Deadlines

I don't like deadlines.

However, they do seem to increase my productivity. ~sigh~

I've been so distracted since moving home. It feels as though my heart and my head are in two different places, not connected. It's difficult to concentrate on any one thing and feel as though I'm making progress or a contribution.

I've made new friends at work, and despite not liking what I do, I am glad for the income. I'm so very happy to be with part of my family again, getting and giving hugs is something that you just can't appreciate enough. Sharing meals and daily conversation is a true treasure.

However, I am still a bit at sea. Two people this week have asked me what I plan to do once I'm done with my studies. For the last three years I've answered that I'm trying to leave the answer to that question open, as I'm waiting for God's leading on it. Well, I have been back in Texas for nearly a year now, and still haven't found a place to serve the church again. It's not coming easy, and it's clear that the denomination doesn't really need me right now. It's not harsh, mind you, it's just becoming clear that returning to the local church isn't quite what God has in mind. So I'm looking more seriously at teaching, either undergraduates (like an Intro to World Religions course), perhaps at a church related college, or at the seminary level. I often think about the Bible College in Cambodia, and the devoted students there, whose only desire was to be trained so they could return to their home villages and share Christ with the people there.

So if I'm going to seriously consider teaching, I have to make it through my qualifying examinations, the first of which comes up in early May. It's a daunting task, one that I'm not quite sure I'm up to as yet. That is the deadline which is looming at the moment, preparing for the exam. So much reading, so much information. I don't know how I will manage.

Through it all, I have been working on my prayer life, connecting scripture and prayer. It often feels like a walk down a long dusty road, with no clear idea of the destination. My hope is that by following in the footsteps of the missionaries I have studied, I will be able to carry through. Single female missionaries in the late 1890s and early 1900s had to have a very strong spirituality to survive on the mission field. Leaving home then often meant a long sea voyage with little prospect of ever returning home, with limited communication through letters. Their strong sense of being guided by the Spirit is what sustains me and gives me hope that my study of mission today is a needed gift to the church, and will eventually be fruitful.

So here's to deadlines: may I not die of this one, and live to see the next! :-)

No simple villain, no simple hero

Today I listened to On Being on NPR. On Being

I had to work. The past few years "I had to work" on Palm Sunday meant at the church, celebrating the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem with friends and family at various congregations. A glorious Sunday morning with every sort of palm in central Houston. A magnificent cathedral by the sea, filled with children waving deep green palms. A snowy morning following a donkey down Main Street in a New England town. As a clergywoman or a church staff member, Palm Sunday means the culmination of Lent, the busiest week of the church year. Rousing hymns, smiling children. Solemn scripture readings, humbling foot washings. Stripping all color and symbols from the sanctuary. Lighting the first candle in the dawn's light, bringing riotous colors of blossoms into the santuary. Watching the sun come up over the ocean, celebrating communion, singing hallelujahs again.

But this year I don't work in a church. I am still a clergywoman. But I no longer have a parish to care for or worship services to plan. The congregation my family attends has welcomed me and given me a place to teach, for which I am deeply grateful. However, for an income I depend upon my job in retail.

Fortunately I don't work on the sales side of retail. I couldn't do it, I can't sell anybody anything. I think the consumer culture we live in, which mainly defines us by what and how we consume, is destroying our souls. It is ironic that I depend upon the very culture I critique for an income. It is a dilemma for me that as I place signs to draw people toward certain merchandise, I depend upon those people spending their money - consuming - in order that I can live. It is not easy for me to do this job with integrity. I have tried not to think about it too much. My theology school friends have expressed thanks when I do reflect on my experience.

I was not alone in the store this morning. It takes an astounding number of people to open the retail world - all of whom had to work rather than worship this morning. Grocery stores, clothing stores, restaurants, gas stations. In order for us to keep moving, keep eating, keep driving, keep consuming, people must work rather than worship.

The nature of my work means that I can listen to radio programs with one earplug (gotta keep the other ear open for intercom announcements and such). This morning I caught Krista Tippett's On Being. Her program today is Exodus, Cargo of Hidden Stories with Avivah Zornberg. I encourage you to give it a listen.

Zornberg discussed how traditional Jewish midrash interpretation views the story of the Passover as a complicated story. There are no simple villains, no simple heroes. Moses is a reluctant leader. When the scripture talks about his "slow speech" it is "heavy", and in the Hebrew that is the same word used for Pharoah's heart...heavy. The Israelites doubt who God is, whether or not God will provide and deliver.

