A Confession and a Plea

I have a confession that I need to get off my chest, dear readers.

I listen to the local Christian radio station in the car, because I like contemporary Christian music.

By now, more than likely, either you're wondering what the big deal is, or you're gasping in shock.

Whichever reaction my confession provokes in you, I hope you'll do me the honour of hearing me out, because I need to get this off my chest today. Because the thing is, I was watching a video this afternoon and a familiar contemporary worship song came on, and I actually teared up. Which tells me that this is actually, really bothering me. (And also tells me that January is cold and dark, and it has been a long week, and I'm about at my max. But I'm working on that part too...)

Because I grew up in a pretty traditional church that used an organ accompanying hymns as our primary music of worship, I actually didn't know that other forms of worship music were 'a thing' until I moved away from home to go to university.

There, at university, I encountered first the kinds of praise and worship choruses that were common in settings like summer camps. Soon thereafter, a friend introduced me to her CD collection which included a variety of so-called Christian music.

I'd never been much of a music listener before that, but pretty soon as I dove deep into exploring what it meant to be a Christian and as I came to the decision that following Jesus was the road I wanted to take, these songs became the soundtrack to my emerging faith.

By the time I was baptized and settled into a church in the city, the so-called "worship wars" were already behind the congregation and a mixture of hymns and contemporary songs were the music of worship.

So it's these songs that carry the echoes of the story of the journey that my faith has taken me on over the last twenty years. They carry the stories of the hard times, and remind me of moments when God spoke in significant ways. They hold memories of the community that nurtured me into faith, that first affirmed my gifts for ministry, and that shaped me to be the person that I am today.

Now, my community are "hymnal people."

I think that's great. There's a beauty and a richness and a depth to that type of congregational singing, and it's obviously deeply meaningful to the people I pastor. I'm learning to appreciate the songs in our hymnals, and wondering which of them will hold special meaning for me a decade or so down the road.

But it hurts me, if I'm honest, the way in which I hear people talk about other types of worship music. And, let me be clear, I've heard that go in both directions. It's not kind, and if we realized that we were talking about people we would never, ever speak about another group of people in such a public and demeaning way. It hurts me because it's been a hard week and it's the familiar voices and melodies that have been part of my community for many years already that I gravitate toward, that have the ability to recall to me God's faithfulness in the past in a way that gives me hope for the future, and I don't want to pile feeling guilty about that onto the heap.

It breaks my heart, because I wonder who else we are othering when we so casually speak about someone else's musical preferences in this way. And I wonder why we can't just accept that God is big enough to be present in so, so many different forms of worship. In every tongue. Every culture. Every nation.

By the way, the song that made me tear up? Chris Tomlin, Enough. "All of you is more than enough for me." I need to believe this is true today. And every day. But especially in this season where everything is new, and around each corner is a new challenge, and sometimes I doubt my ability to be the kind of pastor that deep in my heart I want to be.

So, please. I'm not asking you to like it too. Just understand where I'm coming from, and honour the many ways in which God's Spirit generously shows up for his beloved ones, even when they're unfamiliar.

Prayer of the Church

It has come as a bit of a surprise to me that one of the things that I have heard appreciation for most often since beginning in my new role is the prayers I share in worship. At Bethel, it is the role of the pastoral team to lead the weekly prayer of the church on Sundays. So, for something a little different, I thought that I would share today's prayer.

Giver of every good gift, in this season of gift-giving and gift-receiving, where every store we pass seems to want to tell us what we need or ought to need, today we remember the gifts that we receive from your hand that money cannot possibly buy: the beauty of winter sun sparkling on the surface of the snow, the breathtaking view of hoarfrost covering the branches on a winter morning, the northern lights that dance in the night sky—the beauty of Your creation, reflecting its creator. We give thanks for the miracle of the incarnation—for the light that pierces the great darkness, for the reminder that Your love has never given up on Your children, for the miracle of a helpless baby whose birth would change the course of history.

