Cribbage

Meetings often feel like a waste to me. I'm not a big group person so unless a gathering builds relationships, establishes vision, or determines specific steps of actions, I tune out. I'm glad there are folks who love agendas, ideas and voting, but I'm too aware of my mortality to let a sunny day pass.

I have two great coping skills for surviving meetings: cribbage and hiking. I embrace these not as avoidance tactics, but so something feels real in an environment where I tend to numb. I learn more about people and what is truly going on in the church during a walk in the woods than I ever have sitting around a fluorescent lit room in a circle.

As fabulous as hiking is, I want to hold up cribbage as a great gift to large group gatherings. We only got thirteen games of cribbage in during this last assembly. I know our games seem exclusive since Keith and I often only play each other, but two introverts playing cribbage provide a safe place for others to be who they need to be.

Two people playing cribbage in a corner, cry room, or sunny deck provide a space for relationship that's hard to find in big groups.  Bars and coffee shops are too loud for vibrant conversation. Silence is too intimidating, but cribbage provides a lovely space for sharing.

The sharing doesn't happen between Keith and I - we normally only talk smack with each other - but those who come alongside. The spotlight doesn't shine on them, the environment has neither the sacredness of silence nor the distraction of noise, and folks begin to relax and talk.

So I consider my obsessive cribbage playing a gift to the community. It is the gift of making space in business for life to happen. We were good kids and kept the window cracked so we could vote if need be. I probably could have fit my arm and green card through the crack so I didn't even have to get up. But sitting on the deck in the sunshine was in many ways an act of grace and making space.

I'm also an ornery turd so I'm sure some defiance is mixed in there. The fact that recalcitrant* was my word of the day on Saturday was foreshadowing, but I do appreciate order and guidelines.  Without them there couldn't be any defiance; there wouldn't be little escapes where people could let down their guard and
be the messes we often are.

*Recalcitrant is having an obstinately uncooperative attitude toward authority or discipline. 

Ebony and Ivory

I miss dancing in the kitchen with my husband.

We don't dance or cook well together. We have some leadership issues. But I long for those times when he walks into our one-butt kitchen, wraps his arms around me and we sway to the sweet lulling rhythm of NPR. Then I press my lips to his ear and begin singing,

Ebony and Ivory, live together in perfect harmony

Side by side on my piano keyboard, O Lord, why don't we?

I can ruin the mood faster than a fart. He will jump away and say, 

"That's not our song."

"It's totally our song - all about living together closely and getting along."

 "No, the song is about race relations, black and white people living in harmony."

"Well, it got played at my mostly segregated middle school at every dance and when I stage managed For colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf  they told me my hair was so nappy I had to have black blood in me somewhere. See it is about us."

At this point, he normally kisses me so I stop talking. 

I have no idea why this song pops into my head or why I know every word. I do know that perfect harmony is a lot to ask out of any relationships, let alone relationships that cross racial, cultural, or economic boundaries.

One of my professors in seminary once said, "If you don't have a friend who is a person of color, then you are a failure as a pastor." I thought that was the most ridiculous thing. I still think friendship can't be forced, but I do think being in relationship with folks who experience and see the world differently is essential to our life of faith. I also think walking with someone and experiencing how the world views him or her can be stunning. 

I've been the only person with pasty skin in a room many times. There are times that I've taken some pretty wicked teasing and felt uncomfortably outside, but I still often hold more power and resources than anyone else in the room. The color of my skin, my education, upbringing, and connections open doors for me where others have to walk through suspicious glares and unmarked obstacles to get to them.

I don't know how to fix anything, but I do know how to have lively conversation with pretty much anyone I meet. So I do. I try to get as many eyes on the world as I can because the center of my faith is a table where all those boundaries are broken and we all gather to eat.

I also appreciate something Elijah has taught me. He talks about a person with darker skin or lighter skin, a person who is in the wheelchair, or a person who can't see. I don't know where identifying the person first and then the other mark came from, but it's very Grundtvigian. 

Nikolai Grundtvig was the Danish theologian in the 1800s who argued, "“Human first; then Christian.Our common humanity is the basis for freedom, equality and dignity. Christ is found in the living community rather than in any book." Many trace the Danish resistance to the Nazi regime to his "Human first" motto. 

I don't know how I got to Grundtvig from dancing in the kitchen with my husband. All I know is:

There is good and bad in everyone, but you learn to live, and you learn to give each other what you need to survive together alive.

12421

12421 is my favorite address in all of Juneau. Every time I drive by it, I giggle and start quivering in excitement.

