Making Change

It was the day God showed up in my dining room! 

It was me – 12 high school students – a Little Caesar’s pepperoni pizza and a 2 liter bottle of Coke.    A meal not unfamiliar to that table and those who sat around it but as that cardboard box passed from hand to hand and the styrofoam cups were filled to almost overflowing, all were unaware that parsonage windows were about to be blown open and unseen matchsticks about to find flame.

It was early summer – those moments when the wet chill of spring starts to give way to days that seem endlessly awash in possibility.  Summer – when time seems to shift for a moment and what lies around each corner begs you to give chase.  It would be the season when a group of teenagers would suddenly find themselves like another twelve, once locked off from the world outside, now in a room burning with the full presence of God.

It was the summer of the Live 8 concerts.  Eight concerts, taking place on the same day, all around the world with one purpose in mind: raise the awareness of death dealing poverty and the African AIDS epidemic – to awaken a sleeping world into action.

I recall Jesus once saying that if the church didn’t act like the church “these rocks would cry out.”  Now it was the “rock stars” who were crying out and for the moment this group of young people was listening.

What was it they were hearing? 

The numbers:

· 2 million deaths a year in Africa due to AIDS
· 14 million AIDS orphans in Sub-Saharan Africa

· Life expectancy dropping from 59 to 47

 And the number that got stuck in their heads was the big one: 

23 million

23 million men, women and children currently infected with the virus. 

What does one do with a number that big?

It is a rare thing to be present for an epiphany – that sudden realization that everything from this moment forward will be painted with a different brush.  And when it came that day – it came in the form of a penny – a single penny.

The penny.  The smallest of coin.  It’s value – next to nothing.  The forgotten coin – abandoned on dressers and underneath couch cushions – unnoticed on sidewalks and parking lots.  But this single copper-faced-coin would connect this group of kids to a people and their struggle a half a world away.


No one remembers anymore whose idea it was –but that whole table was suddenly ablaze with expectation.  A mission was born – to collect 23 million pennies, nearly a quarter of a million dollars, one penny at time – one for each person in sub-Saharan African infected with AIDS.  They emptied their pockets and with a little more than four dollars in spare change on that table the Penny Project was born.


Have ever you rushed off in the pursuit of hope?  Stood at the edge of a cliff, and despite every fiber of your being telling you shouldn’t, jump anyway?  They jumped – and thank God they took me along with them. 

Over the next three years we watched as the Pennies trickled in – in zip locked sandwich bags a couple dozen at a time – in mayonnaise jars – and shoe boxes.  Collections stored up for years in back closets suddenly discovered their purpose.   Piggy banks and plastic cups.  The pennies came.  10,000 then 50,000 then 100,000 then the first million and on the weekend before Thanksgiving three years later these young people saw their dream come true – 23 million pennies.

What does 23 million pennies do?


It puts 10 students through medical school in Zimbabwe, provides food to orphans in South Africa, starts a sewing collective for women, buys medical supplies for hospitals and starts micro-lending banks in Ghana.  And it changes the direction of a group of teenagers’, and their pastor’s, lives forever.

Years later I sit and write this at that same table, the table my little family gathers at each night to break bread and share cups, our hands laced in fingers, wrapping our conversation in the humility we call prayer – waiting...

for the day God shows up here again…

A Year Later

It started with a phone call.  It came in the middle of the morning.  You are going about your business, pushing full steam ahead, making plans and making connections all in hopes of making a difference.  Then the phone rings and in the matters of just a few minutes it all changes.

I am a United Methodist pastor, which means I itinerate.   I go where I am sent.  I don’t get interviewed or selected.  I do not apply or send a resume.  I don’t get to pick or choose. I go.  Go when, and where, I am sent.

That is the peculiarity of our system – when called – we go.   That fate-full call marks a moment in time for a church and their pastor.  A moment to look back.  A moment to look ahead.   A moment to see how far you have come.  A moment to dream about how far you might go.

Last year I got that call.  After seven years in a place we had grown to love, among a people who had grown to love us, it was time to go.  It marked an important moment in our life.  We had our two babies at that church.  We had lost a baby at that church.  We got our legs under us at that church.  We experienced miracles there - suffered defeats there. We came to understand ourselves more fully as pastors and people and partners and parents there.

In short, we came of age there – and then it was time to go.

  

Itinerancy means trust.  

