The dishwasher loaded, I moved to the family room to fold the blankets on the couch, and saw this pink had lightly soaked the creases of my sheers. Still, I continued folding.

It wasn’t until I moved around the corner to open the door and let the sun in for the day, that I saw it.   Beyond the glass separating me from the outside, wide expanses of smooth cloud billowed up from over the tops of the mountains like cotton sheets from a clothes line, while the slight touch of the early sun set fire to their breadth, brightly spreading the light of yellow flame from end to end. The pink I’d seen from the sink and over my couch, soaked through each curve and dip of the clean-sheet clouds, just as it did my sheers, until all waved gently into a brilliant blue, waiting in the west.

It was nice.

In fact, the sight was so gorgeous, I had to share it immediately with the first set of sensing eyes I could find outside my own; so I grabbed my cat, and lifted him to the window to see.  I wasn’t sure if he could appreciate life from an aesthetic perspective, or if that was more of just a human thing; but I at least wanted to give him the chance.  As I suspected, he didn’t look once at the sky, but instead batted downward at the screen, in search of tiny bugs.

It got me thinking about what we let ourselves see in life. About what distracts us. About what opportunities we give ourselves to more fully experience the world.  I didn’t notice the sunrise either,  in those early minutes of waking; and I would have missed it entirely had it not been a typical part of my morning routine to open the front door for extra light during the day.   My opening the door had nothing to do with expectation toward anything beyond, at that moment. I opened it merely for the sake of the light coming later.

During this season of Epiphany, let’s remember the breathtaking light of  God which enters our minds and our souls, and gives us direction through each day we wake up in this crazy life; and lets think of the ways we open ourselves to receiving it, all the while thanking God for this beautiful gift of being alive, and having eyes to see what God has done.

All the while, of course, I had to stand in the corner covering my eyes.  I come from a family of highly neurotic people (my older brother being the worst—shhh. Please don’t tell him I said that in a reading which is actually being printed on paper and posted online!); and in a psycho-light version of what would have been my brother’s total nervous breakdown, all I could think about the entire time Ky was decorating, was that I would have to try my best not to look at the lights or walls for the next three weeks!  For me, hanging Christmas decorations before Thanksgiving is like a groom sneaking into a bride’s closet the night before the wedding to have a look at the dress. It just shouldn’t be done!

The days passed, and just as I feared, it was impossible not to see the decorations over the last three weeks, no matter how hard I tried to keep my eyes toward the floor; and I eventually grew numb to them. I resigned myself to having a senseless Christmas, until the day Ky returned home with our Christmas tree (several days after Thanksgiving), and we spent the night decorating its branches, and listening to Christmas carols with Chevy Chase on mute in the background.

As Ralphie said, “All was right with the world.”

I could finally look at the Christmas lights my husband hung early, and allow my mind to not only accept their place in our home, but to embrace it, and stare long and deep into their warm colors bouncing from glass, and splashing over walls.

As I wove the Christmas lights through the branches of the tree, I realized my situation with the Christmas decorations in many ways reflects our experience of our spiritual beliefs throughout the year. We’re surrounded always by our Christian beliefs, and our love and passion toward the life of Christ; but over the course of the year, our minds sometimes grow numb to these things. We take these feelings for granted—as a given. We’re used to seeing them—to being around them.  The season of Advent—Christmas time—is a set of days and weeks in the year when we can allow ourselves to finally let ourselves take a look around at the beauty of the love and life of Christ and let our eyes bathe in the light, and our hearts warm at the thought.  It’s a time we can let our minds delve deep into why and how we came to feels so connected to this person, and the things he said, and meditate on our thankfulness for receiving such a wonderful gift from God.

Throughout Advent, each service at Deer Park UMC will be a meditation on what we received when we were given the gift of Christ’s company in the world, as we let our eyes settle on the beauty of his life, and finally open our minds to the celebration and joy at the sight of it.

I hope you all have a wonderful, and soul-warming Christmas season shared with friends and the people you love.