When I was a kid, I loved addresses. Since my father regularly felt the need to cruise through neighborhoods in his big white whale of a car to see how the city was doing, I had plenty of time to slouch in my seat and look at addresses. I would play the ultimate nerd game of seeing how many different equations and patterns I could make with the numbers.

Hence why 12421 is a fabulous address. Not only are there wonderful patterns and equations, but it is a palindrome. Palindromes run a close second to apple pie in making me smile. Hannah should thank her father everyday that she is not named "race car".

I love addresses for the same reason I love doing my taxes. Bringing order out of chaos, finding patterns in what looks like disarray, looking for shortcuts in what appears to be overwhelming tedium is joy in pure form. This is my love.

Details always caught me up in math. I get so wrapped up in process, I miss the little things. I remember doing a multi-page problem that I ultimately got wrong. I got the process right, but missed multiplying 6x7 correctly.

My math advisor laughed at me when I left a math major to double major in world religions and theater. Luckily, I realized early I was a big picture person and my crazy double major fit my weird way of thinking, even if it did open me up to tele-evangelist jokes for the rest of my life.

But, I will always be thankful for my little math voice telling me to pay attention to details. I try to keep this in mind when I start skimming through the boring parts of the Bible for the great schemes and patterns. I'm happy to have the dimensions of the ark and the temple so there is something to read at an engineer's funeral, but they kind of kill me to slog through.

Except the details matter. Life is not always patterns and ordering. Sometimes all order, reason, and shortcuts get thrown into complete confusion and you are left with the details and long slog. No sense can be made, no shortcuts through; you have to get up, make coffee, and put one foot in front of the other.

As much as I love seeking order and connections, sometimes the cruelty, unfairness and randomness of life trumps and all I can see is the next step.  It's my least favorite place in the world to be (unless there is apple pie), but that's how it goes. You have to pass a lot of addresses before you get to 12421.

P.S. I told Hannah I was writing about 12421 and she literally gasped and said how much she loved that address.

Wish I'd Known

There are times as a pastor I wish I knew fifteen years ago what I know now. There are some tidbits of wisdom that I've learned over the last fifteen years:

1. Don't drink coffee with your white robe on
2. Don't mention sex or anything related to bodily functions in sermons
3. Close your blinds at night so people don't report to you the next day what they saw you doing in your home
4. Laugh and cry freely; pastors with hardened hearts are no fun
5. Be kind to your family. Using up all your goodness at work is not a valid excuse for grumpiness.
6. Write down announcements or else you forget something or go off on weird tangents.
7. Pray regularly.

And that exhausts my tidbits of wisdom.

The main thing I wish I'd known fifteen years ago isn't related to any of that wisdom. I wish I'd known how incompetent and impotent I am.

I went back and forth on whether to use incompetent or impotent.

Incompetent: Not having the necessary skills to do something successfully
Impotent: Helpless or powerless

Yay! I'm both. I'm not saying that in a self-deprecating way. When I admit I'm inept at passing out the children's bulletins, I'm being self-deprecating. That really is just because I'm an idiot and slightly scattered after all the zombie questions.

I feel great freedom in admitting that I am incompetent and impotent. It's the freedom that comes with humility in its truest sense. I am not God and I'm at my most faithful when I admit such a thing.

I'm not even sure what success looks like in the church. Is it increased attendance, stunning sermons, children pouring out of every orifice, everyone happy and healthy? That kind of success has made for fabulous idolatry for at least the last fifty years in the church. I'm incompetent in church growth and happiness. I do not have the skills to manipulate that successfully.

Churches ebb and flow; I don't take any of it personally. Now, if success is about death and resurrection, then I am relatively competent in that arena. I can fail, sin, and die as well as anyone and trust that God will somehow bring forgiveness and new life out of it.

I suppose that goes hand and hand with the impotency. I have nothing to fix anything. I can't mend broken marriages, cure cancer, or rehabilitate addicts. I can sit awkwardly with folks in the face of the big stuff in life, but I have no magic words, balms, or plans to make the pain subside. I apologize for all the times I pretended I did.

So, here's what I do as a pastor. I show up. I pay attention to what is going on around me and how God's spirit might be at work. I try to give words to what I observe. It doesn't seem like a whole heck of a lot and maybe you should reconsider paying me.

There are obviously things that I do and do well. But my primary mission is to stand in the mystery of humanity and divinity and try to make connections when possible or stand in awe when not. I am incompetent and impotent in the midst of the eternal and that's okay by me; I just wish I had admitted it earlier.