Benediction

When I worked with the children's ministry program at my church in Seattle I had the amazing privilege to learn and experience the Godly Play curriculum.  For those who aren't familiar with Godly Play, you can read more about the program here but essentially it is a Sunday School program that assumes children are capable of encountering the mystery and majesty of God in silence, in opportunities to pose "wondering" questions, and in the participation in the ancient liturgy of the church (simplified to their level of course).  It's an incredible program and in my opinion probably the best way to help our children learn to worship and experience God so they are able to make the transition to worshiping with the larger corporate body.

Anyways!  This post really isn't an advertisement for Godly Play!  I was a worship leader for the 4-6 year old room and one of my very favorite parts of that role was getting the opportunity to bestow a blessing, or a benediction, upon each child before they left every week.  They would all be sitting in a circle and one by one I'd call them up to me.  Some would sit on the floor in front of me or next to me.  Some would exuberantly throw themselves into my lap for a quick snuggle as I gave them their blessing.  Others would more shyly approach.  I would lean towards them and whisper words meant only for them into their ear, placing my hand upon their head in the ancient motion of blessing  someone.  I would try to incorporate some aspect of the day's story, but I would also try to make it personal to their lives.  If I knew Ryan had a soccer game and the lesson of the day was how God was with Abram and Sarai everywhere he sent them, I may have whispered "Ryan, may you always remember the Lord goes with you everywhere you go this week, he's with you in the classroom, he's with you on that soccer field, and he's with you as you lay down to sleep each evening. May God bless you and keep you.  Amen."  If one of the children came from a difficult family situation I would incorporate words of blessing that addressed their life somehow.

This was powerful.  In so many ways.  For the little ones, you could visibly see their countenance change as they got up from receiving their blessings and headed towards the door.  They exited into the rest of their week buoyed by the words of love, grace, and God's truth spoken over them.  Many many children would tell us that the blessing was their favorite part of Sunday School.   We live in a culture and a world where critique is everywhere.  Every assignment we turn in, every play on the sports field, every outfit we wear is up for the critique and evaluation of the world around us.  We are all hungry for words of grace and love to be spoken over us. As the one giving the blessings I found myself in awe of the privilege to be one of the voices speaking into these little minds and hearts.  It was powerful, and that experience has stayed with me all these years.  I haven't spoken a blessing over a child since I left Seattle in 2005, yet I've never forgotten those holy moments, that sacred ground when a child expectantly waited for her unique benediction.

My friend Kimberlee is a mom of 4 beautiful children, and is doing an amazing job raising them to love the Lord.  She has carefully & thoughtfully incorporated aspects of the church calendar, liturgy, and rhythm into her family life, and I've learned a lot from her as I've read her blog and her book over the years.  Every night she and her husband speak the words of each child's baptismal verse over them, mark them with the sign of the cross on their foreheads and speak a benediction over them.  I have loved this idea since the moment I heard about it long before Aidan ever existed.

Now that it's my turn to put my little one to sleep I have begun the ritual of speaking a blessing over him as he begins to nurse to sleep in my arms.  I mark his forehead with the sign of the cross, the same way it was marked with the waters of his baptism.  I speak the words of a scripture passage over him--not one particular verse yet, each night it's the words of a different verse, words I want to begin taking root in his little soul.  I long for him to always know the height and depth and breadth of God's love for him.  I pray he will always know that when the waters of life swirl around him they will not sweep over him.  I hope he will never ever forget that the Lord delights in him.  I pray he will be a boy and then a man who will love justice and mercy.   In these moments my ordinary hands, the hands that spend the day wiping a little nose and a little bottom, the hands that wash what feels like a never ending slew of dishes, hands that type words of reflection into a computer--these ordinary every day hands become holy.  As they caress a tiny forehead and smooth back fly away strands of baby hair something powerful happens.  I'm sure Aidan can't feel it, and doesn't realize it, but in these quiet moments of blessing my son I am somehow changed.  My perspective shifts and refocuses.  The frustration of having to tell him twenty times in a day not to touch the DVD player melts away and I remember that in the long run, what really matters is that these holy and ancient words from scripture begin to take root in his tiny heart.  I sit and I rock and I nurse him and I pray.  I pray words of blessing, words of benediction.  And I pray that somehow these moments of grace make a difference--in his life and in my own.

Live for Now

**This was a devotion I gave for our MOPS group this fall, but as I'm reflecting on a new year, it still seems pertinent to what I'm learning these days!

