Anniversary Roses

I’ve been thinking a lot about marriage recently.

First, we had a wedding at St. Andrew’s that was called off just weeks before the big day. The couple discerned that what had seemed like a right and good and joyful thing wasn’t right for them, at least not now. I can’t imagine how hard the decision must have been for them, but I have great respect for their maturity in putting the brakes on a process that, too often, seems to have the momentum of a train that can’t be stopped.

Then came yesterday, the 19th wedding anniversary for Ann and me. As we sat with the kids at the table last night (the two of us will celebrate another evening), they asked about the dozen roses in the vase in front of us. All the roses are red but one, which is white; and they asked why. I said it stood for the new life that’s created when two people come together and let God make them one at the deepest level of their being. For Ann and me, the details of our life together certainly haven’t turned out as we might have expected 19 years ago – a little bit of tragedy and a lot more unexpected blessing. But through it all, the new creation of the marriage grows and thrives.

And then I look at the calendar and remember that my parents’ anniversary will be this Sunday – 57 years of marriage. I can’t even begin to imagine how that feels. But I do know their white rose has incredibly deep roots.

“The bond and covenant of marriage” may not sound terribly attractive to many in our culture, given the premium we put on the Gospel of Me. Living for ourselves sounds like freedom, and we’re all about that. But, ironically, to give up this kind of freedom returns to us a much greater gift: being rooted in the soil of God’s love, with souls entwined, becoming so much more than we can be on our own.

It’s amazing the rose God can make of us when we give ourselves away.

Mission Trips Into the Reign of God

I took a little trip to Haiti this afternoon.

Really, I only had coffee with Drs. Stan and Kathy Shaffer at the Roasterie, doing some planning for the mission trip I’m leading in November. But in a week of … well, a typical week at church, it was a wonderful foretaste of what our week in mid-November might feel like.

I don’t yet know precisely what we’ll be doing in Haiti, but I do know we’ll spend our time working with our partner school in Maniche – among other things, teaching about good hand-washing technique, visiting kids’ homes to teach the families, and doing some painting at the school.

Whatever we do, I also know this: We’ll be making a concrete difference in the lives of children of God whose place in life we can’t even begin to imagine. For the children of Maniche, simply progressing through school might make the difference between a life of hope or a life of subsistence. For the children of Maniche, the school lunch we provide might make the difference between adequate nutrition or wasting away. For the children of Maniche, learning to wash their hands after using the latrine and before eating might make the difference between living to adulthood or dying young.

So, for an hour or so this afternoon, sipping my coffee, I got to travel into the future – the immediate future of a November mission trip, and the longer-term future of the reign of God. Someday, no child will starve while others feast. For now, those of us who go to Haiti will do what we can do to help that day come a few moments sooner.

Want to go? Let me know: frjohn@standrewkc.org.

Burden or Blessing?

A recent event and two recent conversations make me think God’s trying to tell me something.

The event came last week, when my wife’s step-grandmother died. It was a blessing, healing her of cancer that had progressed beyond the point of treatment. We traveled to Ft. Smith, Ark., to gather with that side of Ann’s family and celebrate her step-grandmother’s life. Near the end of the visit, we received a great gift – her car. It’s not exactly new, a 2002 Honda Civic; but it’s in great shape with very low mileage. Gifts like this have fallen into our laps a few times before, and they always make me stop short. They are moments when gratitude washes over you, when you get a window into just how richly you’re blessed and how often you miss it. We’re trying to discern now what to do with three cars; but with two kids nearing driving age, we may well keep them all and make one a gift for their use.

Then this week, I had a conversation with a parishioner about prayer. She is very wise in many ways, but one thing she said particularly stuck with me. She was talking about a truly difficult time, when she wasn’t sure how to pray or what to pray for. What carried her through was the intentional practice of thanksgiving. When she couldn’t pray anything else, she could take note of all that God had given her – children, work, relationships, plenty to eat, a lovely home, and so on. It was a bridge toward a place of deeper healing because it kept her orientation Godward in a time when the temptation was great to turn away.

