Napkin Epiphanies

Thanksgiving Ride

2011-06-24T07:24:00.000-07:00

It was the night before Thanksgiving.

The freeway was dotted with little red lights.

Mile after mile of brake lights in front of me

and coming towards me,

nothing but the soft glow of headlights.

People were on their way home.

The night before Thanksgiving.

It’s just one of those night when the roads are full.

Full of pilgrims - full of travelers - full of those searching

for an open spot around a table that awaits them at journey’s end.

They go to break bread with the ones they love,

and they will drive hours in the cold and dark just to get there –

just to get home.

And that’s where I found myself that night;

stuck in this great Homecoming Parade,

crawling along the trail of lights,

meandering my way to the place, and the people, waiting for me.

But there was something different that night.

Something that separated me from most of the other folks on the road.

I wasn’t focused on where I was going.

My mind was lingering on where I had just been.

I was driving back to Redford from Big Rapids.

I had driven up there earlier that morning with Michelle.

Her mother Debbie was not well.

She had been moved into home hospice care

and Michelle had asked if I would go and spend some time with her before the holidays.

So on the day before Thanksgiving,

we made the three hour trek to see her mom

(you’ll have to ask Michelle about how driving with me taught her a lot about prayer).

When we got to the trailer where her mom and stepfather lived,

we found Debbie in the living room, resting in a hospital bed.

I sat by her side.

We talked about life and we talked about death.

We talked about all the ways she was blessed,

her love of family and friends

and the grandkids that made her feel like the luckiest woman on the face of the planet.

We talked about being angry with all that was happening to her,

how it made no good sense,

and where God might be in the midst of it all.

We laughed and we cried that afternoon,

and when it was time for me to go,

Debbie asked me to do something for her;

she asked if I would baptize her.

And so I did (or I should say God did – I just got to hold the water).

Michelle went to the cupboard,

got a small, plastic Tupperware bowl,

and filled it with warm water from the kitchen sink.

We gathered around that bed.

Her daughter.

Her husband.

Her lifelong friend.

We sang Amazing Grace.

We said the Lord’s Prayer.

We added our blessings to the water,

each speaking words of hope for Debbie.

Debbie asked for peace,

and then I placed the sign of the watery cross on her forehead.

Sometimes you are not sure what to pray for.

Sometimes you know your words cannot come close

to capturing all the sentiment tangled in a moment.

It can be like trying to explain the perfect sunrise
to those who decided to sleep in.

There is simply no way to get it right.

So, you don't try.
You don’t say much at all.

All I could do was ask;

ask that anything Debbie needed to be lifted from her in that moment,

would just simply fall away,

fall as easily as the clear, damp pebbles of tap water grace

now rolling down her cheeks.

Maybe we are all just in the middle of a Homecoming Parade.

Stuck in the line with all those who travel

in hopes that there is a place for us at the table,

and loved ones there to welcome us, when we arrive.

Resurrection, The Counter and Mickey Mouse Pancakes (or how we know it's Easter in Redford!)

2011-05-16T22:36:00.000-07:00

Here we are...almost a month after Easter.
Seems longer than that actually, doesn't it?
Seems like Easter is already a distant memory -
pack away for another year.

Easter.

It doesn’t get any bigger than Easter.
The tomb is empty.

New life – new possibilities – all unleashed upon the world.
It's what we are supposed to be all about;
there is a new world coming – and nothing can hold it back!

But here we are.
Just a few weeks after all this hype and hoopla and life has...

well, life has pretty much gotten back to normal.

Pretty much the same struggles.

Pretty much the same routine.

Pretty much life is just like it has always been...

And it sometimes makes me wonder if the promises of Easter
aren’t just as empty as the tomb.

Still, at least we are in good company.
Read John’s story and you will see what I mean.
It’s actually pretty funny.

They are back to work.

Doing what they did before Jesus ever
showed up in the first place.

Never mind the fact they just saw a real life dead-man-walking.
Easter has come and gone, and now they are right back at it;
doing what they have always done.

They are fishing.

Nothing seems to have changed at all.

And that's when it happens. He's back.
Right there on the shoreline of their lives.

And here is where it gets kind of weird.

All this "up-from-the-grave-he-arose"
and all Jesus wants is to have breakfast.

