Friday, March 30, 2012

Time-Out

Reflections on 1 Corinthians 7:14-25 & John 6:31

I knew that if I could just get out of the car I would be free.  It was an unusually warm February morning, almost fifty degrees.  The sun danced on the waters of the Delaware River just a stones throw from the parked car. Leafless trees and a blanket of week-old snow, marked only by the restless wanderings of squirrels and deer, made the invitation to come almost tangible.  There is something about bare winter trees, all bark and branches, unencumbered by summer’s leafy greens, which exposes a truth that is both shameful and beautiful.  These are the days postcards are made of, I thought to myself.  And still I sat, buckled in, keys in the ignition, windows up and doors locked. 

I do not understand my own actions.
 For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.
1 Corinthians 7:15

I had come with the intention to walk, just to walk.  I had come to shake loose the cobwebs that had grown thick around my once active imagination.  I had come seeking inspiration … motivation.  I had come to take a first step toward something bigger than the laundry list of daily chores that had occupied so much of the past several months.  It is amazing how fast you can lose yourself in the details of day to day living.  Picking up this and that, keeping three children in clean clothes and erasing fingerprints and toothpaste splatters from bathroom mirrors.  It is a dangerous endeavor to pay too much mind to the details.  Details can be the undoing of creative promise, a convenient distraction, an excuse to hide behind when fear gets the better of us.  Like so many leaves on a tree hiding the brokenness and the beauty that lies beneath, petty details hang like scales before the eyes of those who have forgotten their dreams.

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Jesus had big dreams … kingdom-of-God-sized dreams.  Big dreams require lots of work and Jesus was no slacker.  He logged a lot of miles in those sandals, traveling from town to town, healing and teaching and gathering those who longed to share his dream.  Everywhere he went he drew a crowd and soon word of his coming preceded him and crowds formed in anticipation of his arrival.  There was no end to the people who wanted and needed something from him; a dying child, a leprous man, a bleeding woman, the blind, the accused, the cheaters, the religious leaders.  There was so much to do on any given day that twenty-four hours just wasn’t enough.  And still Jesus found time to get away, time to put the to-do list on hold and take a walk around the lake or a hike up a mountain to pray, to think, dream, to find a little inspiration … a renewed sense of motivation.  He gave himself permission to walk away for a short time and he taught his disciples to do the same.  I could be mistaken, but I think those little time-outs provided fuel for the dream.  They helped keep the dream alive and in focus.       

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I had almost forgotten my dreams.  Had I forgotten them altogether, I suppose I wouldn’t have been sitting in a parked car facing the banks of the Delaware.  I almost didn’t come at all.  There were so many pressing reasons to stay home.  I had several years’ worth of medical bills to file.  The kitchen floor needed to be mopped.  It always needs to be mopped.  The basement was a disaster.  It has never been otherwise.  The doors to the bedrooms needed to be scrubbed.  Why hadn’t I seen that before?  And when was I going to get around to painting the molding around the new front door … the one that was installed almost a year ago?  I am, it seems, passive aggressive toward my own best interests, subconsciously manufacturing reasons to delay doing the things I most want to get done, so that the anxiety that results renders me unable to get my lazy rear in gear.  It is a cycle of subversion that spirals faster and deeper, until I am dissatisfied with everything and everyone with of course, only myself to blame.  I am aware enough to know that I am, at times, my own worst enemy and that is enough for me to compound guilt with a twinge of self-loathing.

For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.
1 Corinthians 7:19

The upside is that this is only me at my worst.  There is another side to my slightly complicated self and that was the side that I was hoping to rediscover along the river’s edge.  I just needed to get out of the car.  I had driven fifteen miles from my home with every intention of getting out of the car.  I was dressed for success … sweatpants, sweatshirt, sneakers and my favorite fleece vest with an inside pocket for my iPod, which was charged and ready to go.  There was some forethought here and that was encouraging.  So, even I was surprised when I pulled in the parking lot and found my body at odds with my plan.  Why was it so hard to get out of the car?

Wretched one that I am!  Who will rescue me from this locked car?
1 Corinthians 7:24 (sort of)

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The disciples had been busy, very busy.  Jesus had sent them out in pairs to preach and cast out demons and heal the sick.  There was no end to the people who wanted and needed something from them.  When they returned and submitted their reports to Jesus they were spent, but the work was not done.  That is when …

Jesus said to the disciples, “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest awhile.”  For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure …
Mark 6:31

   

Friday, March 23, 2012

There was a Time ...


