Resolutions - Tasks or Relationships?

Have you begun thinking about New Year Resolutions?

I used to resolve to remember better my family's birthdays, but with my aunt, my grandmother, my father-in-law and my step-father all having birthdays in the first three weeks of the year, I always failed miserably. After all, I'm one of the the people who have trouble remembering to take down the Christmas tree even as its needles lay a fir carpet in our living room. How was I going to remember to do something in January when I was still thinking it was December? I was sunk before I ever began!

So, these days, I don't think too much about making resolutions; after all, most resolutions get broken before January ends - why invite disappointment?

But I admit, I am intrigued by a thesis made by Charles Duhigg in his book The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. Duhigg's book is the first of several on my reading list for JTerm classes that I'll travel to Luther Seminary for next month. He argues that habits consist of a loop that begin with a cue, a routine and a reward. He suggests that habits can be created by creating new cues or rewards, and changed by inserting different routines into the loop. Eventually, when a habit is formed, the cue triggers a routine and delivers a reward semi-automatically.

What intrigues me though is how his presentation parallels a way of thinking about discipleship that is promoted by Mike Breen of 3DM. Breen acknowledges borrowing this form from the business world thirty years ago, but it is durable. Using the shape of a square,Breen suggests that discipleship involves 4 movements that begin with teaching people in safe spaces where they can watch how things are done (1), and then, they can help (2). Eventually, being coached, they take a leadership role (3), and finally, fully equipped, they lead (4).

Correlating the square and the habit loop helps me understand that short-term bursts of activity are likely less to create or change habits than sustained relationships.  I'll have to think about what that means in practice, but maybe it changes the ways I resolve to live differently in 2013.

What about you?

Conspiracy in the Preacher's Corner

Conspiring to hold Jesus at the center of all of our Christmas preparation and expectation, St. Mark's joined neighborhood churches in participating in the Advent Conspiracy [AC] for Advent. Four churches, four preachers, four worship styles but united as one Body of Christ around the table and the Word - pretty extraordinary.

On Sundays at St. Mark's, we returned to the prophets' words and heard the promise of a Messiah.  I preached the first and last Sundays of Advent.

December 2, 2012
1st Sunday in Advent (Year C)
Jeremiah 33:14-16   
Psalm 25:1-10
1 Thessalonians 3:9-13
Luke 21:25-36
 

Listen Now

December 23, 2012
4th Sunday in Advent (Year C)
Micah 5:2-5a
Psalm 80:1-7
Hebrews 10:5-10
Luke 1:39-45, (46-55)

Listen Now

Stories that Matter

What is your favorite story? And who told it to you?

When I began my studies at Luther Seminary, I was surprised to discover the first preaching course was actually called, “Telling the Story.” As a little girl, my daddy told us Uncle Remus stories which were tales about the shenanigans of Br’er Rabbit and Br’er Fox. That was my introduction to storytelling, a traditional art with a rich history that happens to be woven into western North Carolina's own traditions.

At seminary, the focus is on God’s story, which we hear and read in the Bible. If you grew up in church, you may have learned many of the most well-known Bible stories as a child, and you know the major characters. But many people, including me, didn’t learn them in childhood, so I wondered how people can learn who the characters are, what their stories say and why their stories are important to us, two-thousand years later. Why does what we believe matter? With all the stories we hear through advertising, popular culture, television and the internet, how does Christianity help us make sense of the world around us?

I think we can begin to answer those questions by discovering that God’s story is not only an ancient text that we read, but a story that continues to be shaped by God’s activity in our world and lives today.  And hopefully, as we explore how we can connect with God, with each other and with the world around us through God’s story, we also can learn to tell our own stories of where God touches our lives in ways other people can hear them.

I have created an internship project, “Stories that Matter” that is rooted in these two ideas: that people want to learn God’s story in ways that make sense, and want to find language to talk about how God shows up in our lives.  Working with tellers who are members of the Asheville Storytelling Circle and other storytellers, I hope to introduce storytelling into people's lives in ways that help them learn God's story and identify their own stories, too.

