That’s a Wrap (with a bow on top)

At present, I am sitting at Starbucks in my pajamas.  I mean, it’s possible that no one here recognizes this.  It could just be sweatpants and a T-shirt.  But I know I slept in these clothes.  I feel slightly less than human, but that’s probably to be expected.  I just finished my first year of PhD coursework.  No one claimed it would be easy, but it doesn’t matter.  I don’t generally do things the easy way, anyway.

As I was submitting my final papers and exams, I thought back to a conversation I had with a friend, in the fall of 2017, as I was preparing to apply to PhD programs.  Sitting in Boston, I said, “I think I’m going to apply to the University of Boston.”

He looked confused and responded with something like, “L…  I don’t think that’s a thing.”[i]

Just in case you’re wondering, it’s not.  That’s how fully unaware I was about this venture.  The following days, weeks, and months led to multiple applications and acceptances with a final decision to sign on the dotted line at Boston University (I was sort of close), which I discovered is an R1 Doctoral University while sitting at orientation with my cohort full of Ivy League graduates.  I had to Google what “R1” meant.  I swallowed hard and introduced myself and proudly proclaimed my affiliation with Northwest Nazarene University, the small school in Idaho that I love.  I fluffed it up with words about publications and conferences, but I also realized I had either hit the PhD program jackpot or somehow slipped in by mistake.  I proceeded to spend much of the school year vacillating between greeting the day with exuberant energy as I burst through the doors at Back Bay station, shouting, “GOOD MORNING, BOSTON!” and defeating exhaustion as I crawled back onto the subway at night hoping to find a seat where no one would be touching me... or at least to remain upright.  There was really only one day when I collapsed in a puddle of tears in a library study carrel, but there were several when I wondered if I might actually be someone’s case study… “Let’s throw a middle aged, Midwestern mama of five into the big city on the East Coast, at a tier one research institute, and see if she makes it…”

As a fairly serious daydreamer, I want to take just a moment for an aside.  Leading up to this particular leg of the journey, there were some frustrating disappointments.[ii] Maybe you read about all of them.  But there was always this vision… this hope… that one day I would “arrive.”  I would post a selfie and stick it to the world, announcing, “Here I am!  See!  This is where I was going to end up all along!” 

Except it wasn’t!  This is just dumb!  I was never going to end up here.  I didn’t even know “here” was a place, remember?  And maybe that is exactly the point.  I’ve been lamenting Catherine Keller’s “cloud of missed possibilities” for a ridiculously long time.[iii]  I’m not sorry about that.  I do lament well, and since it’s something of a lost practice, I’m OK with bearing it.  But there’s something else, too.  Sometimes we risk missed possibilities not because we have already made choices that exclude them but because we just don’t know what’s possible.  I didn’t know.  Now I do.  And it’s not what I expected.  And it’s good.  But I probably still don’t know everything!  Year one… that’s a wrap.

Now here’s that “bow.”  As I left for the train station on Tuesday (the last day I had to go into Boston for the semester), a quick stop at the mailbox produced a 5 x 7 envelope from Northwest Indiana, which contained my District Minister’s License from the Church of the Nazarene.  If I’m honest, I’m struggling a little bit with how to celebrate this.  I was beyond thrilled to hold this piece of paper (dare I say an outward sign of the inward grace that is vocational calling to ministry) in my hands.  I don’t really want to hear people say things like, “What?  I thought you were already ordained!” or, “Wait!  How are you not already ordained?” or even, “Well, it’s about time,” even though I know the intense support and compassion with which these words would be (have been) uttered.  Y’all, the honest truth is my licensing process just fell through the cracks while I raised a family and ministered alongside my spouse and pursued the necessary education to eventually fulfill this calling on my life. 

What most people don’t know is that I drove over a thousand miles to meet with the good people of NWIN for my district licensing interview… that I slept in my van at a rest stop for several hours with my two oldest kids, because the sleet was so intense… that I spilled a gas station coffee all over the gas station (and myself) right ahead of the interview, because I was shaking so badly… that I got pulled over on the drive afterward… that friends drove several hours to meet me for lunch expecting that they would find me in tears, either way.

Sometimes, it has been extremely difficult to articulately verbalize this itinerant life and the unusual ways in which I have fought to live into the call to preach and to administer the sacraments as fully as possible.  Yet, one of the interviewers looked at me and said (and I paraphrase, because it’s been months), “We know you now.  You don’t have to transfer and explain this to another district.  And, can I just tell you what I appreciate about you?”  I think that might be the point at which I resumed breathing.  Even I could not have imagined how beautifully this would come together, not in my wildest dreams.[iv]   

Alright, that’s a lot.  Here I sit, 20% of the way through my PhD, a district licensed minister in the church I love, and rather spent.  One of those super smart cohort members of mine gave me about the greatest compliment I could receive the other day when she said, “You’re the real thing.”  Well, I’m trying to be less self-deprecating, so alright.  Maybe it’s time to kick imposter syndrome to the curb (although I’m not done writing about it, stay tuned and send publishers).  If this life it anything, it’s real.  Next.

