Missing You, Church

I don't have big events happening right now as I wait for our child to be born, maybe this week, maybe today. But I'm dying to write something down, anything, because I go back through my blog every now and then and wonder at the long silences: wasn't anything happening? The truth is, a sea change is taking place, but it's so quiet, there's no event to narrate, no pithy interactions with strangers to laugh at later.

So I went back through my Google Photos and chose a month and year at random to think and write about. From this exercise, February 1, 2015, I found pictures of a baby dedication! It seems fitting.

Maya, Josh, Nora, Andre, and Henry were being dedicated that day. They are all chubby-cheeked and beyond cute. Maya has these perfectly-shaped eyes and she stares off into the congregation from her father's arms, seeing her larger family from a new vantage. Josh, only a few months old, has his thick hair parted in the middle and is dressed in a dapper baby suit, complete with tie and pocket square. Nora looks at the Pastor with some curiosity at his touching her head, but is maybe ready to believe it is a blessing. Andre's mom, Janelle, holds him close and he looks positively angelic, even if half his face is covered by his pacifier. Henry might be the most baby-looking of them all, for some reason. His duck-fluff hair is barely settled on his sweet, round head. He is wide-eyed and alert, but quietly sitting in his father's arms, facing outward. 

These little babies are a bunch of five-year-olds now! I see them on their parents' Instagram and on Zoom and through the occasional email; they're doing wonderful things like holding snakes, going to school, making friends in new places, learning to feed their baby brother. I hope I never underestimate seeing kids growing up close ever again. It broke my heart when I returned from Morocco, the growing I had missed seeing weekly and monthly at church. And now! The pandemic separates us, and our recent move, and several months, and in one case, an ocean, and I tell you, digital messages are something, but they're nothing compared to looking around the room at West End Church, and seeing each little kid troop in from Sunday School with their sticker sheets to sit with their families not quietly. I miss you and your kids, West End. So much. 

Singer/Soldier

Today in church, the worship leader led some new anthem. It was beautiful, declaring our newness in Christ, our deaths to our old lives. The rest of the worship team followed the leader like a well-trained platoon. That's what our worship team often reminds me of: an army. 

Perhaps it's strange to think of singers as being equal to trained soldiers. Soldiers are so tough and so cool. Singers so often earn their keep by ingratiating and entertaining. But sometimes we sing to God; sometimes we sing declarations to our circumstances. In my church here, the singers lead us into battle, reminding me of Jehoshaphat's army the time it was led by musicians and singers. *

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A gigantic army is facing Jehoshaphat and the Israelites. He calls all of Judah together to fast and pray and call on God. "God, you gave us this land because you wanted to. We've built you a temple where we can assemble when we're in dire need; we'll wait on you here, asking for help, and you can save us.

"Oh, great God! You told us to spare these enemies long ago, but here they are, massed against us, and there's no way we can defeat them. We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you."

All the frightened families of Judah were there, waiting. 

It's Jahaziel, distant grandson of the famed poet Asaph who speaks up, prophesying, "Listen up, everyone! The Lord says that we will not have to fight this enemy. We must go down to meet them tomorrow and take up our positions, but God will deliver us himself. Do not be afraid! Do not be discouraged! Go out to face them tomorrow, and the Lord will be with you."

The other singers in the Tribe of Levi start to praise God. It gets loud with the many voices, every other child has found a percussive instrument. Jehoshaphat falls down on his face, praising and worshiping the God of his deliverance. I bet they're up all night, praising God, believing and trying to believe in the words of Jahaziel; that is their one and only hope of surviving this encounter.

The next morning, instead of appointing snipers or scouts to surveil the area ahead of their army, Jehoshaphat puts the worship team at the front. The people of Judah sing and drum their way to the site of their enemies, thanking God, lifting up his name with great sound. While they do this, God is ambushing their enemies. God HIMSELF is AMBUSHING their enemies. How? Like, how? With great balls of fire? With fear so that they turn on themselves? How? I don't know. But GOD AMBUSHES all these other armies so that when Jehoshaphat and the worshipers of God crest the hill on the path that leads down into the desert gorge, there's nothing left to do but pick up the plunder of their enemies.

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*paraphrase of 2 Chronicles 20

Bible Quiz Coaching: An Incident

Before I tell you this story, you have to understand a few things about my church. Let's start with my church's floor plan. First, there are two floors: the downstairs used to be a bar, and has an open floor plan you'd expect of such a place. It has two entrances, one can be unlocked from outside, the other must be unlocked from within. The second floor, only reached from the outdoors, used to be a small apartment and includes a bathroom, kitchen, and three rooms we use for Sunday school. It's a warm place you might enjoy holing up in if you're without a home, and you happen to find the door unlocked.

