Writing for the sake of writing . . .

I haven’t written in a bit.  I’m feeling too tired or lazy to check how long since my last post, but I know it’s been a week or more.  I’ve started other posts.  I’ve come here and almost started other posts.  I have this itch to write but no idea to actually write.  Finally I decided to just write anyway.  So here it is.  Writing for the sake of writing.

My last two weeks have been spent preparing for my ordination exams.  Well, more accurately, they’ve been spent under the cloud called Supposed-to-Be, presently labeled “preparing for my ordination exams.”  Whatsa ordination exam? you ask.  Well.  I’ll tell you.  Because I’m just writing for the sake of writing.

I’ve said that I graduated from seminary and I’m a sometimes preacher.  In my denomination (PCUSA) that does not make me a pastor, that does not mean I’m ordained.  Seminary is but one step in a longer path toward ordination.  I can best describe the process–for the truly curious–by using my husband’s experience.  He finished his bachelor’s degree (in Mechanical Engineering, wouldn’tchaknow) and then headed to seminary three months later.  Seminary is a three-year program culminating in a Master’s of Divinity.  It’s kinda like law school.  It’s a professional degree.  While he was in seminary he did two field education placements, one full-time over a summer, one part-time over a school year.  In February of his senior year he completed four ordination exams.  For the first 12 weeks after he graduated he completed a program called Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) where he served and trained as a hospital chaplain (in his case, assigned to an oncology unit). All during this time, he was “under care” of his presbytery which entailed periodic meetings with a committee, they were tracking his progress, while he was getting to know them, presenting them with a statement of faith that was then put up for evaluation.  His next to final step toward ordination was being extended a call (getting a job offer) to a position in a church that required ordination (in this case, Associate Pastor for youth and family ministries).  The final steps were being examined (evaluated and questioned in beliefs) by the presbytery under whose care he had been and by the presbytery in which the church that called him was located.  He started the job, he was ordained.

That’s the quick, efficient way of going about being ordained in my denomination.  Yes.  That is the straight-shot ordination process.  My experience has been a little different:  more complicated, more convoluted.  First:  I was out of undergrad (B.A. in a nice, sensible program:  English/Secondary Ed.) for four years before I sensed a call to seminary.  Initially I was pursuing an MA in theological studies.  Shortly after beginning (6 credits of Greek in a 6-week summer session), however, my classmates sensed in me a call to pastoral ministry I had not yet discerned and they encouraged me to switch to the Masters of Divinity program and to go under care.  Two weeks into my fall semester of classes, I decided I needed to get da heck outa that seminary and transfer to the seminary from which my husband had graduated.  So we moved back around the corner from our first apartment and I joined the church where my husband had done an internship so that I could come under care of the presbytery a year from then–you had to be a member of the presbytery a year before you could come under care.  (Meanwhile, as an aside, my husband was called to serve as that church’s associate pastor for youth and families.)  I did indeed go under care a year later.  In the course of my time in seminary I did my part-time, school year internship and two full-time summer internships.

In the end, I was 37 weeks pregnant with Isaac when I graduated.  I essentially put on hold the entire care process.  I did not take my ordination exams during my senior year like everyone else did (I was horrifically nauseous with morning sickness and likely pretty darn depressed and, possibly, just plain under-motivated and lazy) and I did not do CPE.  I worked that first year out of seminary (well, beginning in October, when Isaac was 4 months old) part-time as a director of Christian education.  After that and since that time I have been a SAHM.  Full-time.

Now, my baby is two and I can feel the promptings to move forward in this whole ordination process thing.  I went under care of our new presbytery (we moved 4 years ago) and now, this very weekend, I’m taking two out of four ordination exams:  theological competence and biblical exegesis.  Their purpose is to make sure you can take all your academic knowledge from seminary and translate it into normal-person-speak so you can actually talk to real, bona fide human beings, not just those pale creatures that roam the hallowed halls of the ivory tower.  My hope is that’s all I’ve been doing for the last seven years.  Talking to real people.  Answering the real theological questions of real people.  We’ll see if that’s really all one needs to be able to pass these bad boys.

After I finish these exams, and assuming I pass them, I’ll have to take two more in February.  They will take much more in the way of preparation.  I need to do far more than just sit under the Supposed-to-Be cloud.  I have to learn a Book of Order top and bottom and inside out and know how to apply all the denominational rules.  Fun times.