Trusting that there is something larger at play.  Trusting that the common good can still bring about things that will be  uncommonly good.  It means trusting that what you experienced in one place will meet you in the next place.

It was a year ago today that we moved.  

This is how I remember it:

On the day Michael Jackson died, we loaded everything we owned into moving truck and let four men transition our lives in boxes filled with more than just our stuff.  

They shifted our seasons without ever noticing that each load seemed a bit heavier than the last.

 

It was somewhere between the sofa and the plates for the kitchen that one of them mentioned he died.  But with the radio still buried somewhere deep underneath, television not yet connect to cable, internet disconnected, there was no way to know for sure – just left to imagine the candlelit cardboard lining the fences to Neverland.

But later ,when stacks of corrugated containers covered every inch of free space in a house that did not yet know our stories, I found it – the shoebox -that used to contain the red and black hightop sneakers that cost me an entire summer of newspaper delivers. And there it was.  The cassette tape: 

 

Recorded in the 4^th grade.  The case long gone.  The writing worn thin.  But when rewound – the beats of “Beat It” filled that basement with more than just sound.

And I let it play...

until it was silent...

like our new home...

like my childhood memories...

silent

like the music

 August 29, 1958 – June 25, 2009

No Outlet

We were stuck.  All of us at a standstill.  Wedged in a lineup all too familiar.  

Orange barrels to the left.  

Orange barrels to the right. 

Thin layers of dust rising in blacktop heat creep up through dash and floor.  

Only with the flick of a wrist does stop become slow, the sleeveless woman inches us forward. 

Stuck like the secrecy surrounding in sprawling, sub-urban still-life.

Stripped malls selling vacancy signs.  

Coin-op Laundromats. 

The same pharmacy next to the same check cashing place next to the same three digit, blue-slushy dispenser 

same as the last corner

same as the next...

Patience at a premium. 

All of us caught in commute.

But I am a pastor – a spiritual leader. 

I have spiritual work to do.
Spiritual thoughts to think.
Spiritual words to write.
Spiritual duties to perform.
Spiritual things to say to people not quite as spiritual as me.   

I do not have time to sit in this line.  

I must commence with my commute.  I need to get to wherever it is I am going – for God’s sake, there are spiritual things that need to be accomplished.

So almost without thought, knuckles wrapped white around steering wheel veer quickly onto the first side street.  Matters taken into own hands.  Mess circumvented.   Escape route found. 

   

Sadly relief never got the chance to sigh. There they were:  Two words.  Eight black letters left against a backdrop yellow square turned on end.  Three syllables echoing across time and space:

 
Not to be deterred.  I am smarter than this. I have advanced degrees.  So press on.  Stay the course.  Bypass the confusion.  Get to where you need to be faster than everyone else sitting in that line.  

But every side streets within the side street ended in a cul-de-sac turnaround – not once – not twice, but three times, until sitting face-to-face once again with this roadside truth: 

No Outlet means no outlet.

“How many times do we have to let this guy off the hook, Jesus? Isn’t seven times enough?”


“Can’t I ride my camel through the needle nosed doors of heaven?”


“When we get there, can you get the ringside seats?”

I sit with a lot of people looking for shortcuts – escape routes –ways to circumvent the mess.  

They want a shortcut through cancer.  

A shortcut through marriage troubles and teenaged turmoil. 

A shortcut through unemployment and addiction.  

They come hoping that I am as much David Copperfield as I am pastor, wanting a magic wave of the wand:  “Pray some special prayer – evoke some holy name – crack open gold trim pages – pull out smoke and mirrors.  Anything.  Just make it go away.”
 

But most days I don’t have much more to give them except a savior who says:  

“See those two pieces of woods?  Nail them together and carry them around with you for awhile and see what happens.”  

“You want out of this?  Then grab that washbasin and towel and make yourself useful.”  

"Sure you’re welcome to come on in – the gate is always open.  (Just not sure you’re going to fit through it with all that crap you’re carrying around.)”

But honestly - I am no different.  

I travel hours to conferences, hoping to find quicker ways of filling seats then searching for stray sheep or pulling up floor boards looking for misplaced dimes.  

I scour books for secrets and tricks for running a church without hours spent breaking bread around meetings tables or answering the door for midnight knockers.  

I want healing for my people without calloused knees or a closed prayer closet. 

I listen so closely to tapes wanting to learn how to earn credibility without incursions across boundaries of privacy and family. 

So there I was back at the crossroad with really only one choice:  

Rejoin the line I left fifteen minutes ago – get back onto the only path that will take me where I need to go.

