Tackling Transitions

Next week, a new series of blog posts will begin to be published on the site Off The Page, a ministry of Our Daily Bread. I am excited about this opportunity to reach a larger audience and hope that the posts are engaging, inspiring, and thought provoking-- sincere and maybe even a little funny now and then.

My first series with Off The Page was about transitions and what it's like to change jobs, change communities, and change churches. Here are a few excerpts:

Changing Directions
I recently did one of those things you do in your twenties and thirties: I changed jobs. The job change was a package deal and included a new town, a new commute, a new house, and a new school district for my kids.

I wasn’t really looking to change jobs. It’s rare to think that you’ve found the job you are made for when you are twenty-five, but I was certain I had: administering a graduate writing program, managing a small press and literary journal at the university I had graduated from four years earlier, working with faculty members who had mentored me when I was an undergraduate … I was in happy spreadsheet, literature, and poetry heaven.

Everything had fallen into place to make it happen too. My husband, Brandon, and I had prayed through the job offer and acceptance, the house sale and moving plans, the birth of our second child … every single little detail that summer. And it was good. Read More...

Church Hunting

I hate trying to find a church.

The last time we moved, Brandon and I fell by mercy into a community of believers that met our deep need for friendship and community. We only visited one other church in the land-of-a-thousand churches before we found 5 Stones Community Church.

5 Stones is filled with people who praise Jesus for his extravagant grace, make no claims of perfection but aspire to become the truest versions of themselves, and drape other people in that same outpouring of mercy and forgiveness. For realz, I know that was a lot of church-y talk and all, but I’m serious. Like all churches that exist here on earth, it has its battles and bruises, its history and its weaknesses. It’s made of a bunch of broken people covered by God’s grace, so that’s to be expected. Read More...

Life Together

I started the new year feeling a need for some meaty inspirational reading, so I picked up a book that’s been sitting on our shelves for a while now, Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Hangin’ out with other believers and talking about Jesus is one of my favorite things to do, but deep and sustaining relationships in the church are sometimes hard to come by. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Christians can be kind of judgmental and easily offended. Whaaaaaat?! I know. Crazy. Because of this and my incapacity for small talk, I don’t find it easy to jump right into faith communities. I’m not always sure if they’re going to get me, and I don’t want to offend them by my sarcasm, self-deprecation, wide laugh, and loud grace. Read More...

Bringing the Word

You should know that I didn’t grow up reading the Bible—though we did have a basic illustrated Bible stories book floating around among the Dr. Seusses.

One Thanksgiving Day, I paged through a King James Bible looking for the section on Thanksgiving prayers, resolved that I would provide the most eloquent of blessings on our meal. This made perfect sense to me; after all, I had found the proper formal place setting arrangements for Thanksgiving in the cookbook. Surely there would be an index of holiday prayers in the Bible.

Later still, my mom bought me a red-letter, black, leather-bound, New International Version study Bible for Christmas. I was sixteen, and the hunger and curiosity from internal and external sources burned. I wanted to know: Is there a God? Is he real? Who is he? How do I reconcile all I’ve learned in sixteen years with this book? Can I?

I started reading at the beginning, like you do with most books. Genesis wasn’t so bad, and the start of Exodus is eventful, but then you get Leviticus and Numbers and Deuteronomy all up in there, and my interest waned. Read More...

Tune in beginning May 13 for the next series on Off The Page: The Desire to Be Desired.

Praise God from whom all shopping bags flow...?

I stood in line for an hour and a half without a cart carrying a basket full of stuff and two boxes full of more stuff for $160 worth of merchandise today. There was much sighing. I kept telling myself, this might be the only day you have free child care and can actually go to the store and pick stuff out, so buy the stuff and get out, get out, get out!

I love this season. I love the anticipation, the longing, the delight, the promise of hope and joy and peace, all of which I think are essential to practice and promote when the darkness seems to encroach from all corners.

Lydia's Christmas List

It's hard to practice peace and hope and joy in a line that wraps around the perimeter of a store with a hundred other Scrooges out to buy buy buy some joy joy joy joy down under the tree.

