Until you bless me

Under my pillow. Inside the blue teapot. On the porch windows.  Above the doorway. Between the couch cushions. Within the folds of a bathroom towel. 

These are just a few of the places I found benedictions today. In a sense, these serendipities are of my own devising. On Sunday, I invited friends, baked bread, set the table, and then demanded a blessing. Go into each room, I said, and pen a prayer. Inscribe my walls and tuck your blessings into the smallest corners of my house. Speak peace over this place. 

In a sense, these blessings were superfluous. The friends who came--students, colleagues, children, mentors--have already blessed this house with their presence. They have stood in the yard, offered compost for the garden. They have brought their children to gallop across the wood floors. They have come to cradle my new puppy. They have sat at the table and planned trips across the seas. They have been here with me. 

Even so, I begged them for their prayers. Gently enough, of course, but still cringing a little. Is it selfish to demand a blessing? Audacious to expect them to write words over my house, when I have yet to do as much for them? Superstitious to want their handwriting to cover the house from floor to ceiling, yard to Spare Oom? 

Yes. Yea, verily. Even so, I asked. 

And they gave. They gave me their prayers with all the generosity and abandon of the saints. They prayed that friends would be familiar with all the doors, that the table would be full, that no harm would come to the house or its inhabitants, that even the lean days would call me back to the heart of Christ. Some wrote formal poems--staggering prayers for comfort, laughter, mystery. 

As they did this thing for me, it seemed that  they were kin to the one with whom Jacob wrestled: "I will not let you go unless you bless me." But of course, they are kind and image of that one who blesses and wounds, and I felt a strange reverence for each of them: children of God, Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve, glorious and fallen, strong in the harrowing love of Christ. 

When they left, I felt the weight of what I had done. I had called upon the Lord, demanding a blessing, and he had delivered me through the prayers of his people. The weight and rhythm of their love settled on me, and I slept.

When I woke, I let myself read one or two of the blessings I could see, but most I have left, intending to savor them slowly.   Every day since, I have woken to find some new mercy waiting. 

The Young Adult's Guide to an Awesome Thanksgiving

(compiled from four years of wonderful Waco celebrations)

My nook, Thanksgiving 2006

1. Stay where you are. If home is a place we go for holidays, be intentional about celebrating in the place where you live, work, or study.  Celebrations are one way to consecrate a place as home.

2. Be extravagant with your cooking. Buy the best and finest food, and prepare it with care and courage.

3. Invite anyone you can think of who might be alone or lonely. 

Thanksgiving 2011 Photo by Kt



4. Let the kitchen fill up with food and people and merry chaos.

Thanksgiving 2009

5. Serve sweet tea and tamales along with the turkey and dressing.

4. Try to celebrate with an equal number of family members and friends. Introduce your teenage cousins to your grad-school colleagues.  Recognize that the highest bonds of kinship are far above blood, nationality, or common interest.

5. Sing your prayer before eating. "For the Beauty of the Earth" makes a perfect Thanksgiving blessing. Don't be afraid to demand all four verses. 

Thanksgiving 2011 Photo by Kt

6. Go for a long walk after feasting and lingering at the table. Point out beautiful doors and interesting trees in the neighborhood. Say, "Happy Thanksgiving!" to everyone you see.

7. Try all the pies.

 Photo by Stephanie Harris Trevor

8. Give thanks for all the Thanksgivings past. Remember what it was like to sit at the kids' table. Try to name the songs Casey played when he came up from Ft. Hood for Thanksgiving in 2008.  Let Grant and Jenn know how much you appreciated being rescued from a solitary Thanksgiving last year. Laugh at the way Jon never let your wine glass go empty during that first holiday with friends.

Room for more, 2011. Photo by Kt

9. Let yourself be sad for all the miles, years, or hard conversations separating your from people you love. Cry a little if you must, but then imagine that your table is growing longer and longer, and that by the time dessert is served, every seat will be filled with some faraway friend.

