Rainy Days & Mondays

This morning I made a bad decision. Rather than take my normal old-highway-back-route in to my downtown office, I chose the freeway. Bad choice. Very bad choice.

I never saw a wreck. Never saw a cop (other than the highway patrolman in the lane next to me. Remind me again why they get laptops in the car and we can’t so much as look at a cell phone?). Regardless, it was 8:22 am before I was anywhere near my downtown exit.

By that point, nerves shot and patience thin, I deserved a little luxury to sooth my anxiety. That meant being one of those annoying people who pulls into the most ridiculously located Starbucks ever. Normally, I’d be the person complaining about the line holding up traffic and preventing people from getting to work. Today, I was the enemy. But dammit, I deserved it!

Waiting in line and listening to my obligatory Dolly Parton (St. Dolly is known to soothe the soul), I noticed a man squeeze by my window in his SUV to get past the drive-thru lane. Assuming he was going to park and run in, I instead watched as he drove straight through to the exit. As I got closer to the bend in the drive-thru, I noticed that rather than leave, the man had parked his SUV on the other side of the dumpsters and was walking in his suit around muddy puddles and through wet grass. “Geesh!” I thought, “this guy really doesn’t want to get trapped in the parking lot while going to get his coffee.”

I mean, I pretty much never stop at Starbucks on a weekday morning. I only did it today because I needed it. I deserved it! But this guy – this guy probably doesn’t even know how to brew his own coffee. His time is too precious to get stuck in a Starbucks. He lives by different rules.

I glanced back through my rearview mirror to chart his beeline to his caffeinated beverage of choice, and that’s when I saw the big picture. A homeless man who I don’t know by name, by definitely recognized by presence, was sitting off in the grassy area, alone. Mr. Suit was continuing his trek through the grass and mud, headed straight toward his neighbor. His neighbor I hadn’t even noticed in my haste to get my reward for a shitty start to my week. (Late to a good job? That’s practically a tragedy! My life is so hard!) He stopped his morning, pulled off the road, found a quick spot to park, and took his nice suit for a trip through dirty, wet grass to take food to a neighbor and offer him a bit of conversation.

Now, that’s a reason to be late. That’s a way to start a week. Let’s go & do likewise.

Listen Up, Y'all!

If we are going to be in community with one another, whatever form that takes, we have to learn to listen to one another.

If we are going to grow, to take deeply honest looks at our faults, to repent and turn in a healthy direction, we have to be willing to hear one another.

If I ever hope to become a wise elder, I have to first be wise enough to slow down, to listen, to hear, to process… these things precede all understanding.

Questions are healthy. Not having the answers is ok. Exploring the mystery together is growth. Listening together to how the spirit is moving, challenging, illuminating – this is an essential practice of the body of Christ.

When we fail to listen to those who feel their voices are being silenced, we dismiss their experience and receive their challenge as a something negative to be sneered at, rather than something valid and valuable from which we can grow.

“This is a common response to those of us who speak from the margins of evangelical Christianity about issues around gender, race, and sexuality, and it’s an effective one because it appeals to something most of us value deeply: Christian unity… far too often, the “stop-being-so-divisive” line is used by those in power to diffuse, or even silence, difficult conversations about why things might need to change… I don’t like being divisive. Believe me. But I don’t like being silenced either.”
~ Rachel Held Evans, “On Being ‘Divisive’…”

When we fail to listen to those who feel their voices are being silenced, we miss out on the beauty, honesty and healing that can come when we release our tight grip of control, and step out into the risky unknown of growth and change.

"To me, the marginalized are those who, for all kinds of different reasons, are on the border or edge of whatever groups or systems they are part of. They are not in the center where the power and resources flow, but instead are in the white blank space that lingers on each side of the center… So much beauty emerges from the margins, and I get to see it almost every day. Truth so pure that it is like gold. Beauty so glorious that it can’t be matched. Honesty so raw that it pierces souls. Healing so deep that it transforms the most hardened heart.”
~ Kathy Escobar, “Truth from the Margins”

Adam McHugh, who has an upcoming book on listening, recently tweeted, “We are, in large part, a result of the voices we choose to listen to. Pick good and diverse voices.” And also, “If the people with power in your community do not practice listening, odds are no one else will either.”

Who am I choosing to listen to?

How am I practicing listening?

Am I willing to learn from the voices that are speaking into my life?