It is also useful for you to know that some people attend my church who are homeless, and homeless for diverse reasons. It has been a matter of course, though somewhat unnerving for me, to leave the Sunday school rooms after Bible Quizzing practice of a winter evening, and find the luggage and detritus of a homeless person, though only once did an owner thereof accompany his few belongings. (It was -20*F with the wind chill, and I fussed at him to go to the shelter to find safety. It briefly occurred to me that it would be nice if he could inhabit the Sunday school rooms, but the plan died right away: way too complicated.)

That one rather simple incident with all its implications made me forever-after hesitant to arrive to Quizzing practice alone. The very next week, though, found me arriving alone, at 6:50 pm. We were going to celebrate our first victory with ice cream that night, so I unlocked the downstairs, which includes the kitchen, though we usually have practice upstairs. I went to unlock the other door, but found it already unlocked. I paused, knowing that I might not be alone in the building. I checked the bathrooms and storage room, turned on more lights, and began to feel that I was alone. But, ah, I had left the Quizzing lights upstairs. Outside, I tried the door handle to the upstairs, and found it already unlocked. Again, a bad sign, what was it with our lackadaisical security? Most of us live in the city, and know that you lock your doors. And if not your own, surely the empty church building's doors!

I turned on the light, fairly certain that I would meet with some desperate person - whether in or out of their right mind was the question. "Hello?" I called.

At the top of the stairs, I opened the door, and saw no lights except for the TV, which displayed only static. "Hellooooo?" I called again, but was arrested at the faint sound of children's voices singing. A kid's worship CD was playing. What the hell was going on here?

Chairs had been strewn about the room, and the other doors in the room were closed. Everything was wrong with this picture. I was suddenly and overwhelmingly certain that this was the scene of a grisly murder, and that if I were to open the door one inch more, it would be caught on a corpse lying just beyond my line of vision. The killer was probably still in the room.

I went downstairs, to the sanctuary, telling myself I could wait until another adult arrived to survey the room. Then I heard it, just above my head, footsteps treading right where I had been not a moment ago. So this is how I die, I thought. I went out to the porch to confront the stranger and warn off the quizzers. I knew I couldn't run away, because the quizzers would be arriving any minute, possibly to encounter a dangerous person. I also knew I couldn't call the police. In the worst case scenario, they might use excessive force; in the best case scenario, they would have far too many questions.  I decided to call Pastor Josef. Someone should know how I died. 

"Hello, Carolyn!"

"Hi, Pastor Josef, how are you?"

"I'm good! How are you?"

"Well... I'm not great..." I quickly explained how I had found the doors unlocked, and the creepiness of the upstairs, and most importantly, that there was still someone up there, and I didn't feel safe.

"Do you want me to come over to the church?" he asked.

"No," I said, "I'm sure someone will get here soon." Whatever was going to happen would be finished long before he could arrive. Right then, the door from the Sunday school rooms opened, and Pastor Josef heard a desperate scream come from the other end of his phone - this was the end, surely!

"Are you okay? Carolyn? Who's there?"

"Pastor, I'm fine. I'm... I'm just fine," I was shaking as I tried to explain, "I am so sorry to scare you... I'm fine. But I am going to have to kill the quiz team. I know it's been a lot of work getting a team together. But I am just going to have to kill them. At least, Tyler and Isaiah. Sorry, Pastor. But I'm going to kill them."

---

Tyler and Isaiah had been dropped off early, and a dad with a church key had let them in to the upstairs, and gone his merry way, incorrectly assuming that they would use the time to study the Holy Word of God. And maybe Tyler and Isaiah thought they would do that, too. Until, after 33 seconds, one of them slowly closed his scripture, and said to the other, "Wouldn't it be funny if ..."

Disposable Packaging (parts II, III, and IV)

You say "Glorious," I say "Sparkly"

I wish you could have been there for Sunday's service two weeks ago, because it was all about disposable packaging.* Pastor titled the sermon, "Don't Save the Veils."** Moses was in God's presence for a while, and his face was radiant. But after a few days, that radiance began to fade, and he felt (perhaps) shame as the glory left him. So he covered his face with a veil.

Moses himself was not glorious, that stuttering, murdering, shepherd. The radiance was the glory of being in the presence of God. God chooses to use inglorious people, disposable packaging, to contain and reflect his presence, because in our weakness, he is stronger. The less impressive our clay pot is, the more beautiful is the glory that radiates from the contents inside.

This week three people asked me how I was, and waited for an answer, to which I confessed an embarrassing truth: "I just... I don't feel... sparkly this week. You know? Like my sparkle is... just... blah."