From the Preacher's Corner, here are my most recent sermons at St. Mark's which both include story elements:

October 28, 2012
Reformation Day (Year B)
Jeremiah 31:31-34
Psalm 46
Romans 3:19-28
John 8:31-36

Listen Now


November 11, 2012
24th Sunday after Pentecost (Year B)
1 Kings 17:8-16
Psalm 146   
Hebrews 9:24-28
Mark 12:38-44


Listen Now

Ordinary Time in the Preacher's Corner

I once heard a preacher say he appreciated this long, green season after Pentecost, called "Ordinary Time" because when you come down to it, most of us live in "ordinary" times.  While festivals are wonderful, rich celebrations, for much of the year we are learning to find ways to connect to God, to each other and to the world around us in our "ordinary" day-to-day lives.

In this Preacher's Corner, I post recordings of the sermons I've preached.I am a candidate for rostered ministry in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America  (ELCA) and a full-time intern at St. Mark's Lutheran Church in Asheville, NC. St. Mark's follows the Revised Common Lectionary for the lessons. The sermon text is in bold.

While I've been taught to preach for a particular people at a particular time and in a particular place, I hope that in these recordings you will hear God's promise of relationship, grace and forgiveness and God's call for you in your life wherever you are.

I welcome your comments. Thanks for listening.

September 30, 2012
18th Sunday after Pentecost (Year B)
Numbers 11:4-6, 10-16, 24-29
Psalm 19:7-14
James 5:13-20
Mark 9:38-50

Listen Now


September 2, 2012
14th Sunday after Pentecost (Year B)
Deuteronomy 4:1-2, 6-9
Psalm 15
James 1:17-27
Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

Listen Now


August 12, 2012
11th Sunday after Pentecost (Year B)
1 Kings 19:4-8
Psalm 34:1-8
Ephesians 4:25-5:2
John 6:35, 41-51 
(Audio has been archived. Post a comment if you want to listen.)

Listen to earlier sermons.

Asking

Friday’s Five at RevGalBlogPals asked us to  list four ways you have been helped when you didn't want to ask for it and one way you had a chance to help that meant a lot to you.

Only Four? I really hate admitting I cannot do everything on my own, or even my husband and I cannot do everything on our own, and I probably hate the phone, almost as much, so asking for help is a struggle. But without people willing to share their lives with ours, even for a short while, we wouldn’t be the people and family we are today.

I easily can rattle off a half-dozen times when other moms and dads have pitched in to help my husband and me because we haven’t mastered the art of being in more than two places at one time, and with a family of four, often that means being in four places simultaneously.

• three moms who rotated driving my daughters to children’s choir and Wednesday night fellowship because I was embedded in my teaching parish at another congregation;
• another mom (whose own child was not in tae kwon do) who took my daughter to and from her tae kwon do class because I was away at seminary for a winter intensive;
• another dad who brought my daughter home in a downpour because her bus lets her off at his family’s driveway, a mile from our house;
• another mom who took my older daughter to her gymnastic competition and texted me her scores because I was away at winter intensive;
• yet another mom took my oldest daughter home to their house between school and practice, giving her a break from walking in the heat;
• dear friends with grandchildren of their own drove my daughters to my internship congregation to hear me preach...

I thank God that we are not alone…we are part of the Body of Christ, joined together inextricably.

While these recent examples of help received are those times when people stood in for one or both my husband and me, other times help was provided in crisis and we are grateful for the people who made those experiences more bearable.

More than fifteen years ago, at 26, I was diagnosed with cancer and underwent chemotherapy and radiation treatment. No one knew what to say. You’re not supposed to be sick that young, and you’re certainly not supposed to be bald! But people overcame their uneasiness and poured out love and support on our family, even though we’d lived in the town just two months.

One of the more enduring memories is of the women who drove me to and from radiation treatments. A similarly strong image remains of the women who would babysit my daughter so that I could sleep when the chemo hit my system about 36 hours after treatments. And the third powerful memory of those months is of the oncology nurse whose college-age daughter babysat my daughter overnight when she had a cold so that my immune system wasn’t compromised and I could stay on schedule. Angels among us, or as someone has taught me recently, “love with skin on it.” 

After I was in remission, the nurses invited me to speak on a survivors’ panel. Then, a few years later, a colleague’s sister was diagnosed with the same cancer, and I discovered I could answer some of her questions. Almost ten years after my cancer went into remission, a colleague and peer was diagnosed with a  much more aggressive cancer, and during his illness, he recorded posts on Live Journal, which allowed us to hear his experiences in his own voice. I transcribed the audio files into text, giving me a way to support him from three thousand miles away.

