Mothers’ Day: Bracing Myself Once Again

As you read this, I’m on the road driving from Charlottesville, VA to Chicagoland after celebrating TBC’s 21st birthday.  I am a mother.

Nevertheless, Mothers’ Day has always been fraught with sadness because I miss my own mother very much.  Like every day.  This loss explains the whopping majority of my pathological issues.

I had a mom for 32 years.  I’ve been a mom for 25 years.  Therefore my let’s-celebrate-Mothers’-Day-as-a-daughter trumps my let’s-celebrate- Mother’s-Day-as-a-mother by seven years.  I semi-hate Mothers’ Day . . .

which brings me to a creative business idea:  cards for people who miss/dislike/avoid/pray-they-aren’t-like their mothers.

Several of my friends are motherless for the first time this Mothers’ Day and my insides ache for them.  It’s fairly miserable. And in the effort to find just the right “I-wish-I-could-help-soothe-your-sadness” Mothers’ Day card – even at those cute, anti-Hallmark card shops, I realized that such cards do not exist.  Or at least I haven’t found them yet.  The closest I came to victory is the image shown in this post.

So, motherless ones, would you like to help me come up with pithy card sentiments?

• “Thinking about you on Mother’s Day“  (too bland?)
• “Mother’s Day Sucks“  (too sharp?)
• “Let’s get together for Mother’s Day & eat key lime pie“  (like it)

Your thoughts?

 

This post is dedicated to those who’ve lost their moms since last Mothers’ Day.  Love to you.

When Children Play Church

I shared in a recent post that TBC used to play church in her room by singing hymns in front of the mirror.  I’ve had parishioners tell me that their preschoolers “play church” by pretending to preach to their dolls and stuffed animals.

I wonder how most children play church.  Do they pretend to be preachers?  Choir directors?  Organists?  Sunday School Teachers?

Or do they “play church” by pretending to make casseroles for their neighbors?  Do they “play church” by pretending to stock food pantries or driving someone to the hospital or praying with somebody?

As some of our faith communities are shifting from a worship-focus to a mission focus, I’m wondering if our children are noticing.  How do the children in your life “play church”?  Or do they?

Image source.

Available 24/7? Not really.

I’ve told this story before about the church member who phoned me late at night – almost every night – to review her day, when I was a single pastor.

Me (waking up to answer the phone after midnight):  Hello?

Lonely Lady:  Hi, Pastor Jan.  How are you?

Me:  (still technically asleep)  Ok.  How are you?

LL:  Well I just watched Citizen Kane again and it’s really excellent.

Me:

LL:  When was the last time you saw it?

Me:  I don’t remember.            Are you ok?

LL:  Yes, I just wanted to chat since you were available.

Me:  Actually I was asleep.  I’m happy to talk in the morning.

LL:  But you have to talk with me.  You’re my pastor.

Me:  If you have an emergency, you can contact me any time.  But if you are calling as a friend, this can wait.

Here’s one of many problems with that conversation:  I am really NOT available 24/7, even in the event of an emergency.  Sometimes I’m driving a car.  Sometimes I’m on vacation.  Sometimes I’m with someone else during her/his own emergency.

We pastors (and other self-claimed “heroes”) need to stop giving people the impression that we are always available.  The beautiful thing about The Priesthood of All Believers is that all of us can be equipped to sit with the frantic, pray with the anxious, hold the hand of the dying.  In fact, if I am the only one doing this, I am a failed pastor.

How can we make this Biblical shift?

• When you hear someone say, “Our pastor is never available” don’t automatically believe it.  Every pastor gets at least one day off a week.  Every pastor works away from his/her office.  In fact, if your pastor does not answer the phone on the first ring, it means that – at that particular moment – he/she is probably doing ministry with someone else.  Or taking a much-needed nap after working late the night before.
• If you need “a pastor” consider who else could help you – A Stephen minister?  A Deacon?  An Elder? A person in your spiritual community with obvious gifts of compassion who is not an official officer of the church?
• Remind your spiritual leaders to keep Sabbath and don’t grouse when they do.

I used to lie in bed at night after a long work day and recall all the things I didn’t accomplish that day.  But we need to change this culture.  We have done enough, if we have done the best we can do.

Image Source.

Our House Was a Very, Very, Very Fine House

I’ll be honest with you:  I’m feeling a little traumatized today.