After ords, in addition to continuing my care process where people meet with me and ask me questions and evaluate my suitability for the ministry, I’ll still need to do CPE somehow.  And then . . . and here is the million dollar question . . . what will I do when I’ve checked all my boxes and I’m eligible for ordination?  I wait for the call to find me.  Because I’m still not sure how I’m going to work with three still-pretty-small children and how I’m supposed to teach my children how to worship when I’m standing up in front of the sanctuary jabbering during worship.  I’ll see.  I know God’s prompting me forward, I’m just still waiting for a head’s up on the destination.  And honestly, I’m perfectly fine not knowing it yet.  That’s the gift of faith.  Just waiting on God to show you what’s next.  And it’s fine.  Because he knows what he’s doing, he’s got plans better than any I can come up with.  Or maybe I’m just lazy or too tired to make my own plans.  Maybe I’m just waiting for the sake of waiting.

Nah.  I’m just waiting.  And it’s good.

You think you’ve got it bad . . .

. . .  you should meet Mr. So-and-so.  His life’s really bad.  You’ve got it good.  You should just thank your lucky stars you’ve got it so good and quit your complaining.

I hate that.  I hate hate hate when people say that to me.  And I hate it more when people say it to other people.  And you know what?  I probably hate it most when I hear people say it to themselves.

It’s just poison to me.

Why does there have to be a Who’s-Got-It-Worst contest?  Why can’t I be upset I stubbed my toe while I’m standing next to an amputee?  Why?  My toe hurts.  It really hurts.  It hurts worse than you expect a teeny tiny appendage to hurt and no matter what I do I can’t stop the pain and it’s throbbing up through my shin I slammed it so hard!  Yes the poor guy next to me longs to have a toe he can stub, but does it make my toe hurt any less?  Would he not cry out in agony if he magically regained a leg and a toe and subsequently slammed it into a curb?  I’m pretty sure he would.  And, the right response, I suppose, would be:  “Well, at least you have a toe.”

How is that helpful?  How is that kind and compassionate?  How how how?

Why can’t my toe just hurt because it hurts and why can’t you just say, “I’m sorry your toe hurts.  Gee that sucks!”?  Then when my toe stops hurting I can carry on in my quest to solve all the world’s ills.

So, somebody does this to me.  I’m overwhelmed by life and this person’s response is, essentially, “Suck it up and deal, you should see what real anguish is like.”  That is so not helpful.  My anguish is my anguish, no matter how trivial.  Let me have it.  The thing is, if it’s my anguish, I’m going to feel it whether or not you give me permission to feel it.  And if you strip me of my permission, you’re not leaving me without anguish, you’re leaving me still firmly in anguish but now I’m drowning in guilt to boot.  Again I say, how is this helpful?  I hate it.  Just let me feel crappy and tell me you’re sorry I feel crappy, wish me well, and send me on my way.

Should I address here the fact that said person doesn’t even know what I’m overwhelmed by and he’s only assuming it’s trivial?  No, I’ll worry about that later. . . .

So, I hate when people do it to me, but I hate it more when people do it to someone else.  Why?  Because I know it’s an awful, totally unhelpful, minimizing, dehumanizing thing to say and I worry that the recipient doesn’t know that and that he will now go off into the depths of guilt, wounded and weakened by pain, all the more likely to drown in it.  And my heart aches for him.  I just want to say, “Ugh, your wound, your pain, it sucks.  And I’m so sorry.  I can’t imagine how that hurts.”  (Because I’ve never felt his pain, and I’m not him, so I can’t even imagine it.)  Oh yeah.  And I want to slap the other guy in the head.

Then there are the times when a person does it to herself.  She’s struggling, overwhelmed, in some sort of anguish, and she tells herself, “Oh, this is no big deal, Mr. So-and-so, he has real problems.”  And she chokes down her tears and packs up her sorrows and tries to carry on.  But she still has that heavy trunk of sorrows to carry around.  She won’t share it because she thinks it should be light enough to carry on her own.  But it clearly weighs her down, so it’s clearly not light enough for her to carry on her own.  And that’s OK.

You know what?  I think I’m only good for carrying like 40 pounds around anywhere for any length of time.  And that’s 40 living pounds, as in the weight of a small child (well, young child in my house, anyway).  A dead weight?  I probably can’t do 40.  My husband?  He works out in a gym.  Has done so for . . . well I’d say as long as I know him, but I’m not sure he started when he was eleven . . . lets say an even 20 years.  He can carry so much weight around that when I ask him “How much weight can you carry?”  he has to give me a zillion different possible scenarios to determine a specific answer.  “How am I carrying it?  Like in my arms?  Like a bar across my shoulders and squat it?  A person?  Am I going up hill or down hill?”  etc. etc. etc.  I can pick up 40 pounds, tops, under any circumstances.  Now I have to get specific for my husband to come up with a range:  about 200 pounds, we’ve concluded.  (We’ve also concluded he could probably “move” up to 400 lbs.  Like on an incline bench pushing up with his legs.  Once.  It’s been a fun conversation.)