~ real human moments ~

Watch this clip:



Listen to this song:

Said & Done by Speed the Plough

Think on these things:

Having no destination, only this will to wander, we move slowly. What’s more, Wendell announces that in response to our culture of instant messaging, he has just founded a new cause, the Slow Communication Movement. Certainly we embody that spirit today, and it feels good. It is a more leisurely, more deliberate form of communication, and it isn’t limited to 140 characters.

Reconcilable Differences

on Binding and Loosing from John Howard Yoder's Body Politics:

Moral discernment and forgiveness condition and enable one another in complex ways. Admonition presupposes prior discernment; otherwise the criteria for admonition would not be common to both parties. Conversation with reconciling intent is the most powerful way for a community to discover when the rules they have been applying are inadequate, so that they may be modified. Asking whether there has really been an offense helps determine which differences need to be resolved by coming to unanimity by means of dialogue and forgiveness and which call for an agreement to differ. Having experienced forgiveness together enables a community to deliberate in an otherwise inacessible mode of mutual trust...

Taking seriously this apostolic witness would seem to put us at the mercy of a number of ecclesiastical scarecrows. It gives more authority to the church than does Rome, trusts more to the Holy Spirit than does Pentecostalism, has more respect for the individual than does liberal humanism, makes moral standards more binding than did Puritanism, and is more open to the new situation than was what some called "the new morality" a quarter-century ago. If practiced, it would radically restructure the life of churches...

...We have here a fundamental anthropological insight into the relationship of conflict and solidarity. To be human is to have differences; to be human wholesomely is to process those differences, not by building up conflicting power claims but by reconciling dialogue. Conflict is socially useful; it forces us to attend to new data from new perspectives. It is useful in interpersonal process; by processing conflict, one learns skills, awareness, trust, and hope. Conflict is useful in intrapersonal dynamics, protecting our concern about guilt and acceptance from being directed inwardly only on our own feelings. The therapy for guilt is forgiveness; the source of self-esteem is another person who takes seriously my restoration to community.

The Christian community has thereby been endowed with the wherewithal for ongoing moral discernment in the face of questions which could not conceivably have been answered substantially ahead of time. Just as a wisely written constitution for an institution or government provides procedures for amendment and for decision making rather than immutable prescriptions, so the Christian community is equipped not with a code but with decision-making potential.

Dare to be a sinner.

on Confession and Communion, from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together:

But it is the grace of the Gospel, which is so hard for the pious to understand, that it confronts us with the truth and says: You are a sinner, a great desperate sinner; now come, as the sinner that you are, to God who loves you. He wants you as you are; He does not want anything from you, a sacrifice, a work; He wants you alone. "My son, give me thine heart" (Prov. 23:26). God has come to you to save the sinner. Be glad! This message is liberation through truth. You can hide nothing from God. The mask you wear before men will do you no good before Him. He wants to see you as you are, He wants to be gracious to you. You do not have to go on lying to yourself and your brothers, as if you were without sin; you can dare to be a sinner. Thank God for that; He loves the sinner but He hates sin.

Christ became our Brother in the flesh in order that we might believe in him. In him the love of God came to the sinner. Through him men could be sinners and only so could they be helped. All sham was ended in the presence of Christ. The misery of the sinner and the mercy of God - this was the truth of the Gospel in Jesus Christ. It was in this truth that his Church was to live. Therefore, he gave his followers the authority to hear the confession of sin and to forgive sin in his name. "Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained" (John 20:23).

When he did that Christ made the Church, and in it our brother, a blessing to us. Now our brother stands in Christ's stead. Before him I need no longer dissemble. Before him alone in the whole world I dare to be the sinner that I am; here the truth of Jesus Christ and his mercy rules. Christ became our Brother in order to help us. Through him our brother has become Christ for us in the power and authority of the commission Christ has given to him. Our brother stands before us as the sign of the truth and the grace of God. He has been given to us to help us. He hears the confession of our sins in Christ's stead and he forgives our sins in Christ's name. He keeps the secret of our confession as God keeps it. Whe I go to my brother to confess, I am going to God.

So in the Christian community when the call to brotherly confession and forgiveness goes forth it is a call to the great grace of God in the Church.