Even as we remember that there is a day coming when there will be no more gloom, nonetheless we live with awareness that the light has not yet vanquished all that which resides in the darkness. We listen to the news, we hear the stories of friends and neighbours, and we become still and recognize the hurts that we carry within ourselves—and we know that all is not as you intended.

And so today we bring to you our prayers. We bring prayers for healing for those who journey with failing health, who are undergoing treatments and therapy, who are patiently or not-so-patiently waiting for test results. We pray also for those who wrestle with depression and anxiety and other kinds of mental and emotional pain, especially in this season when the short hours of daylight and the long hours of darkness can be a struggle for so many. We pray for those we know who are enduring the pain of broken relationships, and who are facing this holiday season with fresh memories of loved ones who have died in the past year. God, you know these and other kinds of hurts that we and those we love carry. And we pray for healing, for comfort, and for glimpses of light that chase back the darkness, if only for a moment or two.

We pray for the places in our world that are hurting. For those recovering after the tsunami in Indonesia this past week, and for all those working to provide aid and relief there, we pray. We pray for the upcoming elections in Congo and Bangladesh, for a peaceful and just process. For all those in various places around the world who find themselves fleeing the only homes they’ve known out of fear for their own safety, we pray for provision for their immediate needs, and that they might find a place of welcome and safety soon. We long for a world where these kinds of conflict will cease and your peace will reign at last. We pray for politicians and others in positions of great power, for wisdom and kindness to prevail as they do the work they have been empowered for. 

God, we long for the day when your light will drown out the darkness once and for all. In the meantime, we pray that you would give us a vision of the kind of world you desire, and empower us to work towards greater peace for all people beginning right where we are.

And we offer you these gifts this morning, remembering that all that we are and all that we have is, in the end, a gift from you. May we steward them wisely, being generous as you are generous. 

Amen.

Eighteen.

Eighteen years ago tomorrow, I was sitting in a prayer room at Urbana 2000 when I first sensed God

nudging me toward a vocation of leadership in the church.

It was only about a year after I had been baptized, at the time, and I thought that I surely couldn't be hearing God's voice clearly, but even so I can still remember eighteen years later the desk I was sitting at in that little prayer room when I heard God speak so distinctly to my questions that it might as well have been aloud. Even though I had many doubts about whether I'd heard what I thought I'd heard, even though it seemed too preposterous to write what I thought God had said in the journal I was keeping, nonetheless I remember the moment to this day. Even though I had never heard a prayer answered quite so clearly before.

I know it was eighteen years ago, because Urbana 18 is happening right now in St Louis, and I've been seeing periodic updates on my social media feeds, and remembering with lots of emotion my own experiences as a university student attending Urbana.

And this year, more than any other Urbana year, the floods of emotion and memory have caught me off guard.

Maybe it's because, for the first time, I actually feel like I can wholeheartedly affirm that God's call to me, in that quiet little prayer room so long ago, was actually real.

Because, eighteen years later, I'm finally in a place where my gifts have been wholeheartedly welcomed, where I don't have to face a constant fight to defend my role and reconcile it with my gender or my marital status, where I don't feel that constant, painful background dissonance with the larger denomination's stance on women in ministry leadership. Where I feel like my skin finally fits.

Eighteen years.

The length of time that it takes to go from newborn baby to adult.

For eighteen years, I have wondered, on some level, if this would ever happen, or if I had misheard God that day in that prayer room. For eighteen years, I have wrestled with a sense of call to pastoral ministry.

And now, eighteen years later, after many challenges and much heartache and many doubt-filled wonderings, I can see how the seed that God planted deep within my heart that day has been fulfilled.

Eighteen years of hard wandering, taking paths that often seemed to lead in the exact opposite direction to that I thought I should be taking. Eighteen years of questioning, wondering, aching, dreaming. Seasons when it seemed that God had turned God's face away. Seasons when I seriously considered choosing a sensible career path and moving on.

