Healing, through Sea Creatures

I was just thinking about after my dad died, if I could pinpoint the time when the grief started to lift a bit and I started to feel like myself again. I didn't think I could, but it turns out that I know exactly when it was. It was during a trip to a cabin in Michigan for Spring Break. Michigan, not such a spring-breaky place, but I went with good friends and my boyfriend at the time (husband now) and we did pretty much nothing for a week.

I say nothing, but I guess we did stuff. We walked in the snow. We ate crazy-ass thrown together meals, and we went to a brewery. We played cuthroat euchre. We laughed a lot. And when we left, I felt a little bit like the fog was lifting. When we got back, I said to my supervising pastor for my field work, "guess what. I'm out of heavy grief." And he hugged me like he knew exactly what I meant and said something like, "congratulations" in a way that wasn't sarcastic at all...just that he had been there and was glad I was through it.

And here I am again, after grieving the loss of this church and all that goes with it, and I can pinpoint again when I started to feel better. It was at the Georgia Aquarium, last week.

This trip was a consolation prize from my family to my family, mostly because our air conditioning decided to break during the hottest week of the summer. Also because we were supposed to go to a cabin that I had grand plans for...to be all healed and stuff again...but it didn't happen so we went to the aquarium.

It was so, so, beautiful. The beluga whales looked like they were dancing. Schools of rays, which happen to be my very favorite sea creature, swam over our heads...literally a hundred of them together. The sea lions played and the otters decided to come check us out, which my baby son laughed at.

It was also not four thousand degrees in there, which was a big relief in and of itself. We stayed there for no less than eight hours, and then we went home, and the next day (I'll omit the part about how everybody cranked around since the house was still hot as hell) I felt a little bit better. The day after that I felt healed, or on my way.

I guess what mostly both experiences were all about was getting out of where we live for a while. Friends and sea creatures and beer and red velvet cake help, but I think it's mostly just being somewhere other enough to forget yourself and your house and all the stuff that waits there for you to fix it or do it or change it.

Grief is weird, but I'm learning all the time. And if you get a chance, go to the Georgia Aquarium, damning the cost, because it is worth it, and more than worth it. No, they do not pay me to say stuff like that, but they should.

August and everything after

How much do I love that Counting Crows album? Everybody who was in college in the 90s must love it...I think you were issued it upon entrance. But it's sort of how things are going. I have eight minutes left of Elmo so I must type fast.

I didn't know that I would miss working so much only a week after I've been done. I miss preparing for Sundays although I complain about it almost every Sunday...I miss writing a sermon and showing up to preach. Ugh. As I've already discovered several times in my life, grief sucks.

Things are going better with my kids though, at least for the moment. I think I'm out of crisis mode and on to the working on grief mode. I'm finding some productive things to do with my "learning experience" to help other developers/redevelopers not make the same mistakes, or at least, make them in an educated manner or something. So I'm not so snappy at them, and it helps that my daughter is transitioning from three to four, and is (oh, please God!) on the better side of things for a while, not protesting everything, not so, erm, SCREAMY. But we all do better when I'm not anxious and edgy, of course.

So I'm in the process of figuring out how to fill my days. I'm doing some worship consulting, which I love, I'm supply preaching some, I'm going to crunchy-mama playgroups as much as possible. It's still suffocatingly hot here, even more so than usual, but we're managing.

Whoops, Elmo is up, so I will return to blog another day!

And then there was the picnic....

We had a church picnic to basically say goodbye to everybody. Well, it was good, because it reminded me why the church needed to close, and it was bad, because it reminded me of all the other times I've felt like this.

First of all, we went to a shelter for the picnic that a member had reserved. He said it had a grill by it....no grill, of course, when we got there. Nobody else got there until at least 15 minutes late and I had to pick up buns and burgers because what my church really should have been called was Church of the "Somebody else will do it."

Finally, the families came, and we went to a different picnic shelter. Some craziness with the grill happened, and the charcoal heated slowly, and someone had to go get a hibachi at the dollar store, but then it heated up and we ate together.