Yesterday, I said “goodbye” to our home of 24 years.  Although I didn’t live there regularly since June 2011, I was there often enough to be a legal Virginia resident.  Part of that was because Cindy was sick and I popped in to check on drink wine with The Moderator.  And part of it was because our kids still officially lived in that house.  We did what had to be done to keep in-state tuition.

Last Friday morning, we said goodbye as a family, thanking God for our lives in that house.  One of the kids recalled in prayer, “The house was falling apart, but it didn’t matter.“  We loved each other in that house.

My Dad found the house shortly after Mom died when HH and I learned we’d been called to a church there.  Dad needed something to do after eight years of watching cancer ravage the love of his life,  and he randomly met a hoarder at the Rite Aid in Alexandria who sold us her house.  And then my Dad died of cancer.  We foolishly thought we’d be exempt after losing one parent.  I became an orphan at 34.  In that house.

My grandmother – who rarely left her county, much less the state of NC – visited when HH and I were installed as pastors.  It was in that house that I  entertained MV and CB and KB.  All of them are gone now.

This was the house where two of our children came home from the hospital.   This was the house where FBC marched to the theme to Inside Washington every Saturday night.  This was the house where SBC saw angels who literally saved his life.  This was the house where TBC played “church” in her room singing “Holy Holy Holy.”

This house is where the neighborhood kids divided their Halloween candy every year on our living room floor, where the high school kids met to watch episodes of “Lost” on snow days, where we celebrated 22 Christmases and countless birthdays.

This is where we brought two babies home from the hospital and where I recovered from cancer surgery.  This is where my brothers drew a (lame) portrait of Coach K on the wall when they were helping us paint the living room.

This is the house where the kids did their homework at the dining room table, where we buried a pet goldfish in the back yard, where we planted bulbs in the yard and played “horse” in the driveway.

This is where we had baptism parties and confirmation parties and Thanksgiving dinners, and one particular Easter dinner for people with no place to go – which was nuts considering the fact that we were also pastors and already had full schedules on Easter morning.

This is the house where I taught the kids how to bake.

And so I drove away from our house yesterday and stopped one last time at my neighborhood Caribou – which will become a Peet’s Coffee in 2014.  And the barristas came from behind the counter to give me hugs and I wept.

The other customers were amazed that these barristas were so kind to the crying middle-aged lady. Little did they know what all of us had experienced there together.  Those barristas had watched me sit with parishioners in that tiny coffee shop – one sharing the details of her divorce and another confessing his love for other men.  They’d watched me fire a church staffer there.  They’d watched me pray with people sitting right there in that crowded seating area, in that Caribou a mile from my house.

I was very young – 33 – when we moved into that house.  And now I am much older and living in a wonderful place in the Midwest, but my heart will always be on the Virginia side of Our Nation’s Capital.

Our house happened to be in a neighborhood filled with Peace Corps alums and Foreign Service professionals and wild-eyed NoVa liberals from all over the country and lots of mutts from the pound.  The schools were so diverse that our kids grew up with friends from Peru and Italy and Jordan and Ethiopia and Paraguay and Guatemala and Thailand.  I am forever grateful to – and I’m naming names here – Doris Jackson, Erin Sonn, Meg Tuccilo, John Word, Lisa LaBella, Kelly Carruthers, Amy Shilo, Loren Zander, Colette Fraley, Nancy Mohler, Joe Spencer, John Clisham, Denis Babichenko, Doug Burns, and the magnificent Mr. O’Donnell.

Yes, I’m getting personal here, but I don’t care.  Thanks be to God for friends who had nothing to do with our church lives.  I will love L & B forever.  And thank you to J. who came over when I went into labor and took the boys.

One of the truths of moving to a new part of the world as a middle-aged lady is that no one knew me as the mom of three kids under four.  No one remembers me as a soccer mom or a lacrosse mom or a chaperone mom.  No one remembers when my hair was long and my waist was tiny.

All of those wonderful times happened in a simple Cape Cod house in South Arlington with a cracked foundation and a single working bathroom.

And now new memories are happening on a lovely street in Chicagoland.  But it’s a loss.

And now  – I’m proud to say – I totally live in Illinois.