One friend considered this, and somberly answered, "No. I can't say I've ever felt 'sparkly'."

Another more inquisitive soul asked, "What is your sparkle, exactly?" Of course I don't know the answer to that one. It just is sparkly. It's how I feel about myself.

And another said, "You're just tired. It'll come back," to which my inner self responded, "A-HA! So you agree that I'm not sparkly! Jerk."

But there's hope for my sparkle to return, because it's not me. "[W]henever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, who with unveiled faces, reflect the Lord's glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit."

And until my sparkle returns, I'll take comfort here, in 2 Corinthians 12:7-10, where Paul boasts in his weakness, because,"when I am weak, then I am strong." In this passage, Paul [is crazy and] rejoices in his sufferings and deprivations, because God gets to show Himself to the world in those situations. Paul is glad that he's shown up to be the mere human (read, gifted animal) that he is, and that God gets to be God in those unbalanced situations.

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Hannah and Mary: Clay Pots Filled with Glory

Hannah and Mary were humble clay pots, entrusted to carry children who were blessed and purposed by God. They sing similar songs # about God filling the empty with good things. Mary says, "He has been mindful of the humble state of his servant. From now on, all generations will call me blessed, because the Mighty One has done great things for me-- holy is his name."

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A Prayer

Your glory will shine in the humblest, ugliest faces, and make them beautiful.
Your glory will cover the least melodic, grating voices, and make their song rise to the heavens.
Your glory will fill the barren woman, and give her many children.
Your glory will bring down the proud, and lift up the humble.
Your glory will fill the whole earth, of this we can be sure.

You have chosen the weak of this world to confound the strong. Blessed are the poor in spirit, the meek, the mourners, the lost, desperate, and hopeless, the insulted and grieved, because your ear is attentive to their cries, and great is their reward in heaven.

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Notes

* You can listen online  (maybe start around 55 minutes), but know that it was better in person. There is so much more happening than just what is spoken, especially the moments after everyone is dismissed. People start to mill around, a few people may leave right away (they probably have friends coming over for lunch, and need to make sure their house hasn't burned down because their electric is a little finicky and the crock pot may have caused a power surge (okay, I don't even know if that's possible)).

** (but he is German, and "veils" sounds like "whales" and it's a whole German/English pun that people groaned at mostly, but that was actually the funniest thing to happen in my life all week). 

# Here's one such song, "Holy is Your Name (Magnificat)," one of the most beautiful renderings of the Magnificat I've heard, written by David Haas, performed here by Mark Haas.

Possibilities for my Anabaptist research paper:

• Prayer practices in Hutterite/Bruderhof communities

• Anabaptist eschatology (beliefs about the end times)

• the Brethren in Christ holiness movement

• Jubilee practices in today's Mennonite/BIC churches

Care to weigh in?

Update: I'm writing about peace-making in Russia. I know, it wasn't quite fair to ignore all the options and go with door #5.
All this is happening because I work at an Anabaptist high school, and needed to take a seminar called Understanding Roots of Community in Anabaptism. It's nice to be on the paper-writing end instead of the grading end. Relaxing, you know?

June

It's beautiful: being overcome
by simple exhaustion at the end of a school year.

[Breathe.]

It's beautiful.

God's Signature: Happy Easter

"If it's beautiful and it multiplies, it must be God's work," said Pastor Josef this morning. It was a fitting comment, for the entire congregation seemed to be wriggling with new life. In a group of perhaps 320 people, babies under one and a half years constituted perhaps 20. Children under three years... oh my. That would be many more. And it would be far too awkward to try to count the children who are soon to be in our midst: pregnant women were all over the borrowed gym for today's service, taking part in the wriggling in their attempts to get comfortable.

I glanced over at J and M with their new baby. But I can never just glance. I looked. I stared. It's a wonder they haven't mentioned something about it, actually. J and M lost a baby over a year ago just before she would have been considered full term. We all mourned this loss deeply, just as we had all celebrated wholeheartedly when we first found out they were expecting.

"It's not fair," I thought repeatedly. I was just as quick to fire back at myself, "Of course it's not fair. A lot of things aren't fair. Are you gonna cry about it?"

Yes. I am going to cry about it, I hope.

But in not too much time, J and M decided they would begin to do foster care.

Just a few weeks after beginning the paperwork, a newborn girl (who looks as though she had been born of the two, seriously) was put into their arms by the foster care system. Hopefully this is a long-term thing. It sure is lovely to see them. And this morning, their little girl was in her baby carrier, fast asleep in a bright Easter dress and a little pink ribbon around her head. Of course, I gained all this by staring, like I do. And when she gave a start and awoke, M took the baby and rested her on her shoulder. Because she's her mom.

