From Ministry to Motherhood
Throughout this pandemic season more often than not on Wednesdays you will find me recording what could only be called a cross between this blog and a short service. If you’d like to pop over and have a listen I would be delighted.
Stay safe my friends. Stay safe and well and carry the hope of Christ with you wherever you go.
Blessings,
Becky
Things have changed this year. It’s not as it once was. It is different in these COVID times. In the times before my Mom would have called me by now to assign me my ‘dishes’. We would be preparing and planning for a great feast. Things have changed. Change is unsettling at the best of times but when you want the change it is much easier to deal with.
This kind of forced pandemic change can leave a soul wondering when it will end and if we should go back to the way it was. Should it go back? That is a real question we must wrestle with. There was a disconnected air to our culture before. A text over talk, facebook over face-to-face kind of life. It lifted up being busy over meaningful moments. The pace was fast and furious which is completely unsustainable. We had forgotten Sabbath. We had forgotten what it means to rest in the present.
We now know what it means to slow down and in some ways that is unsettling. We did not choose this and yet here we are. For people who have controlled everything (and lived with the illusion of control) that is terrifying. There is much to be frightened of these days and I suspect our loss of control lies at the root of our fear. We cannot control the outcome in this situation and that is hard for us to accept. As we are used to planning. We are used to knowing what comes next.
The interesting thing here is that we never were supposed to know what exactly what our future holds. We were born to experience life. We know the end game we’ve been promised. We know that Jesus will return and new creation is coming, but the in between? That is something we are to uncover as we live it. What joy would this life hold if we knew what to expect? What fun would bring us if it was all laid out with no possibility for adventure?
While this particular season may not be fun is has the potential to be educational and enlightening. In this time we can see what we don’t like about our lives. We can uncover that which we truly value. In this time we can begin to contemplate the type of world we want to build when this is over. That’s right, I said build. We are after all called into the way of Jesus and Jesus himself built community wherever he went. He crafted challenging moments of contemplation. He created pockets of Sabbath. He intentionally lived and built his life.
In the lead up to this weekend I’m practicing gratitude and trying to build more moments of that practice into my day. I’m lifting up the little things in life that bring me joy. Things like crisp leaves, hot tea and the presence of a friend (in person or otherwise). I have a lot to be thankful for. In this pandemic I have not lost any family or friends. In this time of pandemic I have been able to provide food for my children. In this time I have cared for my body, my soul, my life. It hasn’t always been easy and there are days that are better than others but I have learned a great lesson as I’ve been forced to let go of the control I thought I had over my life. I’ve learned to lean into being present and accept the gift that it is.
How will you give thanks this week?
Remember those days when I used to blog? Me too. Those were the days. The days when I had time. The days when I got to sit in front of a window with the birds chirping and the sun streaming in.
To be fair it rarely looked like that. Honestly my blogging efforts were done in stolen moments while life swirled around me. I’ve been happily writing lately but for the most part it’s sermons and newsletter articles which never make their way here. Now in the midst of this worldwide pandemic I find myself opening up my blog and offering thanks for it. The art of blogging, of sitting behind the screen without having the instant read of what people are thinking has helped prepare me for this moment of ministering to those I cannot see. It was a season of both preparation and reflection. One I’d like to get back to if I can.
This week though I leave you with the fruits of that season of preparation. I’ve been doing a mid-week meditation for the gathering where I serve and I leave the link with you now if you’re interested. In a way it’s like a blog online. Maybe more of a reflective podcast to be honest. Either way it has been heavily influenced by what I learned here and I expect that I will use both mediums from here on out as we continue in this season of unexpected challenge.
I hope this blog finds you well. I hope it finds you safe and healthy. Take care of yourselves friends. Take care of yourselves and I’ll see you again soon (in this space most definitely!).
Last week’s connection point can be found here if you’re interested:
I’ve been relatively quiet these last few days. After the busy wonder of the Christmas season with services and preparation my introverted soul needed quiet moments with books and blankets and holiday nog lattes {courtesy of my new Nespresso machine}. That’s right friends, my love of coffee has reached new heights thanks to a very thoughtful gift from my parents. All good things must end however and after a whole 24 hours of not really talking to anyone other than those who live in my house I was forced to leave my house to go to work. Such is the way of things when Sunday is coming. Afterwards I worked my way tentatively into some stores as our food supplies were running low and we were in need. That’s when I happened upon this mug.