Board of Pensions Options

You may remember that a “dues plus” plan was introduced by the Board of Pensions of the PCUSA last winter and the Board received quite a bit of feedback.  Now there are three options being considered with a final decision to be made this summer.

Here are of couple of my naive questions:

- How much of the issue of “The Health Care Crisis” is about greed – the greed of healthcare providers, pharmaceutical companies, etc.?

- Is the Board willing to consider pay cuts for their own highest paid professionals?  Are they willing to shave some of their expenses?  (Meeting at the Ritz Carlton is not helpful.)

- Are we in the best paid positions with the most time in the system willing to make sacrifices for the youngest pastors with the most dependents?

Your thoughts?  And which option would you choose?

 

What Are We Willing to Do to . . .

I sometimes ask engaged couples, “What are you willing to do to make this relationship work?”  

• Are you willing to make sacrifices in your career?  
• Are you willing to give up controlling all your own money?  
• Are you willing to share your weekends with your new family?  
• Are you willing to spend holidays with your in-laws?

What are we really willing to do to be a healthy, faithful church?

Almost every week, someone in church tells me that they know the church needs to change, but they don’t want any changes until after they die.  (Really, people tell me this.)

Or worse, they might say that the church can die after their funeral.  After they die, they won’t care what happens.  Sigh.

I realize that – as a people – we are weary.  We are too tired or disinterested to change what we like.  But this is very selfish.

What are we really willing to do to be a healthy, faithful church?

I often share the story of a guy I met at a New Church Development conference a few years ago.  He was a ruling elder who had paid his own way to Florida to learn about building up the new church he serves.  During a break, we had this conversation:

Me:  So tell me about your church.

Elder:  Well, we meet in a school which is kind of a pain because we have to set up the chairs every week and the atmosphere doesn’t do much for me.

Me:  What’s worship like?

Elder:  I’m not crazy about the music.  I prefer traditional hymns and a pipe organ, but our music is a little wild.  Lots of drums.  

Me:  So, you don’t like the atmosphere and you don’t like the music.  And you paid your way to come to this conference, so you must be committed to your church.  Why are you part of a church if there’s so much you don’t like about it?

Elder:  (Face lighting up)  Because I’d give up all the things I like about church to see all those 20 and 30 something come through our doors.  I can tell that they don’t mind setting up their own chairs.  They like the music.  They are meeting Jesus.  Isn’t that why we have a church?  To make new disciples?

This brings us to the same questions I asked yesterday:  Why do our particular churches exist?  To provide a location for our funerals?  Or to make new disciples?

One of these answers is more prevalent than the other in every congregation.

A Check List for Pulling the Plug?

I wrote last month about our little churches and the paradigm shift needed for those congregations to have a thriving future.  My denomination is not governed by a single bishop who makes decisions – as our sisters and brothers in Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Episcopal, and United Methodist have.   My denomination is governed by “corporate bishops“ sort of like the U.S. Senate, which begs the popular retort:  ”For God so loved the world, God did not send a committee.“

Decisions are made s-l-o-w-l-y. 

Sometimes – honestly –  I’d like to be the bishop, solely because I could move things along a bit faster.

I feel an urgency about ministry.  The world is craving hospitality, healing, forgiveness, and spiritual peace.  We don’t have time to waste.

So here we are with many tiny churches – under 50 members – and some (all?) of these churches need to close.  But we in the Presbyterian tradition do not close churches in a vacuum.  We might advise churches, coach them, and try to equip them for redevelopment.  But we are unlikely to close a church without that church’s members agreeing that this is the healthiest choice.

Nevertheless, I’m being asked more and more to come up with A Check List for Pulling the Plug.  In other words, there is a movement towards pushing our very small congregations to take a hard look at their ministry together and discern if their ministry is about God and expanding God’s kingdom – or something else.

If you were creating such a check list, what would you put on it?  I have some ideas but would love to hear from you too.

Jan’s Check List for Congregation Viability and Effectiveness:

(Please check all that apply to your church community.)

___  Our congregation meets regularly for worship, the celebration of the sacraments, study, and fellowship together.

___  We have at least four different leaders who serve as the worship/music leader, the treasurer/financial secretary, the clerk/secretary, and the pastor.

___  We have the capacity to cover all monthly financial expenses including utilities, insurance, salaries and benefits, supplies, etc.