No, “Come on, fire up the copiers and lets get the word out!”

No, “Come on boys! There's world to save – let's get out of here!”

And no, "Let's get the dirty bastards who did this to us before they do it to us again!"

None of that!

“Come, let’s have breakfast.”
That's all he has to say.

It was the Wednesday after Easter Sunday
and my 4-year-old son was insistent.
(Imagine that – an insistent 4-year-old!)

What he wanted was me. That’s it. Me.
Time with me. Just with me.
Leave mom and little brother at home.
We are talking father and son. One-on-one.
He wanted what we call a “man-date.”

But he was specific. Very specific.

He wanted the two of us to go to Frank’s Diner (Redford’s finest eatery!)

But there was a catch.

He wanted to sit "where all the daddies sit."

At the counter;
where the chairs spin
and his legs could dangle.

It's where the men meet.
It's where the township budget gets balanced.
Where the Tigers' starting lineup gets picked.
And the seven-day-forecast gets predicted.

The counter.
We had to sit at the counter.

And one more thing;

we were going to have breakfast – for dinner.

So, that's what we did.

Just the two of us.

At the counter.

Him with his Mickey Mouse pancakes.

And me with my ham and cheese omelet.

And we talked.

Talked about important things.
Things like Superman and Hotwheels and how hard it is to count to one hundred.

It was the best hour I have spent doing anything in a long, long time.

It was maybe the closest I have ever felt to my kid.

It was surely the clearest I have ever been about what it means to be a dad.

And I was reminded.

Reminded of what was truly important.

And you know what? It felt like – well, I guess it felt like Easter.

Making Change

2010-06-30T20:02:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-24T20:46:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-17T23:19:00.000-07:00

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*

2010-06-10T09:51:00.001-07:00

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*.

The Other Side of the Tracks

2010-05-30T21:23:00.000-07:00

I don’t know much about this place yet.
Haven’t been here long enough
to tell you its stories
or understands its people.

It takes a while to get to know a place – but there is one thing about this place I do know –
it has a train.

Now, I am not sure what this train looks like –
I have never seen it.
I don’t know where it comes from
or where it’s headed to,
but I do know we have a train,
because I've heard it.

Sometimes in the middle of day
its unmistakable rhythm becomes the background,
white-noise soundtrack for my new inner-ring,
sub-urban existence.

And there are those late nights,
when its lonesome whistle interrupts
my ongoing argument with the ceiling fan,
and for a brief moment I find that I am not alone
at this hour when its seems most everyone else is asleep.

So, even though I've never seen it – the one thing I know about this place for sure is – it has a train.

I have taken up walking recently.

After the last church meeting has finished and the boys have been tucked in their beds, I kiss my wife, step out door and spend the next hour putting my feet onto the streets of this place I hope soon begins to feel more like home.

In part, that’s why I do this–
to get a better sense for where I am –
to become less of a stranger in a strange land.

These walks do however serve another purpose.

They have become where, and when, I pray –
pray for the aches and pains
of the bodies and souls of my friendly faithful.

It is where I pray for wisdom and patience –
both in surprisingly short supply some days.

And it is where I pray for, and often find, the courage
to go back tomorrow and try this again.

Someday my kids will be able to say,
“Oh, our dad – he’s just a wandering seminarian.”

It was on one of these recent walks
that I turned off onto a street
I had never been on before
and found myself in the midst of an industrial park:
heating and cooling –
packing and manufacturing –
parking lots full of dump trucks and backhoes –
even a place that specializes in renting industrial cranes (which is good – because you never know when you might need to rent a crane.)

The midnight lights on in the windows
even as the clock neared midnight
peel back another layer of this punch-clock world
where I now find myself living.

And suddenly there it was – the train track.

I push through the grass overgrown with neglect and set foot on the empty tracks.

There were stories to decipher left in the hieroglyphic graffiti of retired boxcars
and overhanging lights
frozen for the moment in red.

I kick rock along this hidden stretch of rails that runs through the heart of this place.

And that’s when it happened.

Without warning or notice.
Every hair on my neck and arm stood at full attention. Every sense suddenly heightened.
My heart and breath raced ahead
to see what was around the hidden bend.
I pulled the head phones from my ears to listen.