Reflections on Mark 10:13-16

Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it. 

There was a time when I could go to the moon or sail an angry sea or hide from the bad guys all from the inside of a cardboard box.  There was a time when a blanket was all I needed to be a super hero or to build a fort.  There was a time when the whole neighborhood would gather around the back of my house, to the spot in the corner of the driveway, where new gravel was delivered.  All we needed were a few Hot Wheels cars, some Tonka trucks and a garden trowel to build an entire city in one day.  There was a time when my friends and I spent hours and hours in the woods tracking Mr. Brown, the neighborhood nemesis, who hated children and carried a shotgun.  There was a time when I delivered the Gettysburg Address, balancing precariously on the arms of a fire hydrant in my front yard, because President Lincoln’s train was delayed.  There was a time when my best friend and I went on dates with the Mickey Dolenz and Davy Jones riding on the backs of our bikes (remember the Monkees?).  Davy always rode with me.  There was a time when anything was possible.

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People were bringing little children to Jesus in order that he might touch them and the disciples spoke sternly to them. 

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There was a time when cardboard boxes were for throwing away and blankets were just for keeping warm.  There was a time when the only hot wheels I was interested in where the four wheels of my mother’s gold, Buick Skylark.  There was a time when my biggest nemesis stalked the hallways of my junior high school, armed with words that could really wound.  There was a time when delivering a speech in class made me so self-conscious that I would tremble and stammer and break out in a cold sweat.  There was a time when those I wanted to date, didn’t want to date me and those who wanted to date me, I had no interest in.  There was a time when all the pretend of earlier days seemed silly and strangely shameful. 

Childhood was for play.  Adolescence was to be survived.  And then adulthood came crashing down.  Imagination, long ago replaced by reality, was now but a wistful dream.  Adulthood is the time when cardboard boxes store mementos of my childhood in a dark and damp basement.  It is a time when curling up under my own blanket at the end of long day is the closest thing to free.  It is a time when the reality of owning and maintaining a car or home or anything for that matter is a weighty responsibility.  It is a time when finding my voice and the courage to use it is mandatory.  It is a time when accepting and embracing me, the good, the bad and the various degrees of ugly, is a pre-requisite for relating to anyone; friend, family or foe.  It is a time when how life is takes center stage over how life could be.  It is a time when possibility seems limited.   

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But when Jesus saw this, he was indignant and said to them,
“Let the little children come to me; do not stop them;
for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs.

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Something is lost and something gained when we leave childhood for our grown up lives.  I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t go back to age 5 or 8 or 13 or even 30.  But there is something we know as children that we forget as adults when we trade imagination for maturity.  There is something about imagination that unlocks the kingdom of God in a way that reason cannot.  Henry Ward Beecher once wrote, “The soul without imagination is what an observatory would be without a telescope.”  The kingdom that Jesus ushered in cannot be seen with reason.  Our adult eyes are far more attuned to all that is wrong and broken in the world, but the eyes of imagination, the eyes of children, look beyond what we see.  They see hope when we impossibility.  They see potential in those we have learned to judge.  They see magic and wonder where doubt has clouded our vision.  With God, we are told that all things are possible and so too with children.  Imagination makes it so.

In the apostle Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth he wrote, “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.”   That, I think, is a shame. 

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“Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.”  And Jesus took them up in his arms, laid his hands upon them, and blessed them.



Friday, March 16, 2012

The Plea of a Concerned Parent

Reflections on Mark 9:7

This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!

It happened quickly.  First, her husband of 63 years passed from cancer of the everything and then her children took over.  I mean took over.  It had been years since all five of them talked, let alone worked on a project together.  And what was the project that brought them together … MOM.  With the death of their father, who was going to take care of her?  There were going to be decisions that needed to be made and by God, none of them wanted to be left out that. 