Point is:  I can pick up 40 pounds.  My husband can pick up 200.  Say we come home from the grocery store and in an attempt to get the groceries inside as quickly as possible we both load up both our arms with grocery bags:  I with 50 pounds, he with 100.   When I stagger my way into the house, my husband is not going to say, “Heh.  You think that’s heavy?  That’s not heavy.  I have twice as much as that in my hands!  Stop staggering and get in this house.”  No.  He’s going to help me get some bags out of my arms because he knows I’m maxing out my strength and my herniated disks in my neck.  What matters is not how much he or someone else can carry or is carrying.  What matters is the load I’m bearing is hurting my arms and my neck and making me stumble.

If we can see the logic of that (and I hope you can) when we’re talking about physical loads, why can’t we see it when we’re talking about emotional ones?  Why do we allow ourselves and others to feel crummy only when we’ve determined the load is heavy enough, not when the person does indeed feel crummy?   Why is it a contest?  Why do we feel compelled to justify our exhaustion?  Why do we feel compelled to minimize someone else’s?   Can’t we just feel the weight of what we’re carrying, whatever the mass?

Talking to my frustrated engineer husband just now (while he’s supposed to be finishing up his sermon.  It is, after all, Saturday night), took me on a little tangent.  But really, it might not be such a tangent after all.  It might just be a deepening of my analogy.  A deepening best appreciated by the science-minded, but that’s OK.  We love them too.

If you (are able,) remember back to your Physics 101, one of the crucial formulae you learned was  F=MA.  Force equals Mass times Acceleration.  The downward force of an object, its weight, is dependent upon not only its mass, but also the acceleration due to gravity in its particular environment.  Remember that a particular object has a particular mass, but it will weigh more on earth than it does on the moon due to the moon’s lower acceleration due to gravity.  So, my two volumes of Calvin’s Institutes always have the same mass, no matter where they are, but if I put them in my backpack on earth, I will feel them pulling against my shoulders a little.  But they’ll simply float away on the moon.  Same books, different circumstances; different environment, different impact.

So, I posit (since I’m getting all scientific-y here), it is with life’s travails.  What totally bogs one person down is barely a blip on the screen of another.  The specifics of the challenge (the mass) is the same, but the conditions and the circumstances (the acceleration due to gravity) are different.  Not better or worse, not weaker or stronger, just different.  Like all people are different.  Consequently, the impact on each person will be different.  Again, not better, not worse, just different.  What matters most is how the individual person is experiencing the weight (the force) of the challenge.

And our job, as fellow brothers and sisters in faith or simply as fellow humans on this planet, is to meet people where they are, to consider only the weight of their pain or struggle or challenge as it manifests itself in their own planet personal experience, and help them carry it.  Our job with ourselves is to stop worrying about how much our problem weighs in someone else’s sphere, and give ourselves permission to feel its weight in our own lives and to ask for help carrying it if we need it.

Sometimes life sucks.  And that’s OK.  Sometimes it hurts, sometimes the little things take us down, sometimes the big things leave us stronger.  Or the big things pummel us to smitherines and the little things are teeny tiny pings.  And it’s all OK.  As in, it’s all crappy and as crappy as we feel it to be.  And if you don’t think so, then kindly leave me alone.  And leave him alone.  And leave yourself alone.  Life is challenging enough without making it a contest.

Answering some questions . . .

My last post in which I rambled on about how theology matters prompted the following comment from one of my imaginary friends:

My favorite college prof. drilled that into my head: THEOLOGY MATTERS! And it does. It really, really does.

And I am at a place right now where I am scared to death that I’m wrong. “We as human beings bring our own baggage and junk to the Bible, read into it and out of it things that are informed by our own experiences and biases.” This is so very true. When I read the Bible, I still see it through my old theological glasses so easily. So how do we ever know that we’re right? I don’t need to be right about everything, His “ways are higher than [my] ways”, and His “thoughts are higher than [my] thoughts.” But what about the basics? How do I know that God looks on me in grace and isn’t disgusted by my failing to measure up?