We can never know what experiences we have and share with others, and how our presence, as well as our help and our prayers, support them. My prayer is that we will be open enough to people around us to see when they are hurting and be present for them, even as we are vulnerable enough ourselves to accept their loved pour out on us.

Sermon Series Starters

Last Friday’s Five laid out kindling to spark our imaginations, asking

• What are two texts or topics you wish you could hear a sermon about?
• What are two texts or topics you wish you could preach a sermon about?
• What's your favorite sermon you've ever heard or preached? What makes it your favorite?

I’m not sure I won’t blur the lines between Sunday learning and sermons in this conversation, and I am wrestling with what kinds of sermons I might wish I could hear. Sure, I’d like to have more conversations about how we are called into the world and I’d like to talk more with people about death and resurrection and heaven, and I like the idea of more pointed teaching about things like the Lord’s Prayer, praying with the Psalms and the Creeds, but, in my understanding, the Word we hear on Sunday isn’t really meant to be about what we want to hear, but how God is speaking to us where we are ─ what we need to hear that day.

It’s easier for me to think what I might preach.  First off, I think I’d like to preach on all those stories in the Bible that seminary professors reference, saying, “Everyone knows this story….”  (The same can be said of hymns.) Every congregation is filled with people who bring their own unique and different story into worship that day. Often, even if you have been raised in a Christian and church-going tradition, your experience of faith formation may look very different from the person sitting beside you. And then there are those of us who didn’t go to church weekly from birth to eighteen, or even fourteen. We can’t talk about sharing a common narrative unless more of us know the family characters and their stories.

Similarly, I’d like to preach on the women of the Bible like Ruth and Sarah and Esther, and invite other women to preach on them also. I wouldn’t be in seminary and preparing for ordained ministry if I hadn’t stumbled into the paths of women vicars, pastors and preachers during the past fifteen years. It’s kind of like being in elementary school or even high school, and being asked, “What career do you want?” How can you imagine, even with Google, that you might want to be involved in a ministry for refuge settlement, or a food bank, or be involved in micro loans unless you meet people and hear stories about people who are doing those things? How can we lives as disciples without learning the stories of the people before us?

And when those knowledge gaps yawn in front of me, I'm grateful for the reminder from a recent sermon that regardless of whether we remember the meat of the weekly preaching we hear, we are fed, nourished and nurtured by it. One especially memorable sermon was preached in Advent by a school chaplain where he told the story of the Christmas truce in 1914 during World War I. The chaplain's storytelling had a way of transporting us back to that night, helping us imagine the loneliness or isolation of the soldiers and the poignant gratitude we feel for being together and safe. My memory of our hymn selections isn't a lot better, but I believe we closed the service singing, “In Christ, there is no East or West.” Thanks be to God for meeting us where we are.

Friday's Top Five

RevGalBlogPals' Friday Five asked, "What are 5 things you do or things you have bought that have made your life simpler/easier to manage?" and as a bonus, "What's something you wish you could manage better?"

5) After reading earlier comments I'll jump on the bandwagon, and praise Google Calendars. I can access school, church and home (x4) and sync all of them to my phone. Updates on my laptop or on my phone show up in both places instantly. I could live without most smartphone features, but reliable access to our household's calendars preserves my sanity! Similarly online polls like Doodle for setting meeting times has put an end to round robin emails and phone calls trying to find agreement.

4) Facebook Groups, like RevGalBlogPal, but also ELCA Clergy, classmates on internship, classmates not on internship and various ministry cohorts help keep conversations focused on a common theme. Hootsuite helps me manage conversations on Twitter and follow threads and chats when I can.

3) My phone's Volume Button. No joke. Giving myself permission to turn my phone to silent and place it face down so I cannot see the pulsing green light that alerts me to messages and phone calls has helped me disconnect at important times, like family meals, sermon writing and face-to-face visits. My laptop's power button hasn't got as much use, but it's another important feature. Turn it off to play board games with my daughter, for meals, for sleep and at least one day a week, leave it off for the morning. The world is always there when I turn it back on.

2) A treadmill. I ran, I swam, I biked; I practiced yoga and rock-climbed. I like all of them in but I'm not a gym rat and I don't especially want a crowd around for workouts. 3 summers ago, we bought a used treadmill from a neighbor down the road and while I'm not walking across the state on the Mountain to Sea Trail anytime soon, I am walking a lot more often, and further, and faster, than I would if we didn't have it, and that keeps me healthier and more fit.

