Mamma Said There'd Be Days Like This, or Somebody Did Anyway

So the heading up there probably says this is a Friday post, but it's still Thursday for me. And that Moment has come.

The moment that they warn you about in seminary in order to scare you out of your procrastinating habits. (I'm pretty sure that's completely ineffective. If it works on you, you weren't really a procrastinator in the first place, and if you are, it won't work on you.)

The set-up is that you shouldn't be able to turn in term papers late because you can't turn in a sermon late. And then they proceed to ask you what you'll do if you waited to finish things till the last minute and then a pastoral emergency arises absorbs that last minute.

Usually, that scare speech is about sermons. I always figured that if the pastoral emergency actually was over in time for me to be in church, I'd wing my sermon. As a Sunday morning sermon writer, I don't actually find that all that alarming. Heck, I made up the second half of my high school graduation speech because I didn't have it written before the ceremony. (I also smuggled in a pen, in case there was time to work on it while other people were talking. That proved to be useless.)

My problem this evening is that it's not a sermon I've procrastinated on. I'm not even sure I'm giving myself the credit I deserve in calling it procrastination. The thing that isn't quite put together yet is our all church retreat. Such things require organization. It's mostly in my head at this point, but the booklet isn't finished. It won't be relaxing without organization; I know that.

But it's now time to go back and see just what is essential, what can realistically happen at the true last minute (that being tomorrow), and what can be skipped completely.

Emergencies are all about priorities. And I'm thinking the triage is the only other thing happening tonight. Blogging probably shouldn't have made the cut, but my brain needed a way of shifting gears anyway!

Alone vs. Lonely

We had the second week back to our contemplative prayer service tonight. It's a really nice service, with very few people who come. Sigh. Oh well.

Each week, I lead an intercessory prayer that starts with ourselves and gradually moves out to the world. The second stop is "our loved ones and all families." And ever since I started doing this, because of single people who had shared their frequent sense of being invisible in churches, the next stop is something about "those who are lonely".

Which gets complicated. I do want people who aren't part of traditional families, that is, people with families of one, to feel comfortable in our church. But trying to pray for them is a little awkward.

I try to include lots of categories of loneliness. In fact, I usually say "for runaways and those who have been dis-owned or distance by their families, for those who are the last one left and those living out their lives in nursing homes, for those lost in the loneliness of dimensia. For all those living lives of solitude, whether by choice or circumstance..."

So right there, you've got a lot of people in dire situations, and then some whose lives are completely normal, they're just single (or divorced or widowed). And what about people who are married and lonely? You know they're out there.

I've even sometimes throw something in about people who are lonely, even when surrounded by other people. Sometimes I list the circumstances, death, divorce, moving...

Obviously, I can't cover every situation. But sometimes I worry if I'm making it worse by bringing it up. I've occasionally wanted to ask some of the people who come how that part hits them. But I never have. Maybe I should. On the other hand, the ones who come may have been thinking of it as applying to people other than themselves this whole time and may be offended if I suggest it might apply to them. Aaah. So delicate.

I mean, when I pray for families, some of what I mention does illustrate that family life isn't a bowl of cherries either. But somehow, those problems are more socially acceptable, I'm afraid. We're just not that good at talking about loneliness.

Any suggestions? Would you rather have it mentioned or left out? How specific should it be? There is always silence after each section, so you could take it in any direction you wanted, regardless of what I say. And it does help me think of some folks I might not otherwise.

Two on Tuesday

1. I'm beginning to understand the 140-character limit on Twitter. I've noticed that when people's facebook statuses are too long, I don't read them. Scary.

2. On Sunday, I accidentally put the toilet paper on the holder the wrong way. I tried to just be okay with it that way, but in less than 24 hours, I changed it around. Oh well.

I'll Be the Heavy. 'Cause He's Your Brother.

One of the strange things about ministry is when it has to involve meddling. Which it does sometimes. One of the situations that comes to mind is when an elderly person is aging and decisions need to be made. Perhaps there are no family members to address things like when it's time to stop driving or whether you really can stay home alone anymore. Perhaps it's something like one kid doing all the care-giving and another hardly being in touch who someone needs to call.

Sometimes it's about getting in touch with out-of-town kids who need to have the seriousness of a situation impressed upon them because non-relatives really aren't allowed to make decisions like moving into a nursing home.

There are very few people who are comfortable inserting themselves into other family's lives in these ways. And I doubt most ministers are either. But sometimes we have to, and we do, and it's the role that carries us in there, not anything about us personally. Sometimes someone has to step in and be the heavy, and having a collar (even if it's figurative) makes that easier.