I’ve been thinking about this since July 27th, when she wrote it, but have had limited online time in the meantime.  But still, the question has been floating around.  Then when I started commenting in response I realized it was all getting too long for a comment, that it may very well be a post in and of itself.  So that’s what I made it.

I’m going to start backwards though.

“How do I know that God looks on me in grace and isn’t disgusted by my failing to measure up?”

Well, my answer to that one is that both are true.    God is disgusted by your failure to measure up.  He’s also disgusted by the presence of sin in the world that makes it impossible for you to measure up.  Which is why he sent his Son, to clean the whole mess up.  Now your failures are buried with Christ, and when God looks at you he sees *Christ’s* righteousness, and all of your failures cannot change that.  And your successes are Christ’s successes.  All of our good works are, first of all, Christ working in us, and second of all, stacked together, are like trying to climb a step-ladder to heaven.  So great is the divide between our sinfulness and God’s holiness.

Of course, you know all that, because you’ve come to this whole “new” theology.  So now the question is, how do we know *we’re* right and “they’re” wrong?  Or even simply that we’re right?  I still suspect I’m going to see Jesus face to face some day and say “ooOOOOOOoooohhh.  Now I get it.  Boy was I wrong.“  Because we’re humans trying to do the best we can with what we’ve got.  But we’re not doing it alone.  We do it with the help of a powerful Advocate.  But how do we know we’re hearing Him, and not someone else?  We test the spirits.  Some of the ways I do that . . .

Which direction is this idea sending me?  Running toward God with open arms?  Or away from God?  Ecstatic in God’s love for me?  Or cowering and trembling in fear?  What does the whole of Scripture tell me is God’s desire for me in my relationship with him?

Which leads me to another question I ask . . . Is this idea reflective of one little piece of Scripture, one verse, one sentence?  Or is it reflective of the entirety of Scripture.  I’m always looking for the big-picture ideas.  Ones that reflect *all* of Scripture.  I also think when a problem arises, a discrepancy, a seeming contradiction, the problem lies with my understanding, and again, look to the whole of Scripture.  Big picture.  That one may be less helpful.

A big one for me is the corporate voice of the Church.  I believe we best discern the words of the Holy Spirit in a group.  Of course, there are big groups holding onto these dissenting opinions, so that’s not quite enough.  I guess the mere fact that the particular theology I ascribe to has been hanging around for 475 years (and more, if you count Luther )  And still (way) more if you count Augustine’s influence on the Reformers) holds a lot of weight with me.  Not because I think those men were any better than you or I or anyone else for that matter.  They are men.  Men men men.  And their ideas are secondary, subservient to, Scripture.  But their ideas came *from* Scripture.  And their way of reading Scripture was reading it in its entirety, as if it is one big book.  And, to me anyway, if you’re going to claim the authority of Scripture, you ought to claim that the whole thing is authoritative and equally so.  I think that’s what my 500 year old friend did.  I see a lot of picking and choosing in the more modern theologies.  I also see such a bias so enormously informed by Western individualism and the Enlightenment that it’s sometimes hard to extract the theology from that bias.  It seems to be the driving force of it, the culture-bound nature of it.

I guess you could say the culture of the Reformers was equally binding on them.  Maybe I find a lot of encouragement (that it’s accurate) in the fact that the theology has stood the test of time and that it has been easily transferred from one culture to another.  As if the theology can be transferred without the culture.  The timelessness of a given theology, to me, speaks to the timelessness of the One who inspired it. . . .

Of course, now the Roman Catholics will–and with every right–pshaw and say, “500 years??!!  You’ve got to be kidding me! You think that’s old??!!“  Likewise-and more so–my Eastern Orthodox brethren.  So, you know, obviously time isn’t the only test of truth.  But it helps.  The age of the doctrines, the broader the adherents, these things help me feel better about my newfangled theological notions.

At the end of the day, though, I think I stay most with my earlier thoughts.  Is this idea leading me to run toward God or away from him?  Remember that it wasn’t until Sin came on the scene that Adam and Eve realized they were naked and started cowering and hiding.  And, ultimately, I remind myself that nobody’s right.  Nobody’s got it all together.  It’s all through a glass darkly.  But the good news remains that God’s love is big enough to cover my bad theology.  Nothing . . .  Not even my skewed and dead wrong theologizing . . . can ever separate me from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.  And I know that is true because God said so.  And the fact that he has never stopped pursuing his people illustrates it.  And those thoughts make me want to lay myself bare and lie prostrate before him–not out of shame, but out of adoration–and bask in his love and in his glory.  That’s a theology I can live with.