Beautiful. And despite their loss, their love is still multiplying.

So, what do I know of fair? I could easily get stuck in that place of "fair": telling God how things should work out.

Like Pastor was saying last week, some people believe that being a good person is good enough for God. But what do we even know about what is good? He expounded, saying, "God has changed my mind many times regarding the definition of good."

I like this new rule. if it's beautiful and it multiplies, it's of God.

Pakistan, Canadian Donations

Oh God, do something for these people.

Flood in Pakistan.

People like me, with nowhere to go.

They need everything.

I groan with them.

Oh God, do something for these people.

__________________________

Here's some of what BBC has to say about it:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-11105165

Here's what Mennonite Central Committee has going on:

http://mcc.org/stories/news/race-against-time-pakistan

In Canada, the federal government is matching private donations on behalf of Pakistan. Whoa. You can donate at the bottom of the page.

Oh, to know!

My small group just returned from visiting a man in the hospital. He's well known around here, but I had never met him before tonight.

His wife is lit up from inside. She rubbed his back as she stood beside him, a smile on her face. The room was full with ten people, sitting and standing, all more or less at ease. Clearly, this was not everyone's first visit to a hospital. But even more apparent, they were visiting their close friend.

We tossed a balloon around, then a football. His motor skills were improving, though his speech was mostly garbled. His wife spoke to him directly when she failed to understand his meanings, "I'm sorry, sometimes I don't understand still. But I want to. You're making such a good effort!"

We prayed before leaving. An hour with ten people is long enough to exhaust some healthy people. We first prayed for him. Then for her. As we prayed for her, I noticed him nod his head, his heart in full agreement with the blessings we spoke over his wife: strength, peace. I don't know if anyone else saw, but I was honored to see what he couldn't say in words right now: how he loves loves loves the hands that held his foot, lighting rubbing his sock as we stood around him.

She told us that the last time he was speaking with fluency, the doctor had asked him how he was. "I'm praising the Lord," he said.

It must take a lot of time to become so lovely. It's a stretch for me to realize right now, that God loves me, this man, and his wife with the same love. I had a rare glimpse into the precious heart of suffering.

Hebrews 10:39

"But we are not of those who shrink back and are destroyed, but of those who believe and are saved."

So persevere. It's a matter of identity. We are the kind of people who believe and are saved. Just like runners first have to think of themselves as runners before completing a marathon, or an artist must call herself an artist before completing a masterpiece. We are perseverers. Holding out and fighting through is what we do.

Where I'm From

(This was an assignment based on the poem by George Ella Lyon: http://www.georgeellalyon.com/where.html )

I am from Waynesboro,
Pennsylvania,
the United States
of America,
the Central Mountains,
specifically the valleys.
I am rural
but not boots
raised on a farm.
Instead, sneakers
worn down from sidewalks.

I am from Nancy and Ralph,
Helen and David.
Babysitters who were family,
and family who were strangers.
From teachers and nurses

people trying to be faithful.
From church seats to pews to folding chairs--
One Jesus.

I am from early mornings and toaster breakfasts,
mashed potatoes and gravy, homemade chicken soup,
leftovers, and no recipes. Mismatched dishes, a
cluttered kitchen table, a TV on in another room.

I am from the cinema in winter, park in summer--
sunburns and freckles, chapped lips and runny noses--
snowfights and long walks to school with a delay.

I am from the sunset, quiet evening, iced tea,
prowling cat in the bushes of a fading day.
From the back porch overlooking a slanted field;
the field filled up,
now it's Crown Circle.

I am from tears and hope,
shouting and laughter,
trial and defense,
discord and peace.

Thinking About Church Membership

I don't think I get it. Insofar as church must handle sums of money and decide what to do with it, I understand having official members. But what makes me a member? Is it attending a class and standing in front of a group and saying out loud that I am one of them? It seems to me the very moment someone quantifies this answer, the Holy Spirit has moved beyond it.

How do I recognize a church member? I want to equate "church member" exactly with "Christ-follower". Why would these ever be separated? I recognize Christ-followers most when they're interacting with one another, praying or singing or serving someone in need. I can recognize a Christ-follower when he/she is accountable to a group, under someone's authority, patient in affliction, joyful in hope... In order to be continuous and consistent in our lives, I think believers must live accountably as part of a church. I advocate that we continue to meet together, and all the more, as we see the Day approaching! But I am more than a little confused as to qualifications for church membership. What is more, official church membership seems superfluous after having been baptized into Christ's body.

I suspect that membership in a particular part of the body of Christ (a local church) is really recognizable by relationships. But I feel I am treading on ground too high for me when I think about the Church.

I asked my housemates about official church membership. Joella's response: "The devil is in the details."