I am a planner; I set up certain expectations for myself and I expect myself to deliver or exceed those expectations. No one says, Sarah, you really should blog daily in the month of December like you have the last two years, but here I am wrestling anyway with whether to attempt to blog daily in December or whether I should give it up. It's a challenge, so part of me looks at the doubting part of me and says, "Oh yeah, you BET I can do it, just you watch, I'll prove it to you," while the doubting part says, "Yeah, you're crazy." But surely I could get up earlier, stay up later, sneak it in over lunch, rush home to rush off to make cookies to wrap cookies to deliver cookies to sing and pray and read and hurry UP sit DOWN buckle UP let's GO... Surely I could make it happen. I can make it happen.

Advent is the celebration of the coming of Jesus Christ; it is the period of time during which Christians sing, "O Come, o come, Immanuel, and ransom captive Israel..." the coming of Christ marks freedom from the slavery of sin, ransom paid, release from debt, burden lifted. We are supposed to hope for things yet unseen, and yet, instead, I yoke myself to obligation and ritual - I have to do this because this is what I do, this is what is expected, this is what will earn me love and appreciation. "Rejoice, rejoice, Immanuel shall come to thee O Israel..."

It is hard to lift your hands in praise when you're still carrying your Black Friday shopping bags.

"Advent" is a part of the word "adventure," a pursuit to explore spaces we haven't before. This is a new season, new territory, with new challenges and new opportunities. An adventure has plenty of elements we hope for that are yet unseen.

Advent also means "a coming into being," like the advent of computers, or the advent of cell phones. Once there was none and now there is. Once it was one way and now it is another way. I once was lost but now I'm found, was blind but now I see.

So, too, with this advent.

I do not think it is possible, or realistic, or healthy, to set for myself a quantifiable goal of blogging/crafting/reading/event-ing every single night of December leading up to Christmas. I think it might serve the opposite purpose of the season - where there could be hope and joy and peace, there would be despair and frustration and anxiety. I do not want this season to be despair and frustration and anxiety. I want to use whatever minutes of the day I have for sowing love into my kids, and this is surprisingly difficult when you begin to believe the best way to demonstrate love is by signing them up for lots of activities or planning lots of outings or buying all the things.

I think what I will do this year is string up "hope" and "joy" and "peace," and maybe we will weave these in with some unscheduled nights to play board games or in the early morning hours on the couch under a blanket. Maybe we will pray for ways to make hope and joy and peace real in our daily goings-about.

And maybe, just maybe, there will be a moment like tonight after the giggling ceases and only the tree is illuminated, when I will feel so moved I'll sing, "Silent night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright..." and believe.

2013: I was saying the exact same thing to myself.
2012: This is when I got this stupid I mean awesome advent activities calendar idea.
2011: This was the half-marathon, parents-30th-anniversary, season-of-Beans-going-crazy year
2010: This is when I was trying to make more quality time for my kids. I've obviously solved this problem.
2009: I was super-duper excited about Christmas and poetry and life.
2008: I posted a poem about Snow in Auburn that I still like because it's really a poem about hope and God's presence although you might not know it because it isn't the best poem ever.

You're Going the Wrong Way: God's Plan and Purpose

I spent most of my late teens and early twenties trying to discern God's will for my life. Does God want me to be a creative writing major or a religion major, or an English teacher, or should I do all three? Should I keep going to Ashland or should I transfer to another school? Which school? Is this guy the man I should marry? Is this guy? Is this guy? Does God want me to go to graduate school for writing or should I go to graduate school for Christian ministries or should I go to graduate school to be a teacher? How does God feel about birth control? Did God will for me to miscarry? Is this God's plan? What is God's plan for me?

As a zealous follower of Christ, I plastered verses about God's plan for me all over: "I know the plans I have for you... plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you a hope and a future," "I will lead the blind by ways they have not known, down unfamiliar paths, I will guide them; I will turn the darkness into light before them and make the rough places smooth. These are the things I will do; I will not forsake them," "Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him and he will make your paths straight," "We know that in all things, God works for the good of those who love him, who are called according to his purpose."