10. Write letters to people you are thankful for. Name specific reasons you give thanks to God for them.

Thanksgiving 2008

11. Rest. Don't be ashamed to drift off to sleep as the room fills with low conversations or the buzz of a football game.

12. Don't fret about how or where or with whom you will celebrate next year.  Give thanks for the hope that God will bring you to some glad table, whether as host, guest, daughter, or friend.

Thanksgiving 2008

Thanksgiving 2008 My strangely pinched smile does not do justice to my very real joy at this meal.

Another Thanksgiving, another weird smile. The grad students, Thanksgiving 2011.

Thanksgiving 2011. All is well.

How did you celebrate Thanksgiving this year?

Life Undivided: Frigidaires and Failures of the Imagination, Part II

In my last post, I argued that many churches fail to celebrate occasions that aren’t “fridge-worthy”: marriage, parenthood, missionary service, and other traditional events in the lives of adults.  Many of your comments anticipated this more cheerful conclusion to the tour of the fridge.  Today I hope to complete my inventory, suggesting along the way that many churches, men, and women are stretching their attention and imagination to include other milestones in the lives of men and women, young and old, single, married, widowed, and all in between.

Alongside the wedding invitations and birth announcements, one of my favorite fridge-adornments is a picture of my lifegroup, the small church group I participated in during my first three years of graduate school. As my wise friend Lindsay noted in her comment on Part I, small groups tend to be much better at recognizing and celebrating the sorts of events don’t make the big-church headlines. My experience in a lifegroup certainly confirmed Lindsay’s observation. In addition to our weekly studies, conversations, and prayers together, in addition to our committment to walk alongside one another through trying times as well as easy days, we celebrated the important passages in one another’s lives. Sometimes that meant a baby shower. At other times, it meant a special time of prayer and blessing for a young woman leaving for graduate school.  Once, a group of my lifegroup friends even helped me christen a spinning wheel I had just purchased. (Yes, that’s right: a spinning wheel. I’ll write more on the importance of this eccentric hobby in a future post, but for now, you might want to check out the poem I mentioned in my last post.)  This celebration, complete with prayer and pink champagne, was, in its merry little way, an affirmation of the values I was attempting to establish as the foundation of my life and work. 

More important that the affirmation I received from my lifegroup, however, was the way it challenged my understanding of what qualified as an “important” life event. I began to realize that when we celebrate weddings and babies  and ordination, we not only acknowledge a holy choice someone has made, we also recognize that a person’s fundamental relationships have changed. A man and woman who have had a baby are changed. They have new names--”Mama,” “Daddy”--and the birth of those new identities is part of the celebration. 

My time in a lifegroup taught me that my fundamental relationships can change even without a dramatic choice or event.  As I watched my friends seek ways to support one another, I realized that this group was more than a study group, or even a prayer circle: it was a gathering that modeled relationships unlike any I had seen before. We became friends, to be sure, but not casual friends, not friends linked by common interests or background.  We were, in a sense, like a family, but with freedom--many members came and went over those three years-- and an ever-fresh (sometimes painful) awareness of our kinships with one another.   

There was no ready word to describe the kind of bond I experienced in that group. Instead, I found honesty, kindness, wisdom, sorrow, and laughter enough to push my imagination beyond words and into love.  

I wish that group could have thrived for my entire season in graduate school, but even in its quiet dissolution, my lifegroup taught me that if I only think in terms of “romance,” “blood relation,” or “formal ministry,” I cheat myself out of countless, yet-unnamed bonds of love. 

And so the picture remains on the fridge. It reminds me of my first night with that group--the night I walked into a room of strangers, and found they had saved a chair for me. The memory of that night is as precious to me as the memory of my baptism, and nothing--no wedding feast, no baby, no ordination--could ever mean “You are home” in quite the same way.