I say all this because I'm sensing I may need to be gearing up to do it again soon. Delicacy and weight at the same time is a complicated combination to convey over the phone. It gets easier with practice, thank God! Part of it is that one of the things a minister can do for a family is give them someone else to be mad at so they don't have to stay mad at each other. A crappy role to play, but sometimes a true gift. And since it's not really about you, it's easier to let go of than having a member of your family mad at you.

Life in the Round

In the hammock,
on the porch,
which is on the east side of the house,
it has grown too dark to read.

I must turn on the camping lantern,
left there for precisely this purpose.

But out the south window
(straight ahead
if you've turned your back to the street)
is a terrifically tall tree whose top can still see the sun,
which convinces me that tomorrow will also have a dawn.

The Meaning of Compliments

So I wore a new dress today. Sort of. I also did my hair differently, but this story isn't about my hair, except that it might have magnified the effect of the new dress.

It wasn't a new, new dress. My mother made it. We picked out the pattern and fabric over a year ago. She gave it to me at Christmas, I think. And it's hung in my closet since then.

I knew it was a bit of a departure from my usual style when we picked out the pattern. But I thought I'd try something new. Once it was here, however, I was unconvinced.

The dress fit very nicely, and I love the way the skirt is. But the top is just a little odd, for me. Plus, it had these really long, skinny ties at the top. I'm not really a bow at the neck kind of person.

But today I was in the mood for something different. (That's been a theme lately, I guess. The new hair debuted on Thursday, simply from blow-drying differently.) So I decided to wear the dress, albeit with a black blazer over it, to cover the weirdness of the top, and the stringy ties tucked inside.

But, of course, this is the Heart of Dixie and it's not Labor Day yet, so the blazer was a delusion. It didn't even make it to Sunday School.

And here's the thing: I got a ton of compliments on my dress today. It really is a pretty cute dress. I'm sure I would totally love it on someone else. But the top still seems weird to me. (I tied knots in the strings and cut them shorter when I got home today. Sorry, Mom!)

But people seemed to like it a lot. Or else they just noticed that it's not much like the things I normally wear.

I am convinced that we're not always saying what we mean when we give someone a compliment. Usually compliments about clothing or hair follow a set pattern, which is "I like your ______." I'm not sure all of them did this morning, but that is the most common compliment.

What I think we really mean, a lot of the time, is "You are wearing something unusual, thereby taking a risk, and I admire the courage that demonstrates."

Which is also a perfectly lovely thing to say to people. And makes those "I like your shirt" comments make a lot more sense when they're said to people wearing horridly loud, ugly shirts.

The stock compliment is sometimes even preceeded or followed by an observation that the object in question is different. (When said about hair, this frequently though unintentionally leads the recipient to wonder if the complimenter usually doesn't like their hair.)

I'm not trying to slight the compliments I got today. I was grateful for them. Especially since no one except my husband mentioned my new hair the other day. I'm just saying that, frequently, we aren't saying what we really mean when we compliment people.

It doesn't really matter though, because the result is the same. I'm probably going to wear the dress a lot more often now.

We Need More Categories

A couple weeks ago I was talking with a friend about how "vacation time" is just not complicated enough. There needs to be vacation time and family time and travel time. Because those three things are not all the same, and yet, you have to take vacation to do any of them, and therefore, somehow, people expect you to return refreshed despite the chances being very slim that you actually were only sleeping in and reading novels the whole time.

Today was Saturday, and I spent most of the day at work. But I was doing "Saturday work". And in fact, I was doing two different kinds of Saturday work.

We had an actual Saturday thing going on where we walked around the neighborhood with doorknob flyers to invite everyone to our dedication service next week. So that was "real work" though of the Saturday quality, which means I got to wear jeans and a t-shirt.

But the rest of the day, I spent tidying my office. (HALLELUJAH!!! PRAISE JESUS!!! It was really a mess. There was mail in my inbox from 2009.) This is something that has needed to happen for ages, but it's not something I can effectively get done during the week. Because there are too many interruptions and too many other things that are seemingly more important.

But since it's Saturday, I'm not supposed to be doing those other, more important things. So I had the time to tidy my office.

Now, the thing is__the messier one's office gets, the more vital tidying it becomes. I suppose you could say my office reached a critical point where it became worth it to use "time off" to clean it. But shouldn't it also qualify as work?

