Testing, Testing, 1...2...3...

So a few minutes ago I left my son's room, having rocked him to one of his lullaby songs. I'm glad he called one of us back in there, because the going-to-bed routine tonight was particularly heinous. Now I'm the first to tell you that my adorable child is not perfect, but throw in the fact that he has given up afternoon naps (this happened several months ago) and is now three (a much more difficult age, in my opinion, than two was), and you get a "tired tooter," as we say, around 7:00 each evening.

He had been great for my husband all day today, I'm told, after they left me at the church to continue working through the evening. But just before his bath, he decided to lose it. He screamed through my washing him. He kicked me in the gut while I tried to dry him and put on his P.J.'s. He wailed that he wanted pink (strawberry) milk to sip as we read bedtime stories instead of the chocolate we had given him (for which he had asked, I might add). He fussed so much he missed "Goodnight Moon" almost entirely. He finally did give up on getting the pink milk and join in his bedtime prayers.

Anyway, so I'm thinking God must feel this way a lot. All the Lord asks of us is a little love and cooperation in return for the amazing love and divine care we receive. But instead we scream when God tries to clean us. We moan for things we don't have instead of appreciating what we do. We fuss instead of listening to God's voice speaking to us. It must be frustrating.

But eventually, when we become settled, I hope that God also hears us calling out to be held and comforted. I hope that we realize that we've behaved badly and want to tell our Heavenly Parent "I love you". I hope that we snuggle up to the heart of our Creator and listen to what the divine love tells us. In those tender moments, we realize that the only thing that matters is the purity of our love, the relationship that sustains and saves, the connection and trust we share in God's heart. And hopefully, hopefully, we learn to be a little bit better than we were the day before.

Over the River and Through the Woods...

I know I'm not the first to say such a thing, but my grandmother is one of the most wonderful saints I've ever known. Now 88, she continues to amaze me with her warmth, her faith, and her love.

Can't you see those things in her smile?

She's generous and kind, understanding and wise, tender and encouraging. I'm so thankful my son, her only great-grandchild despite six children and 11 grandchildren, gets to know her. He adores her, as well he should.

My grandmother went to college, Meredith College in Raleigh, NC, before most women took that step to higher education. She became a teacher. One summer day, she met my biological grandfather, who was studying at Duke University's Divinity School to be a Methodist preacher, while on family vacation on Portsmouth Island, adjacent to Okracoke Island, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. He was there for his summer ministry internship.

They were married, and she began the life of a preacher's wife in the Holston Conference of the Methodist Church. She supported him as he made visits to mothers in the coal mining community he served during World War II, delivering the worst news any parent could imagine. She made visits with him to ill parishioners. She cooked wonderful meals for the presiding elders when they came for visits to his churches. She bore him four children, the second of whom is my father. When she moved with him in 1949 to a new church named St. Paul Methodist in Fountain City (now part of Knoxville), where he would be the second pastor ever, she did not know that she would not move with him again.

Early in his sixth year of appointment to St. Paul, when he was just 41 years old, my grandfather died suddenly and unexpectedly, early on a Sunday morning. My grandmother was left with the four children, ages 13 years to six weeks, in a parsonage in which she could not stay. Strangely, none of those four children followed in their father's footsteps by going into the ordained ministry. I am the only child or grandchild who has so far done so. Six decades after my grandfather, I, too, went to Duke Divinity School and became ordained. I remember how proud and happy my grandmother was at my ordination. Seeing her joy was one of my greatest joys.

I believe that if the Methodist Church had been actively ordaining women at the time my grandfather died, my grandmother could easily have been encouraged to enter the process. In fact, my grandfather died in 1955, and the General Conference of 1956 granted full clergy rights to women, but my grandmother found her calling, and her means to support her family, in becoming a lay minister of visitation at Church Street Methodist Church in downtown Knoxville. She talks about the time following my grandfather's death as a time of deep grief, yet a time in which she learned the provision of God through the dear and generous community of the church, who built a home for her, and whose monetary gifts would show up anonymously in her mailbox, exactly when she needed them most.

It was serving and worshipping at Church Street United Methodist Church that afforded her the opportunity to meet her second husband, the man I called "Granddaddy" until his death one year and four months ago. She knew him with his first wife and cared for both of them as she died of cancer, leaving two children alone with their father. A year later, love surfaced between my grandmother and "Granddaddy", and she took his children as her own. They married two years before I was born and lived together for 35 years.

