I met Leah 25 years ago today.

In a hospital room in Stevens Point, WI I learned what wonder was. 

Wonder was struggling out of the fog of an emergency Cesarian section and being fearful about asking after the health of the child who had been constant companion for ten months and being answered by the handing into my arms a bundle capped by blond fluff and eyes bespeaking a soul old and fine.  Her eyes found mine  and there was an “of course” as we took each other in, as if to say we had been destined to learn love and life one from the other.  Of course.  Of course.

Wonder. 

She is far from my arms on this day, making and learning her life.  It aches, this not holding her on this day of remembering and celebrating.

But the world holds her.  She is, and she is so fine, and of course she will venture and learn and explore while her mother marks the day remembering.  Remembering the communion of soul-meet.  Remembering the advent of wonder.

Key Minnesota statistics around on the status of children:

• 11.4% of children under 18 years old are living in poverty in Minnesota.
• For families the poverty rate is 6.2% and for families with children under 18 years, the poverty rate is 9.8%, and for families with children under 5 years the rate increases to 12.7%.
• In Minnesota there are 78,629 children living without health insurance (6.3% of children in the state).
• There are 108,098 children not enrolled in school in Minnesota between the ages of 3 and 17.
• The median household income is $72,008, and 12.5% of children are living in households with Supplemental Security Income (SSI), cash public assistance income, or Food Stamp benefits.

The above statistics landed in my email in box courtesy of the Children’s Interfaith Advocacy Network.

Artist Kathe Kollwitz has an incredibly powerful work in which a mother is depicted in a fiercely sheltering embrace of her children.  It is entitled “Seed Corn Must not be Ground”.  It speaks volumes.  As do the above statistics.

I just can’t figure it.  I can’t understand that any sort of rationale could be shared that would legitimate our grinding of the seed corn that is our children.  They are the crop of the future.   They are our hope and our legacy and, increasingly, our witness to our values.

Clearly we value armaments and strip malls and stadiums more than we value the seed corn.  Clearly we have deafened our ears and hearts to the teachings of Jesus which are so very clear about our need to care for the “least of these”.

I don’t much want to hear arguments from politicians about whose failed policies created a reality in which so many of our children live without basic human necessities.  I don’t much want to endure any longer the finger pointing and posturing because clearly, the only place the finger can point with unerring accuracy is at ourselves.

We are a part of the problem.  And, thank God, we are a part of the solution. 

Let us put down the shields we hide behind as we play the partisan blame game.  Let us instead wrap ourselves in the awareness that whilst the battle for blame goes on, our children are being ground.

Check out the Children’s Interfaith Advocacy Network.  Organize a group in your church.  Raise your voice and your awareness.

Seed corn must not be ground.

Living in the city is hard for me.

So, I bought a scooter.  A Barbie pink one.  It is a 50 cc which means I can go up to 45 mph, it gets 80 – 100 miles per gallon, and it has made me giddy.

Now upon waking, one of my first thoughts is whether or not it’s a “scooter day”.  Now, I plot out routes across town that are back road beautiful.  Now, I am delighted to run errands and tend to tasks that require travel because I get to feel the wind in my face and I love it.

I was twelve or so when I first got bit by the mini bike bug.  A friend had one and I remember loving the adventure of putting along trails with it.  I have toyed for years with the temptation to get a motorcycle, but as a mom and as an ever-aging woman-aware-of-vulnerability I wasn’t too keen on high speed and long distance power.

But scooters, well, that’s a whole different thing.  They began appearing before my eyes everywhere and each time I saw one my heart did a lurchy kind of call out to it and when I had run out of the necessary restraints that kept me from plunking down my money for such a one-person toy, I entered a store and there is was:  not the classy red that I had thought to call my own, but a shocking pink one that was priced to sell (imagine, pink as a hard color to move off the floor!).

Fall is fabulous on a scooter.  The smells and the warmth of the sun, the quality of light and the right-in-your-face beauty of flowers and trees and children waiting for school busses is breathed right in. 

I’m in it:  life and living.

Yesterday’s text from Ephesians had to do with joining together to create hymns and songs of gratitude.  Making celebration in concert with all that is is spiritual bread for the journey that is life.

This morning is the first of my 52nd year of life.  Involved in the oh so vital decision- making about getting out of bed for that first cup of coffee, I received a sung gift.  A loon flew over my urban house.   The first call I heard seemed like it couldn’t be:  the singing out of my favorite bird, a spirit animal I have long associated with a father who died way too early and suddenly fourteen years ago.  Loons live on the lake at my cabin and in the north land that still is home place and in the midst of not being there, an emissary appeared.

Four times it called out.  In its song was life and remembrance and proclamation and the weaving of the shine that is creation. 

Happy birthday to me.

I was at a training recently for United Methodist pastors.