L.         

---

[i] On a second reading, I’m actually sure this is not at all what he said.  This is how I would have said it.  He just admitted that he hadn’t heard of the University of Boston (which does not exist).

[ii] Ok, years of frustrating disappointments.  Years. 

[iii] See Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming.

[iv] I fully recognize that it is hysterical that my wildest dreams are of licensing interviews and ordination and PhD regalia (wait, did I admit that out loud), but I’m rolling with it.

The Lies We Tell Ourselves

I think I’ll start with this one:  Summer is almost here, so I won’t be as busy…

I almost laughed out loud, yesterday, as I started to fill the calendar, and it caused me to think of my very dear friend who walked alongside me for years, as the adult conversation sanity of my weeks, in the midst of raising lots of very little people in what sometimes felt like a bubble.  Thursday afternoons meant play dates, and if I’m honest they were just as much for me as for the kids.

The kids got older, life took turns, and we often found ourselves saying things like, “We’ll have more time in the summer… in the fall… over Christmas break… after the new year… someday…”

We both made new friends, and the hard truth is our priorities shifted.  And then one day a couple of months back, I found myself in a church parking lot, picking her kids up for a sleepover…

And I said, “I have big news!  I’m starting my Ph.D. in the fall!”

And she said, “I have big news, too!  We’re adopting a baby from Nigeria!”

And then I cried all the way home.  But don’t worry.  I wasn’t driving.

We live in this insanely connected era, but I sometimes wonder how much we really know that matters.  Sometimes I wonder if we’re missing the people and places and things that are right in front of our faces for the sake of remembering yesterday and planning tomorrow.

Matthew 6:34: “So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own.  Today’s trouble is enough for today” (NRSV).

I had a brief moment of comic relief when I scribbled this well-known verse in my planner and it spilled right over into tomorrow.  Oh, the irony.

Today does have enough trouble, and I don’t particularly want to miss out on it! 

So I’m super excited about chasing dreams, right now, but I’m also trying to balance this with being present in every moment of every day, particularly to the people around me, because life is too short and too unpredictable to be anything less than all in. 

L.

Oh, Dear God, Please Don’t Call My Kids to Ministry

I’m glad I’ve been called to ministry.  I cannot imagine doing anything else with my life.  But I would be lying if I said it wasn’t hard.  That’s the understatement of forever, and try to take that in the context of an author who loves hyperbole.  By hard; I mean heartrending, life changing, breaking me down to the core and beyond at times, blood, sweat, and too many tears, scar inducing hard.

And so, for this reason, I admit that I have sometimes prayed, “Oh, Dear God, please don’t call my kids to this.” 

I thought we were doing OK…

I have kids who want to be video game programmers, composers, and architects.  I have one who wants to be a theological paleontologist and discover the backstory of the creation of the world.  I don’t really know if that’s a thing, but it sounds pretty safe, right?  And then I have a seven year old who declared pretty early on that she was going to be an OBGYN, which I thought was a lofty (if somewhat specific) goal for second grade… until she approached me one afternoon and proclaimed that she needed to preach.

Well, crap.

Like any good pastor mom who wishes her kid would choose something less risky, like logging, fishing, flying airplanes, collecting garbage, or construction (try to find the humor… these are the five deadliest jobs in the United States); I put her off.  But she was relentless.  Finally, I told her that she could preach if she prepared a manuscript.  I mean, what seven year old is going to put in that kind of work?  The answer is mine.  I came home from the office the next day and found her with a stack of papers that included not only her sermon but an entire order of worship (call to worship, music, children’s moment with ‘Pastor M,’ (that’s what I get for using only one initial), Scripture, and prayer.

We listened to Pastor M² (that’s what I decided to call her) as she preached, last night.  Her siblings laughed too much.  I made them sit up front for the 'children’s moment.'  I don’t care that they’re teenagers.  Of course, I joined her, kneeling on the floor, for prayer.  She was missing one of her papers, so she rustled through them with a confused look on her face before throwing her hands up in the air (I turned to my husband and said, "Oh my gosh... she's just like me").  When we sang “Jesus Loves Me,” as the closing hymn; she marched her little self right out the door and waited to shake each of our hands and thank us for coming to church.  There were fist bumps, as well.

