Real Grown Ups Revisited

In honor of my friends that just moved to Louisville, CO (near Boulder), an early post about a woman I met on an airplane that lives an unusual lifestyle in that area.

Real Grown Ups: Dorothy

Being a Grown Up means...

Being a grown up means...you see the value in taking time to teach someone younger than you how to do the things you do easily. And that you are patient and encouraging while doing it.

World's Largest Pillow Fight: Grand Rapids

Well, technically I don't know if it's the "world's largest", but it certainly is the biggest I've ever heard about! My son, who attends Kendall College of Art & Design in Grand Rapids, MI shot these photos of the event. Get several hundred people with pillows together, divide them into teams with different colored t-shirts and watch the feathers fly. Check out his awesome slide show here. For news coverage of the event, click here.

Love is Hard Work

"Love is a form of hard work the young can not foresee."
Richard M. Cohen, from an article in O Magazine

I spoke briefly with my dad on the phone last week. Briefly, because he won't talk long, and is usually quick to hand off the phone to mom. If I happen to catch him alone, he still won't talk for long. His southern gentleman humbleness kicks in and he insists you must have something better to do than to talk to him. So I have to be quick to ask questions if I want to get any information on how he's actually doing. And though he won't say it, I know he is tired. It's been a rough few months for Dad. He takes care of my granddad, age 99, and my grandmother, age 90. Taking care of them includes driving to their house almost every morning to take my grandfather to the "Cardinal Drive-In" for coffee and breakfast. This used to be a time for them to visit and relax, but increasingly my granddad is forgetful enough that Dad fears his repetitious comments will annoy the regulars. He often wakes from his afternoon nap not knowing where he is, which means he can no longer be left at home alone if grandmother has a doctor's appointment.

Driving them to their many doctor's appointments is another way dad takes care of them, driving to a city about 45 miles away. Recently on one of those visits, after the doctor's had given my grandmother a clean bill of health (at least for her age), Dad left her on a bench inside while he went to pull the car up to the door. In the span of those few minutes, Grandmother stood up, passed out, and hit her head on the bench. She has struggled with blurred and double vision since, and the doctors are not giving them much hope that her eyesight will improve. In that instant, she lost the ability she still possessed to drive short distances to go to the store or post office, and along with it another layer of freedom was lost and another layer of responsibility added to my dad's. Adding to the load, my mother had knee replacement surgery in August. While the knee is healing well, she had difficulties with some side effects from medications given to her in the hospital. Dad was also her primary caregiver, and while not an invalid by any means, she needed help and transport to her appointments and therapy (she is back to driving herself now). And during this time, she has been unable to help with the grandparents. Fortunately, my dad's brother has been traveling back from out-of-state to help.

We've all suggested they get some help. Help from friends at the least-and they have on rare occasions--and in home professional help as well. My Dad has not pursued it yet. He says he feels that this is something he needs to do--and then quickly will add "wants" to do as long as he is able. They are his parents and that same southern humility doesn't allow for him to pass off responsibility to someone else lightly. He looks tired. He struggles to keep up with his property and theirs. He longs for time alone to do what he loves best--spend time outdoors in the hills and woods of the area. And yet even exploring the option of putting his parents in a nursing home is not something he is ready to do. Not while he is still able to do these things for them.

I tease Dad that when he gets old and senile I will bring him north to my state and "put him in a home" and just tell him he is actually in Florida or someplace warm. In reality, I can't even yet imagine that time. I pray that with the longevity that runs in our family I won't have to deal with it for quite a while. If I really stop to ponder the future, I don't know if I will be able to do for my parents what he is doing for his. Logistics aside, do I have the fortitude to bear that burden? I'm beginning to think that it is a calling in many ways, and not something everyone can do. The same author I quoted above says, "We live in the real world and ask only what reasonably can be delivered. Love is picking up the other when the times come. And come they do." I pray that when that time comes, I will be able to do the hard work required and to be prepared to deliver the love that is needed.

Being a Grown Up Means...

"Being a grown-up woman doesn't mean you can't look beautiful, individual and different." Twiggy, age 59, the original 'supermodel' in her book, A Guide to Looking and Feeling Fabulous Over Forty

A Defining Hair Moment

"It's funny how so many decisions that start with "What the hell?" turn out to be the right ones." ~saying on a card at the Union General, Clarkston, MI

"I had long hair, waist long, until I was 13 years old," said the stylist at my salon when I remarked on her very chic, very short auburn brown hair. She looks much younger than her 50 something years, wears great funky clothes, and has a tiny diamond piercing the side of her nose. I was surprised to hear she has several grandchildren. As she snipped my hair, she went on with her story.

"I was the oldest of seven children, and I have 4 sisters. We all wore our hair like the good little Catholic school girls we were--long, straight, with bangs cut straight across our foreheads. When I was 13, I got tired of looking just like my 7 year old sister, so one day I sneaked out and got my hair cut very short." Her parents couldn't believe she would do something so radical. "Back then, you could sell your hair for use in making wigs." (She had brought the length of hair home with her.)

