November Grace, Day 4

 We laughed, still holding hands and keeping our eyes closed.  Tiffany had not intended to make a joke during our prayer, but we couldn't help giggling along with her.  Had we been children, someone might have shushed us, but we are the adults now, and the laughter was too sweet to chide. If anything, it sounded our thanks and our hope in ways words alone could not. Still smiling, I listened as the women in our circle, and the men across the room, continued to lift heavy words into the light: "tests...sickness... essays... jobs....family."  When silence fell, I began the Lord's Prayer, and everyone joined in.

 Today, I am thankful for my lifegroup.  We are still a fairly new community, having only begun to meet in September (you can read about some of my past experiences with small groups here and here). However, the group is coming together--is being drawn together--in holy ways.

 Tonight, I heard that holiness in our laughter. If "the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words" (Romans 8.26), I wonder if that Holy Ghost ever teaches us to pray with a mirth that defies our heavy hearts and weary days.

Settling the Solitary in a Home

Two weeks ago, I delivered this testimony during worship at Calvary Baptist Church of Waco, Texas. Many of these stories and ideas have appeared elsewhere on my blog, but I think it is worth repeating in whole.

“God settles the solitary in a home.” Five years ago, these words from Psalm 68.6 were difficult for me to believe. I had just arrived in Texas to begin my graduate studies, and this cross-country move was the culmination of a disorienting year: in a matter of months, I had attended the funeral of my last grandparent, broken up with a boy I could have married, graduated from my beloved college, and now I was more than a thousand miles away from my friends and parents. An introvert and an only child, always quite happy to be alone, I suddenly found myself, at twenty-two years old, deeply and truly lonely for the first time.

The people at Calvary were kind from the first morning I visited, and when I joined a lifegroup later in the fall of 2006, I learned that God was going to use this church to teach me that the Gospel brings us into a body, a kingdom, a home. On my first visit to that lifegroup, I arrived a little late, and as I crept shyly through the front door, I could see that everyone was already seated in a circle, sharing a meal. “She’s here!” someone said. “Come in,” they called, “We’ve saved a chair for you.” When I heard those words, I felt as though I had walked into a parable.  Is this what the kingdom of God is like? I wondered.  To arrive at a stranger’s table and find they have saved a place for you?  Ephesian 6 tells us that through the Gospel, the Gentiles are co-heirs with God’s chosen people, strangers made at home in the kingdom of God. Through my experience with lifegroups, I was a witness to this mystery every Thursday night.

In so many ways, the members of that lifegroup were ministers of the Gospel to me during my first three years in Waco.  Especially during that first lonely season, they met the physical and spiritual needs that so often come with young adulthood: our lifegroup suppers were usually the only meals in a week I didn’t eat alone.  And holding hands during our prayers was the only time in a week that anyone touched me.

When school was discouraging, they assured me that my work as a teacher and scholar could serve the kingdom. When I fell in love with teaching, they rejoiced with me.

This would be a partial testimony, however, if I only gave an account of my own consolation. My lifegroup taught me to turn my own sorrow into compassion, my own joy into an invitation. Listening to my friends share their stories, I was able to step outside of my narrow fears and loneliness. Praying together, we endured illness, unexpected pregnancy, medical school applications, depression, job decisions, and family strife as one body. Celebrating together, we gave thanks for new life, acceptance letters, and reconciliation as one body. Studying and discussing together, we tested ideas, hoping to find words and actions that would bear witness to our faith.

These memories are so precious to me that I hate to admit our group’s quiet but painful dissolution. Jobs and school took many members away, leaders changed, and somewhere along the way we forgot that the Gospel demanded that we be more than a supper club and support group.  Our prayer times became brief and vague, our discussions drifted from questions about faith and practice to intellectual squabbles, and most dangerously, we forgot that we were supposed to be serving the church, Christ’s body, not ourselves.

As I prepare to step into a new lifegroup this fall, therefore, I am both eager and watchful. I have seen lifegroups wither and fade, but I have also seen them make the kingdom visible.  I have seen God use them to settle the solitary in a home. I have seen, as Pslam 84 says, that  

Even the sparrow finds a home,

and the swallow a nest for herself,

where she may lay her young,

at your altars, O Lord of hosts,

my King and my God.

Beloved, we are so many sparrows perched upon the altars of our Lord. God forbid that we neglect  any good way to establish one another here, as heirs of this kingdom, as children of this home.

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?