Bringing Faith to Life
church
Stretch to strengthen: pain of a healing sort
01 year
by wlebolt
in Body, Call to Action, church, Deeper Sensation, faith, In Action, Made to Move, prayer, witness, writing
No one really wants to be stretched. At least not too far, and definitely not when the stretching goes beyond what feels comfortable.
There’s just a certain out-of-control-feeling when someone is pulling you and you don’t know how far they will go, or even if they will stop. If you have ever had physical therapy after an injury or surgery, you know exactly what I’m describing. It’s painful but it’s pain of a healing sort. It helps recover your range of motion, and once you have that, the strengthening can begin. Then you’re on the road to return to action.
While there lots of ways to strengthen — exercise machines, dumbbells, pulleys, weights — it’s likely that when you earn your discharge from the PT gym you’ll be sent home with a lovely parting gift called a resistance band. It’s meant to be your home exercise companion. And it comes with a wonderful secret: When you stretch it, it strengthens you.
I know that sounds a bit counterintuitive, but it’s true. When you pull, it resists, gently. As you pull harder, it stretches, slowly. The harder you pull, the more it stretches and the more that strengthens you. This feels very much like life these days and, to me, very much like the life of faith. Body and soul engaged in a give-and-take which feels very much like exercise.
Apparently, my approach is a bit atypical. While most faith-folk tend to start with the soul and then invite the body along, when I begin with body, my soul always comes along for the joy ride. *
Try for yourself. Here’s a simple prayer routine using the “exercise” band and the words to the praise song, Spirit of the Living God. My daughter Stephanie’s lovely voice accompanies me.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mse98SpD1v4]
The movement is prayer. The words are prayer. The music is prayer.
But even better, even after the prayer-exercise is done, the sensation of prayer remains… in the body! The muscles that moved the band — the effort, the stretch, the exertion of prayer — reverberate and reiterate: melt me, mold me, fill me, use me. Literally, the prayer is still there.
This is too good to be true, right? Try it again. Become aware of the energy, the symbiosis, the connection of stretch to strengthen. Let your body prayer become fluid, flowing one motion into the next. Body and soul, together. Who could conceive of something so powerful and yet so simple?
*My thanks to the folks at the Upper Room for honoring my unusual approach and inviting me to join them to lead worship at SOULfeast 2013.
One Table, Many Chairs
1
Something special happens when we insist on one table with everyone around it. Oh, we may not like everyone there. We may not have seen them in years. We may not even recognize them. But, when the first rule of gathering is that everyone gets a seat at the table, the dynamic changes.
It seems that rule #1 has gone missing. We feel just fine with one head table and a banquet hall filled with rounders of 10. Or, let’s just scrap the head table sit with our friends around a 6-seater or a 4-top. Why not a deuce? Hey, we’re completely happy with our laptop and our tall latte at the table for one as long as there’s an outlet. As long as I can plug into “my community” and access all the wisdom the world has to offer, I’m good.
This is the direction we’re headed and we’re good with it. Our private truth feels fine. And that’s fine until we are confronted with different: different looks, different ways, different beliefs. Nothing wrong with different, we say, take that seat over there. Way over there.
Separate but equal, that seems fair. Just like it did when segregation seemed fair. And, in practice, people thought it made sense, until it didn’t.
What’s wrong with each one having a seat and a table to himself is that it doesn’t cause us to squirm. It doesn’t require us to listen to the difference, consider the different, and frame our response in respect to the one who differs. We dearly need rule #1: there is one table.
As soon as separation is an option, it’s an out. A reason to pack up our differences and find people who agree with us. In our own clusters we can justify our actions and find support for our opinions. We may work up a sweat and convince ourselves this is the work we are meant to do, this holding the line against those who would invade from that other table across the room.
But it’s hard to hear across the distance. And in the rabble of a million voices, each speaking his truth, where can we find a common language?