"My dad said 'You will not prosper from this act of defiance' and he took it outside and burned it. I didn't think of it as being defiant. I just wanted to be myself--an individual. I was also grounded for a month."

"A month doesn't seem like that long," I said.

She agreed, and thinking back on what must have been a defining moment said, "It was totally worth it."

Sunday Morning..Last Goodbyes

The best things said come last. People will talk for hours saying nothing much and then linger at the door with words that come with a rush from the heart. ~Alan Alda

Being a Grown Up means...

'When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability... To be alive is to be vulnerable." ~Madeleine L'Engle

Gifts I Received

Gifts I received on my last day of work:


-A mocha frappuccino
-A stuffed fuzzy yellow duck (quacked me up!)
-A pelican made out of shells
-A caramel frappuccino
-Flowers & cards
-Lunch with co-workers/friends that I'll miss a lot!
-A beautiful necklace and earrings
-A "piratey" email from my daughter for National Talk Like a Pirate Day ("yarr matey! How be those scalywags you call church folk? Tell em if they be distubin' you, Capn Shortstack is gonna make them walk the plank. Arrrr!)
-Lots of tech support (thanks, George!)

-Lots of smiles, hugs, and laughs! Thanks to all who sent me out with a smile and a prayer of thanksgiving!

Endings

"I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next." ~Gilda Radner

Tomorrow is my last day at my current job. Working in ministry is different than other jobs. The only way I could find to change jobs and still stay "in my field" is to get a job at a different church and leave mine. Which means-in a lot of ways-leaving many people that I love. I'm not moving, but I'm enough of a realist to know that there are people who I will loose touch with. The leaving is difficult and bittersweet and is for a lot of people a "poem that doesn't rhyme". Through this process I've been reminded over and over that God is the only one that knows our thoughts and motives. I've learned that all you can do is try, with God's help, to live your life with integrity, grace, and love with God's help. Your friends who know and love you will love you whether or not they understand the whole story.

I start my new job next Tuesday. Last month when I was on a trip with my husband I bought a magnet to put in my office. It says, "Faith is jumping and believing that you will either land on solid ground or that you'll be given wings to fly." I don't know exactly what is going to happen next, but I'm going to do my best to live my story trusting the One who does.

Being a Grown Up Means....

Being a grown up means....sometimes you have to do the hard thing in order to be able to do the best thing, even when others might not understand it.

Good Article about Leaving a church

I don't often post links to other people's work, but I found a great article that might be helpful to those who are struggling with the same sort of things I've been sharing here lately about leaving my church and my ministry job for another. It's a great report on the book "Life After Church: God's Call to Disillusioned Christians" by Brian Sanders. While I wouldn't consider myself "disillusioned," the article offers some very basic and practical advice for anyone examining their part in the community of their church--whether 'staying' or 'going'. It's on the Crosswalk website here.

Being a Grown Up Means....

Being a grown up means...you don't have to eat coconut if you don't like it. Or asparagus. Or green beans.


(Got any thoughts about being a "grown up"? Let's hear them!)

Thankful for True Friends

"True friendship is a sacred, important thing, and it happens when we drop down into that deeper level of who we are, when we cross over into the broken, fragile parts of ourselves. We have to give something up in order to get friendships like that. We have to give up our need to be perceived as perfect. We have to give up our ability to control what people think of us. We have to overcome the fear that when they see the depths of who we are, they'll leave. But what we give up is nothing in comparison to what this kind of friendship gives to us. Friendship is about risk. Love is about risk. If we can control it and manage it and manufacture it, then it's something else, but it's really love, really friendship, it's a little scary around the edges."

Cold Tangerines: Celebrating the Extraordinary Nature of Everyday Life

By Shauna Niequist

A Life of Faith

"Living a life of faith means never knowing where you are being led,” writes Oswald Chambers. “But it does mean loving and knowing the One who is leading. It is literally a life of faith, not of understanding and reason – a life of knowing him who calls us to go.”

I am going. I am starting a new job at a new church. I am (well technically, "we are") leaving our church and joining this new church. It hasn't been an easy decision. While most friends understand it and know and love us enough to have an idea of our motivations, people still ask, "Why?" It's not an easy story to tell, because there are lots of little stories that led us down this path.

The short version is "Our pastor and friend left. When we knew he was leaving, we stopped to evaluate my job and our service and God began to call us elsewhere."

Maybe a metaphor would help: "When we tried to unpack the overstuffed emotional baggage that comes from being deeply involved in a church that is going through years of 'transition' and struggles, we found that we just needed a whole new suitcase. The old stuff in there doesn't even fit us anymore."

My husband in exasperation has said, "Sometimes you just need to change churches after 16 years! There doesn't have to be a big overly-spiritualized reason!"