Slow to Speak, Quick to Listen

on The Ministry of Listening, from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together:

The first service that one owes to others in the fellowship consists in listening to them. Just as love to God begins with listening to His Word, so the beginning of love for the brethren is learning to listen to them. It is God’s love for us that He not only gives us His Word but also lends us His ear. So it is His work that we do for our brother when we learn to listen to him. Christians, especially ministers, so often think they must always contribute something when they are in the company of others, that this is the one service they have to render. They forget that listening can be a greater service than speaking.

Many people are looking for an ear that will listen. They do not find it among Christians, because Christians are talking when they should be listening. But he who can no longer listen to his brother will soon be no longer listening to God either; he will be doing nothing but prattle in the presence of God too. This is the beginning of the death of the spiritual life, and in the end there is nothing left but spiritual chatter and clerical condescension arrayed in pious words. One who cannot listen long and patiently will presently be talking beside the point and never really speaking to others, albeit he be not conscious of it. Anyone who thinks that his time is too valuable to spend keeping quiet will eventually have no time for God and his brother, but only for himself and his own follies.

Brotherly pastoral care is essentially distinguished from preaching by the fact that, added to the task of speaking the Word, there is the obligation of listening. There is a kind of listening with half an ear that presumes already to know what the other person has to say. It is an impatient, inattentive listening, that despises the brother and is only waiting for a chance to speak and thus get rid of the other person. This is no fulfillment of our obligation, and it is certain that here too our attitude toward our brother only reflects our relationship to God. It is little wonder that we are no longer capable of the greatest service of listening that God has committed to us, that of hearing our brother’s confession, if we refuse to give ear to our brother on lesser subjects.

Where are you?

I ask a lot of questions.

I ask them of myself, I ask them of others, and I ask them of God.

My questions are often confusing, and lengthy, and still in the process of figuring out what it is I really want to know in the first place.

I don’t think God minds my questions, because he seems to like them, too.

Jesus asked lots of leading questions, often about the crazy parables he told, knowing no one had a clue what he was talking about.

God’s not quite so cryptic.

God’s questions seem to be pretty simplistic and straight forward, which is kind of annoying, because you know he totally already knows the answer.

I think he asks the questions just to see what kind of whacky answer the human will respond with, and I think he gets a good laugh.

Oh sure, sometimes he may appear stern, but I think like any parent who is listening to his child trying to explain away a situation, digging deeper into a hole, God has to turn his head a bit to the side to suppress his uncontrollable chuckle.

Take Adam and Eve. They’re in the garden, communing with God, everything’s kosher. Cue the snake, Eve eats the fruit, politely shares it with Adam, boom they’re naked. Ok, so they were already naked, but now they know they’re naked. And they’re not just naked anymore… they’re nekkid! They start covering themselves up with leaves, hear God coming, and hide behind some trees.

God asks, “Where are you?”

Like. He. Didn’t. Know.

It’s like the parent playing hide-and-seek, whose child is lying under the coffee table with her feet sticking out the end, completely exposed. Yet, for the sake of the game, the parent continues wandering around the house, being sure to avoid the area directly surrounding the coffee table, calling out “Where are you?”

But here’s the thing for me, God could have ended it all right there. I mean, they ate the fruit, this is not going to be pretty. Like a writer whose story is going nowhere, he could have balled up the paper and tossed the draft into the waste bin. He could have called a do-over.

But he humored them. He played their little game. “Where are you?”

If God wasn’t the least bit surprised by Adam and Eve’s actions, if he didn’t scrap the whole project and go back to the drawing board, why are we so afraid to come before him honestly, just as we are?

Adam and Eve did not like everything God had to say to them, he didn’t just pat them on the head and let them off with a warning. Their actions had consequences. But life went on, and God did not leave them to face it alone. He loved them. He created them. He longed to be with them.

God loves you.

God created you.

God longs to be with you.

If you have to hide behind a tree and some fig leaves to be able to talk with him, ok – he’ll humor you.

But feel free to come before him just as you are. He already sees you, he already knows you, he already loves you.

“The great weakness in the North American church at large, and certainly in my life, is our refusal to accept our brokenness. We hide it, evade it, gloss over it. We grab for the cosmetic kit and put on our virtuous face to make ourselves admirable to the public. Thus, we present to others a self that is spiritually together, superficially happy, and lacquered with a sense of self-deprecating humor that passes for humility. The irony is that while I do not want anyone to know that I am judgmental, lazy, vulnerable, screwed up, and afraid, for fear of losing face, the face that I fear losing is the mask of the impostor, not my own!” ~ Brennan Manning, Ruthless Trust