Take care, and God Bless!

On Thanksgiving, people always ask you to mention at least one thing you’re thankful for having in your life.  Each head around the table tends to roll their eyes as the rolls are passed (and if you don’t do it on the outside, it usually happens somewhere below the surface, no matter how old you are, or how much you actually find value in being thankful).

So at the risk of sounding corny (sorry for all of these indirect food references—must a subconscious ), I’ve been thinking lately about how thankful I am for all of the “thank you” ‘s people have been speaking down at the food pantry. Not because they were heard; since, at the end of the day, wanting to hear a “thank you” tends to be, on at least some level, an act of egotism, as we gain self-satisfaction in hearing someone recognize something we’ve done which we considered “good.” I don’t mean it like that, and believe we should feel enough satisfaction in knowing we did what we knew was right regardless of whether or not someone says “thank you,” or even realizes how much work you put into whatever it is you did to supposedly “deserve” the comment.

I’ve been happy about all of the mentioned thank you’s because they were felt.

We all know what it’s like to sense that feeling of “thanks.” It rises and swells sort of right in the middle of your chest, then sits deep. It’s the feeling of an easing heart. And it’s a gift to be able to bring that sense to anyone else, knowing how good it makes you feel to have it yourself.

Today I walked into the church, and saw the Thanksgiving Baskets laid out on the tables inside.  Just looking at them made me feel so thankful for all of that thanks people would feel at seeing them, and taking them home.  I was shocked to see too, that a Christmas tree was provided to the families as well.  When my husband and I went through our harder times, the crunching pain inside of not being able to celebrate the holidays because the numbers on your ATM slip are too low has a tendency to bring you down even lower than the inked digits on the bank receipt.  Today I saw a small kid smiling as he pulled the tree from the rail and brought it over for his dad to strap to the top of the car. I was overwhelmed with gratitude.

This month let’s give thanks for the thanks, as we do as much as we can to help hearts swell and settle with the love and care of God.

I looked down at the truck, then back to my friend; and he knew before I said a word that I was hoping we could head down together to help.

Immediately he shook his head. “Huh-uh. I’m not going down there with all of those Churchies around.”

I “lol’ed” just now, typing the word.  “Churchies” is what this good friend of ours calls people who regularly show up at services on Sundays.  He knows I’m a pastor, of course, and we mutually respect the details of each other’s lives; but you’d be hard pressed to find someone more against organized religion than “Jim” (this isn’t his name, but for the sake of privacy, this is the name we’ll give him for the blog).

His reasons for being against organized religion are legit. He’s aware of the ways Christian history has played out in the world over the centuries, and of how the various, and unfortunately, multiple moments of corruption have hurt good people.  As a result he’s become deeply jaded.  No surprise there.  I hope we all are, to a certain extent, or else we’d have to wonder whether or not we’ve been fully informed about the details of our own religion, and the accuracy of that nagging needle on our proverbial moral compasses, right?

On top of all of this, Jim was hesitant to head down because he tends to rattle more traditional church-goers with his tattoo sleeves, which on one arm extends into the second knuckles of his right hand.  He didn’t want to go through the awkward pains of being judged.

I assured him the people down there were laid back, and absolutely wouldn’t push him away—that they were down there to help people who needed some support, and wouldn’t shove pamphlets into his pockets or bible verses into his brain.

With one last look of hesitation, Jim nodded his head, gave me some chuckled grief on the way down the stairs, and walked with me to the bed of the truck to unload. Inside the pantry, Jim helped the kids move containers of frozen food to the freezer, worked at organizing the non-perishables, and broke down boxes.  The volunteer downstairs burst out with endless thanks for us coming down to help, and gratefully let Jim know how much time he took off the task by lending a hand.  No one looked twice at his well-crafted tattoos (at least not in any way a person could notice from the outside).

As we all worked together, I noticed Jim smiling—often. He isn’t the type to grin without reason.