Eighteen years that, I'm convinced, have left me more sure of who I am and who God has created me to be than I ever would have been if the path had been easier. I'm beginning to see the gift in the discomfort that prevented me from becoming complacent, from going along with the crowd because it was the easier path.

So, tonight I give thanks for eighteen years, but also for the profound realization that God has kept God's word, even when there were so many times that I questioned it, and almost turned my back on it.

But most of all, I give thanks for the new thing that's being born.

Because in a couple of days, at the end of this month, I will quietly celebrate a new anniversary. Six months. December 31 will mark six months. Six months since I started serving as associate pastor, six months of learning and growing and coming to love this congregation who has embraced me and welcomed me and invited me to lean into my calling to pastoral ministry.

So, here's to God's faithfulness, and to new adventures yet to come on the journey ahead!

Broken Keys and New Year's Resolutions

Unbeknownst to me, my key broke off in the lock late on Christmas evening as I arrived home to my apartment after spending the evening with my family.

I'm not sure what happened, because I got into the building safely and was none the wiser that anything was out of the ordinary until, just after lunch today, I went out to take the garbage out on my way out to what I thought was to be an afternoon and evening of a couple of Boxing Day errands followed by time with my family.

My plans were halted abruptly when, having duly deposited the refuse in the bin, I realized that on my keychain I had only half a key to the building. And no mittens.

I was unsuccessful in buzzing a couple of my neighbours to try to get back into the building, but thankfully before frostbite set in some kindly souls happened along and let me in again.

However, the lack of a means to ensure safe entry into the building has held me hostage, in a manner of speaking, for the rest of the day. The family engagements were canceled, the errands placed on hold. Being Boxing Day, the apartment offices are, of course, closed--and this hardly constitutes an emergency that cannot wait until tomorrow morning.

And so, here I sit, safe and snug inside my home. And here I shall stay, however much I would like to be doing other things.

Can a broken key be a gift from God, I wonder?

You see, December has been a marathon. A happy but exhausting marathon. It has consisted of planning Christmas concerts and banquets, attending even more Christmas events, preaching, and planning leading Christmas Day worship, on top of all the regular duties of pastoral care and presence. Of course, all of these have been firsts, too--which happily means that next year I'll know more and be better equipped to manage all the things.

All of it is good work, work that feeds my soul and makes me grateful for the gift of the call this congregation has entrusted to me.

It is also exhausting, and has meant many long days and few opportunities for my introverted self to recharge away from the hustle and bustle, to seek out the stillness where I can sense the Spirit's presence most clearly, to set down the needs of others long enough to wonder about my own.

Enter today, and a morning spent blissfully drinking tea and staring into the lights on the Christmas tree, tidying up and attending to laundry and setting things right in my home once again, where the chaos of the month has been taking its toll.

And then, the broken key, and the cancellation of any further plans, which has meant I could enjoy a favourite show, do a little baking (because, of course, none of that got done before Christmas), and make supper--a balanced meal to enjoy in the comfort of home. And tonight I will curl up with a good book--a gift from new friends at church, which I am dearly looking forward to diving into, which I can tell already itches where it scratches right now, which will call me back to the first love of the One who does the calling in the first place.

As 2019 draws nearer, I'm determined that I will do better at finding the balance that I need to sustain pastoral ministry in the long run. I don't know what the answer looks like, except that learning to exercise the little word 'no' with grace and gentle firmness is going to have to play a role. I know that I need to learn what it is to play again, to know what gives ME joy, to create space for prayer and silence and long walks and all of the other things that give me life and root me in the glorious gift of spending time loitering with my Creator.

And I hope that it won't involve too many more broken keys before I learn to take seriously the health and well-being of my own soul.

Like a Fire...