Five siblings, five opinions, but the one thing they all agreed on was that mother couldn’t make it alone by herself in the house she had shared for 53 years with her husband, Ed.  She was going to have to move somewhere where she would not be alone.  She couldn’t live with Vicky, her eldest, because Vicky has a job that requires sixty-plus hours per week, including a Saturday every now and then.  Not to mention the 3 grandchildren that she sits for on Sundays. Jen can’t take her, because she lives on the other side of the country, too far from the rest of the family.  Mike is out because he has his new younger wife and her three teenage daughters to think about and that would be too much to ask of of them.  Kevin is flat out irresponsible, has been his whole life.  Nice guy, but no help.  Sue, the baby at age 43, is willing to take mom in.  She is recently divorced and economically strapped, but willing.  If she takes mother however, the rest will have to supplement her income to make it work, including financing an addition to her home so mom can have a bedroom and bathroom on the ground floor.  The others suggested she sell her home and move in with mom.  But Sue isn’t willing to give up the home she fought to keep in the divorce or to move her twelve year-old son to a new, less accomplished, school district.

photo by Chalmers Butterfield
So Marilyn sits quietly in her living room, next to an empty chair that was Ed’s, as her kids discuss her future in the kitchen.  They think that she is napping.  She has been known from time to time to sleep in her chair, but she is not napping and she hears almost every word.  She hears Jen argue for an assisted living facility and already has several in mind.  Mike and Kevin seem to agree.  Kevin always agrees with Mike, so that is no surprise.  Vicky would like to see her mom with Sue, but is worried about her own retirement and cannot commit to indefinite financial support.  Sue of course has made her pitch and has dug her heels in when Mike suggested, yet again, that this would be so simple if she would just move two towns over and live here in mom’s house.  Kevin wants Mom and Dad’s 1994 silver Ford Taurus and that turns the conversation to who gets what, since it seems a forgone conclusion that mother will have to move.

Marilyn can’t help but tear up as she listens without comment from the living room.  She knows that her children love her and she is so grateful that they are all here, but not one of them has asked her what she wants, what plans she has made, and she has made plans.

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Jesus had plans.  He had his sights set on Jerusalem.  As the gospel writers tell it, he knew what awaited him there and he tried to share what he knew with his disciples.  But they would have none of it.  Peter even went so far as to pull Jesus aside and rebuked him.  No doubt the disciples had been talking on the side, plotting and predicting great things for the Jesus they had left their homes and families for and those great things did not include arrest and suffering and death.  They refused to listen to what Jesus was trying to tell them.

Then one day Jesus went on a hike with Peter, James and John.  They climbed a high mountain for a little quiet time, a chance to get away, but when they reached the peak they were not alone.  First, Jesus transfigured before them, framed in light and dressed in clothes dazzling white.  Then Moses and Elijah showed up and engaged Jesus in a conversation as the mouths of the disciples dropped to the ground.  That is when Peter took over.  He started to organize.  “James you go to Home Depot.  John you get the others.  I will lay out camp with three dwellings, one for Moses, one for Elijah and one for Jesus.”  And Peter knew he was right.  Jesus wasn’t going to Jerusalem to die.  He was going to Jerusalem to shake things up, with Moses and Elijah by his side.

But before Peter could hand the credit card to James, a cloud overshadowed them.  A strange combination of darkness and light swirled around them and the voice of God could be heard as if being spoken not in front or behind them, but all around them … as if God where cupping the faces of the disciples with God’s own hands in an effort to get their attention.  “This is my Son, my Beloved; listen to him!” 

“Listen to him!” the plea of a concerned parent and the command of an omnipotent God. 

How often do we make our plans and set them in motion without listening to the divine whisperings of the Holy Spirit longing to get our attention?  How often do we stumble into a future that is not meant to be, like bulls in the proverbial china shop, leaving hurt feelings and broken promises in our wake, making messes that damage and stain us and those around us?  How often do our actions serve as a rebuke of God and the life that God has called us to?  How often do we refuse to listen because we are afraid of what we will hear?  How often do we think that we know better?

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Marilyn has a plan.  She and Ed had finalized it in those last weeks of his life, but no one has bothered to ask.  As her children go on and on in the kitchen, she sits in her chair and wonders how she will ever get their attention and if, in the end, it will matter.

Friday, March 9, 2012

Life Lived in Reverse


Reflections on Luke 17:32

Remember Lot’s Wife.