There’s only one way I know: One Table, everyone around it, no exceptions.
Yep, it will be nearly impossible to find union there, and the struggle to find a unified voice will nearly kill us. But it’s the presence of the opposition, not its absence, that forces us to find it — faith, word, answer, method — a way forward that includes EVERYONE around the table.
One Table with as many chairs as there are people who seek a seat. One microphone and one scribe. When we love, we listen.
It would nearly kill us all. But out of that near death experience what life!
By Our Wounds, We are Healed
210 years
You don’t start out the best at anything. The only way to get better is to work at it. Things take practice and patience, trial and error, falling down and getting up. Three years ago this April, I fell and could not get back up. I needed help, which included a repair to the hamstring tendon which had become detached from its site of origin. Sewing and bit of skeletal carpentry would be necessary. (I also began blogging then. You can find that story here at On the Way to Well.)
Today, the attachment is good as new, but not the hamstring. Oh, it works pretty well. I can run and jump and play without concern. Just every now and then, when I get in just the wrong position, it panics and balls itself up. This is inconvenient and can be a bit embarrassing because there is no inciting event. Nothing startles or irritates. I am just sitting or getting up or kneeling and bingo. Hello says the hamstring and I am at its mercy.
This wouldn’t have surprised anyone back in the days when I hobbled around in a brace. They expected my gimpiness and disability. But now that I am healed, I should be good as new. Well, I am new, but I need to qualify that good. I am the product of repair. I bear the scars, inside and out, of all that life has hurled at me. And that is good. In fact, today I would say that is very, very good.
But oh my, the list. When I go to see a new doctor he wants to know my “history.” Not just of this ailment, but of all the things that have ailed me. What hurts, what has malfunctioned, what’s been repaired, modified, extracted. All that’s ever gone wrong I’m supposed to write on those few puny lines. Oh, if he only knew. Then he would know me.
So, in these days after Easter, I am sitting vicariously with those cowering 11 disciples in the Upper Room. Had I been fortunate enough to be among them in those days, I surely would have been around that table, worrying, lamenting, fearing the worst, right along with them. And suddenly Jesus is among them. They weren’t expecting that, clearly weren’t expecting him. In fact at first they didn’t recognize him. Here’s how John recounts it:
On the evening of that first day of the week, when the disciples were together, with the doors locked for fear of the Jewish leaders, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” After he said this, he showed them his hands and side. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord. Again Jesus said, “Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” And with that he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit. ~ John 20:19-22
Once he showed them his hands and side, they “saw” him. I had always thought that Doubting Thomas was the only slow one, but apparently not. They didn’t know it was Jesus, it seems, until He showed them his wounds.
And so I think of my “wounds.” After I die, this is how people will be able to positively identify me. Regardless of the lifeless state of my physical body, people will know me by the dental work I have had done, the thumb tendon I had replaced, the bunionectomy that realigned my right big toe, the scar over my right eye where that girl headed me in the head playing soccer in college, the C-section lines where emerged two of my children, and yes, the stitch marks where they sewed back my damaged hamstring tendon. They will know me by the marks on my hands and feet, the scar on my forehead and the gashes in my butt and belly. They will know me by my wounds, that have been healed. The evidence remains.
How compassionate of the Living Christ to show this to those cowards in the Upper Room. See these? Now you go and live life, battle scars and all. That’s how they’ll know you have lived, just as it is how you know that I live.
When we bolt the doors against fear, we don’t keep hurt out, we lock ourselves in. Thank goodness God broke in to show us the Way out!
Looking for truth through fallible eyes
111 years
See is believing, right? Well, yes and no.
I was talking with an elderly man who has been colorblind since, well, at least the 10th grade. That’s when they discovered it. When they showed his class the disk with the pixels and everyone else saw 9. He saw 27.
He’s red-green colorblind which is, apparently, the most common form of the disability. This means he can’t distinguish red from green. This presents a unique problem when it comes to traffic lights.