1) The number-one investment that keeps life manageable ends in a three-way tie between books, my knitting needles and my banjo. But regardless of which one really has my attention in the moment, the value they each hold is that they provide an outlet that isn't academic, theological, pastoral or professional.Whether I'm reading a mystery or a Mary Oliver poem, ripping out stitches (or better yet, adding rows) or picking a very slow Cripple Creek, the time reminds me to get out of my own corner of the world and look up and breathe.

Bonus: Making a really excellent pot of coffee? No, seriously, I can wear a lot of hats really well, juggle and move from one thing to the next and work effectively, a lot of the time. But I don't do a great job at remembering that I'm connected to the people around me, and more than that, I really love them and want the things that make them well and happy, whether that means I unplug and play a game of chess, watch a movie I might not pick, cheerfully talk on the telephone, or empty the dishwasher. So I'd like to get a little bit better at managing life less and living life more.

Just like Letterman, right?
Hope you thought of some of your own top five. Let me know what they are. 

No Syllabus for God-sightings

July 10. Registration day for fall classes. Oh, wait, that’s right. I won’t be taking classes this fall. One of the new experiences gifted to me because I am going on internship is a semester without coursework.  Most of the time, I recognize it as a gift; sometimes, like this morning, I want to throw a two-year old’s tantrum and scream, “But I need that class now...” I think that, besides interrupting the reassuring, steady march of completing degree requirements, what I fear is missing the structure of having a schedule and a syllabus and some predictability. Instead I’m living in a pretty unstructured environment, for a few weeks anyway; trying to listen and watch what God may be trying to teach me in this time and space; and, watching internship draw closer on the horizon.

The learning doesn’t stop, fortunately. I discovered the local library system has a free online language tutor that lets me refresh my Spanish and bridge its Castilian foundation to the Latin American Spanish we hear more often in the Americas. I visited the stacks of the local used book store where it looks like somebody traded in a library of emergence theology and other interesting books. (so, I obligingly brought a few home)

I was finishing up a library copy of Kenda Creasy Dean’s Almost Christian and hoped to find a used copy to buy but I didn’t have any luck. I’m not surprised; it is a sticky book − one I expect I’ll reread even though I don’t usually read things more than once. In Almost Christian Dean writes about the 2003-2005 National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR) and talks about teenagers, contrasting popular, cultural faith which reflects a moral therapeutic deism and “consequential faith”, which develops in teenagers in congregations who “portray God as living, present and active, place a high value on Scripture; reflect the life and mission of Jesus Christ in its practices and relationships; and emphasize spiritual growth, discipleship and mission.”

As someone who is more comfortable talking with people born in the ‘20s than people living in their 20s (or teens), a while back, I adopted a mantra for ministry: “break stereotypes, learn flexibility, build relationships and communicate well.” Dean challenges stereotypes of teenagers who aren’t interested in talking with adults and who aren’t capable of conversations that take more than 140 characters.  She includes an important reminder in Almost Christian that can get lost in the tussling about that is parenting a teenager:

[Every teenager is] an amazing child of God. Their humanity is embedded in their souls as well as their DNA. Their family is the church, their vocation is a grateful response for the chance to participate in the divine plan of salvation, their hope lies in the fact that Christ has claimed them and secured their future for them.

In Almost Christian, there’s a challenge to be intentional about living this truth out in our relationships with teenagers. There's also a challenge to Christian adults and to parents, particularly in mainline Protestant traditions, to recognize how we influence the faith of children, whether we know it or not, and to not be as afraid of speaking about God and Jesus, of pointing to the ways that God is moving in our lives. We tell our lives in stories and unless we are talking about our God-sightings and God-stories, how can anyone else recognize themselves in the Christian story?

So one hope I have for this unstructured time I have is to participate in more conversations about God’s active presence in our world, and more readily answer where I saw, heard or experienced God in everyday life. I hope you’ll listen in.

Like a Milkpod Bursting

"Like a milkpod bursting" was how Phyllis Tickle described the communities that grew out of a year-long gathering in Kudzu's, a local bar in Memphis. From her description, I would guess a lot of the participants in "Beer and Bible" might have refuted that it was church. Certainly, it didn't look like church if you imagine church as a building with pews and hymnals and offering plates, but, undoubtedly, it was church, the ekklesia: it was local people gathered around the Word of God. 