The next important token on my fridge is a picture of Nelson, the boy I sponsor through Compassion International. Like the grins of my lifegroup, Nelson’s shy smile reminds me that a holy imagination can create strange but beautiful bonds of love.  I am new to sponsorship, and so I am still marveling that I now have a relationship with a little boy on the other side of the world. I may never see him face to face, but I know he wants to be a policeman when he grows up. I know his mother--just a year older than I am--has four children, and was abandoned by their father several years ago.  I know he receives the letters I send. I know that each time an envelope with the Compassion logo arrives, I feel like it is my birthday. I know I love Nelson, but, again, not with a love that has a name in the world’s hasty, narrow vocabulary.



Sponsor a Child
 

Finally, my fridge boasts a blessing from one of my favorites, Julianna.  When I moved into my current apartment, she penned a blessing for my new “lighthouse” perched on the Brazos river.  This dear friend believed that setting up household in a new place was worth a blessing, and because she believed, I did too. Her words are not from any known ceremony or liturgy (“May you have warmth enough for bare feet and chill enough for baked goods…”), but when I read them aloud in my kitchen, the place felt a little more like home. 

Can you share a time when someone celebrated an event, decision, or relationship which was important to you, but which was not a traditional cause for celebration? Have there been times in your life when the ordinary labels (e.g. daughter, sister, friend) have been insufficient to describe the relationship you have with a person or group? 

Life Undivided: Fridgidaires and Failures of the Imagination, Part I

I did not intend for this blog to become a spiritual inventory of my kitchen appliances, but after last week’s post on my crock pot, my thoughts have turned to the refrigerator.  (And for the record, I’m in good company discerning spiritual truths from domestic machinery. You can read my favorite example here). 

When I moved into my first, and then my second, apartment, I did not intentionally consecrate the front of my fridge as a place of honor. However, after spending time in the kitchens of friends and acquaintances, I realize that the items on my fridge are typical among other church-going young adults. Almost all the items fall into one of three categories: 

1) save-the-date cards and/or wedding announcements  

2) birth announcements 

3) prayer cards for women (or, less often, families) who serve as missionaries

I put these things on my refrigerator because they represent decisions worth celebrating, blessing, and sustaining.  When I see Jenn and Grant’s save-the-date card, or Casey and Caitlin’s wedding invitation, I remember that a holy choice--the choice to make one from two--can renew our tired language about love. When I see Jordan’s baby boy smiling above my grocery list, I catch my breath, amazed that my friends have produced this entirely new person.  And the beautiful woman with the rich brown eyes? She has just left the US to begin her career as a Bible translator.  Even in a secular context, these decisions and events (especially the first two) would be deemed worth celebrating, but they all have deep, beautiful roots in the faith of Jenn, Grant, Casey, Caitlin, Jordan, and all the rest who smile from my fridge door.  Most of the time, churches do a very good job of supporting people as the enter new seasons of marriage, parenthood, and ministry. 

At the same time, my fridge sometimes makes me sigh a little.  Having no wedding to announce, baby to boast, or foreign mission to claim, it would seem I have not yet made any decision worthy of the refrigerator door. I don’t really mope much about my lack of spouse or child; I would very much like to have both one day, but for now I am content knit and sew for other people’s babies.  Nor do I think I missed my calling by not following Lottie Moon to a distant land.  

Instead, I have begun to reflect on the way Christians celebrate (or fail to celebrate) the decisions and events other than marriage, children, or traditional ministry that shape our lives.  

Whether or not you have followed the recent debates about the changing milestones (or lack thereof) among young adults, you have probably noticed that many adults--young or otherwise--have built lives that look rather different from their parents’ lives.  Maybe they have married later, or not at all. Maybe they have stepped into careers which, though “secular,” they see as vocations in which we can love mercy, do justice, and walk humbly with our God. Maybe they have chosen or have been unable to bear children, and exercise their love in a thousand daily, hidden ways. 