And I'll get right to it....I'm bitter because nobody got me anything.

I got cards for my assistant, our musician, and our child care person, plus small gifts. I got nothing. And I'll tell you...this is mostly about me but not all. I'm hurt because when a pastor leaves, even if the church closes with her, I think that at least a card would be nice. I didn't realize how much I wanted to have something to remember the congregation by until nobody came forward with anything. And it really, really hurt.

But it confirmed for me (and perhaps this is the gift?) that we are doing the completely and totally right thing by closing the church. No evil spirit still exists, just indifference. And that is just as bad.

Still pondering all this and praying for it not to fester, but to become a lesson for me.

Last Sunday

July 23, 2006, was my last Sunday at my church, and as it turned out, the last day that the church existed. I didn't mean for it to happen that way, but that's how it turned out (see the post before this for details). I was very sad yesterday. I'm clearly grieving...I'm terribly cranky with my kids and I feel depressed and like I want to cry at everything, and I'm re-evaluating everything right now.

It was a good last worship service. I used a plan for "closing of a church" that was lovely and appropriate, and we confirmed a boy who has gone through most of the classes. He read his own statement of faith that he wrote, at age 13, and it ended "God is with us in the chaos and craziness of this world." How beautiful and how much I needed to hear those words!

We sang "A Mighty Fortress is our God," and our theme song of late, "Soon and Very Soon." We also sang, as my own private joke with myself, a song that the people in my last post wanted to sing every single Sunday and got really really irritated when I suggested that maybe not EVERY single Sunday we should sing the same hymn. So I threw it in there just to give myself (and my awesome musician) a laugh.

I will miss worship so much. Our worship, which I created, was the first one that I've actually enjoyed going to except for maybe at camp. I loved our music, sort of a gospel/traditional Lutheran hybrid, and I loved our liturgy, which I drew from all kinds of sources. I will miss celebrating communion and I'll miss preaching. I'll miss giving bread and wine to little kids. I'll miss my musician terribly...he was so wonderful and had just started bringing his partner to worship with us, as he finally felt comfortable enough to do that.

Mostly, I'll miss being a pastor. This was the first place that I actually felt like the pastor. People are always surprised when I say, no, I really AM the pastor, not the youth pastor, not the associate pastor, but THE pastor. And there I really felt it.

I know I'm supposed to be a pastor...that's never really been in dispute in my mind...but here's what's changed. Instead of seeing each call as a destination, now I think I've been enough places to say to God "What's up next?" instead of just "what am I going to DO?" It's seeing each call as a stop on the journey instead of seeing each call as a destination, forever. And that is good. I may try transition ministry next, where I will go in between permanent pastors and do what needs to be done in the middle, good or bad. But I don't see it as forever anymore, and that feels really good, like I have more time in my life instead of less.

To sum up, I am cutting a tooth. I'm 31 years old, and I'm teething along with my 9 month old! But what's coming through is my first wisdom tooth. About time, I'd say!

I wanted to share how we ended worship on Sunday. Simply, and with tears in my eyes although knowing it was for the best:
"May the Lord bless you and keep you.
May the Lord's face shine on you and be gracious to you
May the Lord look upon you with favor
and give you peace."
Amen.

Spiritual warfare (and stuff)

A few years ago...okay, let's say 15 years ago...I read a book by Frank Peretti called "This Present Darkness." It was sort of THE Christian book to read at the time, sort of like the Left Behind series were recently. It was about spiritual warfare, the theory that angels and demons are battling it out slightly over our heads, with us involved in the battle in some ways. The things that happen, fights, accusations, averting danger, could be attributed to angels and demons. At the time, I just thought it was kind of interesting...the book was riveting in that beach-book way...and I though it was kind of an allegory or something.