A statement made really got my attention.  The issue was how it is that sometimes, when we seek to build community based on shared values and corporate buy-in, people who exist on the edges of the community seek to dictate course.  In other words, they show up only rarely, “invest” themselves minimally or not at all, and then lob their comments into the “boat” of the community and expect that they will be able to chart the course of the communal boat.

The comment made was that these folks are “on the dock” and have not earned the right to pilot the boat.

I loved it!  Church is so often a messy and confusing place.  We are somehow under the impression that as dutiful followers of Jesus, we cannot practice clean and clear boundaries around process.  We’re too nice to say to someone “Hey, get in the boat and we have something to talk about.  As long as you remain on the dock, your voice just isn’t going to be pilot”.

What happens when people forget that living in healthy ways together is a foundational value of Christian community is that members wield power in the ways practiced in secular culture.  They withdraw their monetary support.  They boycott worship for various and sundry reasons.  They mutter and mutter via emails and spoken word their denigration of the course of the boat called church.  They refuse to practice the Jesus teachings of face to face conversations and communal problem solving.  And they somehow believe that if they shout loudly from the dock and enjoin others to join their campaign of discontent,  they can pilot the boat from the dock.

I had a clergy colleague, a former District Superintendent, who asked a question that lives with me yet:  “Do you want to be Christian, or do you want to be nice?”

I think that in charting the boat called church in these days of necessary honesty and new shore seeking, we need to be Christian.  We need to celebrate those who are in the boat. 

And we need to leave the dock party in the hands of God as we set out on the thing called being community in Christ in the 21st century.

The seas await!

We’re blending families at church.  Two congregations that have collectively spent three hundred people and ministry years are coming together to become something new.  The process has been amazing grace.

We talk about being the One Body of Christ all of the time in the church.  It’s one of those phrases that get tossed off as an “of course”.  Of course we are one.  BUT, we like the way we do things and we like the way we know each other and we like the way our sanctuary looks and we like the treats we serve at coffee and changing these things that give us a sense of ground in a shifting day and age seems too much to risk.

But risk we will.  Edgewater Emmauel will hold its last service of worship in its sanctuary on September 13th of this year.  Richfield UMC will hold its last service of worship in its sanctuary on September 13th of this year.  And then, on the 20th of September, we will join together as a new Body: Richfield UMC, composed of folk from EEUMC and RUMC and anywhere else God sees fit to garner partners in ministry.  Some of us will be in a sanctuary that may look and feel familiar, but we have to know this:  we are a new creation.  We’ll learn from each other and we will change and grow and explore and blunder and wonder about how it is that we have been so blessed.

We’re blessed by a Spirit that leads us into new celebrations and expressions of what it is to be community in Christ.  Blending families (this I know) is a work that is challenging.  But done mindfully and prayerfully and with a willingness to just plain laugh at the foibles of being human, it is Spirit work of immense power.

We gather at the common table of grace. We trust that God is in our midst.  We are blessed.

Words have great power.  Sometimes that power scares us, because words peel back layers we have wrapped around the quiver that is our hearts.

I run into this a lot as a clergy woman, this word aversion.  At a former church I served, the word “struggle” sent a shiver of distaste up the spines of some of our leaders.  We wanted to use the word in our mission statement.  It seemed important that our church claim our participation in the struggle against the death-dealing amnesia that can be our cultural reality.  The amnesia would have us to believe that poverty and isms and injustices of the endless stripes that exist are somehow beyond the notice of nice Christian folk.  To acknowledge that living the teachings of Jesus is struggle in our world means that we might have to engage, get dirty and roughed up in the living of the gospel message.   Well, of course.

The lament goes up often:  why is it that the church seems to be increasingly sidelined in our civic life?  Why is it that our young-ins seem to scorn an institution that is built upon the teachings of a man who was radically inclusive and insistently justice seeking?  How is it that in a time when loneliness and a sense of powerlessness grip our communal being the movement of Jesus is deemed somehow irrelevant?

It’s about words.  The words we are afraid will somehow offend or challenge or confront.   Words that would stake our claim upon the challenging and cosmos healing vision of Jesus.  Words that would call us to claim that systems of oppression, even when they facilitate our middle class comfort, those systems of oppression must be named and claimed as foe.

Why?  Because of a word that we hold to: gospel.  The good news.  The good news to the poor and the outcast and the addicted and the lonely and the frightened and the hopefilled and the beaten and the powerful.  The message of relief to those burdened and awakening to those whose hearts have been too long wrapped.

Our hearts need to quiver.

It is awful.

I love the graciousness of my house.  It has stained glass windows and rooms meant for entertaining and woodwork and it has… no central air conditioning.

It is 95 out in Minneapolis.  Humidity is at about a bizzillion.  Yesterday was the same.  On such a day it is hard to summon the energy to think a coherent thought, let alone stir bodies that simply want to sleep through the agony of it all except sleeping in such heat is impossible so what is a person to do?