And yesterday I had a conversation with another parishioner, this time about illness and recovery. He had endured heart surgery to correct problems that would have killed him, and he’s still dealing with the rigors of recovery and rehab. But what he was taking away from the experience was deep gratitude – not just for the gift of renewed health (which is significant enough) but for the gift of relationships with those who had supported him through the process, everyone from his spouse and children, to friends who showed up, to physicians and caregivers who were God’s agents of physical healing. For him, heart disease was an opportunity to see the blessing of relationship and say thank you.

I struggle with lots of things, but one of the more consistent wrestling matches God and I have is about orienting me toward gratitude. And when I’m feeling especially hard-pressed (or, perhaps, self-pitying), God seems to come through with examples of the contrast reality that the life of the kingdom is all about. The lines between our perception of burden and God’s reality of blessing can be terribly thin. But the choice is ours as to how we’ll chalk things up. Do we choose to see burden or blessing? The answer will tell us whether our primary residence is the kingdom of anxiety or the kingdom of heaven.

Kittens and Children of God

As of a few weeks ago, we have a kitten in our house – Maisy. Of course, she’s the cutest thing in the world (at least when she isn’t attacking my ears in the middle of the night).

This morning, I’ve been watching Maisy hunting a fly in our dining room. She understands that her chances are better if she can attack from atop the dining room table (which I’m not wild about, but I realize trying to keep her off the table is a battle I won’t win). So she backs up away from the table to get up a good head of steam, charges, and launches herself at the tabletop. Sadly, her size and her judgment don’t yet allow her to perform such feats. Instead, she rams herself into the tabletop and crashes to the floor.

Part of me feels awful watching this. I want to show her how she can use the chair next to the table as a step up; I want to save her from crashing and tumbling to the floor. But then, as she picks herself up and tries again, I see that she has to crash and fall in order to learn just how tall the table really is. Failure is a learning opportunity – and an essential one, too.

As God’s children, we’re in the same situation. We have to fail in order to learn. We have to crash and fall to the floor in order to figure out how to succeed in the environment around us. We have to learn for ourselves how high we can jump.

This is no great insight. But it might be helpful to keep in mind the next time something happens to us – as individuals, as a church, as a nation, etc. – and we find ourselves asking, “God, why did you let this happen to me?” Although I’m sure it pains God as much as it pains any of us to watch our own children fail, the Heavenly Parent has to let us crash and fall so we can build our strengths and learn our limitations. I don’t much enjoy it when I’m the one tumbling to the ground. But I also give thanks that God loves me enough to let me figure it out for myself.

Being a Visitor

I’ve been on vacation for the past two weeks, and I still have one more week of vacation to go (praise God). But I had an experience today that I wanted to share while it’s still fresh.

This morning, I put myself in a position I never get to experience: being an anonymous, first-time visitor at a church where I don’t feel comfortable. Part of it was simply professional curiosity – wanting to see how other folks do church. But mostly, I wanted to see what it was like to be one of those people to whom we’re supposed to be especially attentive on Sunday mornings: the people God brings through our doors for the first time.

I chose to go to a local megachurch, one of the congregations with a reputation for excellence both in worship and in ministry to newcomers. I arrived about 10 minutes before the service, and I was greeted with a “hello” and a handshake from the greeter stationed at the door. I came into the lobby (what we would call a narthex in my tradition) and marveled at the coffee bar, the large gift shop, the welcome counters staffed by volunteers, and the impressive children’s ministry desk (which had a helpful sign directing visiting families where they should go to get their kids off to children’s programming for the first time). The space was huge and open – although, to a person who works in a very traditional liturgical setting, it seemed much more like a convention center or an airport than a church.

I went into the worship space and received an order of service from an usher. I found a place to sit and looked over the day’s announcements. In this congregation’s tradition, the time to greet people sitting near you comes at the beginning of worship, and I shared a handshake with everyone immediately around me.

But – those five “good mornings” and the handshake from the greeter at the door were the only times anyone spoke to me. I even hung around the lobby for about 10 minutes after worship had ended, browsing the gift shop, checking out the literature on a rack, walking through the conversation spaces. Not a soul introduced him- or herself to me.