Perfection*

It’s a late summer sunset over the quiet of a get-away lake. 

It’s oranges and reds tangling with clouds
as gentle ripples of rhythm push against the shoreline.

It’s your arm around her waist, silence sitting against a backdrop of blessing.

It’s perfect.

It’s a sorrel sauce barely noticed,
drawing subtly from a pan-roasted salmon.

It’s spring asparagus kindly bathed in lemon butter,
yellow squash and zucchini on the side.

It’s the sweet edge of the Pinot
pulling you to the glass. 

It’s cross-table-eyes caught in candlelight.

It’s perfect.

It’s Bach playing cello on strings hidden behind closed eyes.

It’s an unnoticed tear slipping from
a cheek onto a program in a lap.

It’s the moment when the last tumbling note
has reached the roof, every bow held stiff above violin string,
the conductor’s baton suspends eternity,
whispered breath being held on the edge of eruption.

 It’s perfect.

It was the second time through the batting order that the thought first crossed our minds.

Eighteen batters had stepped up – eighteen batters were sent down.

Three zeros, beauty in symmetry, lined the top of the scoreboard.

 No runs. No hits. No errors.

No Cleveland Indian had yet to take up residence beyond the batter’s box. Almost effortlessly the game seemed to be moving towards perfection.

Perfection – the greatest of all rarities. Less than two-dozen occurrences in the entirety of the game’s history and it appeared that perhaps a young Venezuelan pitcher named Armando Galarraga was ushering us to the outer edges of the record book.

 Perfection was taking shape before our eyes.

But no one dared speak such hope aloud.
At least not yet.
You don’t ever want to be the one responsible for messing with perfection.

Fast-forward.
Two innings later.
Six more up and six more down.
Triplet zeros still lined up so nice and pretty.

Now it was all we could talk about.

Detroiters, as much in need of a moment as anyone, held our collective breath as our foreign-born, native son found himself standing just three outs from perfection, and when Tiger centerfielder Austin Jackson chased down a long drive to the deepest part of the outfield, checking off the requisite defensive gem from the list of perfect game ingredients, it appeared that the planets were all aligning.

A new name was about to be etched in the annals of America’s pastime.

There he stood, twenty-six straight outs notched on his belt, looking eye-to-eye with baseball immortality. The only thing that stood in perfection’s way was rookie shortstop Jason Donald, dragging his.235 batting average behind him. Donald preceded to hit a slow roller that was scooped up by the first basemen and with Galarraga going over to cover the bag, the entire stadium stood poised to explode into celebration.

The scoop, the toss, the cover, the catch. It was a done deal. Perfection!

But it just wasn’t meant to be.

First base umpire Jim Joyce signaled the runner safe.

 The dream was gone
crushed like a plastic beer cup.

After almost two hours of perfect baseball the number one would become the single blemish between two zeros.

A one hit shutout.

Any other night it would have been heralded as the pitching performance of a lifetime – but not tonight. Tonight all it could do was leave us heartbroken.

Then it went from bad to worse.

Instant replay showed that Joyce had blown the call.
The runner was out.
It wasn’t even that close.

Heartbreak suddenly turned to outrage.
It’s one thing to lose a perfect game on the last at bat–
it’s another to it have stolen right out from under you.
It felt like all hell was about to break lose.

A giant flock of “Boo birds” started circling the stadium.
 The benches cleared.
The Tiger manager was letting the errant umpire have it.
There would be demands to reverse the calls.
 There would be a push forJoyce to lose his job.

One had to wonder if he would be ale to leave the field that night unharmed.

Perfection is elusive.
Gone the moment you think you’ve grasped it.

 Maybe that’s what made us most mad.

You do all the right things.
Invest in all the right things.
Go to the right school.
Pay all your bills.
Go to church.
Put your money in the collection plate.

Do everything that is expected of you expecting the perfect life in return.
And here we were getting ripped off again.
This had gone too far.
We were fed up and we were not going to take this anymore!

And just as an umpire in effigy was about to be set a flame three things happened:

An apology.

An acceptance.

And a moment of grace.

A teary-eyed Joyce admitted he blew the call.

In the post game press conference, Galaragga,
who had every right to be resentful and bitter,
was humble and grateful.

And when these two men met at home plate the next day to shake hands,
the hometown crowd stood and cheered.

It was perfect.

Now there is one for the book*.