___  We make a difference in our neighborhood by: _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

___  We make a difference in the lives of our members by: _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

___  At least ten members can articulate why our church exists.

___  Our neighborhood would notice if we were gone.

 

I would hope that a viable church could check off at least six of these items.

Again, what would you add to the list?  

Why This Is Beautiful

After the moment of silence at Wednesday night’s Bruins’ game, after Rene Rancourt started singing The National Anthem, this happened:

The other day, L & I were talking about the post-Boston Marathon media coverage.  By now we all know that:

• ordinary people ran towards the explosion to help
• marathoners kept running to hospitals to donate blood
• Bostonians offered their homes for people who needed accommodations
• people are continuing to live their lives as best they can

Reporters and locals have occasionally responded by saying things like:

• “This is what makes us Americans.”
• “This is what we do in the United States.”
• “We are unlike any other country.”

L. and I wondered if, after people in other countries keep going after tragedies, they say things like:

• “This is what makes us Indonesians.”
• “This is what we do in Afghanistan.“
• “We are unlike any other country.”

What makes the moment in the video beautiful is not that it is uniquely American to be patriotic or compassionate or generous.  These are the things that make us human.  This is what human beings do.  We are unlike any other species.  We were created in the image of God

We live in a great country, filled with amazing human beings, who live alongside other people who are so broken that they would bomb innocent people.   Just like the rest of the world.

The world is truly beautiful, thanks be to God.

“Please Let It Be a Lone White Guy”

I heard someone say this about the unknown terrorist who set off the two bombs near the end of the Boston Marathon Monday:  ”Please let it be a lone white guy.”

Why?  Probably because . . .

• If this was the act of a Middle Eastern terrorist group, ignorant Americans might take it out of innocent people like the Sikhs.
• Most immigrants from the Middle East are not terrorists – although, according to a 2011 study, 1 in 3 Americans think that Muslim Americans are more sympathetic to terrorists than other Americans.  A Middle Eastern Boston Marathon bomber would not help correct this misconception.
• If a lone white guy – or a group of white guys – are responsible for the Boston Marathon bombing, vigilantes are unlikely to take it out on random other white guys.
• Women are unlikely to initiate terrorism in the U.S. – although women are increasingly “carrying out suicide bombings, hijacking air­planes, and taking hostages in such places as in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Lebanon, and Chechnya” according to this study.

Whoever did this is clearly evil and sociopathic – whatever race or ethnicity he/she might be.  But I understand the person who hopes it’s a lone white guy, just as I used to hope that people who make stupid racist comments don’t have Southern accents.   (Enough people already believe that Southern accents = ignorance.)

I pray this person is identified and caught soon.  And maybe that he’s a lone white guy.

Levi’s Genes

Note: Few things feel as important today as our neighbors in Boston today.  Prayers of peace lifted for them and the world.

In life and in death, we belong to God.  Romans 14:8

Who owns our genes?  The Supreme Court heard arguments between The Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics yesterday, which will result later this summer in a legal decision about whether or not a private company can patent human genes.  The genes in question are BRCA 1 and BRCA 2 — associated with hereditary breast and ovarian cancer.  Myriad says they created synthetic genes which should be patented.  The US government says that some of Myriad’s “creations” are actually made from nature.  Some of us might say that God made them.

In the Bible, the Levites were priestly people, descended from the third son of Jacob and Leah.  One of their roles, among the Hebrew people, was to guard what is holy.  The Supremes now have some semblance of this role in their Court.

My grandmother used to say “It’s amazing what the LORD has let us learn.”  Just because we have figured something out doesn’t mean that God didn’t do it.  I find it hard to imagine that a company can lay claim to certain genes that may or may not be in our bodies.

Culturally, we are thoroughly in need of a clearer understanding of whose we are.  Our libertarian friends believe that each of us essentially owns ourselves and have the right to live any way we wish while respecting the rights of others.  We all know women whose bodies are treated like the property of men.

But imagine if we truly believed that our bodies actually belonged to God.  What if  women and men shared their bodies knowing that all those parts we find tantalizing and pleasurable ultimately belong to God?  What if we looked upon each other as God’s property?  What if we claimed the priestly charge to protect what is holy in each other?

What if we considered even BRCA 1 and BRCA 2 to be something like Levi’s genes?

Image is an anonymous artist’s rendering of DNA.