So work needs more categories, just like vacation does. Because life is complex. I'm not complaining. I just like to be precise.

Sometimes It Doesn't Go Both Ways (Weekly Devotional Message)

Matthew 7:12 – “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets.”

Proverbs 24:29 – Do not say, “I will do to others as they have done to me; I will pay them back for what they have done.” (NRSV)

Most of us learned “The Golden Rule” early on in life. We are supposed to treat people the way we would like to be treated. This is a natural corollary of loving our neighbors as we love ourselves. Despite the technicality that some people may have different preferences than we do, this is a solid guideline for behavior. It offers a clear measure of whether our actions are right or wrong.

And yet, too often, we are tempted to twist it around into justification for bad behavior. “He did it to me first!” “She started it!” These are the cries of children, yet we act them out, even if we don’t say them out loud. We tell ourselves that if someone did such-and-such to us, that must be the way they want to be treated, so we can respond in kind.

The author of this saying from Proverbs knows about our tendency to rationalize this way. And he points it out for the lie it is. The Golden Rule doesn’t go in both directions. It is a standard for our behavior toward others, not a justification for our reactions to others. The truth is that we all fail at it much of the time. But the example of Jesus is one of forgiveness and grace. We are asked to turn the other cheek and walk the extra mile, even if the other person will never in a million years do so.

Just like children, we are so often obsessed with fairness. But our preoccupation with what’s fair comes from our preference to judge other people’s behavior and not stay focused on our own. That is not what Jesus asks of us. When it comes to judgment, the gospel says MYOB – Mind Your Own Business!

Collect for the Week: Gracious and Loving God, who sent your Son to show us how to live your will, grant that our hearts might be filled with grace, mercy and love, that we might offer a gospel witness in the face of injustice and discord. Through Christ Jesus and the Holy Spirit, Amen

Pros and Cons

Hmm, does anyone know where that phrase comes from? The words aren't short for anything, right? They're just a Latin way of saying "fors and againsts"? Weird.

Anyway, what I was going to say was that last week my walking buddy and I finally got back to walking. This was a good thing. This week, we finally got back up to 3 miles. (From 2 and then 2.5.)

But then my walking buddy went to the beach. ("BUM!" Oh well.)

So today I walked by myself. And since I was by myself, I decided to walk through my neighborhood instead of on the indoor track where we usually walk.

There are many lovely things about walking outside through the streets instead of inside on a track. There are people's houses to look at, and their dogs to be barked at by. There are birds singing, and breezes blowing.

In my case, it's particularly helpful because we're going to be visiting the houses in this neighborhood on Saturday with flyers about our upcoming Service of Dedication, and this gave me a chance to notice anything we'd need to know in advance. (Not sure I did though. May have to try to notice things again tomorrow.)

Those are the pros.

And then there's the humidity.

Triumph!

It's September now!!!

The statement is obvious, I suppose, so I should clarify that the exclamation points are because September is my birth month.

And in honor of my birth month, I am going to try to blog every day again. I will warn you, however, that it's highly likely that "my birth month," as it's defined in my head, probably peters out very shortly after my actual birthday.

Then, of course, I will be leaving town for a week, so that will complicate things, won't it?

Anyway, one of the things I thought I would share, as I approach a number that feels more significant than some (like the last 2, for instance), is an observation I made while on a road trip last month.

I was driving along, possibly cleaning my teeth, when I suddenly realized that my gums are a whole new color than they used to be. That is to say, they are finally the pale pinkish, healthy color they're supposed to be. This is astounding to me.

Remember back in January, when I blogged about a list of potential resolutions someone suggested that weren't very hard but could actually make your life a lot better?

Flossing was at the top of that list. And I wanted to do it. But I usually just assume that I will fail at that sort of thing.

But in June when I was at the dentist, my hygienist actually said my gums looked good. That surprised me, but I was so distracted by my first cavity that I didn't really check it out.

So there I am, driving up the highway in Illinois, and I suddenly noticed she was right. My gums look great! I must be flossing more than I realized.

I think the trick was trying hard for long enough to get my mouth used to the feeling of being flossed, so that not being flossed feels wrong, like something that needs to be fixed. (This is quite possibly the secret to any long-term keeping clean project. I wouldn't know.)

Anyway, as I approach this particular birthday, it feels like a minor triumph to know that I've finally overcome (at least temporarily) my life-long unhealthy gums problem.

Did any of you really need to know that? I suppose not. But Happy Birth Month to Me!