“I memorized the order,” he says.
He sees things in shades. The lit one is brighter gray…I guess. How really would I know? I can’t see what he’s seeing any more than he can see what I see.
Curious. He knows that diamonds and hearts are red. How? Because whatever “color” he sees them, he has learned, is red. Green? same. Purple, same. Yellow, same. He has taught himself to distinguish colors in ways I don’t have to. Literally, he sees color in the shades of gray.
So, how do we know what color something REALLY is? He sees it one way. I see it another. In fact, how do we know what shape or shade or orientation something really is? Maybe we just don’t see it. Or we don’t see it clearly? Or we see it differently?
Or, we interpret it differently because of our experiences, our perspective, our “dis”ability.
How do we know what something really is if our senses are all we have to count on? And they’re fallible. Or at least inconsistent, person to person.
“There are some things,” the elderly man says. “I just can’t think of them now.”
“What if there was something we all gathered around, each with our different sensations and perspectives, and it was the same to all of us?” I ask him.
“Yes,” he said, “that would be it.”
Perhaps the heavenly throne will be like this. Something around which we all can agree.
“Is that what you see?”
“Yes, I see it, too. Just that way.”
The only way we’d know it would be to consult the other. Down to the very last one. It wouldn’t be defined by our perspective. Rather, it would be confirmed by our consultation. Non-negotiable. Consensus, without debate.
That would be truth. Wouldn’t you agree?
It’s all in how they read it
012 years
“LITTLE PIG, LITTLE PIG, LET ME COME IN!”
There, did you read that in a big, deep voice? Reverend Miner says, “I hope so, or you’re not a very good storyteller.” Because you want the child to get the message: when danger comes knocking, don’t let it in. Isn’t it funny how children’s fiction speaks so much truth, in a voice that sounds very much like our own?
We are blessed at Floris with preachers who are good storytellers. Barbara Miner went on to share the stories of no shower but my family loves me anyway, of Timber the golden retriever who lives to be with Becky, of famous people who have undermined our national trust, of a groom and bride who sob with 100% joy. Way to tug at our heartstrings, Barbara.
But story, well told, does that. It engages us and then unleashes the “aha!” But, more than that, it stays with us in a way that lectures and exhortations and, well, regular preaching, doesn’t. I love hearing a good story on Sunday, don’t you? Partly because I’m still chewing on it on a Monday morning. I guess I am a “morning after” person.
Now, true disclosure, I take notes during worship. I’ve done it for years, through the tenure of a number of pastors at several churches. I hope the folks sitting near me don’t find it distracting. They notes are for my Monday. They are actually an act of worship for me. I come on Sunday expecting a gift, so I bring my pen. And I am never disappointed.
Oh, the notes I take don’t look very much like this blog, because everything looks different on Monday morning in the light cast by worship. But today I am feeling better about this because Barbara has reminded us that it’s not about the words, it’s about how you say them.
I need to go back and read some of those children’s stories we still have on our kids’ shelves. That’s what they tell you to do if you want to write your own story…read what you’re trying to write. And, as it happens, I am in the middle of trying to write a children’s story. It’s fictional, but the truth keeps getting in the way. Makes it hard to write, but I hope it will make it easier to read.
But, isn’t it like God to come to my rescue just as I am threatening to take myself too seriously? This morning, I am paging through gift catalogs on my kitchen counter – yes, that time is upon us – and open to a page of t-shirts with silly sayings. Somehow I gravitate to the page for scrabble players, I guess. One of the shirts reads:
“Let’s eat Grandma. Let’s eat, Grandma. Commas save lives.”For a storyteller the message may be all in how you say it, but when you write it down, punctuation is NOT optional. Commas save lives!
If you just chuckled, too, perhaps you are a worship service note-taker who finds God on a Monday morning, too. Take it from me, the accidental blogger, you can trust Him. Remember, it’s all in how they READ it.