The other day, she said, “Church people are nicer than other people.” 

Those stinking teenager siblings all choked to death, and I shot them a look that justified the dying.  It seems that her church experience has been different than theirs, thus far.  But I was still holding out hope that this is a phase…  Mommy’s a pastor, I love Mommy, I should be a pastor, too…  It’s the kind of thing that could fade with time and age.

I was hopeful that she got the “I need to preach” bug out of her system. 

She greeted me, this morning, with, “I think the next time I preach will be on Christmas, but I’m not sure what to do for the call to worship…” 

I gave her a hymnal, as I walked out the door…

L.

Am I Your Pastor?

I’m not 100% sure where to begin this post, because the truth is I am exhausted (as denoted in my post, this morning, at These Ordinary Days), and I am vulnerable (as denoted all over the place—in writing, in real life, in spontaneous episodes of tearing up, recorded on podcasts… just… everywhere…).

My feelings were a little hurt the other day when I couldn’t wear a green scarf with any kind of integrity intact.  It’s pretty hard to be a woman with both an M.A. and an M. Div. in theology; who waited to start the formal ordination process, because I wanted to give adequate time to the educational requirements while raising a family; who writes and edits theological works; who counsels and encourages other women who struggle with their callings; who really loves scarves a whole lot… and to realize (kind of brutally) that your tribe doesn’t consider you a pastor… or, at least not a pastor ‘enough’…

There’s that stupid word again.

Now, thankfully… right in the midst of this there was a denominational leader who was all like, “This isn’t a red flag, L.  You’re OK.  Just start the process.  And come teach and stuff” (super great paraphrase, mine).  Then we smiled, and I went on feeling OK in my orange paisley pants, without my green scarf.

But I say all of this not to expose my bitterness (I’m actually not bitter… I made choices based on what I could handle at any given moment, sometimes I absolutely stretched that to the max, and it really is OK that my formal process is just going to take a little more time than others) and not even to express my gratitude (although, thankful was definitely the word of the hour after that conversation).  Everything I have just written is a preface to what I’ve felt in the ensuing week (and more often than I’d like to admit).

I never set out to be a pastor.  Seriously, who does?  It still surprises me when I walk into ERs or nursing homes or salons or down grocery aisles or sit down to have coffee and someone introduces me to another human being by saying, “This is L.  She’s my pastor.” 

Interestingly, this is almost always followed by some ironic disclaimer such as, “You can go ahead and say whatever you need to say in front of her,” and I laugh (really hard, on the inside), because I know it’s coming.  People say stuff to me that I never would have imagined anyone would be willing to share with a pastor!  But I love that they do.

So I had this moment where one of my people was hospitalized last week, and I actually couldn’t get to him, because this bilocational life is for the birds, but my emotions were telling.  He’s mine.  I’m his pastor.  I immediately worried that some other pastor who doesn’t know or care about his story would step in and be stupid or something.  How is this even a concern?  Well, it’s because I have often been a pastor to the pastorless… to the people on the margins who don’t quite fit the church mold.  In many ways, my not-enough-ness has made me exactly the kind of pastor they need.  Go figure.  We gravitate toward people who look like us.

So, speaking of birds, I thought of the children’s story, Are You My Mother, as this post was forming in my mind.  If you are unfamiliar with it, please take the time to watch this 8 minute video:      

    

 As the baby bird searches for his mother, the responses are telling:

“It did not say a thing…” (Isolation)

“No…” (Exclusion)

“I am not your mother, I am a dog.” (Duh… don’t you know anything, baby bird… uh… he’s a baby!)

“How could I be your mother?” (Do you really want to know?) 

Poor baby bird begins to doubt whether or not he has a mother, at all…

He is so desperate he tries to self-identify as a boat… as a plane… a ‘snort’ (backhoe)…  Well, that’s just crazy and pitiful!

It’s not until the baby bird arrives home that he finds his mother, and the interesting question she asks is, “Do you know who I am?”

Of course the baby bird does; but before he identifies her, he speaks to all of the things she is not (not a cat, not a hen, not a dog, not a cow, not a car, not a boat, not a plane, not a snort…)

Sometimes I think we have to figure out who we’re not before we ever figure out who we are, and it can be a heck of a journey…  It can take a really long time…

I’m a pastor, and I might even be yours—formal process or not, green scarf or not, it’s coming.  The people who will one day give the green light and lay their hands on my head to make it official already know this.  We’re all just waiting in eager expectation, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned in life; it’s that I’d better take a moment to rest when it seems like nothing is happening, because once it breaks loose I’ll have to hit the ground running, and there’s no telling when another respite will follow.

And… marking time…

L.