Zootopia

I might have been the only person who cried through the movie Zootopia. I sat in the theater watching this story about a female bunny trying to find her way into her calling in the midst of a masculine world and I was weeping. My heart hurt in a way it hadn't in a long time as I thought through the past 18 years in ministry where I have been disinvited or ignored at best, belittled and preached to at worst. The lecture is the worst. But I have always had to prove myself capable.

I might also have been the only person who screamed during the movie. Welcome to my life.

It wasn't until I watched Michelle Obama's speech tonight with my daughter that I felt the tears well up again. 

I don't want my daughter to have her ass grabbed at work and dismiss it because it's a manager and everyone laughs it off. 

I don't want her to go on trips with a bunch of pastors and priests and learn to stay with a buddy in the hallway so the guys don't trap you and try to get a good feel. 

I don't want to whisper a good idea in a man's ear because I know he'll get heard in a way I won't.

I've adopted so many different techniques through my years in a man's world, and most of them are dismissive and demeaning to me.

And I think I'm tired of it. It really is too much to be asked to dismiss on a national scale what I've been forced to laugh off or ignore for a good chunk of life. 

I talk pretty openly with my kids about assault and boundaries. Hannah's been traveling lots with volleyball and they stay in host homes. Sometimes I know too much about humanity and what we are capable of doing, especially to those we think will remain quiet  so I teach them to yell and swear. 

I worked with Hannah to point with purpose and say, "*%#$@ Stop It! That's inappropriate." No one gets to touch you without your permission and if someone is making you feel icky then tell them to %$&* off and get out of the situation.

Men cannot do anything to you they want. 
It doesn't matter how much power or money they have. 
We are not owned. We are not less important. We will not be dismissed.

And if a man wants to call me any kind of slang term for a vagina, that's fine with me. I'll carry those names proudly because I've brought three kids into this world and I know just how flexible and strong vaginas are.  

Glaciers

Least favorite quotes as a pastor:

"Sorry Pastor, we're out of pie." 

"Pastor, the toilet is clogged."

"Look at this incision for my hernia surgery."

"I'm sorry I haven't been to church for a long time." 

"My kid doesn't go to church, but she is really nice." 

I have my reasons for cringing at all of them and most of the time I'm happy to speak up or make gagging sounds. It's the last one that I've never figured out the right way to respond.

I see absolutely no correlation between being nice and going to church. The super nice people are the ones I trust the least in church. I always imagine they're hiding bodies in their freezers and the niceness is just a facade so I don't go looking in their freezers.

Sometimes I think about telling people there are actually lots of assholes in church so if she really is nice she might want to stay away. 

Church isn't about becoming better people; it's about becoming people who live in community.

Church has something to do with figuring out how to live as the body of Christ so we need all kinds. We are one body and the goal is not to achieve niceness, but some sense of real community:

• knowing each other in our messes and gifts
• confessing when we've hurt others 
• forgiving what stands in the way of relationship
• being honest about our limits and gifts
• taking risks
• offering hospitality and compassion
• having boundaries
• laughing and crying together
• opening our tables
• taking turns unclogging toilets and taking out the trash

Maybe I just don't want my faith to be about niceness because I find my nice moments to be my least authentic and often the ones that stir some resentment. They are the moments when I put on a mask and create some distance. 

Maybe it's because being nice makes me feel a bit like a doormat where I forget to be alive and try to always care and tend for others.

I had a long list of "shoulds" today. I suppose that's different than being nice but they are wound up together in my mind. I've learned that I cannot be compassionate and loving if I don't take at least four to five hours and wander the woods on my day off. It's hard to check out for that big of a chunk of time, but I have to. 

Today I got to experience a beautiful day and place with one of my good friends. We got to be the church knowing, confessing, and laughing. It was a kingdom moment and I might have missed it because I was thinking about what I should do. 

You can tell me your kid doesn't go to church, but please follow up by telling me where they or you find meaningful community, where do they find places to be themselves confessing and forgiving, loving and being loved? I'm not sure it always happens in our churches, but if it's not happening anywhere in your life then I don't care how nice you are, it sure sounds like hell to me.

Ravens

I don't feel very fun in the fall. I've moved into the earnest, somewhat stressed, not enough Vitamin D mode. 

Except at dinner last night when I spit smoothie. My children like to mock my cooking concoctions sometimes. I will always be a cheap German who tries to use everything until it is gone, unless I can leave a tiny bit in the bag so somewhere else has to throw it away.

So we had halibut on Sunday night. But I got distracted chasing chickens out of the neighbor's yard and overcooked it a minute. Here's the thing about halibut. If you overcook it for a minute, it turns into this never-ending chew experience. Nothing some special sauce and cheese couldn't fix, but there were some leftovers.

I couldn't just warm it up as is for Monday night or they still would be chewing so naturally I made it into chowder. And maybe I threatened that if it didn't all get eaten, it would reappear on Tuesday night as casserole. My sweet Hannah asked if it would be soggy bread, chewy halibut with cheese on top casserole. Turd. They ate it all and made me laugh hard.