The faith side of it is I cracked the door open in a moment of worry and grief about the coming changes and tossed out a resume. And I feel like God flung the door wide open and said "come on, we're going somewhere and it's going to be big and scary and exciting and a lot of people won't understand, but I'm in it and that's what matters."

And after much wrestling, procrastinating, whining, and praying, there was a peace that settled in. I hadn't really even said "yes, I'll go with you on this" in my head, but my heart was already there. There was peace.

At one point in the wrestling process, I sat on the front porch step while my husband worked in the yard on a gorgeous late August day and I felt the Holy Spirit. Now if you know me at all, you know I am generally more a thinker than an emotional/feeler kind of person in this area, but I'm telling you I felt Him. A breeze and the sun and then the quiet whisper saying to my soul "It's going to be alright. Trust me." I hadn't decided yet, but God was with me in the tension, reminding me that whether or not I understood or knew where I was going, He was with me. He would be the one calling me.

Most of the people at our church are staying. The most amazing and encouraging thing is that I've literally heard the exact same words coming from many people: "God isn't telling me to go, so we are staying." Listening to what God is saying, whether it is "stay" or "go"--following Him when you don't know where you're being led--that is what it means to live a life of faith. May we be gracious and encourage each other to keep our eyes on the "One who is leading".

Quote from the original, theological OC

"A gilt-edged saint is no good, he is abnormal, unfit for daily life, and altogether unlike God. We are here as men and women, not as half-fledged angels, to do the work of the world, and to do it with an infinitely greater power to stand the turmoil because we have been born from above."

Oswald Chamber, My Utmost for His Highest

Urbanesque Poem

Hey you,
young blonde
punk athlete
in the Mercury Sable
seat low and back

playing rap music
so smutty your mother
would cry and your sister
would whomp you
for even owning it

Don't you know that
what goes
in your head
can end up in your
heart?

Generational Unity: Is it possible?

Things are more like they are now than they have ever been.
Gerald R. Ford US Republican politician (1913 - 2006)

Every generation has grown up with certain church standards, habits, and accepted norms. For example (and this is one of the more low key ones, I think), one generation of women sees dresses as the standard for church attire; the next is comfortable with dress pants, and the next with jeans and t-shirts. Each preference displays a different mindset about something that is not scripturally mandated, but has spiritual thought behind it. For the older generation, the thinking was that you dressed to present your best self to God as a sign of respect. The next generation felt somewhat the same, but the definition of ‘best’ was already changing with the culture. The current young generation feels that it is inauthentic to dress up for worship—they feel it is like putting on a mask. None of these motivations are unbiblical. They are just different. They are a reflection of the culture and thinking of that generation.

In the church circles I work and live in, there is a generation gap that lately seems unbridgeable. While opinions on “appropriate” dress, music, and decorum in worship are the most obvious differences, there are growing differences in focus and changing deeply held attitudes about living out our faith. Some challenges to the status quo include: Is it more important to support pro-life candidates or to support those who are working for social justice (issues of poverty, race, and affordable healthcare)? Is it more important to have correct doctrinal beliefs (beyond the core), or to be living out the beliefs we have by serving others? Is it more valuable to give to missionaries around the world, or to give to local efforts to help the poor and addicted? Should our focus be on those who already believe and have access to tools to grow in their faith, or on those who have not yet begun to explore life with and in Christ. (again, these are issues of focus and not necessarily either/or questions).

These issues are fundamentally more important than ‘dressy’ vs. ‘casual’ and ‘hymnal’ vs. ‘praise chorus,’ but get much less discussion time among the churchgoers I know. As a matter of fact, part of the division seems to be that the older generation (forgive me, those of you who are the blatant exceptions to the rule!) doesn’t even seem to know there are brewing changes in thinking (even among scholars and theologians) on these issues, let alone that the younger generation is concerned with them. The generation I hear discussing the more meaningful issues I’ve thrown out here is the 20 somethings –who seem to have stepped right over the worship service issues, seeing them as a battle their parents engage in that doesn’t really concern them (in my experience, most just don’t seem to see what all the fuss is about—which gives me some hope for our future!) If you haven’t seen this, sit down with your church’s college and career group, or visit relevant.com, a website/magazine that both my young adult children and their friends read cover to cover.

The problem with accepted norms and standards comes when we begin to defend them as though they are Truth. When we are challenged to examine them, we should seriously consider our own reasons for defending them. The issue, that to me leads to offense, comes when we don’t bother asking the generations coming behind us OR the generations who have come before us why they do what they do, and instead condemn and pass judgment on their choices. Do we trust that God is leading the younger generations in what they choose to focus on? Or do we berate them for not focusing on our battles of preference? Do we look to the older generation for examples of wisdom and patience, asking them to stand beside us as we do battle? If we move forward in our churches without generational unity, don’t we all lose?