Not really anymore. Three years ago almost to the day, my little church had a meeting about their future. I had only been there six months and was already about to be kicked out, or leave, due to crazy phone calls, accusations, and just plain me not doing what they told me to do. The meeting could be described, using Bible langage, as a "pit of snakes" (brood of vipers in the King James translation) with people hissing, anger all around, and none of it really even about me or justified. Afterwards, I called a friend of mine who spent 30 years in Singapore as a missionary. "Dude," I said, "I think we need an exorcism."

He explained to me that people could not have demons cast out of them if they were not willing, but what I could do was to claim a building for Jesus Christ. I could walk the building, praying that anything not of Jesus would be bound and cast out. So I did. I walked it before a meeting with one of the women who was the main "viper." And when she came in, I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I felt "electrified" in some way...and then the thunderstorm started. When the woman came in, she seemed physically uncomfortable and sat as far away as she could from me in my small office. When I told her that she could not continue to make calls behind my back to stir up trouble and still be a part of this church, a HUGE clap of thunder sounded, and at that, she ran out of the church, and literally never came back.

Today, I was expecting a fight from the remaining vipers. We were having a meeting to vote on closing the church, a move that I was recommending as it had become obvious over the past year or so that despite many changes, a spirit of unhealthiness remained...that same spirit that had been there several years before.

So this is what I did. I walked the building. I prayed at the entryway, along the aisle, over the altar, along the chairs and the baptismal font. I laid my hands on the chairs of the people who I expected to cause trouble and bound and cast out anything not of Jesus in His name.

When church started, they were not there. They did not come to worship or the meeting, for the first time in three and a half years, barring hospitalizations. We had a lovely, healthy, if a bit sad, meeting, voting to close the church until a full-time pastor could be found for the area, with a brand new start. People expressed their grief, and also their knowledge that this was what needed to happen. They expressed their hope, as did I, that this would lead to better things in the future. We will end in a few weeks with a closing worship and picnic, with talk of meeting once a month for Bible study to stay in touch.

I could not have asked for a better ending to such a conflicted, twisted, situation. I can only imagine that the spirit that had kept hounding us was driven out, if only for the day, so that we could talk and grieve and make plans for something new, with a new, right, spirit.

"Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.
Cast me not away from your presence, O Lord, take not your Holy Spirit from me.
Restore to me the joy of your salvation and renew a right spirit within me."

Before and after

I lost weight, a lot of weight, a few years ago, and I wanted to keep my before and after pics in a place where I can see them often. Above is "Before" in fall of 2003 with my sweet little girl. I had already lost 50 lbs of pregnancy weight in that picture!!!!!!

The next pic is my "after," one year later, with the same little pea, and 45 pounds lighter. Thanks be to God!

Baptism

My daughter is obsessed with all things baptism. And to make things worse, my son was baptized on Sunday by my dear chickpastor friend and now it is clearly just the only thing that we need to talk about. Krispy Kreme donuts are "baptized" in icing. All the Care Bears must receive their baptism before they go to church (??). And we must read the Jordan River story every night before bed.

She did this with communion too. I mean, sure, she's got two parents who are pastors, and it's very normal, but I'm a little afraid that she's going to find one of those churches where they'll baptize you more than once and just jump right in.

Not that that's a necessarily bad thing. I mean, didn't the people of Jesus' time get baptized more than once? for repentance? or just as a ritual bath? So my baby girl isn't so out of place. The weird thing is that she really seems to understand that it's an important thing, and it means loving God and pleasing God.

She was baptized as an infant. I believe in infant baptism, strongly, theologically and everything else. Sure. But now I'm seeing it lived out. We really don't do much in the form of religious instruction with her....she's rarely been to a Sunday school and it's not like we sit down with her and fill her brain full of religious gunk (or funk, as I typo'd first!). But somehow, her baptism sunk in! You would think this wouldn't be so hard for me to believe, but it is. That her baptism when she was six months old changed her forever into a person of God is hard to believe, but I see it happening in front of my eyes, every day. You may believe it or you may not, but it is true. My girl is a wild child of God.

RGBP's Friday Five....zzzzzzzzzz

I just want to preface this by saying that I have a baby and a preschooler....