We moved a lot when I was a kid.  Pittsburgh, Houston, Kansas City and back to Pittsburgh all in the three and half years between sixth grade and the end of the first semester of ninth grade, the prime wonder years.  I was excited to leave the neighborhood I had grown up in in exchange for what my mother promised to be a grand adventure.  Only it never occurred to me how hard adventures could be.  I was shyer than anyone imagined I would be.  I didn’t mix well at my new school, in a new state, in a new neighborhood with no kids my age.  I was miserable and I think I made my parents miserable too.  In six months we were off to Kansas City … another new school, new classmates, and a new neighborhood.  This time I tried a little harder.  The end result was that I was cornered on the playground by a welcome wagon of bullies who promised to make the new kid miserable, and I was, for a time. 

Sixth grade turned to seventh and things got better.  It took awhile, but I made friends, good friends.  In Kansas City my neighborhood was huge and my school friends lived within a short bike ride of my house.  It was the seventies so you didn’t need a play date scheduled by your mom to visit your friends.  My new posse of girlfriends expanded with the onset of puberty to include boys.  On weekends we gathered in rec rooms and basements playing records and dancing to the Bee Gee’s Saturday Night Fever and Gary Wright’s Dream Weaver album.  There was always drama, but it was harmless, junior high, drama …who liked whom and who asked whom to dance.  We passed notes at school and tied up our parent’s phone lines.  My first official boyfriend was the older brother of a member of my posse.  We didn’t talk.  We just slow danced at night and passed notes by day.  I was in love.

Then it was time to move … again.  Chuck and I had finally found each other and my Dad wanted to move us back to Pittsburgh.  I pouted, slammed doors, refused to be pleasant, isolated myself in my room for days, maybe weeks, but we moved anyway.  We packed the Ford Grand Torino Station Wagon and drove east for two days.  I cried the whole way.  I wrote Chuck Gibson all over by white Keds sneakers between sobs.  I was determined to me miserable in Pittsburgh.  And of course I was.

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Jesus would have told me to remember Lot’s wife, just as he reminded the disciples in Luke’s gospel.  Of course that wouldn’t have meant anything to me as a fourteen-year-old.  My Sunday school education was not substantial.  It would be a few years or more before I would become aware of the fate of Lot’s wife as they packed their bags and headed for the hills.   God called them forward, told them it was time to move on, but Lot’s wife looked back.  She lost sight of the present and the promise of the future and instead looked longing over her shoulder and ceased to exist.  She crumbled on the spot.   

I get it.  There is nothing worse than the feeling that the best is over … that the best times have past … that the best love is lost … that the best success has been had … that nothing will compare with days gone by.  There is nothing sadder than the conviction that nothing ahead of you will match what is behind you.  I understand her need to look back.  She wasn’t fleeing bad times.  She was saying goodbye to the good times.  She was leaving behind the home her children grew up in and her own circle of friends.  She was leaving what she knew and heading into the unknown.   Okay, so Sodom and Gomorrah wasn’t the ideal location to raise a family, but still so much of her life happened there.  And besides, the minute the present becomes the past it is open to reinterpretation and of course romanticization. 

It is the sin of nostalgia.  Nostalgia comes from the Greek roots meaning homecoming and pain.  It is an ache for the past, often a past that did not exist, at least not as we remember it.  Many of us are prone to selective memory and embellishment that paints the past rosy in comparison to the present.  As a result we move through life not face forward, but with necks stretched back, looking over our shoulders and longing for the good old days.  It is a life lived in reverse, which come to find out is no life at all, if the lesson of Mrs. Lot is to be believed.  She looked back and turned into a pillar of salt.

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I didn’t turn into a pillar of salt, but I missed out on much of the life that was happening all around me.  I remember little of the end of my ninth grade year and even less of my tenth grade year, because there isn’t much to remember.  I spent the better part of that time mourning what I had left behind … remembering, recasting, projecting a future that would never be.  I was a silly adolescent, but this lesson isn’t just for the young.  It speaks to anyone who believes that the present pales in comparison to the days gone by; who fears that life has little left to offer.  It is a lesson for all who are living life in reverse.  God calls us to face forward.  God gives us life in the present and hope in the future and what is left for the past?  Simply gratitude.

I am about to do a new thing: now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
Isaiah 43:19 NRSV



Friday, March 2, 2012

Passing Through



Reflections on Luke 19:1-10

Jesus was entering Jericho and was passing through it.

