When church hurts

My sister is nearing the home stretch in her third pregnancy, I guess I could certainly count on her to give me a good description of uncomfortable.  But I’ve been mulling over a different sort of uncomfortable.

It has been close to four years (gasp, really?  is that possible?) since our decade long stint serving and working full time in the church setting came to a close.  Our family and friends, our whole life truly was wrapped up in a place that we loved.  We were known.  We belonged and it felt good.

Dealing with the grief and loss in and after that season was very onion-like, we would deal with one thing only to realize there was still more.  Some of it I hated because my heart hurt so bad I couldn’t see straight and some was so sacred, so holy that I relished it for what it was.  After a hiatus from church altogether, we visited a dozen church one summer anticipating ‘fun’ and ‘variety’.  Hmmmm, there would be many words to describe it but fun it was not.  We were strangers, visitors, unknown nobodies.  Sometimes we were welcomed and directed and sometimes we were chastised for sitting in the wrong spot.

When we left our long time church home, our place of comfort and community, one of the whispers that God kept speaking to my heart was this:

You will never again be as comfortable as you were here.

I was tempted to be bitter and angry.  But I had done bitter and angry plenty already and the fruit was sour.  I refused to sign up for more on purpose.  I let the words sit in my heart and simply waited.  As the months passed and the fog of sadness lifted a bit I began to see the down side of being comfortable…

• it was special and felt good to walk into a place and know that everyone knew who I was but somehow I forgot that not everyone felt that way

• it was hard to find the courage to try new things or dream different dreams because the draw of stability when you have kids in your life is a very strong draw

• staying put is (often) easier than stepping out

• living in a nest-like cocoon of community can be a bubble that leaves you out of touch with the world around you

I began to understand that my comfort had often brought along with it complacency.  In order for me to realize that a change was imperative, my world needed to fall apart.

And it did.  What first felt like I-can’t-breathe gave way to maybe-I-can-get-dressed-today which later led to we-all-might-survive-this-just-possibly.  But the sense that we were headed for a different walk, a different sort of path was something I could not shake as we moved forward.

In the past two years we’ve been part of a new place of fellowship.  It has felt like home.  It’s been precious and encouraging and has built us up.  We know we are supposed to be there.  But like any place where a bunch of imperfect people get together, there is hard stuff.  There are challenges that are uncomfortable.

This time however, I am determined to do better at living in that middle place where I can “take my shoes off” but I’m not so at ease that I don’t see the needs all around me.  I have been gifted with children who don’t all perfectly fit in with their peers and this is indeed a monumental gift.  It forces me to be sensitive and aware in ways I would not normally be.  I am learning to welcome the feeling that things aren’t quite right because that means there is room for improvement and that means that I get to watch things happen that are beyond my ability.  I love that.

Testify

Twelve years ago today we walked down the aisle to these words:

For as long as I shall live
I will testify to love
I’ll be a witness in the silences when words are not enough
With every breath I take I will give thanks to God above
For as long as I shall live
I will testify to love
(Avalon “Testify”)

We didn’t give it much thought, love was easy and simple.  We’d waited 4 years to marry, dated through our last two years of high school, been through lots of ups and downs and at the time our very union was testimony to God’s faithfulness.  It really was.

We were idealistic and hope-filled 21 year olds.  All of life spanned before us and it seemed so very grand.  We made plans, dreamed dreams and forged ahead together.  We paid $427 a month to rent a tiny campus apartment that overlooked a lake while we finished college.  I think I threatened once or twice to go back to my parents.  Oh how young I was.   I made coffee and he made disciples as he led the youth group at our church.  He thrived and I watched his passion explode.  We studied hard and graduated together.

While on a missions trip to El Salvador using pit toilets and doing manual labor every day, a pink line rocked our world and we grinned all week as we kept our little secret.  We bought a tiny pair of brown sandals there and flew home on our own cloud as we pondered the parenthood journey we were about to embark on.

Years passed, more babies entered our world and the thriving, passion-filled man faced a lot of challenges and work became something different.  I filled my heart and my life with a job that I loved.  Church life wasn’t all sunshine and roses.  People weren’t perfect, we weren’t perfect.

We walked out our days and our lives in the best ways we could.  But we hurt each other.  A lot.  At the bottom of a spiral that seemed to last forever, we realized a choice had to be made and we chose each other.