I ran across these words yesterday, as I was reading in the book of the prophet Jeremiah:

You deceived me, Lord, and I was deceived;
you overpowered me and prevailed.
I am ridiculed all day long;
everyone mocks me.
Whenever I speak, I cry out proclaiming violence and destruction.
So the word of the Lord has brought me insult and reproach all day long.

But if I say, "I will not mention his word or speak anymore in his name,"
his word is in my heart like a fire,
a fire shut up in my bones.
I am weary of holding it in;
indeed, I cannot.

This is one of the most poignant descriptions that I have heard, articulating what it feels like to try to ignore a calling from God.

It's an apt description of something I've been mulling over for a while--a sneaking suspicion that I have that something about the fifteen years which I spent navigating a sense of call to ministry within a church denomination that still has not fully come to terms with the giftedness of women for pastoral ministry has only served to strengthen my own deep conviction that it is pastoral ministry to which I am called.

Because in the years of 'not mentioning his word or speaking anymore in his name,' the fire shut up in my bones would not let me rest. There is a pain in not being able to respond to God's call that only serves to deepen the inner sense that God is indeed the One doing the calling.

Then there's today. This morning, it was my turn to preach. And as I stood at the pulpit and looked at the faces in front of me, and as I interacted with people in the foyer before and after worship, I was deeply aware of how grateful I am to be serving in this place, among these people.

The fire is not the same--the burning within my bones, the urgency, the painful dissonance is gone. In its place, a deep sense of contentment, a deep gratitude to be where I am, doing what I am, among the people I am. I've said this before, but from my very earliest days here, I have felt like my skin fits, at last.

I am so grateful for this congregation, but even more for a church body that bravely and boldly states that God gives ministry gifts without regard for gender, and that discrimination on the basis of gender is wrong. Full stop. I'm grateful that they were willing to open their arms to me, and to make space for me among them. And I'm grateful on behalf of all of the other women who have and will come here because of a fire that burns in their hearts and deep in their bones.

I share this because I am acutely aware that there are still those who are experiencing this unique pain that Jeremiah articulated so clearly. I hope that, if any of them read this, they will know that they are not alone. I hope that, in sharing my story, someone might someday think twice about their beliefs about whom God gifts for pastoral ministry. I hope that as we hear the stories of actual, real human beings, we will begin to recognize our parts in the systems that are contributing to asking people to make impossible choices like suppressing the gifts God has given.

I hope that the day will come when my story won't be so common, when it seems normal to have both men and women serving in all of the ways for which God has gifted them.

When the fire of the Spirit can be free to burn bright and clear, and needn't be held in anymore.

For the Love...

There is a learning curve with any new job. Learning to be a pastor is no different.

I'm finding this fall that part of the learning curve with my new job is figuring out time management all over again. The challenges of managing my time and balancing my priorities in this job are very different than the kinds of decisions that were involved in managing my time and caseload as an acute care occupational therapist. The fast pace of discharge planning from a medical unit is very different than the endless possible tasks of providing pastoral care and engaging in ministry in the neighbourhood.

And because it will be no surprise to those who know me that one of the hardest things for me is learning healthy boundaries and knowing when it's time to stop working in order to tend to my own needs, one of the challenges I've faced this fall is figuring out how my time is best spent in this new role in which I find myself--because I can't possibly do it all.

This has meant that I've needed to figure out, particularly within the realm of the part of my role that includes ministry within our surrounding community, where my presence is necessary and where my role might be less hands on.

I have come to really, deeply enjoy working with my friends in the neighbourhood--folks who don't attend Sunday morning worship at our church but whom I connect with at other points during the week. And while sometimes it has been suggested that maybe I don't actually need to be present at all of these events, I've been really reluctant to give this up. This week, an encounter reminded me of why.