With all hands together, the time we spent in the pantry was short and sweet; but to my complete shock, the impact was long.  Jim talked about the experience of being down there on and off for almost the entire hour before we finally got on the road to go camp. As he later sat down with my husband by the fire, he brought it up again, cautiously mentioning how good it made him feel to do something to help people who were down on their luck.

The afternoon highlighted very brightly in my mind the fact that so many people these days (of my age, or younger, or older) stay away from Christianity for what Christians have done, but I think something inside – some spiritual spot which sits in the deep parts of us all— still wants to be filled with these moments of doing something they know is right and good to do in bringing loving support to the people around us.

Ironically enough, being a part of the moments of doing something good—of bringing loving support—to the people around us, is the very heart of that Christianity so many people have labeled as a spiritually superficial and socially destructive religion.

Where does this leave us, as Christians, then? And where does this leave all of the people who share the very well-founded opinions floating around in Jim’s mind?

Some food for thought.

Our conversation was supposed to take place inside of a big room under florescent lights, with multiple folders and papers; but we decided to ditch the rug and metal and head up the side of the mountain across from the church.  The conversation was, at first, business. As planned, we went over the news we’d received from the bishop, who’d provided guidelines for each congregation, each year, regarding our growth and calculating all of those nice statistical digits congregants and clergy hope will fill their eyes each week, but prefer not to see on paper.

The two of us quickly tossed between each other the numbers and projections; but  as our legs moved over the dirt, lifting us higher through the trees, our conversation changed.

The cold crunch of the  fall air had finally reached down to the bottoms of our lungs, deepening our talk with the color of the leaves under our shoes; and our minds pushed past the conference room jargon to consider where we’re supposed to go, as people who hope and yearn to find a closeness with this beautiful force of Life we call God.

We talked about a lot of things.  The history of the church, the old ways of missionaries, and all of the ways people, over the years, had come to resent the church for its role amongst people; and how this history — which stands as flawed as each one of us— had worked, over time, to actually isolate people from their natural movement toward God.

What a horrible and wonderful thing to let ourselves consider.

Acknowledging this truth is horrible, because it leaves us with a sense of fear and anxiety toward what has already been done; but it is simultaneously beautiful and wonderful for us to let this truth enter, because it allows us more clearly, and with more bravery, and strength, to walk ahead from where we are.

People still search. People still yearn to be closer with the Higher Force of Life we’ve all felt invisibly present inside and around us since the beginning of our human experience on the dirt.  Sit down at any table with any group of intoxicated college kids (funny, I just turned thirty, and now find it natural to call these adults, “kids.” Oof.), and you’ll find this deep yearning and searching in each of the words expelled from their souls, as long as you don’t ruin the conversation early, by safely and simply regurgitating dogmas and creeds.

People want God.  People search for the God they sense in the deepest parts of who they are; but they haven’t yet found a place to go, where they feel they will find what they seek.

The church is not the church if it is not this place.

While I walked with this other seeker through the trees on the mountain, I couldn’t help but feel a connection with those yellow-white wafers dropped from the aspens to the ground, blowing without attachment to the source of their natural life.

In that cold fall air, I also couldn’t help but remember that life moves in cycles, each beautiful, and necessary, and unique as they are; and that though this seeker and I moved through leaves which right now lied scattered and dry all around us, a time is coming soon, when our eyes will again fill with the green connected strong to each branch of the tree which grows and spreads life through each extended wafer.

As a church, as a branch reaching out from the life of God, we are vital.

And all of us seeking the sight of growth and change, will find it, as long as we’re willing to take a step outside of the conference room, and surround ourselves with the life outside of our open doors.

You’d think exhaustion should only be a physically-based problem, and that our thoughts, being made of who-knows-what invisible substance of existence, should be exempt from running out of energy. … But it certainly happens.  And it usually happens when we need them most, doesn’t it?  This loss of thought-strength comes just as our loss of physical strength occurs– at the point of being taxed by situations outside of ourselves which demand repeated, and consistent use.