Now she has a new community; she chose this past summer to move into a small apartment in a retirement community where some of her friends, also widows, reside. My husband, son, and I spent the last couple of days in Knoxville, dining out with her, going to Target, talking, enjoying the antics of a three-year-old. She let him grab her arm in affection. She bought him gifts. She held her forhead to his and smiled. She forgave his misbehavior. She read him books. She asked about the people in my churches. She overlooked our tardiness in arriving. She asked my husband about his mother, who is battling Multiple Myeloma. It was precious time. It is never long enough.

I dread the day (hopefully quite a few years from now) on which I will keep the promise I made to my grandmother: to conduct her funeral service beside my biological grandfather's grave in a little mountain town in Virginia, where he was born. My joy on that day will be to know that she's receiving the reward of her Master. Until then, it is my joy to spend any time I can with her, and to watch her love all of us in her family (especially her great-grandson) with the purest kind of love there is--God's love flowing through her.

The video you're about to watch...

is one that has been on my heart for a while, one that I discovered this past summer.

On this day of St. Valentine, my heart goes out to the children of the world who desperately want to be loved by a family. There are millions of them. If your family feels incomplete, watch this video with an open heart and with prayer. Perhaps God is calling you to adoption.

It's something that our family has been praying about for months now, as many of you know. None of us know what our families will ultimately look like, but as one of the songs from that Transiberian Orchestra concert I blogged about in December says: "Every man is my brother, and every child is ours."

Orphans of Ukraine

Where Were You At 1:30 a.m.?

I ask because 1:30 seems to be the time that I'm awake in the middle of each night.
I know, I know...maybe if I'm awake I should actually POST AN ENTRY at that time once in a while, but I'm usually otherwise occupied.

For example...
Last night (and most normal nights) I was helping our son make it to the potty for his middle-of-the-night trip.

But the night before, and the night before that, and the night before that,
well those were another story.

Now, before you read the rest, you must know that this post is not for the faint-of-heart (or stomach). If you can handle it, read on. If not, wait a few more days (yes, I'll try to be more faithful to post from now on) and check for a new entry to read. OK, here goes.

So night-before-last, I was regretting that we'd allowed our son to eat normal (and not so healthy) food again too quickly after he got over the terrible stomach virus all three of us have had, because at 1:30 he lost it (all of it--in every way possible) all over the toilet, half the bathroom, and both of our PJ pants. So the next 15 minutes were spent cleaning him, the bathroom, and me, then putting him back to bed. Now remember, I'm still very weak and recovering from the bug myself, still having eaten NO SOLID FOOD since Saturday. Oh, and I'm also sleeping on the couch at that point because the bug had attacked my husband after leaving me sapped, and he now needed the night-time privacy he had afforded me the two previous nights.

So here I am at 1:45 a.m., cleaning up after my son's illness's last stand. But then, of course, the soiled rugs and clothes could not sit in the bathroom for the rest of the night; they HAD to be washed. So I go to the washing machine (in our kitchen adjoining the den where I'm sleeping on the couch). I put in the bath rugs and PJ pants. I start the machine, and I lie back down on the couch to return to dreamland, after pushing the cat out of the way.

Round about 2:00, I hear water pouring onto the kitchen floor.
No lie.
So I rush (as fast as I can) to the bathroom and grab two towels to sop up the water that's now everywhere. Two isn't enough--I go back for three. I don't have the energy to wring them out, so I let them sit in the kitchen sink, having (of course) to move a pile of dirty dishes out of the way. Sigh

Then I go get two more towels to put up against the machine, to guard the floor against the next spin cycle. Fun, huh?

Now, you probably don't want to know about 1:30 a.m. two nights before that.

Let's just say it really not pretty--at all. And neither was just about any other time that entire night.

So all of this to say...If you think pastors and their families are immune from this kind of nasty illness, think again.

Also, I do think a quote from a wonderful spiritual writer said something to me (and maybe to all of us) this morning:

The circumstances of our lives are another medium of God’s communication with us. God opens some doors and closes others.... Through the wisdom of our bodies, God tells us to slow down or reorder our priorities. The happy coincidences and frustrating impasses of daily life are laden with messages. Patient listening and the grace of the Spirit are the decoding devices of prayer. It is a good habit to ask, What is God saying to me in this situation? Listening to our lives is part of prayer.