But that has nothing to do with ravens, except there is a paper raven taped to my window that simultaneously makes me laugh and creeps me out. It's on my office windows at church so the whole time I'm trying to focus on Jesus I hear, 

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary ... 

It's not easy trying to think of something inspirational when the tapping, tapping of death is right there. 

And it is. This fall has been a difficult one for Juneau with way too many tragic deaths.

But it also makes me laugh. Becky taped them on the office windows because we have a mountain ash tree in the front of church. If you are unfamiliar with mountain ash trees, you should get one for your yard. Actually, come dig the one up from the church and put it in your yard.

The berries are edible and messy all over the sidewalk, but they also ferment and the robins who love eating them get drunk. 
Seriously drunk. 
And fly into our windows. 
It's horrible. Except when it's slightly amusing watching them behave erratically. 

So we remind them of imminent death if they don't change their ways or at least where the window is they should avoid.  

Such is the nature of fall. 

Fall

I won't lie. I love the melancholy of a gray fall day when the wind is whipping and leaves are flying. I love it in the same way that I love the season of Lent. It's time that doesn't expect much out of you. Unlike the season of pre-Christmas where we are forced into happiness or summer with the incessant daylight, these days allow me to take a break, have a pensive moment.

One of my favorite poems and the only one I've ever memorized is e.e. cummings "a leaf falls-loneliness." 

Somehow cummings captures the beauty of the falling leaf and the solitariness of letting go of life. 

Endings and changes are such beautiful gifts. 

I fear finding life tedious or boring more than I do death. I fear that I will take the beauty and gift of each day for granted and forget to keep living and being surprised. 

So I watched the leaves fall today on my lovely walk through the bogs and woods. I watched the skunk cabbage decaying and the fireweed giving up its ghost. It's messy and a different kind of pretty than brilliant summer days and vivid colors. But, it was so relaxing; expecting nothing out of me than to keep passing by. 

Robert Earl Keen has one of my favorite melancholic songs called Lonely Feeling and this is the stanza that always sticks out to me:

It's a statue of Jesus your grandmother had when she died

All cracked and all yellow and you know you should throw it aside

But you're growin' religious, the older you get

You haven't been saved but it could happen yet

Kierkegaard would also argue for the gift of melancholy. It can lead us to despair, which is not a helpful place to go. But it can lead us into the external eternal (my words, not his). Melancholy makes us face the reality that nothing lasts forever, and reach outside of ourselves to hold onto that which does. 

Since Kierkegaard lived before plastic, his answer would be the love we see in Jesus. I'm going to stick with that one too. 

The happy Jesus button doesn't make the melancholy go away and force me into smiles all the time, but it gives me the strength to keep walking through whatever season I'm in. But hopefully not before I can talk my husband into letting me buy a couple more flannels and sweaters.

February 30

Kirt and I grew up in the same church but we are several years apart so we never knew each other. It wasn't until a fateful night at the Turnbull house when I showed up out of college hungry for a free dinner and he showed up as a sweet nineteen year old for a Bible study that we got to know each other. 

We disagree about how the meeting went, but since it's my blog I get to tell my story. It was snowing and I was wearing Birkenstocks (with socks naturally). He threw one of my sandals out into the snow and refused to get in unless I agreed on a cup of coffee. Luckily Perkins served bottomless cups of coffee so we drank until nearly 4 am. 

We went out every night that week and then I left to backpack around Europe for a month. I called him once when I met a cute guy to see if we were serious and he said no so there you go. I don't remember the cute guy's name, but he did teach me how to pronounce umlauts in German. 

I got back to Ohio for a short bit before I headed to Alaska to live in a remote native village. I asked him when his birthday was and he told me February 30. I'm not the quickest cracker in the box; I was just excited we were born in the same month. 

He didn't write back often. I'm a persistent dingbat and when Valentine's Day rolled around, I asked him what he wanted for his birthday. 

Wow. 

He did the "we need some space; I'm not ready for commitment" thing and I cried through that Valentine's Day until I got really pissed as my calendar skills finally kicked in.

We figured it out and we're still figuring out. If a perfect marriage is peace and order, then we don't have a perfect marriage. If it is about offering grace and space for disappointment and disagreement as well as delight then I think we are close to perfect.

Today is Kirt's real birthday. Turd. I figured it out after we got married. 

I'm so thankful he is alive.

I'm not the easiest person to live with and somehow my beloved has figured out how to live with my sometimes outlandish quirks and still smile at me or go to bed because he can't handle any more. 

He recently went with fear and trembling to get me yet another new phone. I just wanted a better camera and now I have a phone the size of my head. But, he taught me how to use it and I only took a couple of pictures upside down. There wasn't any yelling or threats to go back to stone tablets this time. Or my flip phone that I still miss.

He makes my world beautiful. 

The transition into the police world has not been easy on our family, but it has been amazing to watch Kirt find his vocation and make the community a better place. He is brave and compassionate. How wonderful to get to watch him live that out. He's also a toddler when he's tired, but who isn't?