1. In what kind of environment do you sleep best? (e.g. amount of light and noise, temperature, number of pillows, breathe-right strip, sleeping in the buff, etc.)
ANY. I can now fall asleep anywhere, anytime. I used to be so picky, in the old days.

2. How much sleep do you need to feel consistently well-rested?
Eight hours, baby.
How much can you get by on?
I need four hours to function, but can do okay on six.
What are the consequences when you don't get enough?
Cursing, hallucinations, excessive crying. You think I'm kidding.

3. Night owl or morning person?
Morning, strangely.

4. Favorite cure for insomnia
Have a baby.

5. To snooze or not to snooze? Why or why not?
I say if you can get away with it, snooze all day long! Hell, why not just dedicate a whole day to sleep? A national holiday!

Storytelling God

My last post seems very flip, but it's how I deal with death. I know it's how I deal with death...it got all CPE'd out of me (that's clinical pastoral education, for those of you who haven't had....ahem...the pleasure...). I suck it up and make jokes and forget to feel that although yes, Granddaddy died at a ripe old age, and yes, he was suffering, that I do miss him and I will miss him. He was the most interesting person I may have ever met. He was also the most generous person I've ever met, with his time and with his money. I never went to his house without receiving my "gas money," a rolled up $20, even after I had a job and was married with a family.

And so when I prayed at his funeral, I talked about generosity, and I prayed to the "storytelling God." I thought Granddaddy might like that, because his stories, like Jesus' parables, were sometimes long and rambly but always had a point, even if it was just to take care of your washing machine or else you'll pay more in the end.

Just to put a capper on my emotional week here, my son is being baptized this Sunday. He is eight months old and absolutely one of the most joyful people I've ever met, already. I have a feeling that I'm going to cry, maybe a lot.

The text for Sunday is the mustard seed...that the kingdom of God is like a mustard seed, that starts out tiny but takes over the rest of the plants and emits a pungeant smell. Like a baby? I think so. We'll start with that.

Thanks to all of you who have shopped CHICKPASTOR: THE STORE! I am anxiously awaiting my fabulous fashion statement too. Peace.

"Dead GRANDFATHER?"

Tonight I'm ripping off possibly the funniest high school movie EVER (arguably, of course), Ferris Bueller's Day Off. They pretend that his girlfriend's grandmother dies to get her out of school for the day off, if you've been living in a hole and haven't seen it, and the principal is suspicious. "Dead grandmother?" he says...but through the miracle of 80s technology they convince him that it's legit, and he lets her out of school.

Something similar is happening in my world...my grandfather is about to die and so much to my husband's delight (and I admit, I'm not un-pleased about the timing) we will probably miss our synod assembly. If you've ever been to one or something similar, you know that even if they're good (which ours generally are) they're still about as fun as poking yourself in the eye with a knitting needle, which I bring to the assemblies ostensibly to knit but also just in case....

Anyway, my grandfather is dying. He's 92 and he always told us he would go at 93, and he's almost there. My daughter's been saying funny stuff like "I'll miss greatgrandfather when he's in heaven. Jesus, make him feel better and make him stop dying!" And that's kind of what we're praying, that he would go ahead and go. He's told all of us he's ready, but somehow he can't quite let go, although his body is clearly shutting down. It's like when I kept trying to go into labor with my son...you just can't go until your body is ready, no matter what people say.

So we are in a holding pattern but mostly just praying that he would be ready, and just go, just truly pass away.

THE STORE!

Yes, I am shamelessly ripping off Mel Brooks' Spaceballs: The Movie. The movie itself was ripping off Star Wars, so that's why I don't feel bad about it. At the end there was a little man (Mel Brooks on his knees) playing the character of "Yogurt" (get it?) and he was all about the merchandising..."Spaceballs: the toilet paper!" and "Spaceballs: the light-up pen!"