Hard work.  So much of it.  So many words and tears.  We found little things to love together.  Like music.  And somehow these words came to be true…

And I don’t care if everyone knows what we’re going through
‘Cause all the roads lead back to you

On and on and on we pray, we can break into a brighter day
Nothing worth anything ever goes down easy
On and on and on we go, I don’t understand this windy road
Nothing worth anything ever goes down easy

And we’ll keep on, keep on climbing on down this narrow line
So we can see the other side, the other side
(Mat Kearney “On and On”)

Weeks, months passed and the ‘other side’ ever so slowly found its way onto the horizon.  We vowed without words really, that what we had was worth it.  And we walked the hard road of healing.

Now we testify to something different.  Not just to an ideal we call love.  Not just to a dreamy something that is nice to sing about.  To the ultimate, radical power of God to change lives and the most stubborn, broken hearts into something beautiful.  To the unchanging, unceasing grace that He gives when we can’t even muster up the ability to ask for it.  To the reality of restoration and the gift of forgiveness.

We testify to love.  But not to our own imperfect, never-enough kind of love.  To the Love Giver Himself and the way He makes all things new.

Godly Play

A couple of months ago, as a couple, we’d been talking a great deal about the way we teach children the message of the Bible within the church.  Over the years we’d wearied of flashy, hip, expensive curricula that seemed more geared toward entertaining children than helping them encounter God.  Some kids programs seemed watered down, others focused on having awesome toys or handouts, loud videos on fancy TV screens, some were haphazard and felt thrown together.  On our long summer visiting churches last year we experienced all sorts of things.  What struck us most was that some places our kids were treasured and some places they weren’t even allowed in the main meeting area.

So when I received a random email from my mom with a link to a young church in our area that was implementing something called Godly Play into their children’s ministry, it immediately caught my attention.  The heart behind it can be summed up but the logistics of how it plays out is a bit long to explain:

Godly Play is based upon the recognition that children have an innate sense of the presence of God. All they lack is the appropriate language to help them identify and express it so it can be explored and strengthened. The Godly Play approach teaches classical Christian language in a way that enhances the child’s authentic experience of God so it can contribute to the creative life of the child and the world.

I loved that it acknowledged a child’s capacity to experience God.  I believe that to be true.  I think it’s easy to put children in a box, try to keep them busy,  give them a printed coloring sheet and hope they turn out okay.  It’s easy to read a kid-version of the story of Adam and Eve and make a quick moral lesson of it…”They sinned, things went bad for them, so you see you should obey God and not sin”.  That is oversimplified obviously, but at the core, that is usually the way church teaches the Bible to children.  I don’t believe it is tremendously effective or holds much meaning.

Godly Play draws children in to experience the incredible story of God through a very deliberate, intentional time together.  Truly, I can’t put words to what it felt like to experience a whole Godly Play session this past weekend at a training event I attended.  I was enraptured as the storyteller smoothed out a pile of sand on the floor and talked about the dessert and then told the story of Abraham and Sarah and all that took place in their life in beautiful, captivating story form.  She used little wooden people to represent them, built rock altars with pebbles, blue yarn for rivers…simple.  But when I got home and replayed the whole thing with Chris, I was almost embarrassed.  I retold the story of Abraham with more knowledge, more passion and more detail than ever and from a lesson intended for a 5 year old.

In the fostering of discovery learning children are welcomed into a room that has been deemed and designed to be a sacred space.  They are welcomed by name, brought into a circle time and then drawn into a great story.  Walls are free of bright, garish decor.  The place is meant to inspire and allow children a chance to hear from God.  They even have moments of silence.  On shelves there are simple but beautiful trays that hold sets of elements to all the great stories of the Bible.  Children learn respect of these lovely things and at a set time they can interact with the stories.  They are also offered an artistic response time after the story and offered all sorts of art supplies and their own tray to do this.

If you are familiar with Montessori, this way of engaging children is similar in many ways to that.  But it obviously brings in the spiritual dynamic as central.  There are some fairly significant ways our team agreed we would have to change things to fit our own beliefs but in general the method is rich with so much that we were thrilled about.

One of my favorite things is that instead of forming the lesson principle for the whole group, the storyteller asks them “I wonder what you think about this story” or “I wonder what you love most about this story”.  This allows for children to experience and enter in to the great Story for themselves, to process and ponder deep things (even though they may not realize they’re doing just that!).

I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface!  For those of you who were curious, I hope this is helpful.  I’m by no means an expert and don’t want to make it sound like this is the only way/best way.  It is simply one of many wonderful ways that can be useful in helping children understand the great mystery of God and the incredible story of the Bible.