I walked a three mile path around Lake Harriet yesterday during the worst of it.  My man was swimming the buoys at said lake and I knew that if I didn’t move I would be scraped off the walls or floors so I set out.  There were other crazy people out, too.  And really, about half way around as I was finding how truly effective the body’s coolant system is (read there was sweat streaming EVERYWHERE) I started to laugh.  What else was there?  I waded into the lake after my walk and laughed again.  The cool water I sought to refresh my hot toes?  Not there.  Even the water of a MN lake in early summer had given up semblance of cool.

Driving around in cars is respite.  Going to movies works.  Libraries are our friend.  Coffee shops work too. 

I’m so happy to be at work.  It is cool here.  The space under my desk seems near large enough to stretch out and sleep.  It is feeling tempting…..

We are what we think.  Is this so?

What difference does our thought process make?  What does being a person of faith have to do with it?  What about free will and what about right thinking and what about shoulds and shame and what about choices and intentions?  And what about the Holy in the midst of it all?

Here’s what I think.  I’m echoing the teachings of the desert mothers and fathers and I’m echoing the teachings of contemporary and long gone teachers of all faiths and I’m echoing the wisdom of many who share community with me at church.

What we choose to think matters.  We are the pilot of our thoughts.  We assent to the negative ones: We can follow them down the same grooved paths that lead to worry or bitterness or despair or any of the other obsessions that can cramp our souls.

Or we can choose to redirect the well-worn paths that lead us to nowhere.  We can choose to gently reroute our negative grooves by paying attention to them when we start down that path.  Noticing them and following them to greater knowing of ourselves and then; choosing a different course.  A course that leads us to a gentler, grace filled place where there is room for sunlight.

We see it all the time in others, don’t we?  Some people seem obsessed with the ways the world has wronged or cheated them.  They pounce on the offenses and pick at them and get energy from rehearsing them over and over and over again and spilling them out into their interactions with the world and while that rehearsal is going on the performance that is life right now is playing out without their whole presence.

I see it in others and I know too that I have been that person.  Haven’t you?

The wisdom teachings of all faiths tell us that fixing our attention upon gratitude and trusting that all things have lessons for us and knowing that in the midst of the most gnarly and ripping of pain we are partnered with the Holy; these choices of thought lead to soul stretch and health and serenity.

So paying attention to what we choose to hold in our heads, what we choose to allow to gain purchase in our bodies, what we choose to ground our lives upon:  These things matter. 

What matters too is that the reach of God toward us throughout time is a reach not of retribution but of grace, love, and enfolding.

We are what we believe.  We are what we think.  We are what we practice.  We are. 

May we choose the expansion that is love and light.  It matters in the sacred gift that is our being, and in the impossibly pregnant gift that is the community of God.

Sometimes I get lulled.

I go about my days and encounter life and then a comment is made and I remember:  I am not a member of the dominant culture.  On many fronts, yes:  I am white of skin (if you don’t count the sprouting age spots), middle class, educated, employed, able to make choices. 

And, I am a woman. 

I am a woman in a culture that pays my sisters an average 75 cents for every  dollar earned by a male.  I am a woman in a culture where we number more than half the population and are not similarly represented by law makers in virtually all areas of government.  I am a Lead Pastor at a church where upon learning the gender of their new lead, some members reacted negatively and continue to refer to their pastor as “that woman” (a very very very small number of my congregation, I hasten to add).

I am a woman who knows fear on darkened streets.  I am a woman who came to her own sense of possibility late in life so I know the pains and glory of those who midwife their own souls later in life.  This is often the case for women.  Our futures and possibilities are peopled with the people we care for:  children and partners and parents and community.  The din of the competing claims for our time and energy juice is loud;  so loud that it can take years to listen to and value our own voices, our own needs.

When we begin to learn to listen and to speak, we do so tentatively, testing out the world of our own thoughts and values to see if it is safe and will it really allow our wholesome being?

If the bumps are not too violent, we continue to venture out into the world, taking our passions and our wisdom and our questions and sharing them and we sail along and through and natter a bit, perhaps, about the non-issue of feminism and equal rights and then we hit the glass ceiling or the wall of sexism and it takes our breath away.  Do we still live in a world where women are asked to somehow state a case for their full humanity? 

Ask the women who are bought and sold.  Ask the women who are not safe in their homes.  Ask the women who are left to raise children alone and then are condemned by culture even as they seek to cobble together a life for their children.  Ask yourself if you are a woman and your partner or sister if you are a man and you will find that being woman is living a cultural “less than”.  Maybe not discernible day to day, but insidiously and powerfully real.  For all the movement toward full equality that has been, there are still lessons which await fullness of lived life in our world.

So on this day, when I have been asked to “chill” because of my passion around this issue, I declare that I am woman.  And I will speak.  And I will lead and learn and live for a day when women are safe and heard and honored. 

I will not be lulled.