I say this not as a criticism of this church. It has thousands of members; it’s obviously doing many, many things very well. Instead, my point is that even in a church that prides itself on ministry to newcomers, it’s easy for a given individual on a given Sunday to feel completely alone in the crowd.

For those of us in congregations that are trying to play catch-up with churches like this one (at least in terms of welcome and incorporation of newcomers), this is a cautionary tale. If an evangelistically focused megachurch can fail to reach out to a stranger, how much more often do we fail to make a Sunday-morning visitor feel at home?

A church may offer an impressive building, incredibly tight worship, professional-quality music, huge video screens, and a solid sermon. But it also has to offer real, live voices and hands to the stranger who takes the huge risk to come in. May every single parishioner remember this next Sunday, when we’re tempted to think we’ve done enough simply by getting ourselves to church. Getting ourselves to church is indeed a good thing – but our own needs are only the beginning of why God has gotten us out of bed that morning.

Church in a Bar

We had St. Andrew’s second Holy Happy Hour last night at Charlie Hooper’s – another great turnout (40 or so), with wonderful conversations all around the room.

As I’ve said before, part of the point of Holy Happy Hour is evangelistic. If we, as an incarnation of “church,” get out into the world having a good time, then the world might see that “church” is more than the self-righteous, judgmental, boring people we’re often presumed to be. Last night, there were signs posted on the wall marking the gathering as “St. Andrew’s Church.” For some, maybe that’s scandalous – “Church people shouldn’t be doing things like that.” But for the other folks there at Charlie Hooper’s, seeing church people gathering for happy hour might make them rethink their presumptions about what those Christians are like. Actually, I rather like the notion that “St. Andrew’s Church” isn’t just the beautiful building up the street but is the body of Christ in the world. After all, Jesus certainly spent his fair share of time in places like Charlie Hooper’s.

Of course, there’s also an internal “good” to these gatherings. As someone pointed out last night, “It doesn’t bother me that we’re getting together for happy hour. Hey, if we get together to do this tonight, we’ll be more likely to get together tomorrow for worship, or education, or outreach work, or whatever.”

She was right. Building community is huge for the congregation’s health. And a little fun never hurts, either – even among church people.

Hard Work and Self-Care

I received word yesterday that a friend and seminary classmate, Bill Stroop, died on Sunday. Bill was somewhat older than me, in his late 50s. But only in his late 50s.

Bill was a scientist as well as an Episcopal priest. His first career was as a researcher and professor of microbiology, immunology, pathology, and ophthalmology. (Among all the other wonderful things implied by this rich integration of theology and science, it also meant that Bill kept otherwise illegal pathogens in the freezer of his seminary dorm room.) In teaching, preaching, and conversation, he could offer insights that none of the rest of us could bring. But he also had a gift for making those connections between God and science in a way that the rest of us could understand.

What I also remember about Bill in seminary is that he worked more than anyone I’d ever met. And from what I hear, this continued in his work as a priest. In fact, I imagine it only intensified, given the demands of ordained life and – even worse – the demands that ordained people often place on themselves. If you’re already wired to be an overachiever, then life in the Church will only encourage you to overachieve even more. There’s nothing quite like the combination of human need, divine calling, and people’s expectations to make you think you have to do it all.

Interestingly, on the day Bill suffered his fatal heart attack, I was traveling to rural southern Missouri to see my spiritual director. I say this mostly in the spirit of confession: It was the first time I'd seen her in several months. I find it a real challenge to carve out the time to do it; and once I do schedule the time, some emergency often seems to prevent me from keeping the date.

It is very difficult, for some of us at least, to make time for things like spiritual direction – or exercise, or healthy eating, or time with the family, or sleep, or…. But Bill’s passing makes me realize there is a price to be paid for always trying to do more. And, as my spiritual director might say (though much more eloquently than this), God probably has things pretty well in hand as it is, without me deciding I’m responsible for how everything works out.

I will miss my friend Bill. And I pray that now, as he enters into the fullness of life in the Kingdom of Heaven, he can enjoy some much-needed rest.