Crazy Love – a book review

I picked up Crazy Love, by Francis Chan, almost two years ago.  It was a time of great transition and great trial.  I tried to read it but couldn’t really read anything at the time.  It was a survival-mode season.

Around Christmas last year I picked it up again finally.  I dug right in and read a couple of chapters.  It felt like a friend had written it to me, it was so readable – and it made me ask some great questions.

Then I got to the chapter called “Profile of the Lukewarm”.  Just the name of the chapter made my heart sink.  I knew what was coming.  Or I thought I did.  But I didn’t.  I read it.  Read it again.  Then I put the book away.

Reading Chan’s long and spot on list of all the characteristics of ‘lukewarm’ left me feeling sick.  Honest.  It described most of the ‘church going folk’ I’d ever known.  What was far worse?  It described me.  Of course not in every instance and I could rationalize all I wanted to make myself feel better.  But I didn’t want to feel better.  That’s why I’d picked up the book in the first place. I wanted my thinking to be challenged…to be changed really.

In the last year and a half, stepping out of full time ministry and also out of regular church attendance (gasp!) I have spent so much time in some serious, sometimes very uncomfortable reflection on God and church and what it really means to follow Jesus.  Growing up in church then serving in a church setting for ten years, I had plenty of exposure to all sorts of ‘religion’.  Much of it was life-shaping and very good.  And of course there was your run-of-the-mill hypocrisy and church politics.

After I stalled out on my Crazy Love reading (I quit reading the book for two months!), I tried again.  But I was not the same.  I had wrestled and argued and thought through some really hard things.  If you read my blog and know our story, this of course coincided with the very tragic loss of my husband’s father this January.

I was ripe for a crisis of faith.

And maybe that sounds bad, which is okay with me.  But really, if we never have a crisis, never question what we believe, never look inward and take some serious inventory…then maybe we don’t even know what we believe or why.  When we are shaken to the core, we are forced to find out what we really hold on to – who we hold on to.  And if it will keep us afloat or not.

God’s overwhelming, relentless love that this book speaks of, that love is the only thing that has carried me through this past season and every other desert I’ve walked through.  It has shown itself in hundreds of ways.  God’s unmistakable, unwavering love.

Joy intermingled

As always, when life seems to stand still in the midst of heartache and loss, it keeps on moving and there is forever joy mixed in with the pain.

For instance,  my kids have been loved on and cared for more in the last 3 days by other members of our family than me and they think it’s pretty cool.  They are aware of what has happened but cannot process much of the reality of it.

Rylee tells me “Mama, are you sure this really happened?  It doesn’t seem like it could be real. Is Grampy really gone?”

Her words take my breath away and I respond on my knees at her level…”I feel exactly the same way.”

The boys still think it’s funny when someone farts at the dinner table.

Or when Kyler comes out of the bathroom having taken all his clothes off.

Or when they see Audrey pick up the cat by her tail.

The smiles will return for us.  The laughter that fills this home will come again.

But for the moment grief lives here and I know that is okay.

I thought I would faint with heartbreak as I watched my mother-in-law wring out and hang her her husbands clothing on the line to dry.

We don’t know how to walk this road.

How does one summarize the life of someone so dear in a couple of paragraphs?

Aren’t we too young to know how to do this?

Are we ever old enough to know how to do this?

Probably not.

The news that long time friends of my parents after 12 years of trying to get pregnant and two successful adoptions, are pregnant brought joy-filled tears today.

Finding an appropriate dress to wear to a funeral in a few short minutes of looking off the clearance rack  was one pleasant little gift of the day.

Abundant food, enough to cover our kitchen counters and table and two chairs left me sobbing in the kitchen yesterday.  I’m pretty sure food=love.  In a very complicated way actually, that food was like a piece of healing to my heart.  After a less than wonderful departure from our 10 years in ministry at church last fall, it was hands from that community that brought food to nourish us on this incredibly painful road.  It is so like God to bring things full circle….and rarely in the way I expect.

Although I missed the girls getaway with 3 of my best friends in Denver this weekend, I was blessed beyond measure to know that many there including my favorite author Sally Clarkson (who put on the conference) were praying for our family to get through these days.  Sally even sent me her latest book, signed by herself, which again was a sweet gift in the midst of it all.

God is good, all the time.  There is a constant swirling together of joy and pain.  In these moments of deep sadness its easy under the weight of it all to miss the good.

But it is here.