Yesterday morning I woke up to my alarm at five o’clock (I know this sounds ridiculously early for someone who works from home, but strangely, when the only face you have to answer to in the morning is your own reflection, you for some reason no longer mind waking up in the dark). After situating my feet in my slippers, I performed my same routine of folding the blankets on my couch, feeding my fish, putting wet food in the bowl for my cat, Beans, and unloading the dishwasher from the night before.

Everything was mechanically following the usual process, until I sat down to prepare for my day’s work.

As a pastor, my “day’s work,” blessedly is doing work for God, and working to help people feel closer to God in their own hours; but when I flipped open my bible (and accompanying “scholarly” resources handed down from my over-priced seminary tuition), I found myself hesitant to look at the print. I found my eyes skimming the words of scripture like a text book of boring material I resented being forced to stare into.  At first, I didn’t even realize this was happening; but the moment the reality struck me, I burst up from my chair in the kitchen as if I’d just found a black widow spider by my foot.

At that moment, I wasn’t looking into The Book, but into the very heart of spiritual exhaustion. And I didn’t want to see it.  I couldn’t see it. I had too much work to do.

Feeling like a complete schmuck, I paced over to the kitchen sink, and stared into nothing for a moment; when all of the sudden, my mouth moved and words pushed persistently out from my mind like typed paper from a printer.  I was talking with God, with no barriers, and certainly no specific intention. I wasn’t trying to pray. This was not a moment of set-aside meditation. It was a moment of needful interaction—like one of those moments, when you’ve been holding something in for too long that you’ve needed to say to your spouse, and it suddenly just bursts out while you’re grabbing a box of cereal from the shelf at the grocery store.

As absurd as it might sound, I found myself talking to God for so long in fact, that I eventually wound up pouring myself a cup of coffee as I spoke, staring up and out the window.  This conversation over coffee lasted a while, and I call it a “conversation,” because the expression, and understanding, and communication, was not a one-way rant, but a two-way time of connection between myself and the Life around me. In this conversation I told God I couldn’t lose It (God/You/”Him”)—-that I couldn’t let the fact that I had responded to God’s call, cause me to fall away from God, or become detached from God. I told God that I understood “Him” (“Him” being used here and after only for the sake of structural ease) to be the very Life inside of me, and that I could not live without that Life for the sake of trying to help others find that Life for themselves. It simply wouldn’t and couldn’t work that way.

In saying these things, my words then fell to fear and skepticism. I asked God what the point of being in ministry was, anyway–and why He’d called me to such a strange and seemingly futile task. I asked God, how many people really felt Him in the world; and how many people even could feel Him in the world; and if most ever did at all, no matter how often you spoke about “Him” with each other in a sanctuary or on couches at each other’s homes.

Between all of these comments and questions, I sat still, and let myself connect with the loud silence of the presence of God.

As I stood there, staring out while absurdly sipping from my coffee mug like God was sitting across a table, God shared God’s Peace with me, and responded to the words which pushed out from my mind.

It was a long conversation, but there was one bold and blunt truth God’s Silence told me so loudly, that  the words were strangely and clearly defined in my mind, as if my ears had actually heard them through sound.

When I asked if people experienced God,  God told me this:

‘Some never do. Sometimes it’s only our own experience of God which allows them to even come close to feeling the presence of God while they’re alive.’ God said, ‘And that’s why you are a minister.

…So get back to work.’

…Nothing new, right?  And it seems too, for us humans, we feel the need to make it more and more complicated as each year passes. Somehow, while we were developing as mammals, we came up with this crazy idea that adding meant we’d get more out of our experience of living. But I think we’ve all found, at different times in our lives, that this existence is strange; and you can’t always count on linear reality being the only reality which guides us, or impacts us. Sometimes life seems to contradict itself; and that’s okay.  Because in the end, what’s happening is our perception or understanding of what living is, is being changed, or contradicted, not the essence of living itself.