In the process of changing church affiliations, I'm still feeling my way into the culture of this new place in which I find myself. If I can be honest for just a moment, one of the things that I've been missing is a certain kind of culture around prayer and other spiritual practices that I have missed in leaving behind my evangelical roots. Different groups of Christians pray differently--the language is nuanced differently, or the times and places at which we pray together varies. I'm trying hard to say this without it sounding like a criticism, because it's not. But the habits that I've developed around prayer, which have been nurtured in different contexts, don't fit as seamlessly in this one. And sometimes that has been hard for me.

This week, one of my friends from the neighbourhood stopped me as I was flying around tending to what felt like a million different things. She told me she had brought something for me, and pulled from her bag a folded up piece of newspaper. I was deeply touched by her thoughtfulness, and assured her that I would read it the next day when I had some quiet time and space to do so.

When I did, I discovered that she had pulled an article on the importance of prayer from an Anglican publication. It so beautifully fit some of the struggles I had been wrestling with, and affirmed the journey--that it's worth the struggle. She had no way of knowing, I should add, that all of this had been going on inside of me in the previous couple of weeks. But in that moment, I felt so seen and encouraged--not only by this woman, whose thoughtfulness was such a gift in and of itself, but by the reminder that my story, and all of our stories, are held by God who sees and knows our hearts.

So often, it seems, I encounter God in profoundly beautiful ways in the work that I do that takes place outside of the traditional confines of what we think of as 'church.' So much of my faith journey in the past several years has been deeply shaped by encounters with God that happen outside of the box that is the traditional church. I would even go so far as to say that these 'wilderness' encounters with God have saved my faith during the season in which I had to process the rejection I felt from the church.

So, no, I don't do anything irreplaceable that means that I need to have a hands-on presence at any of these neighbourhood ministry programs, really. There are many, many capable people who could do these things.

But then there's this--there are the moments when these neighbours welcome me as their pastor, too. There are the moments when they become the hands and feet of Christ to me, when they offer me the gifts of vulnerability and gratitude and hospitality, when through them I encounter the Kingdom of God unfolding in our midst, like a mustard seed that may start small but can flourish into a thriving plant.

I know that I am not needed here. And yet, I need to be here, for the sake of my own Life. And not only that, but my congregation needs me to be here too. We need to be here--to encounter the God who has a habit of showing up in non-traditional places--a burning bush in the desert, or walking across the water in the middle of the sea, or a peaceful newborn soundly sleeping in a manger full of hay.

Thankful

As I drove up to church today, I was struck all over again by the fact that this wonderful congregation has called me to be one of their pastors. 

It is not at all lost on me that I have the amazing privilege of making this vocation my full-time work, of being at home among this particular part of the body of Christ, of developing and exploring my gifts in this place. Someone asked me this morning if I missed doing occupational therapy. The truth is that I miss my co-workers often, but I really haven't looked back as far as the work itself is concerned. It's an amazing gift to make being a pastor my full-time work--a gift that a year ago I wasn't even sure would ever be possible, much less now.

Driving up to church today and unlocking my office door, I was struck all over by the gift of it all. It was a small reminder of the emotions I felt on that very first day of work almost 5 months ago.

I think it hit me so profoundly today because I was coming back after a week of vacation last week. Stay-cation, as it were. I had a week to catch up with a few friends, but mostly to clean my house and cross some long-overdue items off of the to-do list. I had the luxury of sleeping in and taking life at a much slower pace. 

It really wasn't glamorous, but it wasn't until I got home from church and took a step back that I realized that this is the first time I've truly had vacation in a really long time. The last few short stretches of vacation I've taken happened before I started working at the church--while I was still in the process of looking for work and wondering about the future.

The last time I was on vacation, I realized today, was one year ago this past July. And I came back from vacation to find out that the organization that I worked for was closing, and that I would soon be without a job.

So, today I'm profoundly grateful of the simple things. For a wonderful week that was truly restful and rejuvenating. For the stability of a job that is still there to come back to--a job that I love, among people who are now familiar and comfortable, whom I'm happy to see and reconnect with--most of whose names I even remember!