Almost ten years ago now, Lisa lost her husband in a tragic kayaking accident.  She was left alone to raise their two young daughters.  It is one thing to be a single mother by choice, but this was not Lisa’s choice.  It is also one thing to be single by choice, but this again was not Lisa’s choice.  In one catastrophic moment Lisa lost her husband and her parenting partner.  She was, in an instant, both alone and playing the role of mother and father.  It was clear that life was not going to wait for her to grieve.  The work of grieving would have to been done in tandem with changing diapers, shuttling to and from play dates, packing school lunches and answering the question, “where’s daddy?”

Every day is hard in its own way when you are grieving the loss of your spouse, but Lisa found Valentine's Day to be particularly painful.  A day that celebrates love and companionship only pulls at the emptiness, which now each day must be negotiated.  Somehow that day would need to be redeemed.

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Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem.  He had a divine appointment.  According to Luke’s gospel he knew what was waiting for him there.  He knew he was both following God’s lead and heading into a hornet’s nest.  He said as much to his disciples.

“See, we are going to Jerusalem, and everything that is written about the Son of Man by the prophets will be accomplished.  For he will be handed over to the Gentiles and he will be mocked and insulted and spat upon.  After they have flogged him, they will kill him, and on the third day he will rise again.”  (Luke 18:31-33)      

It was a tall order and he was resolved to see it through.  He was on his way to Jerusalem when he passed through Jericho.  He didn’t have an appointment in Jericho.  There was nothing recorded in his calendar, no reason to stop.  He was just passing through on his way to somewhere else.   Still, a crowd gathered to get a look at the guy whose reputation preceded him.  The miracle-working storyteller was a hit wherever he went.  Even Zacchaeus, that dirty, rotten, rich, Roman sympathizing, crooked tax collector came out to get a look.  He even climbed a tree to get a better look (add short to his resume).  But Jesus didn’t have a story or a miracle for the crowd.  Jesus was just passing through.  He was just passing through on his way to somewhere else when he noticed Zacchaeus in that tree.

The rest, as they say, is history … or perhaps legend … or whatever.  It is the stuff of Sunday school songs.  Jesus, who came to bring good news to the poor, spots the one the rich guy in the crowd, sees something redeemable in him and invites himself to dinner.  Zacchaeus was changed, maybe even transformed by the encounter, for Luke tells us that salvation came to Zacchaeus’ house that day.

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For a widow on Valentine’s Day it would be easy to plow through the day, just passing through with blinders on, filling it with all the routines of just another day in order to survive the day and move on.  But you can’t redeem what you don’t acknowledge.

For seven years now, Lisa has made it her habit to embrace the day, to live fully in it.  Not in the arms of a new husband.  Lisa has not remarried.  Still, she has found in Valentine’s Day an opportunity to reach out to others who have lost a spouse and know the irreparable emptiness that that leaves behind.   

This year on Lisa’s list was a secretary at her daughter’s school.  Last fall, Lisa became aware that the woman had lost her husband.  She was one of four stops on Lisa’s Valentine list.  Lisa stopped at her house with flowers in hand only to find no one at home.  She debated about leaving the flowers on the front step and that would be that, but decided otherwise.  She was going to check with a neighbor to make sure she wasn’t away, but halfway up the neighbor’s driveway she changed her mind and decided to head home where she would give the woman a call.

At home with the phone book in hand, she discovered that she had visited the wrong house.  Without hesitation she jumped back in the car.  The woman was at home.  She thought Lisa was a florist making a delivery on behalf of her grown children.  Lisa explained that her own daughter was a student at the school and that she had become aware that the woman’s husband had passed away the previous year.  Lisa explained further that she too was a widow and knew firsthand how hard Valentine’s Day could be.  She invited Lisa in and burst into tears.  She shared with Lisa what Lisa already knew about how hard the day had been, filled with the ghosts of the past, memories, good memories that made her heart ache all the more with the loss.   She was wrapped in a prayer shawl that some friends had knit for her and had been praying just before the doorbell rang that God would give her some relief.      

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You can’t redeem what you don’t acknowledge.  Jesus was just passing through on his way to Jerusalem when he acknowledged that wee little guy in a tree.  And Lisa, rather than merely surviving another Valentine’s Day in order to get through it, acknowledge it, embraced it and found a way to redeem it, for herself and for a stranger.


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Whispers in the Wind by Linda E. Owens is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.