So there is this billboard I keep passing that is a Pepsi ad.  It’s tag line that keeps catching my attention says “Pepsi.  Live for Now.”   The first time I passed it my initial reaction was “that’s kind of what’s wrong with our culture today…everyone running around living for now…living for the moment….doing what feels good and right in the moment with no thought about future consequences or the impact our choices have on our own futures or the futures of others.”  The next several times I drove by it I had the same reaction.  It seemed selfish to me to live for now…this billboard seemed to be saying to me “go ahead, do what you want, life is short, it’s okay to throw responsibility to the wind and live for the moment.”  I didn’t feel like our society really needed more  permission to behave this way, and every time I went by this billboard I found myself irritated at Pepsi. 

I passed it again yesterday and for some reason its message struck me a completely different way—in a way I’m not sure the masterminds behind Pepsi’s advertising intended, but in a way I thought I’d share with you.  I’ve been working on my 2011 Shutterfly scrapbook this past weekend quite a bit, so the events of that year are fresh in my mind and heart right now.  2011 was a bittersweet year if I’ve ever had one, and through the experiences of the year God patiently taught me over and over again to stay in the present, to not worry about, plan or control the future.  In essence, God was teaching me to “live for now.”   

In January of 2011 my husband and I both finished up our masters of divinity degrees from Fuller Seminary, packed up our apartment in Pasadena, said goodbye to close friends and headed north up I-5 to the new townhouse we had just purchased in Seattle, WA.  Charles had just been given the job as youth director at a church there, and I was going to be helping him out, working along side him, using my degree and training as well while we settled in and prepared to start a family.  We moved in Martin Luther King weekend of 2011 and on January 18^th he started his job.  I was looking back on my journal entries of that winter and realized it only took exactly 3 weeks of working at this church before I wrote the words “Lord, did we make a huge mistake?” It’s a long story but we quickly realized the church we were serving at wasn’t exactly the church that had been described to us in the interview process.  The next several months were full of literally working 70+ hour weeks, panic attacks, accidentally trusting the wrong people with information, learning a lot of lessons the hard way, and feeling utterly & completely exhausted and burned out.  And we found out in the midst of all this that I was pregnant. 

We shared our exciting news with the pastor and mentioned that over the next 9 months we might need to make some changes to our current youth schedule, there wasn’t any way we could keep us that kind of pace when a baby was added to our family.  Two weeks later, in mid-june, he called my husband into his office one Wednesday morning.  He was told they had voted at their meeting the night before and had decided that he wasn’t the right youth director for their church, that he was being let go immediately.  

Honestly our first reaction was “oh thank God we never have to go back to that place, it was killing us.”  But our next reaction was “holy crap!  We are 9 weeks pregnant, we just bought a house, we have absolutely no idea what is next!”  Plus, we were hurt.  We were so angry and so disillusioned by everything that had happened in the past 6 months. 

If there are a few adjectives I could use to describe myself it would be “planner,” “control freak” and “not a fan of surprises!”  Needless to say I wasn’t a huge fan of what God was doing.  I kept trying to trust that whatever he had in store for us had to be better, but I wanted so so badly to know the “whats” and “whens” and “hows.”  We started another nation-wide job search, there were no youth director jobs in seattle at that time, so we knew staying there wasn’t going to be likely.  Doors seemed to be closing right and left throughout last summer.  We kept having this feeling that we were waiting for something but we just hadn’t figure out what it was yet.  We did a lot of traveling, spent a lot of time with family, and Charles even spent the whole month of August at a camp in the middle of nowhere in northern Minnesota doing some youth ministry training and a lot of healing.   In mid-September the job here at First Pres literally fell in our laps.  God worked through some amazing logistics and details and circumstances to bring us right back here, not far from where we started our 2011 journey, to a staff full of close friends of ours from Fuller, to a community that has embraced us and our child wholeheartedly from the beginning.  It was an incredible whirlwind of a fall last year—selling our house, moving down here and in with a family from the church for a month while we figured out where we were going to live, getting health insurance switched and finding a new OB at 32 weeks pregnant.  We moved into our apartment over Thanksgiving last year, spent December getting settled, and Aidan was born MLK weekend of 2012—a perfect beautiful bookend to our bittersweet journey of 2011. 