I can't believe I thought it was February 30 for so long. Wow. That's embarrassing, but somehow he still loves me. Turd.

Dips

I knew it was going to be one of those days when it took me three tries to get my underwear on right. I'm not sure why it matters, except it's the same line of reasoning as wearing clean underwear. If I have an accident, I don't want the EMT to think I'm a dork.

So then I started thinking about all the reasons I am a dork. 

The first was a recent conversation where I brought up the fact that one side of my body stinks more than the other side. Seriously, my one armpit grows hair faster and smells worse than the other side. I think that's weird, but obviously not as weird as bringing it up in conversation. I'm slightly fascinated by whether this is true for everyone, but I did pick up on the social cues I shouldn't bring it up again.

The second is that I had to look up the etymology for dork to see if that is an accurate word for me. It's not. It means penis along with nearly every other slang word we use. They all boil down to penis.

So, then I had to look up my mother's term of endearment for me growing up and one that I often use lovingly with my children, "dipshit." 

You'll be happy to know that dipshit is the emphatic form of dip unlike the softened dipstick, which means penis. Naturally.

But, here's what I really love about looking up the etymology. Right there by dipshit is dip, "to baptize." 

dip (v.) 

Old English dyppan "immerse, baptize by immersion," from Proto-Germanic *duppjan (source also of Old Norse deypa "to dip," Danish døbe "to baptize," Old Frisian depa, Dutch dopen, German taufen, Gothic daupjan "to baptize"), related to Old English diepan "immerse, dip," and perhaps ultimately to deep. As a noun, from 1590s. Sense of "downward slope" is 1708. Meaning "sweet sauce for pudding, etc." first recorded 1825.

dip (n.) 

"stupid person, eccentric person," 1920s slang, perhaps a back-formation from dippy. "Dipshit is an emphatic form of dip (2); dipstick may be a euphemism or may reflect putative dipstick 'penis' " [DAS].

I will be the first to admit that I have stupid moments. Wow.  A whole slew of them just came washing over me like the time I tried to set a girl up with her ex-fiance without knowing it was her ex-fiance. 

I also have my eccentric moments when I look at the world and make observations out loud that others might miss. I'm not nearly as eccentric as men's body wash, but the fact that I read the labels on men's body wash makes me close.

But, ultimately, my identity is in my baptism. I am a dip. I am a beloved child of God who can trust in that love enough to live boldly, make mistakes, ask for forgiveness, and keep trying to put my underwear on until I get it right.

Humanity

I made the teenagers disgruntled on our trip to Whitehorse. I gave up being their friend a long time ago and now I take seriously the role of challenging and forming them into faithful, honest, and gracious folks. That means I get to help establish healthy boundaries and safe places. Not always fun.

One of the teens brought a slightly edited version of Cards Against Humanity and I would not let them play it after the first couple of rounds on the ferry. If you are unfamiliar with this game it is tag lined "A party game for horrible people." The game is a bit like Apples to Apples. Each round, one player asks a question from a black card, and everyone else answers with their funniest white card. For example:

"When I am a billionaire, I shall erect a 50-foot statue to commemorate ____________"

• Getting married, having a few kids, buying some stuff, retiring to Florida and dying.
• Not wearing pants
• Tom Cruise
• Mouth herpes

And those would be the tame answers. I'm not opposed to the game in theory. The absurdity of the scenarios is hilarious, but there are some degrading and horrifying responses too. They can also be hilarious, but not appropriate for teens.

Lutherans don't tend to be moralists so I don't stop the kids from teaching each other how to play poker or blackjack. They also play this mafia game, which is a complicated storytelling game where folks die in hideous ways. There is a disturbing element to the game, but it seems to me like they are trying to engage the precariousness of life and ridicule it. 

My problem with them playing Cards Against Humanity is that they haven't developed a depth of compassion and love for humanity. 

Teenagers, and many adults for that matter, are still figuring out the line between mean and funny. If you hurt someone, it is not funny. But it's not always that easy. There is this weird territory between engaging the absurd to mock diseases, prejudices, and sexual stuff (I think all that's relatively healthy) and being mean to disconnect and distance from life and relationship.

Humor can break down walls and it can build them. All of the teens rode in my vehicle and I felt a little like Jane Goodall documenting behavior. They are actively in the process of figuring out boundaries, safety and humor. Some times it goes too far and I need to pull them back. That's why mentors and adults are so important during this time in their lives.

I firmly believe it is only when one is madly in love with humanity in all its messiness that one can mock it. Humor has the gift of revealing the absurdity of life, turning expectations upside down, and making us see things in a new way. Humor, especially 50 foot statues of Tom Cruise, can act like parables and make us realize how destructive the status quo can be.

Humor can also degrade and humiliate. That doesn't belong on a church trip. 

They spelled my name so they're not too disgruntled.
They make me laugh and I love them bunches.

I do find St. Paul helpful in figuring out why poker is okay but Cards Against Humanity isn't. “All things are lawful,” but not all things are helpful. “All things are lawful,” but not all things build up. (1 Corinthians 10:23).