Okay, it's silly, but I've now created some merchandising of my own: CHICKPASTOR: the store! It's really too easy to do, and I had some fun as well as wasted a perfectly good (although deathly hot) Sunday afternoon. So if you want to fork over for CHICKPASTOR: THE T-SHIRT! or THE HOODIE! or even THE MESSENGER BAG! feel free.

Quitters never win...

So, I quit my job on Sunday.

I've been waiting a while to write about it, mostly because it's been a bit of a crazy week because of this very thing, quitting my job. If you're a pastor, and you quit your job, you're supposed to talk about by saying you're "resigning your call" or something like that, but let's face it, it's quitting a job. But it's also like breaking up with a boyfriend.

In my case, it's like when you say to someone "we need to talk," and they know what's coming and that it's pretty much inevitable, but still are in denial a bit, and so then when you tell them, they look shocked and start bringing up all kinds of dumb stuff like, "but we had tickets for Billy Joel!" and "what about our goldfish that we bought?" and "are you going to give me back my black t-shirt?" when all you want to do is say "screw all that, this isn't working!"

Or something like that.

Wallyworld, continued

Feel free to peruse the comments below, and also here to see some of what we think about WM.

I will sum up:
Most people who responded both to this poll and to the thread in the link above try not to shop at WM, if they do at all. They do this for several main reasons:
1. Labor practices--paying employees not much and
2. WM's questionable practice of driving down prices by pressuring suppliers
3. Taking over land in spite of people's protests that they don't want one
4. "Just too big/gross/dirty"

I need to keep thinking about this, but in the meantime I'm going to err on the side of caution and shop at the stores that are given good ratings at www.buyblue.org (thanks, Songbird!).

Do you shop at Wal-Mart?

Please leave your answer as a comment, and also why or why not.

This comes from an ongoing conversation I'm having with several people...my mom, my husband, a couple of friends. I'd love to know everybody's responses and then I'll post the results once I see that a few people have responded. Thanks.

Festivals!!!!

I love a good festival. I'm currently (okay, not at the moment, but YKWIM) attending the festival of homiletics. There aren't any funnel cakes but other than that it's a great time. Last night one of the members of Sweet Honey in the Rock whose name escapes me led the assembly in singing their "Chant" and "We are the Ones" among others. I don't know how she got us to sound like that, but it was definitely a sort of heavenly experience to sing with her. I miss singing in a choir so much...I'm not great, but I miss hearing my voice sound better when I was next to a fabulous mezzo soprano (as in seminary) and hearing it blend.

The preaching festival also brought my friends!!!!! I loooooove my chickpastor friends!!!! In fact, they just called. Kids so limit our hanging-out-ness but every single time I always want to use the phrase lifeblood or some such to describe how it is to be with people who totally get me and are willing to forgive whatever quirkiness that I might be displaying on that day, and who can complain about our churches with the understanding that none of us would want to be doing anything else when it came down to it.

And tomorrow is the festival to end all festivals....the festival in our small town. It's a "taste of" in the manner of "taste of''s" but the difference is that our little suburb has fabulous food and we can sample it all tomorrow night for 50 cents a taste. My husband compares it to Thanksgiving or Christmas, and I am not lying.

Shoe Shopping....

Did anybody see the Scrubs where Elliott and Carla totally made the men not pay any attention to what they were saying by using the code phrase "strappy sandals?" If the guys thought the women were talking about shoe shopping, they took a mental vacation for a few minutes, and were only brought back by the phrase "lace bra" or some such.

I went shoe shopping today and I wonder why it is that I can find it a great way to kill a few (kid-less) hours, meditative even. I'm looking for the perfect summer shoe, and I have next to no $$ to spend. Even if I did, I'm so cheap that it still takes me forever to decide.

Do I buy the wedges with cork soles that are trendy, but not that comfortable? Do I go for the earthy mama sandals that aren't as cool but will make my feet feel happy in the jillion degree heat this summer? What does it mean that every single shoe I look at was made by a person working for pennies in a 2/3 world country? Do I still buy shoes? Where do I buy them if I can't afford the ones that were made fairly?

