Keeping a Holy Lent, Day 24: Read Psalm 121

During a staff meeting, as my time at my previous ministry was coming to a close, one of the staff members said to me with a certain level of astonishment, “You are bullet proof.” His observation came as quite a shock to me, because I am decidedly not and I most certainly didn’t feel so at the time. Indeed, I felt a significant level of stress and, as I look back from a fairly small separation of time and geography, pain at the things that were happening to and around me.

 There were, and perhaps still are, times that I felt like a total failure. Things were less than good at work and I had internalized a lot of the particular issues and claimed a disproportionate number of those issues for myself; I felt overwhelmed by the endless tasks at hand; I was looking for a new job; and I was in counseling for the first time in my life (certainly not a failure, but even for those of us who put stock in such things we can perceive it as a deficiency in our own being).

I did take joy in many things and tried to focus on those: my family, aspects of work that were still exciting and engaging to me like worship and worship planning, bible study, and visiting with people. Mostly though, I connected to and drew from the deep well I had been establishing through my spiritual practices and disciplines. So, right now, I connect with the words of poetry sung by the psalmist:

I lift up my eyes to the hills—

from where will my help come?

My help comes from the Lord,

who made heaven and earth.

He will not let your foot be moved;

he who keeps you will not slumber.

He who keeps Israel

will neither slumber nor sleep.

The Lord is your keeper;

the Lord is your shade at your right hand.

The sun shall not strike you by day,

nor the moon by night.

The Lord will keep you from all evil;

he will keep your life.

The Lord will keep

your going out and your coming in

from this time on and for evermore.

Not long ago, as a result of a video shared on Facebook, I got reacquainted with Bobby McFerrin – of “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” fame.  On his CD “Spirityouall” I found this beautiful, wonderful, full of grace and healing gem. (Song starts at 1:20)

As I listened to it the first time, tears welled up in my eyes and soon I found myself weeping…sitting in my new office, shoulders shaking, hands over my face, weeping.  A flood of tears releasing the pent up anger, pain, frustration…all the energy I had been using to protect myself and keep myself from being vulnerable melting away.

I’m leaning on your arm, yes indeed, Lord

Oh without your love I can’t make it

No I won’t make it, O Lord, no indeed, hmm

Now I’ve turned and I’m facing the light

And I’m living life with all my might

I know being near You is the best

Love God and your neighbor, be at rest

Shalom Y’all,

Owen

Keeping a Holy Lent, Day 22: Tell someone what you are grateful for…

I know, I skipped Day 21 – Ask someone for help. But, I haven’t done that one yet. I plan to do it. Indeed, I have an email that I am working on asking for help in my family’s process of moving. But, I don’t have everything I need for it just yet.

In the meantime, gratitude!

I am going to tell you that for which I am grateful, and it’s quite a list even if it is not exhaustive.

I am grateful…

For the sunshine today and the warmth that it provides

For the rain we have had here for the past couple days that it nourishes the earth

For the snow that I have experienced since being in Iowa, for its beauty and that it too nourishes the earth.

For a job

For the particular job I have and the joy and challenge and peace and stress and life it brings me

For new friends made over helping someone move and a few beers

For the fragrant aroma that hangs in the air after sautéing vegetables

For the smell of freshly washed clothes (and for change found in the seat of my car so I could finish)

For a place to live that serves me well

For dear friends (and I know that to begin to name specifics immediately gets one into trouble because one cannot name all the friends who have impacted their life, nonetheless there are particular people that I have been cognizant of recently and at the risk of leaving some out, I would like to name a few…) Wade and Diana and Emma, Aaron and LeAnn (and their sons), Dan and Felicia (and their family), Gerry, Lynn, Stephen and Jennifer (and their daughters), and for so many others who have shaped and supported me through so much

For colleagues in ministry and our dialogue and support of one another

For teachers and professors from whom I have learned so much

For my parents and the love – sometimes gentle and sometimes tough – they have shown…for my father and the sense of compassion he passed on to me…for my mother and the strength of will she shared with me

For my in-laws and their generous welcome of me into their family from the very first moments of my relationship with Lori

For music

For good stories

For games

For First Christian Church, South Bend and their nurture (and tolerance) of my creativity

For First Christian Church, Stillwater and their generosity that continues to support my family financially while we are in two places.

For Ankeny Christian Church and their openness to the Spirit of God, and their graciousness as my family is in two places.

I am so very grateful for my wife and my two boys and the bonds of love that strengthen and support me as we walk together on this journey of life, even from a distance at this moment

I know there is not anything profound in this list, but I am grateful for all this and more.

God of all times and places, help me to be grateful at all times and in all things. Amen.

Shalom Y’all,

Owen

Keeping a Holy Lent, Day 20: Check out morning and evening prayer (at dailyoffice.wordpress.com)

Did you ever wonder from where church bells came (or maybe even where they have gone)? They did, at one point, serve a purpose in the life of the church. Perhaps there are still churches that use them to signal something other than what time it is by playing a song followed by the number of chimes to match the hour. Church bells would sound with joy at the birth of a new child to alert the community of the new life among them. They would offer the deep, somber ringing to announce the death of one in the community. And they would toll to call people to prayer. 