I know that sounds kind of strange and vague, but I think it winds around to make sense if we let our minds wander a while.

The point I’m circling around right now is actually a lot simpler than I just made it sound, which brings us back to the point; and that is I believe by doing all of this adding, we often subtract from our quality of living. It’s a strange and paradoxical truth, but a truth all the same.  Sometimes we need to pull ourselves away from the millions of things cluttering our days and our minds. We need to pull ourselves away from our e-mails, and our smartphones, and our lists of the thousands of things we mistakenly believe we need to do in order to keep our lives from falling apart, and just let ourselves be.

I experienced the blessing of doing this tonight, and I can say that I returned home with my chest breathing deeper; my arms, my back, and my muscles resting looser; and my mind and heart moving calmer and more peacefully than I’ve felt in quite a while.

What I was blessed to do tonight, was spend some time with God.

At six o’clock, I sat down with a friend and several strangers in a circle. I was invited to a group in a denomination I’m unfamiliar with, so it was a very cool journey of surprises, and wondering what on earth was going on.  As I seated myself in the circle, almost immediately, we all went from exchanging small talk to quiet. Everyone started settling themselves deeper into the cushions of their chairs, and the minister in charge of this particular gathering looked to me (the only new face), and told me we’d go immediately into meditation.  She held a bell up in her hand, and said, “The bell will ring, and that will start our time of silence. After the twenty minutes has passed, the bell will ring again, and we’ll all regroup.”

My first reaction was a nod, then immediately my brain rewound her words and played them back. The next thought which went through my mind was, “—Jesus Christ! Did she say twenty minutes??”  (We were meditating in a sanctuary, of course, so don’t worry, those words were not spoken in vain!)

The idea of being in quiet for so long was at first daunting, but became quickly enticing. I hadn’t allowed myself to be still for that amount of time in quite a while, and looked forward to the chance to relax.  So I settled back, and stared out for a bit.  At first I was extremely cognizant of the sound of my swallowing.  After this, I noticed my teeth trying to clench, as they clicked against each other on and off while I tilted my head down. At first I believed this to be a sign of mounting stress, then realized it was only because I was unwinding, that I noticed my teeth clenching at all, and that I must often grind them unconsciously. As I realized this, the clicking stopped.

Time went on, and my mind started calming slightly more, though still a thousand thoughts ran.  Being a pastor, I found myself trying to think of the ways I could apply this experience to a spiritual lesson. I found myself actually trying to organize my thoughts for this blog!  Each time this inclination came, I had to stop myself. I had to force myself to let my thoughts go, and to search for God, rather than lose the experience by trying to capture it as a way to help other people search themselves. The thoughts still ran, but over time, I allowed them to get away, instead of trying to catch them; and soon my mind began settling to peace. My breathing slowed and deepened, and I finally saw only the dark, bringing a peaceful, and unfortunately seldom-felt, light to my mind.

In the stillness,  I began to approach the presence of God.

In the silence, I was finally opening myself to hear God speak.

Removing ourselves from the pile of things which bury us each day, and remembering who we are after subtracting all of the extra stuff, adds to our experience and understanding of ourselves. Detaching ourselves from all of the distractions of this complicated world helps us to connect more fully with God (with Life), and pay more attention to the peace of simply being.

I was blessed by God tonight to find a place to let this happen.

Starting at the end of this month, we’ll be gathering together like this each week at Deer Park. The first time will be at 7:00pm on Wednesday, September 28th, if you’d like to come.

We started this Social Media program with Century Link and they have helped us set up our wordpress blog site, facebook page and twitter page and tie them together so you can follow us with your favorite social media tool.  CenturyLink is helping our church with social media in exchange for my honest views on CenturyLink’s services.   We are still working with Century-Link representatives to guide us along our social media path to most effectively reach our audience and so far the experience has been beneficial to us.  To find out more check out CenturyLink.

