped.

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As I made my way into this now community, as if saved in an attic covered in dusty white sheets, my greatest strengths emerged.  And when I scouted and scratched and inched into them I found that these greater strengths were already filled by others. Or undervalued. Or misunderstood.  To use these gifts for the church, I needed the church to identify and affirm them.  But there were obstructions and other choices and different directions.

When I identify my gifts that easily fit into how the church is already working it's easy to slip into place and support the greater vision, maybe just take over something someone else has to drop, or join a team that's already in motion.  That works well.  But when I discover that I have something new that can build her up, something there isn't already a place and person for, I get an ecclesiastical blank stare.

Invisibility.

Let go of the defenses and the shields and the tightfisted formulas for some life that doesn't exist and give away beautiful pieces of yourself and feel the hurt, because the only way to own a life worth having is to give away your own life.  -- Ann Voskamp

A few weeks ago, I determined to stop waiting for an invitation. I started to ask questions outside my church to see if I could use the gifts, if I could be heard.  I thought it would just be a toe interrupting a quiet pond, but I came away astonished at the splash my first inquiries made.  The eager invitation to mentor.  The excited invitation to preach.  The new friend who invites me to tell my story.  Why was it easier to be affirmed outside?  Why was I being invited and challenged by the not-my-church?

Over 20 years of passion and eagerness, heart aflame and vision charging, I have admittedly lived for the Church.  I want to plant her deep and water and prune her, to grow her into "on earth as it is in heaven" people. I grieve over her and I'd be lost without her.

I remain in hope that she'll reciprocate the art of invitation, slip it into her bloodstream, let go of some vision that doesn't, won't exist.  But even if she won't I'll continue to press because eternity runs through our veins together. I'm not leaving her. But this life of faith is something broader and deeper than the life of church and I'm, right now, cracking away at what that means.

The question shouldn't be what do we do when we don't get invitations, but what happens when we don't give them?  We lose the people who needed to be invited.  We miss the practice of abiding in relationships.  We chase off the evangelists.  We grow stagnant and impotent.  We don't pass on the faith.

At the end of all this here's the intersection I'm standing at: the point of this long walk talking to the moon isn't to live for the church but for Christ.  He has a bigger body, a broader expression.  He doesn't squelch the ardor.  He is intimacy, essence and abundance.  He invites and challenges and prepares our outcomes and He is always present with us in his most adept ways.