They would ring in the morning. They would ring at noon. They would ring in the evening calling people to prayer wherever they were. Some would come to the church. Others would stop what they were doing – in the fields, or in their homes, or wherever they were – to join in prayer wherever they were: morning, noon, and evening.

It was a way of patterning the lives of the faithful around prayer. 

I remember a song I was taught as a child that reflected this pattern:

God answers prayer in the morning

God answers prayer at noon

God answers prayer in the evening

To keep your heart in tune.

My tradition, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), and other so-called “free church” traditions have often dismissed the pattern of daily offices as being rote. That is, the criticism goes, they are often done mechanically and without feeling or meaning. (Please note, this is not my criticism, but often what people say about such things as liturgy, prayer books, and patterned prayer.) Many times, however, the folk that I hear criticize such things as daily offices don’t really replace them with anything.  I used to be one of those people.

Then I read these words; I don’t even remember who wrote them – funny thing as they changed not only my perspective, but my behavior as well, “What patterns your life? What sets the rhythm of your day? Is it your schedule? Your job? Your children’s activities? Your to do list? Or is it God?”

Sure, these prayers can become rote and mechanical. There is no doubt that things we do over and over again can get tired and less than fulfilling. Yet, think about the way our days are patterned. There are many things we do that we don’t really think about doing. We just do them. Often we do them in the same order. Now, think about the ways that those things shape our lives. What they say about what is important to us. What they make important to us.

I decided that I would make prayers a part of what shaped me throughout the day.

Now, I confess there are days when it seems like more of an obligation than a joy. There are times when it becomes tired and mechanical. At the same time it is an opportunity for me to pray for my friends, my congregation, people who are struggling, strangers I have seen the day before, even myself, and about the tragedies and violence and vitriol in the world as well as the beauty, order, and wonder I find. More often than not I find peace in my prayers and in the silence, however brief, take solace in the Psalm, experience challenge in the scripture, and receive life from the practice. I miss it when I neglect it for a while. It is seldom irrelevant – most of the time I hear or read or ponder something I need. Ultimately, I credit the practice with rooting me in something much stronger and grander and more permanent than me.

Come and fill our hearts with your peace. You alone, O Lord, are holy. Come and fill our hearts with your peace. Be with us today, O God.

Shalom Y’all,

Owen

Keeping a Holy Lent, Day 19: Change one light in your house to a compact florescent.

It is fortunate that I have a landlord – or previous tenant – who was conscious about such things. All of the permanent bulbs in my apartment are CFL bulbs…including the ones in the bathroom.  I did, however, have a floor lamp in which there resided incandescent bulbs, so I was able to replace one.

Yay me!

Why replace one bulb, though? One bulb will not make a significant dent in a monthly electric bill – approximately $6 per year. One bulb will not change the lighting in a room significantly. One bulb doesn’t seem to make much of a difference. Why one bulb?

Well, Lent is also about making a start and for some, one bulb might be the beginning of becoming both energy and environmentally conscious. Or, it may simply be a step to rearranging finances and saving money. It is a small step, to be sure, but a step nonetheless.

At the same time, it might not be such a small step after all. Think about it multiplied by large numbers of people. CFL’s save around 75% of the energy from a regular bulb.  There are 114,800,000 households in the US. If every household replaced just 1 bulb, think about how much energy would be saved. That means fewer natural resources and less pollution as a result of our energy consumption. The environmental impact and the impact to our collective wallets is not so small.

In Bible Study last night we looked at Genesis 2. The first job the human being is given is to till and keep the earth (connected to Genesis 1 the command to have dominion – not domination – over all of creation). We are connected to the world in so many ways and it is our responsibility to till and keep it, to care for it.

God, help us to find ways large and small of being good caretakers of the world you have given us. Amen.

Shalom Y’all,

Owen

Keeping a Holy Lent, Day 18: Internet Diet

Well, I suppose there are a couple different ways one could take this discipline. It is possible to interpret these words as to have a whole diet of internet – i.e. consume the internet all day.  Somehow I don’t think that is what these two words mean in this context. My hunch is that these two words in this order mean to limit one’s intake of the internet today, which is what I had set out to do this morning.

I started out thinking that all I would do today would be to look at email and respond to those things which needed my immediate attention. After all, with my day-off being Monday, this is my first day in the office.

I was not particularly successful.

I would open an email and “Squirrel!” I would see something that I ‘needed’ to learn more about and explore. Finally, I would remember, “Oh yeah! I am supposed to be dieting from the internet today.”  I have been successful, however, at limiting my social media intake (until I post this on my blog and link to it on Facebook). I did a fabulous job of ignoring the constant buzzing of my phone alerting me that someone had just posted something important on Facebook that really, really needs to be read!