The mug to you may seem relatively benign. Some of you might want to dig into how we can’t pick verses out of the text as that strips them of their meaning. Whatever side you lay on your both probably right but I have a necklace with this verse on it and have found myself constantly bumping into it lately. It reminds me over and over again that if I go with God, I will be ok. I will not fall when God is at the centre of what I do. So naturally when I saw one mug in a pile of mugs staring at me with this verse I picked it up. I held it in my hands and determined that for 5.99 that one lone “Psalm 46:5” mug would be mine and as a result of that choice I had my moment today.
What’s a moment? You know what a moment is. A moment of connection. A moment where you wonder at the wonder of God and it happened upon check out where I met an individual who was lovely but rather stressed. Truthfully she was probably overwhelmed. She told me she loved Christmas but found it all to be a bit much. She was glad it was done, was ready to release it to the next year. Then she picked up the mug.
It was really beautifully simple. She read the verse from the Psalm and I saw something wonderful unfold. She read the verse from the Psalm and then proclaimed to me “This is right you know. We worry about far too much that we don’t need to worry about”. This was the moment where I saw peace begin to work its way onto her face. A gift from God moment. We connected and chatted a bit more and it was a gift. A reminder of the power of Scripture. A reminder of what one interaction can bring. A reminder of God’s presence everywhere, even at the checkout.
Truthfully I didn’t want to leave the house today. I wanted to stay at home and read my book while my boys played at my feet. I wanted to stay cozy and comfy and content. But if I had I would have missed that moment. If I had I wouldn’t have been able to say thank you to God for that gift. If I had done what I wanted I wouldn’t have uncovered that wonder today and what a wonderful thing that was.
I’ve been trying to shop my closet. I want to save the world (or at least be part of it) and I don’t want things to sit around going unused. There is nothing sadder than having a house full of things you don’t use or need. In shopping my closet I can see what I love and what I do no care for.
I’ve found myself looking back a lot lately and I suppose it has something do with the fact that I’m very quickly approaching 40. That and there is the very real and strange phenomenon that one might call “The return of the 90s”. All of the things we wore back in the day appear to be fashionable once more. You know what I’m talking about. Friends and scrunchies and Mom jeans are all the rage.
This morning as I was looking back and digging into the collection in my closet I found a pair of nude wedges that looked brand new and I couldn’t figure out why I hadn’t worn them. I got them three years ago for an interview and then they had just sat on my shoe rack. Now I am not a shoe hoarder. I have a tendency to wear the same shoes every day but am trying to break that habit so I pulled these shoes out, dusted them off and took them out for a spin.
It was a terrible decision. My feet hurt. The shoes kept slipping off. They clearly did not fit well. They look good but looks are apparently deceiving. So why did I keep them? I don’t entirely know but what I do know is that I’m probably not alone in this. We tend to keep things we don’t like because we’ve invested money and time on them. We don’t want to waste and so we put them back in their corner until three years from now when we have forgotten why we hated them in the first place.
The cycle ends today for those shoes. I’ll throw them up on Poshmark or give them to Goodwill but I won’t be putting them back on my feet. If I do, I’ll just be reliving a very bad cycle. And I don’t need to relive my bad decisions.
We don’t need to relive any bad decisions, do we? And yet so very often we do. We sit and stew on our past experiences. We sit and stew on the mistakes of others. We dwell on what happened and what didn’t happen and say we’ve let it go when in fact we’ve tucked them away in the closets of our minds until three years later when we pull it out to stew over them once more. It shouldn’t be this way. We don’t need to hold on to the past. We can move forward in the confidence and hope found in the Good News.
Paul says it this way “Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 3:12-14)
Let us not be afraid to let go of what is behind and strain towards what is ahead. Let us not be afraid to let go and move on. Movement is key in life. Movement towards and into. Our God is a God of movement. The Living God. A giver of life and breath and movement. May we never become stuck. Let us push on, release and surrender. Let us strain always towards what lays ahead in God’s vision for our future.