These, the questions, on my day off.

Mother's Day

So, I'm starting to write my sermon about mother's day and Jesus is the vine and we are the branches. And as I was doing some research about the origins of mother's day it came to me that mother's day is all about guilt. I mean, it's not supposed to be, but that really is how it started, with a daughter feeling guilty about not doing enough for her mother, blah blah blah, so she started a letter-writing campaign to make mother's day an official holiday.

It seems to me that there were some major issues there. I mentioned that it was mother's day to a friend of mine and his response was the usual, "crap, now I have to add 'go buy a card' to my list of stuff to do." I'm sure his mom will really appreciate it...

What I'm working on with my sermon is maybe this is how we are with God. We get all bent out of shape about what we need to DO for God that we forget that we can just BE in God. Remain in God's love, so to speak, as part of the vine.

I won't get into this in my sermon, but I have a secret to tell you...I have a placenta in my freezer. It's from my son's birth, and it was smuggled out of the hospital by some rule-breaking nurses and my grossed-out husband. We're going to plant it under my dogwood tree, eventually, and it was very important for me to have it this time as I never even saw my daughter's because of her surgical birth and how it was done. It's proof to me that I was connected...that my son is mine and always will be...as much as his little bellybutton says.

And while he was growing from the placenta, he didn't have to "try." He didn't have to do anything to grow, he just had to remain connected, so to speak. Wow, now I almost wish I could talk about placentas in my sermon but it would freak them out way more than I usually do.

I'll work it in somehow, the connection between moms and kiddos, God and us. It's not one to force, and it's not something that buying a card once a year is going to make stronger or not. It simply is. And there we remain, in the love of God, as we've started praying with M, "mother of us all."

So M has what I thought was a totally dorky book called "God gave us you." And I was reading it to her and I suddenly GOT it...it's not about the kid feeling special or whatever because God gave them to us...it's about God giving this particular kid to us. Or to me, in fact, which is why it hit me. I have been really irritated with her lately and frankly not wanting to be around her at all. I try to but she's just sort of insufferable in the way that three year olds are I guess, and it is SO hard to be patient and I just suck at it, and blame her a lot, more than I should probably. Anyway, we were reading the book and I just got tears in my eyes thinking that maybe God gave this particular kid to ME for a reason. I probably prayed for patience at some point or generosity or something like that and now I get to practice it on a daily, hourly...let's just say, all the f-ing time.

Because God gave me her. Because God gave me her. If you read it to your kids, you'll see what I mean.

False starts

I am so lame...can' t I figure out how to blog? I used to be good at this stuff.

Okay, now I think I finally figured it out. This may well be another false start, but I really hope not. At right is my sweet (blurry) baby.

I had such a nice afternoon! Actually, this whole week has been packed-full (by me) of all kinds of "girl time." As in, friends who are women, actual, real friends, who I can talk to and hang out with and have lunch with and everything. I forget how much that women just rock. I had a giddy late-night (8 p.m.!!!!) coffee and chocolate with some moms, then saw a friend from sem yesterday which is like, lifeblood, and then today my new good mama friend brought her daughter over to shriek and play and laugh a LOT with my daughter. Hilarious in only the way that little girlies can be, and so good to just sit and watch and talk.

It's like a big sigh of relief week after this winter/spring of depression and sickness. I'm sure this has TONS to do with the fact that I'm running again, really regularly. I do need to run, I think, every other day, or it starts to get to me. Not that I always get to go every other day but once it gets in my blood again I gotta do it or else I get all twitchy and yell and stuff.

So, although I'm sure this has been said in about a million ways since the beginning of time, since even the cavewomen probably had some grunting way to express girltalk, I am so grateful for the company of women.

Please, please, let this blogging stick! I need it too.

Typical of my life, I guess, I had started and then deleted this blog, and then had to recover it...anyway, it all sounds like my early years of trying to figure out how to make a webpage and we just don't want to rehash that. So hopefully now I'm on to actual blogging.