I worried over God's plan and God's will constantly. When I didn't get a job I applied for, I thought, "It must not have been God's plan." When God isn't the one you look to in order to dictate your life's path, you might say, "It wasn't in the cards," as in Fate and Random Chance did not deal you the ace, or "It wasn't meant to be," as in the gray fog of Destiny did not align with what you thought should happen.

And then I miscarried. And then I miscarried again. "I guess it wasn't meant to be."

It wasn't meant to be? Did God mean for this to happen to me? Am I supposed to learn some kind of lesson from this? Does God cause bad things to happen in order to make good? Were these things in God's plan?

I still believe those verses. In this current season, I'm seeking out God's plan and God's will all over again, trying to discern whether to turn left or to turn right.

I still believe God has a plan and a purpose for my life, but not in a Magic 8-ball, "Should I ask Chris on a date," way. I still believe that God intimately cares about the details of our lives. I don't believe that he's micromanaging the details.

The trouble with "It must not have been God's plan" is that we screw up "God's plan" all of the time. "God's plan" looks like this:

"He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God."

As a species, we're almost always doing it wrong. The abuse, the cheating, the lying, the selfishness, the pride, the arrogance, the hatred, the prejudice, the stealing, the killing, all of the sneaky ways we try to manipulate circumstances to keep ourselves comfortable... they all contradict God's plan. Even nature has its ways of stepping out of bounds, in cancer, disease, abnormalities, all challenging what we might call "the natural order."

If I'm not offered a job that I thought I should get, shrugging my shoulders and saying, "It must not have been God's plan," just doesn't work. I didn't get offered that job because some other candidate seemed like a better fit than me, and the hiring committee might have been right. They also might have been wrong.

God, from what I can tell, has left a lot of the daily grind up to us. He has given lots of control over to us through the whole free-will business. Bad things happen. Good things happen. His concern seems to be about how I respond in situations rather than the situation itself. When bad things happen, he grieves with me. When good things happen, he celebrates with me. He is present in it.

If we combine what is said of who we're created and called to be, "Being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus," "You created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb," and more, then part of God's plan is identifying who we are, what our strengths are, and what we are passionate about individually. Then, as we make or discover opportunities to exercise those talents in the broader world, we must apply part two of God's plan - to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with him.

"Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, 'This is the way; walk in it.'"

Part two of God's plan is harvesting the fruit of the Spirit in whatever circumstances we find ourselves in, exercising love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

When new opportunities or challenges present themselves, it would be great if someone would just say, "Nope. Wrong." or "Yup. Do that." Where is my bright red, flashing God sign? Sometimes it is not clear whether one thing or the other is the better choice, and possibly even God doesn't care one way or the other. You might be equally effective whether you stay or go.

And yet, we can ask God for wisdom and discernment to figure out the costs and the benefits, to weigh the opportunity against the challenges, and to be aware when intuition and spirit are shouting, "You're going the wrong way!" These gifts will help us come to a decision free of anxiety, resting in the peace that whatever direction we decide to turn, God's way along the path is filled with both justice and mercy. Now walk in it.

You May Say I'm a Dreamer

Over pizza tonight at Brookside Park, Elvis and Lydia shared how they are going to live next door to one another when they grow up, and they will visit each other every day.  We asked where we will live, and they said that we can live next door, too. 

Brandon said, "Lydia, you can buy John's house, and Elvis, you can buy Tyler and Alicia's house (our next door neighbors)."

Elvis interrupted, "No, I'm going to buy a farm."

"Oh, yeah?" We chuckled. "That's great buddy!"

"Can I build a baseball field on it?" Brandon asked.

"Yeah. And I'm going to have a garage for my tractors," he said. "Lydia will live next to me, and you guys can live next to her," only he said "zur guys" because he's just that cute.

"What about Henry," we asked.

"He's a baby!" he said, "He'll live with you!"

Obviously. 

Clearly, our kids have their futures all planned out.