Unfortunately,  Christian communities often fail to bless, celebrate, and sustain these seasons and choices if they do not fall into a few traditional categories.   

This is a failure of imagination, and it endangers the life of the church. 

When I visited my home church after a semester of graduate school and half a year of living on my own, I felt this failure keenly. I was one of three young people who came home that Christmas--in fact, the three of us had once constituted our church’s entire youth group--and I was thrilled to talk to these friends, as one looked forward to the birth of her first child, and the other to his upcoming marriage.  Then, during a church-wide meal (which, in my home church, meant a gathering of fifty or so people), the three of us sat next to each other as men and women shared things they were thankful for. One woman, who had known all three of us since our cradles, stood and said, 

“I just give thanks to see our young people back with us at Christmas. We’ve known them since they were babies, and now they’re all about to start such exciting new times of their lives: I mean, just look--she is going to have a baby, and he is getting married!” 

Then she sat down.  

I was stricken. Her silence confirmed exactly what I feared: that all my work, all my anxiety, all my hopes about vocation were in vain. So what if, in the privacy of my heart, I had dedicated to God my decision to become a professor? 

Clearly, it wasn’t worth putting up on the fridge.   

Admittedly, this failure was largely my fault. I was still so mopey and miserable after that first semester that I didn’t do much to explain why I saw my decision to pursue teaching as so important, so sacred.  I didn’t try to help them understand why that year of school felt so different from every other school year.  A few difficult months had shaken my confidence, and I didn’t have the energy to convince anyone else that I had made a wise decision. 

A few weeks later, however, when a complete stranger asked me what I did, and, hearing my answer, exclaimed, “What a beautiful thing to do!  God’s kingdom needs scholars and teachers,” I nearly kissed him. My church's silence had made me think, "Well, my fears were right. My choice wasn't holy--school is simply something I'm doing because I'm not starting a family."  This stranger's words, however, infused me with some fiery tonic of hope and indignation. 

I want to be, like that kind man, the sort of person who can celebrate any decision a person makes for the sake of that Kingdom. 

Now, despite my pitiful story, it would disingenuous to suggest I’m really starving for affirmation.  Especially in my current church and social circles, my choices have been respected and encouraged. And at the end of it, I will  at least earn some fancy robes and a funny hat.  But as I write this, I have to ask myself, do I have enough imagination to see even less obvious times and seasons to bless and celebrate? Am I brave enough  to stand up in church and say, “Bless this man as he goes to his office each day, honoring God in his integrity as a janitor”? Or, “Thank you, God, for this woman who has returned to live with and care for her aging parents. Sustain this beautiful, difficult, joyful service she has begun in your name.”  

I am not arguing that we should celebrate the weddings and babies and missionaries any less.  In fact, I would be in favor of celebrating them even more jubilantly (three-day-long wedding feasts! fireworks after the baby dedications!). I challenge you, however, to think in very practical terms about when and how a church can bless, celebrate, and sustain other seasons and decisions.  What about a young man beginning his career as an attorney? What about the woman who has just purchased her first house? What about the childless couple that has decided to become foster parents? If these decisions--like marriage or the mission field--can be offered to God,  I believe they deserve a place of public consecration during worship. I believe they deserve prayer and solemn words of commission, songs and testimonies and at least one bold “Amen!”

And a party.  I would love to see the day when these new seasons carry their own traditions: 

“Oh, is tomorrow the day for Katie’s home-dedication?”

“Yes! I’m giving the blessing. And I’m so excited about the sparkling cider and pear tart! I haven’t had any since Andy set up his household….” 

“Do you know the address?”

“Sure. The announcement is right here on my fridge.” 

***

In my next post, I will finish my survey of the Frigidaire, offering some hopeful signs and suggestions about imagining new reasons to celebrate.  In the meantime, tell me what seasons of life and/or decisions you have seen or would like to see your church bless, celebrate, and sustain. What do or would these celebrations entail?