One More.

Words have been hard to come by lately.

Four months after the closing of House Blend, which was not only the ministry that I worked for but the community that embodied the Kingdom of God for me so often throughout the past three or so years, I guess it's fair to say that I'm still grieving what was lost, and trying to make sense out of not only the loss but also what it looks like to continue to move forward from here.

We always said that House Blend was a community, but it wasn't a church. That was true, I think. And yet, in many ways, it was the Church for me through so much of the three years that I was part of the House Blend community, and it showed me a way of being the Church that was different from anything I'd experienced before, or have experienced since.

And while I belong to a wonderful church now, and appreciate the people there so very much, I miss the unique beauty that was House Blend. The unique perspective it gave me on what it looks like for God's Kingdom to come to dwell among us.

I miss sitting down at a table to share a meal constructed from the offerings of each one present, to laugh and cry together, to learn the hard way what it means to practice forgiveness and to embody mercy, to witness the truth of the fact that each part of the body is valuable beyond measure and that we all need one another.

I miss lighting the candle, gathering the community in a circle in the parlour to pray together, sharing our highs and lows from the week, and speaking words of peace and blessing over one another. I miss how our prayer times could create a safe space for us to rest even in the midst of really, really hard weeks.

What I wouldn't give for just one more potluck, one more time to sit around that table together, one more chance to speak words of blessing and love over this community that has been, and still is even in its absence, so very dear to me.

I ache for the members of my community who have experienced the closing of House Blend as yet another abandonment, and I long for them to know that they are loved and held in God's embrace even now. I pray that they will know that the love they experienced was real, even in the pain of endings. I pray that I might know that, too.

I also ache for all of the people who didn't get to experience the unique beauty of being a part of this community, who didn't get to taste and see God's goodness embodied by this body in all its beautiful diversity and honest vulnerability.

And I long to see the kind of diversity, vulnerability, and hospitality that I experienced at House Blend reflected in the larger Church. I think that the Church at its best is all of those things, and I hope that we'll have the courage to step outside of our comfort zones to make the Church a place of radical welcome for all of our neighbours. Because in doing so, I am confident that we'll experience God's radical welcome to us more clearly than we ever have before.

I wanted to write this because, like many people who encounter seasons of grief, one of things that scares me most is that I will forget the beauty, the welcome, the care, the love that I experienced at House Blend. I don't want to forget that it was real, and true, and good. I don't want to lose the goodness of what was, in the wondering and praying about what will be.

I know this is a less composed blog post than most. These are the words that I have to offer today, and so I share what I have as a prayer--of thanks for what was, of expression of what is, and of hope for what is yet to be.

When You Can't Pray...

I was sitting across from important church person recently, when he asked me to tell him about my
spiritual life in the past year.

I knew the answer that I wanted to give--thanks to my evangelical heritage, the children's song rings in my head readily, although I was well into adulthood when I would have heard it for the first time: "Read your Bible, pray every day, and you'll grow, grow, grow."

The problem is, I could not in good conscience claim to have even come close to that standard in the past year, and I'm through with pretending to be someone I'm not in order to be acceptable to the church.

But the answer that I wanted to give--to be honest about this season of life in which prayer has been hard--was also clearly not the answer I wanted to give to this person I barely know, not without first at least sketching for this man who doesn't know my story the traumas that I've walked through in the past twelve months with my community, and the struggle to find the right words to bring that pain to God.

And, to be honest, while my spiritual life has looked dramatically different this past year, I also don't feel like God has in any way been absent, or like I have at any point turned my back on God.

Prayerlessness doesn't mean faithlessness.

Weeks later, and I'm still dissatisfied with my attempt to answer his question that day. But I'm also convinced that it will help if we claim the courage to talk openly not only about our spiritual successes, but also about journeying with God through the dark nights of the soul, to normalize these experiences.

So, today I want to share a few of the things that I've learned in this past year of struggling to know how to pray, in the hopes that there is some common human element to the struggle and that, in sharing my experiences, someone out there may someday feel less alone when they find themselves in a similar spiritual landscape.

1) Just show up. 
There were days, when the trauma was at its freshest, and my own sheer exhaustion and, yes, burnout, were at their peak, when I had little capacity for words. The experiences were so fresh and raw that it was hard to process them even the little bit required to put them into words. On one of those days, I found myself in the chair in the corner of my office that serves as my dedicated prayer space. I just sat there--no words, no thoughts, no intentional practice to shape my being there. I just showed up, wanting to sit in God's presence but with no idea about how to make that happen.
As it turns out, sometimes just showing up is prayer.

2) The body has many members.
Faith, I think, is more of a communal venture than I have sometimes been led to believe. This past year has, if nothing else, taught me a great deal about the value of Christian community. When I couldn't pray, most weeks (although not always) I could still show up at worship, where more often than not I was met with at least one person who promised to be praying for me in the coming week. After many nudges from others, my introverted self learned the value of sending a quick text to a trusted friend to say that I was having a hard day and could use prayer. For most of the year, in sickness and in health, my community met weekly for Tuesday evening potluck and prayer, and the familiar shape of the liturgy of evening prayer gave me an entry into prayer, even when I was a ball of emotions. Meeting with my spiritual director every month gave me the reassurance that I wasn't walking alone, and that I couldn't stray too far off the path without someone gently and compassionately nudging me back in the right direction.
Prayer isn't just an individual spiritual practice. We were made for community, and letting others share the journey with you is a spiritual discipline--one that has been especially meaningful for me in this past year.

3) Prayer doesn't require words.
Many times over the course of the past year I have found great comfort and a sense of stability and connection with God by spending some time in the wilderness. Being in the midst of God's creation has long been one of the places where I most readily sense God's presence. Sometimes when the words just wouldn't come, I could manage to put one foot in front of the other and spend an hour alone, in silence, hiking through the woods. And, inevitably, I came out of it feeling like I had met God there.
At other times, I found lighting a candle to be a tangible reminder that I don't walk alone, that Christ's light will ultimately overcome the darkness.
Or I would spend some time walking the labyrinth at a park nearby, letting my body do the praying when my head could not.
As it turns out, while words are normally my go-to prayer language, they're not always necessary.

Lest this start to sound prescriptive, let me be clear--these are some of the places that I have met God this year, and some of the lessons that I have learned about prayer in the process. They are not a list of fool-proof ways to conquer prayerlessness. What I really want to say, I think, is that it's normal for there to be seasons in life when prayer is hard, and if you find yourself in one of those seasons, I hope you will know that there's no shame in being there. You are not alone.

And if the practices that normally make you feel closer to God feel hard during that season, remember that there are a whole lot of ways to pray, and that if "read your Bible, pray every day" isn't working, and if the words won't come, it's okay. Words aren't the only way to practice faith. I wish I'd done a better job at articulating that on the day I met with important church leader. I wish I'd risked being misunderstood to speak the truth--prayer as I've normally understood it has been hard this year, but God has met me in these less familiar places, and I'm most grateful.