(Read a little bit more in this 2008 article on Sojourner's website)

What mattered was the people who came and went on those Tuesday nights had questions they wanted to ask about faith, about truth, about the Bible and about God, and they had a space where they could come and ask them. When they ran out of questions, they stopped meeting. A year later they reunited to mark the anniversary of what they had been doing and sometime after that, the milkpod burst and they began meeting in smaller groups.  

Tickle gave the illustration of this emergence community to give us a picture of how church is happening today outside our mainline congregations.

Explaining a cascade of sociological and historical events that have set the stage for “The Great Emergence”, Tickle was challenging those of us “in the business of religion” to listen for and address the hard questions that people ask. The questions aren't meant to tear down the Church we have known; they are to get at which traditions carry something worthwhile – Living Water (John 4:10) – and which ones are like cracked cisterns that need to be thrown out. 

Encouraging leaders to designate a pastoral allowance that lets pastors go where people are – whether that is a neighborhood bar or a coffee shop – Tickle argued that we need to be reminded that our congregations and churches are not the kingdom of God, but we are called to serve the kingdom of God and that means talking to whoever is looking at us, wherever they find us. 

"Take the kingdom out to the people around us."

Here we go!

I had a professor who would begin his four hour lectures with these words, "Here we go!"  They seem appropriate as I transition from being a full-time student and nonprofit fundraiser to being the full-time vicar, or intern pastor, at a local congregation. For the past four years, I have been in seminary preparing for this move, and now it's here.

One of the gifts that internship gives me as a seminarian is a time of discovering more about living life in public Christian leadership and who I am as a pastor. Gathering up wisdom from the people who have gone before me, I am reminded of Robert Fulghum's All I need to know I learned in Kindergarten, where we discover our lives together are rooted in some basic, simple truths.

One of the basic truths I learned from that same professor was, "Take regular breaks." He could be mid-sentence, but at ten minutes to the hour, we stopped and took ten minutes to walk outside, breathe or re-caffeinate. It didn't really matter what we did as long as we got up from our desks and did something else. He didn't want to talk more than fifty minutes in one sitting and I doubt any of us wanted to listen for more than that. Another professor makes the same suggestion when she hits a wall in the process of sermon writing: take a break and do something else for 15 or 30 minutes. Don't just keep staring at the empty screen or tablet of paper. Whether it's preparing a sermon or teaching others, taking regular breaks will benefit everyone involved.

From my grandaddy, I am reminded, "Take care of the patient, not the illness." A doctor at a teaching hospital,  he saw too many new residents who never really saw the patients as real people; instead they attended to the disease and diagnosis, and overlooked the living, hurting human being who stood there. Our congregations and communities aren't numbers on offering envelopes, or statistics for the annual report - numbers on a page - they are living, breathing and hurting human beings.


Getting to know real people means having real conversations, but what those conversations look like has changed a lot in the thirty plus years since I was in kindergarten. When it comes to our conversations here and on Twitter and Facebook and other social media outlets, a United Methodist pastor in Indiana shared these guidelines which advocate, "Avoid harm, do good, be connected and help others connect to God." Pastor Keith Anderson, formerly of Woburn, Mass. and now in Ambler, Penn. writes about weaving social media and ministry, too, and a group of folks who regularly chat about church and social media using the Twitter hashtag #chsocm dove into questions of boundaries and authenticity on June 26 (here's the transcript).


I will be sharing what I am learning throughout the year in future posts and look forward to our conversations.

We, who are many

"so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another."  ~ Romans 12:5


Jane Redmont's When In Doubt, Sing explores ways to pray - contemplative prayer, bodily prayer, the prayers of saints like Teresa of Avila and more. Redmont, who is Catholic, approaches prayer from a fresh perspective for me (a Protestant). One of the questions from this week's Friday Five  added another layer to this conversation, asking:

"What religion/faith besides yours captures your curiosity and why?"

My answer is that I have discovered prayers and practices from Buddhism that make sense and enrich my own Christian perspective. Thich Nhat Hahn is a Vietnamese Buddhist monk who writes about the intersection in some of his books. He speaks well to how we are all related and connected, and responsible for, each other.  Judaism, too, reminds me that of the spiritual ancestry that Christians and Jews share.

But Redmont and others remind me that even within Christianity, there is a richness from sharing practices. of prayer and worshiping together.

"Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God's people and members of God's household." ~ Ephesians 2:19 

Last weekend, I had an opportunity to talk with others about what it means for our denomination, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA), to be in full communion with other denominations. The ELCA is in full communion with six other denominations: the United Church of Christ, the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Reformed Church in America, the Episcopal Church of the USA, the Moravian Church, and the United Methodist Church.

While debate in our culture and society is divisive and polarizing, these relationships illustrate that it is possible to unite, recognizing common characteristics between us:
• a common confessing of the Christian faith;
• a mutual recognition of Baptism and a sharing of the Lord's Supper, allowing for joint worship and an exchangeability of members;
• a mutual recognition and availability of ordained ministers to the service of all members of churches in full communion, subject to the disciplinary regulations of other churches;
• a common commitment to evangelism, witness, and service;
• a means of common decision making on critical common issues of faith and life;
• a mutual lifting of any condemnations that exist between churches.

One participant in the ecumenical dialogue suggested that rather than mourning the differences in our denominations and traditions, perhaps God celebrates the diversity of the Church and the many and varied expressions of worship and proclamation that it brings to God's people in the world. What do you think?

Friday Five Reflection

This week's Friday Five:


1. What has encouraged you? 
Over the weekend, I began reading Jane Redmont's When In Doubt, Sing where chapter-by-chapter she talks about different forms of prayer. The short readable text and the way it engages me with Scripture and prayer has been a real gift to my mornings.

2. What has inspired you?
Watching my youngest daughter work throughout this week to try out for middle school cheerleading. She has gone into something completely unknown to her (and me!) and is having fun while she is learning and practicing. Her excitement about what she is doing is contagious. It all wraps up this afternoon with the tryouts.

3. What has challenged you?
Nothing extraordinary this week. There was the ever-present challenge of balancing work, school, family and self and the give-and-take it requires. Both time and money feel scarce sometimes but at the very same time, I hear from others stories of loss and grief and realize how much I have to be grateful for.

4. What has made you smile? 
On Sunday,two friends told me I looked relaxed. That doesn't happen often! It was my last day of a four-day sabbatical that I gave myself and my family after finishing spring exams. I have two more courses this summer and then I begin a full-time internship at St. Mark's Lutheran in downtown Asheville in August. While I still have a lot of unknowns awaiting, it is wonderful to begin to make this transition into public Christian leadership and full-time ministry.

 5. What has brought a lump to your throat or a tear to you eye in a good way? 
 On Sunday, the boarding school where I live and work celebrated graduation and the boys who arrived with us in 2008 graduated and left for college. This is one of the places along the way where I have discovered how much you can learn from the young(er) people around you and I am grateful for them even when they make lug-headed decisions as teenage boys sometimes do. They also have insatiable curiosity, compassion for one another and fire for the things they hold dear.

What about you?

p.s. I could have written a much shorter answer. One event this week generated all five of these responses: On Sunday, many members of the first cohort of Distributed Learning MDiv candidates  at Luther Seminary graduated with their MDiv degrees at Central Lutheran Church in St. Paul. Congratulations to all the graduates but especially to the men and women who began this pilot program in 2007!

Surrender

What does it mean to surrender?

Too often, I think "surrender" sounds like giving up. Giving up power. Giving up the fight. I imagine Generals Lee and Grant at Appomattox or a  tattered white flag waving in a Bugs Bunny cartoon (07:14):

In this fourth week at Willow Creek's Leadership Institute for Transformation (LIFT) in the "Leader's Soul" course, we are talking about surrendering ourselves with a daily prayer to God. In remembering our baptism, we daily die and are renewed as God's children.We can again grasp the promises God gives us and know we are forgiven our sin and made righteous through Christ. So, how does a daily practice help remember us these promises?

For me, speaking out loud or giving voice to a prayer that re-establishes me each day is helpful; otherwise, the noise of the world can begin to hum and buzz, kind of like mosquito's wings, and I get distracted by it.

Fortunately, unlike Bugs and Yosemite Sam, I know I am not surrendering to an enemy or opponent. When I am asked to consider how I can daily stay in a place of surrender to God, I know I am surrendering to Creator God, Life-giving God, Mother God. (These are just a few of the nurturing metaphors in Scripture that describe who God is.)

Surrender here doesn't leave me defeated. Instead, yielding my life to God means letting go of my human instinct to plan, map, control and execute life. It means stop being an obstruction, stop hesitating, and stop tuning out God's calling, Yielding to God's leading, yielding to God's timing, yielding to God's direction, I can rest in the promises that God gives each of us. Amen.