- Marjorie J. Thompson
in her book Soul Feast

Lastly, I want to acknowledge that ONE OF MY NIGHTMARES BECAME REALITY when I had to call people late Saturday night (when the virus decided to take over my body) and ask them to lead worship in my absence. In nearly 7 years of pastoral ministry, I've never missed a Sunday morning due to illness. There's a first time for everything, but I surely hope it will be at least another 7 years before I have to again.

Thank you, lay speakers Charlie and Gregg! I know you led worship faithfully and spoke God's Word clearly in my absence, and I am deeply appreciative. I look forward to getting back work today (finally I'm getting some energy again) and to being in the pupit Sunday.

Bad Mommy!

So, my son and I were supposed to go to our wonderful Riverbanks Zoo on Friday morning for a really cool program for preschoolers. I had been telling him about it all week. I had him all ready to take his beloved stuffed puppy, because the program was a "teddy bear clinic" in which the kids learn how the vets care for zoo animals, and they also get to learn to "take care" of their own animals. As I put him to bed, he told me how happy he was that he was going to the zoo with his puppy in the morning.

It was then that it hit me: I had not registered for the clinic!

Of course, when I tried to register us online after he went to sleep, the clinic showed up as "unavailable." After an e-mail and early morning phone conversation, still the clinic was "unavailable" to my son and me.

Sigh.

He was disappointed when I told him the next morning, but we still went to the zoo and took his puppy dog. We still spent the day together, and everything was fine.

But it got me thinking...

I messed up.

We humans do that...quite a lot.

We are not God.

We are imperfect.

On Sunday night, the Confirmation class of one of my churches and I discussed one of the prayers of confession in our hymnals. One of the things that we don't do enough in general, I think, is confess our brokenness and ask for God's help.

We like to think we have everything under control in our lives. We like to think we are capable of holding it all together all by ourselves. We often even choose to believe that we have power to control not just our own lives, but the world around us, too.

We forget that we're not the Savior. We forget that we're not God.

That's not a good thing to forget. I'm glad that every once in a while, I get a reminder. I mess up good (or rather bad). And then I thank God for divine mercy and forgiveness. And I ask for help from the Holy Spirit to do better. And I remember that I can't do anything without God's help. Because I'm just a broken human being.

Say it with me...I am not God. I am not the Savior. But with the Savior's help, I can do whatever God asks of me. Thank you, God. Thank you, God. Amen.

My Hope Is Built

I know how the rest of the hymn goes...it's one of my favorites.
"My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus' blood and righteousness..."

It's true for me. The reality of Jesus is what my hope is built on.

Still, I've been thinking about hope a great deal recently, what with Christmas, Epiphany, and my friend and colleague Jim bringing musings on that subject for our reflection at a clergy meeting Thursday.

My hope is built on Jesus' sacrifice and his righteousness. But it is also built on God's determination and anger.

Hear me out. Jesus himself is proof of both.

In God's determination to draw all the world back to the divine heart, the Eternal Son came among us in the flesh to live, teach, die, and defeat the death our persistent sin has brought to us, so we might be raised to new life with him. In God's anger at evil and sin and their power, Christ was resurrected to initiate a kingdom in which Jesus' followers will continually fight evil, injustice, sin, and death's power as those forces continue to fight for control.

In the Trans Siberian Orchestra's popular song "Christmas Eve: Sarajevo," the first notes are from a melancholy cello plays, as the Rock Opera narrator explains, from amid the rubble of a war. As the lonely cello sings "God rest ye, merry gentlemen, let nothing you dismay," in booms angry guitars, beating drums, and loud keyboards shouting "Sweet, silver bells" and echoing the cello's "God rest ye...". In God's determination, Christ demands his way into the world to take it over and bring justice and righteounsenss.

In Mel Gibson's movie The Passion of the Christ, I love the Resurrection scene. Jesus looks angry to me. On his face seems to be written: I'm back. And I'm not going to let sin and death have its way anymore. Satan is finished.

God is angry at sin, evil, injustice, death, and their power over us and the world. And God is determined not to let them have the last word. Christ's life, righteousness, sacrifice, and resurrection are proof, at least to me, that God's word is the last word. It will be a word of life and peace for the world.

Until then, God is still angry and determined enough to lead Christ's followers to fight the sin and evil still seeking control in this world.

On this last word of life and goodness and God's determination to have it...on God's anger at evil and death and God's power to defeat it through Christ's resurrection...my hope is built.