It is a complicated story, and through listening I found myself hearing the Spirit move in my heart for the first time in a very long time. I have spent countless hours in prayer, waiting, hoping, raging, crying. How I have needed to know the Spirit had not abandoned me.

Through this program, as I moved through the twilight of early morning retail (they don't turn on all the lights for us), I began to know again the assurance of God. Prayers were offered afresh, for those who grieve, for those who struggle to understand, for those who need work, for the underemployed, for those who work long hours for little pay, for those who are weary in body and spirit, for students and teachers, for parents and children. And today, those prayers were offered with renewed faith, that even a complicated person like myself - not simply good or bad, just myself - could offer prayers in faith and ask for God to be moved in compassion.

Springtime

It is mid-April, which means spring is coming to a close here in coastal Texas. Mary Grace and I have been planting. I put in three tomato plants at the back of the house, where an overgrown Indian hawthorne used to be. Took a full morning to dig it out, and I had to use the big pickaxe to get it done, but it was well worth it. We already have tomatoes growing on the vines!

I also put in a Don Juan climbing rose bush. It's very small still, but produced two blossoms within its first month. Fragrant burgundy flowers, such a joy.

Mary Grace put in a big garden with help from her grandpa. He tilled up a patch out in the back yard, and she's put in tomatoes, cucumbers, strawberries, eggplant, lettuce, squash, carrots and beans. It's not big, just a few of each of those, but it looks great. James' fig tree already has a tiny fig on it as well.

I have some herbs to put in a big pot, and planted a small rosemary just outside my meditation garden. It will get to be a big shrub if I take good care of it.

I have lots of other gardening plans, but can only do a little bit at a time. The yard and flowerbeds have such promise, and my dreams for them are quite big. However, there is only so much time in a day, and only so much money to fill out those dreams. So the garden requires that I exercise patience. Patience when I come out to water and want to get to working in it, but know that my priorities must lie elsewhere.

Patience seems to be a lesson I have to learn over and over in my life. I'm waiting to hear back from a friend today. An old dear friend who even after years and years still knows me very well, and whose advice I treasure. But my friend doesn't use the computer the way I do, and so doesn't answer email or use Facebook for the very-nearly-instant-response that I've come to expect with everything else in life.

As I recall, I preached on this very topic a few years ago. Patience. Don't rush, don't be in a hurry, be patient and listen for the nudging of the Spirit.

And here I am, not listening or watching for the Spirit, but checking my phone and computer every five minutes. Silly! The discussion goes round and round in my mind - be patient, am I learning that AGAIN? Still? Be patient. Things will work out, it's worth the wait. Good things come to those who wait. Those who wait will be lifted up.

And then I go check again.

Why is patience such a hard lesson to learn?

Perhaps I should go look at the gardenia buds, and how they are taking their sweet time to unfurl. Perhaps I should go look at the tiny green tomatoes. Take a lesson from nature and her slow unfolding of the beauty and blessings of waiting for the right season. In time, I will know the certainty of the nudging of the Spirit again.

Catch and Release

While it may have been weeks and weeks ago that I last blogged, the thoughts of that post have not been far from my mind. I decided to view it through a catch and release framework.

You see, I'm a master of self-judgment. Thinking about friendships that I'd let go or a project that never seemed to get finished, those are the kinds of things that I can mentally beat myself up over - and over - and over! I'm good at THAT.

I thought that perhaps most people have this internal self-critical dialogue going and we just don't talk about it. But then I realized that an acquaintance of mine really doesn't have that internal self-critic going at all. For maybe a few minutes, but then she's right back on the blame everybody else bandwagon! It's never her fault, she is always innocent. She tries her best at everything and doesn't hold herself liable for anything. She's right. Even when I can clearly see that she's NOT right, she firmly believes that she is. It can be difficult to have conversations with this person, because it's hard to be honest with someone who is just so incredibly selfish and spoiled.

So that led me to think about the extremes and a middle ground, a place of balance. If my inner self-critic voice is the loudest voice, that is just as much of an extreme as the selfish voice. Where is the middle ground? The catch and release framework is helping me to find my place of balance and peace, in the middle ground between selfishness and self-critique.

When I think about friendships that I've let go, the inner critic says that I've been a lousy friend. So I caught those thoughts and examined them for what has really happened. Sometimes, the friendships were one way. The responsibility for making contact, doing the traveling to meet up, or providing emotional support were imbalanced. A friendship should be give and take over time, not one sided over time. So in those cases, I decided to release the critical voice and let it go. It was time to let those imbalanced friendships go. Sometimes the friendships just weren't strong enough to last. And it's okay.