Do you have a prayer, poem or practice that you use regularly to reconnect with God?

Friday Five (and it's still Friday!)

So this week's FridayFive asks:

1. What does the Lord's supper/ Eucharist mean to you?
2. How important is preparation for this, and what form does it take?
3. What does baptism mean to you?
4. How important is preparation for baptism and what form does it take?

When I began the conversation with my church about being called to rostered ministry, the question of how central to my call was being able to administer the Sacraments was *the* question that made all the other questions fade into the background. The presence of Christ in the bread and the wine and the living-ness of God’s promise of forgiveness and new life sustain me.

One of my favorite descriptions of the sacraments comes from Dirk Lange and Christian Scharen, two of my worship professors at Luther Seminary:

Baptism brings you into the family of God and coming to the Table teaches you how to live in that family.

(Hopefully I haven't butchered the paraphrase)

It's a question others may debate, but for me, infant baptism is one of the ways we witness the depth of God's grace and understand that it a gift freely given by God to each of us. An unearned gift. We are forgiven and it does not come from any merit or worthiness of our own at all.

What I want for adults and for families though is for the catechumenate process of learning what God promises and how we are called into life, to renew our lives daily and live into the fullness of life in Christ, to be transformational.

Similarly, I want people to grasp the joy of being welcomed to the Table and of being loved despite our brokenness. For my congregation, part of preparing to come to the Table is participating in the order of confession and forgiveness where we hear our sins are forgiven. Even on my ugliest, most bitter day; my most despairing or exhausting day; my grief or anger. Even then.

How about you?

p.s. Sally also asked whether we had a quote, poem or song that helps us come before God in a sacramental way...will you share yours?

Friday Five (Yes, it's Sunday!)

RevGalBlogPals is a network of women blogging about ministry and life and on Fridays, we play Friday Five where someone chooses a topic and we “play” by blogging our answer. I didn’t make Friday’s deadline but I'm posting anyway.

Inspired by increasing movement from wired devices and even laptops to mobile devices, this week’s questions asked how we’re using the internet. (Here’s a snapshot of the trends from Pew Internet)

You can play along too and leave your comments with your answers.

Here are the questions:

Q1. Do you use social connections, like Facebook, Twitter, Linked-in or whatever else there is? Describe how you use it/these.
Q2. Do you text on your cell phone? Work, friends, family?
Q3. Do you play any games? Which ones?
Q4. How do you predominantly use the various electronic devices you possess?
Q5. How do you feel about blogging? Are you as involved in blogging as when you first started? What facilitates your blogging?

A1: Social media opens the corner of my world, forging connections with people in other parts of the U.S. and even across the pond.

On Facebook, I am friends with people I can recognize on the street but I can interact in groups or on pages with people with whom I share something in common – parents at a school or club where my children are involved, classmates at seminary or alumni from my high school or university. A decade ago, we might have been connected through a bound paper directory but social media keeps us up-to-date in real time.

Twitter makes conversations possible with an even broader group of folks. Often, I have not met the people I talk to on Twitter, and most of the time, physical geography makes it unlikely that we ever will meet in real life. We might talk about churches and social media (#chsocm), climbing (#climbchat), or Asheville (#avl). We might have a Lutheran connection or a ministry connection or they might be associated with someone who does. Beyond niche topics, Twitter delivers breaking news as quickly as Google News or traditional broadcast channels. While I don’t look at what’s trending on Twitter, but, unfiltered, Twitter reflects a pulse of what is getting people excited, angry or otherwise engaged with the world around them.

For the ways I use Twitter, Hootsuite  lets me create streams that I can follow for any topic I want to follow and when I’m in a chat, I can see the thread of conversation in a single column, making it easy to keep up and contribute. Someone recently joked with me that researchers say if you’re over 38 you cannot manage social media multitasking; I answered I would go and crawl back into my cave then, but I won’t. I like hearing voices from different corners of the world and hearing opinions I might miss if I was only in conversation with locals.

Linked In creates connections to people in the workplace. Again, I generally know everyone in real life – we have worked together in nonprofits, on projects in seminary or they are alumni from the school where I work. Through our shared relationships, we have opportunities to again engage more voices in conversation, whether I need advice about a solicitation strategy, best practices or researching a new vendor.