This past weekend I went on a two day camping trip into the Byers Peak Wilderness with some friends who I didn’t realize until just now are actually some “long-time” companions of mine.  These people I’ve been sitting and talking and walking to different places with for almost a decade now, stayed up late under the stars, sharing their experiences in life by the fire with me; they walked up and down dirt trails in search of new places with me; and they strolled along rushing waters with me, laughing at my jokes, and showing me how to catch fish.

As I type these words, I realize I won’t have the company of these faces forever. As long as I’ve been a part of each of the lives I just spoke of, there will come a day when they’re only referenced with a smile, as something from the past, now gone. We all know as we grow older, that these things happen not necessarily by will, but by the natural way of things. Some people pass away before your paths would have later parted; some move to new places to make new friendships with new people; some start families, and start lives separate from the things and people they knew before; and some just sort of quietly fade off into the distance, before you realize far later that they’ve gone.

Life is always changing, and it does strange things to your mind to think of that terrible and beautiful fact of existing.  Feelings of depression, and gratitude, and love, and loss flood you all at once, and you don’t really know what to do with it.

Personally, my first reaction is to clutch.  My first thought is to hold tighter, and try to stop life from moving those things which are close to my mind and heart, away from me—concocting some plan to do all I can not to allow those faces and things and places to go.  But doing that, I realize in clearer moments, is like trying to grip water with your hand. It’s impossible. Life moves outside of our ability control, and trying to fight against that, and manipulate that reality to work in our favor is probably one of the more purposeless and wasteful ways we can spend the short and blessed moments of our lives. Of course, that still doesn’t stop us, right?

I’ve found lately that I’ve been adamantly staying awake late into the night, despite my boredom and exhaustion. I’m doing it even now as I write this blog. Tonight was the first time I allowed myself to wonder why, and one of the initial thoughts which popped to my mind was the possibility that I might be subconsciously fearing the progression of time.

Life has been strangely wonderful in recent days, and knowing life changes sooner than we’re usually given warning, or any kind of notice, I’ve been somehow plagued with a fear of losing this new found happiness to the unknown moments waiting ahead. Moments which hold the potential to alter this beautiful bliss I accidentally stumbled upon not too long ago.

But as I think of this, I can’t help but feel embarrassed by the blatant ridiculousness of it all. I recently found happiness, and I’ve somehow managed to turn even that into misery by dwelling in fear of losing the good thing which is (for the moment) still my blessing to enjoy.

In fearing losing the happiness I now have, I cease to enjoy the beautiful moment for what it is. By dwelling in my fear of not having it longer, I’ve already lost that thing I’m so afraid of losing.

Being human is a real pain in the glutes, isn’t it?

This is a problem our species has been dealing with for a while. Ancient Buddhist and Hindu religious philosophies are almost entirely based on this concern, actually. Christian spirituality as well speaks to these things. In all, is the idea that we need to let life be what it is, when it is. To accept the nature of our days, and to stop ourselves from grasping, and clutching, and worrying, because in doing this we only bring our fears to reality unnaturally sooner than they would have come on their own, and we isolate ourselves from truly experiencing the moments of our lives as they occur, dwelling constantly outside of reality, in the fictional realms of the past and future. This is paraphrasing and generalizing these three very unique belief systems, but it expresses basic truths found in each of them.

As a minister, I can’t help but think about the nature of God, compared to ours. There is nothing in the universe which remains constant except for the totality of eternity.* That Totality I believe is what we use the word “God” to describe. Then I start to wonder, if God is in all things, and all things are smaller parts comprising this totality—this eternity—does anything ever really die? Does anything ever really end? Or do we just stop seeing it?

Do we just become somehow isolated from our experience of it, in this time, and in this space? And do we expedite this experiential isolation, by premature mourning our loss of the sense of it?

Alright. That’s it. I’m going to bed.

*For the specifically minded, in saying this, of course, I’m speaking of particular manifestations of objects and events and excluding basic principles of calculation we can apply to these manifestations, (i.e. the speed of light).