Through it all, the recurring theme kept being “stay in today.  Live for now.  You can’t do anything about your future until I choose to reveal it, so do not worry.”  In the moment, it was excruciating, but for the first time in my life I felt so strongly that God was somehow in control.  God was bringing us through the desert into a place he was preparing for us, and that somehow it was all going to fall into place before this baby arrived.  I swung back and forth between panic and peace.  But I started to slowly understand what scripture meant when Jesus tells us: “²⁵ “do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? ²⁶ Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? ²⁷ Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life^[e]?  ²⁸ “And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. ²⁹ Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. ³⁰ If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? ³¹ So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ ³² For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. ³³ But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. ³⁴ Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”

Live for now.  We have so many things in life we can get caught up in worrying about.  Finances, health, education, our marriages, jobs…the list goes on and on.  But Jesus invites us to let go of those things, to not live in a state of fear and panic about the future.  He invites us to live in this day.  In this moment.  Maybe not exactly in the way the Pepsi folks meant it when they chose their slogan, but I think by choosing to live in the here and now is our way of saying “okay God, I trust you.  I can’t see around the corner.  I can’t see what’s coming up, and that scares me to death, but I choose to trust you.”  We’re entering a new year…January is almost behind us.  What is looming on your horizons this year that has you worried?  What can we place into the hands of Jesus?  I don’t know that I’ve made any new year’s resolutions this year, but attempting to let go and live in today is definitely one of my focuses.  Will you join me in saying no to worry this year? 

The Liturgy of an 8 Year Old

I think God might be trying to teach me something about prayer, as sometimes, when He is trying to make a point, He is not very subtle. At chapel on Monday morning we had the privilege of hearing Dale Bruner, one of the best teachers in the Presbyterian Church today, come and share with us on the Lord’s Prayer for an hour. I am not going to re-write Dale’s message, yet I do know that he has inspired me to take this prayer to heart--he has encouraged me to make this prayer one of the central components of my time with God and let the rest of my conversation with God flow out of these words that Jesus himself gave us.

Monday night, I pick up this incredible book I am reading, Mudhouse Sabbath by Lauren Winner. The chapter I had left off with the night before and was to pick up on Monday night is entitled “prayer.” I kind of laughed and thought “ok maybe God’s trying to teach me something…” and I started reading. Her words on prayer and on liturgy spoke so powerfully to me. Lauren started by talking about how in the Jewish tradition one receives a prayer book and one prays set prayers at set times during the day. Now that she has converted to Christianity, the prayer book isn’t as prominent, yet for her, those words became such a part of her soul that now her prayers often feel like they are lacking something. She recognizes that praying a liturgical prayer written by someone else sounds so confining to a lot of Protestants, and here is how she responds to that:

“I have sometimes set aside my prayer book for days and weeks on end, and I find, at the end of those days and weeks, that I have lapsed into narcissism…it is returning to my prayer book that places me: places me in words that ask me to confess my sins, even when I can’t think of any red-letter deeds recently committed; words that ask me to pray for presidents and homeless Charlottesvillians and everyone in between; words that praise God even on the mornings when I wonder if God exists at all…sometimes it is great when, in prayer, we can express to God just what we feel; but better still when, in the act of praying, our feelings change. Liturgy is not, in the end, open to our emotional whims. It repoints the person praying, taking him somewhere else.”

I love Lauren’s point. Sometimes we just don’t “feel” like we believe in God or we don’t “feel” like praying or don’t seem to know what to say. Liturgy helps us to begin the conversation, and just because the words have been around for hundreds of years does not mean they are invalid or not worth integrating into our daily lives. Scripture has been read, memorized, recited and integrated into lives for a couple thousand years and that doesn’t negate its importance or power; yet often our churches are so quick to toss out anything that is “old” or out of date, which I think is tragic. We’re creating an entire generation of Christians who have no idea where they’ve come from or the history of their faith.

I grew up reciting the words of the Lutheran liturgy every Sunday for my entire childhood and then as I began being exposed to other churches and other aspects of the evangelical church when I was in high school, I began to believe that the way I was raised in regards to faith was somehow wrong or invalid. My later years of high school consisted of a lot of questioning—which I think is good and every young person needs to go through that. Through questioning though, and through more exploring in college, I realized that while I do love singing “contemporary praise music” and worshiping in more informal settings, it is when the words of a familiar liturgy are said that my heart jumps to life. They are so deeply rooted in my heart and soul that as soon as I hear them something inside me says “pay attention, we’re standing before the Lord now!” I’ve seen some powerful examples of the way that pieces of liturgy (most specifically the Apostle’s Creed & the Lord’s Prayer) have helped people pray when they did not have the words on their own. Lauren tells us of meeting her boyfriend’s grandfather for the first time. Dr. Gatewood had lost most of his memory, he couldn’t even remember his grandchildren’s names any longer, yet their first meeting was in church on Sunday morning. Lauren sat next to him—to this man who had no idea who was sitting around him—and she said the most amazing thing happened. As soon as the congregation began the Lord’s prayer, he joined in. Here’s how she described it:

“Dr. Gatewood, who might not even remember how to count to ten, remembered how to pray. The Lord’s Prayer and the Apostle’s Creed were somewhere in the foundation of his memory, beneath even his grandchildren’s names…these words of prayer are among the most basic words Dr. Gatewood knows. When he has forgotten everything else, those words are the words he will have. Those words have formed his heart, and—regardless of what he feels or remembers on any particular morning—they continue to form his heart still.”

When my own great-grandmother was living her final days here on earth, she was often in and out of consciousness, but when she was awake, my grandma prayed with her. Oma didn’t always know what was happening around her but when Grandma began praying the Lord’s Prayer, Oma joined in—in German—her first language that she hadn’t spoken in years, but that was the language she learned the Lord’s Prayer in first, and it was so deeply rooted in her heart that when she no longer had the words to engage in conversation, she had the words to pray.

Lauren writes that “liturgy happens any time we repeat one prayer over and over week in and week out…even the little child laying herself down to sleep, praying the Lord her soul to keep, is praying a liturgy.” This where it hit home for me the most. My parents prayed “Now I lay me down to sleep…” with Megan and I every night until we were in high school, any anytime we would visit any of our cousins or grandparent’s, whichever adult was tucking us in that night would pray the same prayer with us—those words and that prayer is rooted in each of my cousins and I. They don’t seem very sophisticated now, or theologically complex, in fact, I hadn’t thought about that prayer in years until I read what Lauren wrote. But, those words were my first liturgy.

So Monday night, after hearing Dale Bruner speak about prayer, and after reading what Lauren had to say, I turned off my light and lay in bed thinking “I really should pray.” And, much to my dismay, I didn’t seem to have the words. I know I don’t need fancy words to approach God, I know that He wants us to come before Him and just tell him what is on our hearts, but at that moment, my heart was so full that I could not put into words what I was thinking. So all of a sudden, I found myself saying “now I lay me, down to sleep…” and immediately after I concluded that prayer I found my mind saying something else—words I had forgotten were a part of me. You see, after my parents had said the Lord’s Prayer and Now I lay me… with me, and they turned out the light and left every night as a child, I had a prayer of my own that I always prayed. I don’t think my parents or anyone else ever knew this, but I would fall asleep every night as a child, probably from the time I was 7 or 8, saying the words to my own prayer that I had written. Each night, with the exact same words as the night before, I would ask God to please be with mommy and daddy and with Megan and that he keep them very very safe, very very healthy, and very very happy. And then I would ask for whatever else was on my mind that day, and I would close by telling God that I loved him, “very very very and infinity more very’s much.” Don’t ask me why I felt the need to add that “infinity more very’s” line, but I did, every night. It was a piece of my liturgy as an 8 year old, and I remember lying in bed never ever doubting that God was listening. I remember imagining Him bending down from heaven over my bed every night, listening to the words of my eight year old heart.

Why is prayer so much more difficult for us now? I have talked to countless Christian friends who all struggle in the same way I do—we don’t pray! It is so difficult for us to somehow quiet ourselves before God and come before Him with the faith of a child. Instead we try to analyze him, or try to pepper our prayers with sophisticated language etc. When did it get so difficult? Last Monday when I was laying in bed and had finished “now I lay me…” my eight year old’s prayer came back so clearly, as if God were reminding me, “Sarah! Start here! Don’t make this so difficult, go back to the things you believed and trusted in as a child! I haven’t changed, I’m still bending down over your bed, waiting to hear your now-24 – year old’s heart!” And all of a sudden, after praying that God keep mom and dad and Megan safe, healthy, and happy, I could pray again.

Those words of my prayers that night came out of words that were so deeply ingrained in me that I had become unaware of their presence anymore. But they were there, waiting to help me begin a conversation with the creator of the universe. So, Mom & Dad, Grandma & Papa, if you’re reading this, thank you. Thank you for taking the time to patiently sit with all of us kids as we learned the words to bed time prayers, table prayers, and the prayer that Jesus himself taught us. And once we learned it, thank you for realizing your job was not over. Thank you for continuing to pray with us night after night for years, as together we invited Jesus to come watch over us as we slept.