What surprised me is that as active as I am in these channels, I usually use them from a desktop computer in my office or from my laptop at home. Mobile for me remains the domain of texting, email and phone calls. I think that has as much to do with my eyesight as my age, but I guess those could be related. The notable exception is when I need information quickly. For googling information and maps, my phone is the most convenient device and is indispensable for finding out a store’s hours, what a word means, or discovering where I missed a turn.

A2: I rarely text for work or socially, but it’s the primary mode of communication for our immediate family. I think one of the reasons I don’t use it for other interactions is that I have email synced on my phone, so I can silo external communication on email accounts and preserve my privacy. That’s another sign of my age – I think privacy is being redefined, or maybe deconstructed, by youth today. Opinions about what belongs in public conversation are widely varied,

A3: Games are great time sinks for carpool lines, and I am easily addicted to backgammon and bubble games while my daughters like Temple Run and Unblock Me, but if we get tired of those, here is a top 50 list. What are your favorites?

I’m out of space and time so I’ll save the other questions as food for thought and hope you share how you’re using social media and devices to enrich your learning and life.

Living Souls

With spring bursting open across our mountains, the image of a living soul as a part of our being finds company with other images of new life, blooms budding, grass greening and trees leafing. I am not talking about my soul as something metaphysical that exists apart from my body, but as my heart, my center, my core – what drives me.

In the first week of The Leader’s Soul , we were asked how we recognize soul health and soul neglect, and we began by listening to Jesus’ words in John 15:5:

“I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.”

As Willow Creek Association’s Mindy Caliguire reminded us, vines know how to live. They know how to take the nutrients they need from the soil and how to harness the sunlight for new growth. The branches are extensions that grow and are strengthened because the vine is firmly rooted. Severed from the vine, the branches wither and die. They cannot live apart from the vine.

And, as Christians, neither can we. We cannot live the lives God intends for us apart from Christ. But we try. We forget this very clear teaching by Jesus and, instead, we try to live by the strength of our own energy and willpower. And then we are surprised and even hurt when we hit the wall, encounter obstacles, or simply fail. Thankfully, daily, we can confess our brokenness, receive God’s mercy and forgiveness and abide in God’s promises, as we hear them in Psalm 145:16-19:

¹⁶ You open your hand, satisfying the desire of every living thing.
¹⁷ The Lord is just in all his ways, and kind in all his doings.
¹⁸ The Lord is near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth.
¹⁹ He fulfills the desire of all who fear him; he also hears their cry, and saves them.

Partnering with the LIFT Project

A few weeks ago, Willow Creek Association tweeted out to folks looking for partners to collaborate with them in the next round of classes being offered as part of their LIFT Project. LIFT (Leadership Institute for Transformation) is teaching ministry leaders to learn and lead in ways that are intended to be transformational for ourselves and our ministries. Class began today with introductions and I will be blogging about my experiences as a participant in the LIFT Project.

One of the reasons the project attracted me was because it was a new model for how churches can use social media to talk to people they might not see inside their buildings. Willow Creek is based out of South Barrington, Illinois and I’m almost 700 miles southeast of there, so I don’t think I’ll be darkening the church’s doors this Sunday. While some of my classmates are in Illinois, several more are on the East Coast and in Canada and one is on another continent. Through social media (#chsocm), faith communities can join in conversation about ministry and leadership despite the distance, and it widens that conversation so that we have larger group of us talking asynchronously about the challenges and joys we encounter in ministry.

Another reason I dove into the project is because Willow Creek offered a class called The Leader’s Soul that is focused on caring for ourselves as ministry leaders, recognizing how our health and wellness affects our leadership. Throughout the four years of my seminary education there has been a consistent emphasis on the importance of balancing the emotional, spiritual, financial, physical and intellectual demands and passions in our lives and achieving, or at least pursuing, wholeness in these areas. It remains a challenge and I am excited about the accountability and structure that being part of a class provides.

Last but not least, I like learning! As a distributed learning student at Luther Seminary, I’m comfortable in online learning environments but this course provides me with a new experience in a system other than the one we use for my MDiv studies.  I enjoy the opportunity to think through the elements that strengthen the educational experience and the new perspectives that are brought to the table when you bring people together from different parts of the country and the world.

If you'd like to join the conversation, I hope you'll share how you care for yourself so that you can both listen and lead, too.