When I think about my ongoing office project (yeah, that's right, it's still a work in progress) I have been much easier on myself. Writing about it here and in my journal has helped me to see my procrastination and avoidance of office work for what it is - and not as a failure on my part in housekeeping 101. When I had a staff position at a church and a fabulous office manager, I had a great filing system. My fabulous office manager set it up for me! It's not easy for me to do the filing when it's overwhelming. I've caught up the inner critic, examined it for what it is, and released it. No surprise that the office project is coming along, bit by bit. It's a working space now, with my priorities up front where I can reach them (books and binders). Those old records and files? They can wait.

Applying catch and release to my vocation - that is the next step. I don't quite understand what it is that God has called me to do, what shape that will take or how it will play out. It was much easier when I was working on my masters leading to ordination - that path is quite clearly defined. The only question was "where". Now the questions are what, where, how, when? What will I be doing? Where will I do that? How will I support myself until then, and maybe even through it? When will this come to pass? I know those questions don't have answers yet, and I'm okay with that. But some days, trying to focus and study on my own, without my fellow students around me, without a church and clergy colleagues around me... some days it's just hard to hear God. Those days it feels a lot like a valley of dry bones.

So I catch and release, let go of the inner critic voice, and try to focus on the work in front of me again.

New Year, Past Reflections

When I moved back to my house, I began a project to organize and create a home office. We have a bedroom upstairs that has been called "the office" ever since we bought the house, but it hasn't been organized in years. No one can function in there.

We had renters in the house for a while when we lived in Galveston. They didn't treat the house kindly. When we discovered that they had moved out it was quite a shock. Electric box red tagged (we obviously weren't the only ones not getting paid) and weeds as high as four feet tall in the back garden. Stains all over the carpets. Black permanent marker on some walls. Red marker on others. Black ink pen on the walls in Celia's room. James was beyond himself.

He moved back in and started the long slow recovery process. Our back garden still doesn't have the grass as lush and thick as it once was. It's an ongoing battle against weeds. A different type of grass has invaded and chokes out the Augustine, but we keep trying.

We repainted Celia's room the same color, her favorite light blue. Later we repainted Mary Grace's room - one wall an apple green and the other two a tropical turquoise, with a black desk and dresser in two shades of purple. I matched the original paint in their bathroom and repainted it as well. Most of the rest of the house is the original builder's off-white, and does need repainting, but we don't have the funds for that big of a job quite yet.

James and I decided to rent a carpet cleaner in the coming months and try to clean up the carpets ourselves. We'll see how that goes!

But the office. ~sigh~ Packing up and moving out of the Galveston house was difficult. We were in a tough spot financially and emotionally. I think I must have let the office go while settling into my job there, and not filed much or even tried to organize things, leaving them in the moving boxes. And back they went in their moving boxes. Add to those the boxes from my office when I left the Galveston job, and the boxes from the apartment there. Add to those the papers from James' office when he left two jobs. Add to those all the (endless it seems) papers that arrive in our mail box - bills, mortgage information, insurance information, tax papers. I didn't make things any easier adding another filing cabinet from Boston and more boxes of personal papers.

So last June I found myself starting in on a project that turned into a massive project. Sorting and filing. Shredding and pitching.

Here I sit in January, still working on things. I've moved furniture around a few times, broken a bookshelf (note to self: take books out first next time) and made some progress. James and the girls have all helped at one point or another. But the project is Not Yet Done. I really REALLY want this project to be done soon. (is that a resolution?)

In clearing things out, I have found lots of old interesting stuff. One is a coaster with a pretty pink flower painted on it, with a bright green center. It is surrounded by screen names - a group of women who were my trusted confidantes some years ago. Witmoat - who I met for lunch in Houston one sunny afternoon. Zoey, Lisbet - who came to have dinner with me in Galveston. Holly, Sorcha. Em, Torchy, JL, Daednu, Bethany and Waterbaby. And Sapph, who made the coasters for us all. Reading their names made me realize how many friends I have had over the years... and that I have not always been a good friend. Thoughts of so many friends have been occupying a corner of my mind for a couple days now, which is a blog for another day.

New year, past reflections. Time to put hands to the work of sorting, filing, assessing, and making plans to move forward.