It is astonishing how much I am reliant upon the internet. Not only is it my preferred source of communication, it is also where I store my documents as I work on them, and it is a primary source of research for sermon material. Then there is so much cool stuff out there too, and pretty glittery stuff to spend money on, like books and electronics and – well, is there anything else?

I would observe that without the distraction of social media, I have been a bit more focused on work. Maybe tonight, I will use the silence of an internet diet to spend more time in prayer and meditation.

God, help me to fill my life with that which satisfies. Amen.

Shalom Y’all,

Owen

Keeping a Holy Lent, Day 17: Forgive Someone

Okay, I’m back in the saddle. It really is not that I haven’t been doing the daily disciplines through the past week, I just haven’t found (or made) the time to write about them. I still prayed the paper, read Psalm 139, and did some reading about human trafficking.

Today, though, the task is to forgive someone.

I have a lot of questions about this discipline, especially as it relates to doing it this very day. How does one go about forgiving someone? Do they have to know I have forgiven them? Do they have to know they need my forgiveness, or is forgiveness something that rests only with me regardless of their awareness? How will I know the forgiveness ‘worked’? Isn’t forgiveness a process that will probably take more than a day?

When I think about forgiveness, I recall a couple years ago the astonishing and quite public example of forgiveness that an Amish community in Pennsylvania provided. It was so provocative and compelling that if you Google the words ‘amish forgiveness’ the event is still what comes up for the first 2 or 3 pages of the search results. Not a definition, not a description or how-to, but this example and the multiple articles and YouTube videos about the school shooting and the Amish community’s seeming ability to overcome it.

We were captivated by it, all of us.  Sure, some shook their heads and dismissed it as idiotic.  Many of us, however, marveled.  What would it take? To forgive enough to go to the funeral – the celebration of life – for the man who killed your child, what would it take? I don’t know that I have it in me.

Recently, however, I read “Pastrix: the Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint” by Nadia Bolz-Weber (the author of the disciplines I am doing through Lent). In it she writes a chapter that centers around forgiveness and she says this, “In the end, if we are not careful, we can actually absorb the worst of our enemy and on some level even become them. It would seem that when we are sinned against, when someone else does us harm, we are in some way linked to that sin, connected t mistreatment like a chain. And our anger, fear, or resentment doesn’t free us at all.  It just keeps us chained.”

There is an Ancient Near Eastern saying that goes, “Choose your enemies wisely, for you will become like them.” Maybe Jesus knew what he was talking about when he invited us to forgive not 7 times, but 7 times 70. Maybe forgiveness changes a relationship so that the thing that connects two parties is not the harm, but can be something different. Maybe forgiveness is as much setting yourself free as it is about setting the other one free.

So, today I am trying to let go of the chain. I am trying to release myself from a desire (even if it is a small, just-under-the-surface-but-pokes-its-head-up-every-so-often desire) for vengeance and retaliation. Perhaps then it won’t catch me off guard.

God of life, help me not to let past hurts define me. Amen.

Shalom Y’all,

Owen

Keeping a Holy Lent, Day 10: Buy a few $5 fast food gift cards to give to homeless people you encounter.

Okay, I realize I have missed a couple days – living so far away from my family has made time with them even more precious than it is. I am going back to Saturday’s ide for two reasons: 1) I confess that I have not yet done it. 2) It is probably the most important item on this list for me to do.

Here is why:

I have already mentioned that giving brings me great joy; and it does. However in our culture giving has become sanitized. There is often a great distance between the giver and those who receive the gift. Most often we give to charities or churches so that they can distribute aid to the ones who need it…whatever the need may be.  There is certainly benefit to this kind of giving. It means that the few dollars I give are combined with the gifts, large and small, of others to do bigger things than I am capable of doing by myself; to serve more people or take care of larger needs or both!

At the same time, this means that I am never, or at best rarely, in relationship with those I seek to help.  There are a lot of dangers in that absence of relationship.  One among many is it assumes help only goes one way. To put it very cynically: “Here I am. I have the wherewithal to help you, who need what I have. You have nothing I need.” It inflates my own self-importance and diminishes the importance of the one to whom I give.  It can become a denial that the other, the one I am called to serve, is also one made in God’s image and may also be called to serve me in ways that I can’t even imagine. In short, it assumes that I have no need of the relationship.

Isaiah offers a word from God that hints at this danger, “Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin?” (Isa 58:6-7 NRS)

When we share our bread with the hungry we can no longer hide ourselves from our own kin. The text invites us to share not just money with charities to help efficiently, but to be in relationship with others who are also made in God’s image.

So, I am going to do this.  Maybe more than once before Lent is over, I am going to do this!

You have made humankind in your image, God of all life; male and female you have made us. Help me to love my neighbor in such a way that I recognize their value and their wholeness as a brother or sister made in your image as well.  Amen!

Shalom Y’all,

Owen