Was it coming?

How would I know?

Where would it come from?

Would I be facing it head on or

would it be sneaking up from behind?

I was sitting ringside as pure, almost giddy, excitement
duked it out with utter fear flapping uncontrolled
to become the sole proprietor of the pit of my stomach.

What was I supposed to do?

Let the four-year-old within me giggle with adventure and wait for it to pass by in a rush of glory?

Or find the quickest exit and get the hell out of there?

I am pretty new to this whole pastor’s life.
Most days more unsure of what to do
than I was the day before,
wondering if there was a handful of classes I missed somewhere along the way.

Maybe all you can do each day is step on the barren track until the train you’ve only heard in the distance is suddenly upon you.

I guess I'll show up in the morning and see what happens...

Church Buisness

2010-05-25T17:52:00.000-07:00

They came by horseback, saddlebag preachers traveling sometimes hundreds of miles just to get there. They did everything they could to get there – endured every element and every imaginable hardship just in order to get there.

The first time they got there: Christmas Day, 1784.

And where was there?

There was Baltimore’s Lovely Lane Chapel. And it was there, in the quiet, almost unnoticed shadow, like the first time Incarnation broke into human history, wrapped itself in swaddling cloths and landed in manger straw, that the Methodist movement in North America was born. And once a year ever since, “the people of the covered dish” still do everything they can just to get there.

Sure, we no longer ride on the back of a horse to get there, instead we climb inside of a Honda Civic or Chevy Suburban – a Ford Focus or Toyota Prius – many still traveling the hundreds of miles just to get there.

The Annual Conference – the yearly gathering of the people who call themselves United Methodist. It is the place where we will connect with old friends and maybe make a few new ones. It is the place we come to attend to the “business” of the church.

The business of the church. It can get messy and mean – contentious and cantankerous – divisive and disruptive – confused and cluttered "The amendment to the amendment on the point of order to table the call to do something we should be doing anyways" stuff can make one wonder if God is in the midst of any of it and if the business of church is worth all the effort it takes to get there.

And this year, I wasn’t sure I wanted to be there in the first place. The year had been tough. Turf wars over parlor paint and carpet colors, exhaustion from pushing rocks too large to push alone up slopes that nobody else seemed interested in pushing anything up in the first place only to watch them roll all the way back down again left me with little energy for even the "holiest" of conferencing. I just wasn’t sure I was up for the four day marathon of side choosing and hair splitting – the monotony of tending the weedy field where the business of church gets done.

So there I sat, in the front pew of an 8:00 am worship service – distracted and preoccupied, going over the endless lists of “to-dos” that awaited me on the other side of all this, agitated, completely unprepared for what was about to happen.

The service was themed around the sacrament of baptism – the ritual sprinkling of babies oblivious to what is happening to them, a family photo-opp before they too often disappear onto the rolls of the Christmas and Easter crowd. And I could have called it – as if the dozen glass bowls filled with water on the table up front weren’t an obvious tip off – that at the end of this service we would be asked to come forward and remember an event the vast majority of us had no memory of in the first place.

And that’s when the parade began.

Down every aisle they walked to the front of the sanctuary to have wet fingers press the mark of the cross into their foreheads. I got caught in the moment, hooked and slowly reeled in, and I did not fight it – I went willing into the waters of my parents' best wishes for a son they once held with hands full of hope and humility.

I watched person after person – people of all ages, races and backgrounds marching in silent procession.

I watched a Native American woman drive her wheelchair right up to the front of that church – nothing would deter her from dipping her fingers in the fresh springs of her salvation.

I saw a woman approach her clergy spouse. When he held out the bowl of water to her, their eyes told a story of a promise held onto where recently there had been as many bad times as there had been good –as much sickness as there had been health – as much struggle as there had been blessing.

I spot a young pastor standing in front of his mother. She leaves her blessing on his brow, their eyes as wet as the water.

I see strangers deeply connected in a moment no longer held so tightly by things that simply will not last.

Then it was my turn. As the drops of graces traveled down the bridge of my nose - I wept – wept for the beauty of the moment and for a Savior that made this parade possible – and for the God who reminded me of why I was there.

Because this - this is the business of the church.