Growing Pains

I have the best job in the world. In the last few days I’ve spent time at the community garden marking new plots for new people, planting for the food pantry, and calling people interesting in starting gardens in their own communities. I gave the opening devotions for a weekly meeting of senior citizens in our community. I gathered with other Bread for the World chapter leaders across Indiana for a brainstorming session about encouraging advocacy on hunger issues. I spent several hours going over minutes with a retired volunteer who is typing up 135 years of our Monthly Meeting Minutes. I helped Friends move material goods into the church attic for our next rummage sale for missions. I spent time cutting reeds for a basket class I’ll teach to 6th graders at the Community Vacation Bible School on Monday. And then there was the never ending shopping, cooking, laundry and planning for another round of meals and activities for the coming weekend.

Recently my husband, Ron, was asked to serve on the Policy Committee for the Friends Committee on National Legislation. I am excited about his involvement on this committee and about the things he will learn from hanging around Washington DC with FCNL. In order to make it easier for him to attend the 3 weekend meetings in Washington DC, I offered to the Ministry and Oversight Committee my willingness to speak in meeting for worship when Ron is away.

I think I made a huge mistake. I do not preach. It probably isn’t very fair I’m considered a “co-pastor” since I’ve been reluctant to take on that responsibility. There are reasons I shy away from preaching. One is my husband is incredibly articulate and gifted in teaching. I, on the other hand, am not. I rarely speak in public and it takes me way out of my comfort zone to do so. I have a long tradition of being verbally backwards. Recently on a trip home to help my parents get their legal papers in order, I discovered my third grade report card. I can’t even remember the third grade, much less my teacher, but she wrote on the card that I was not as engaged in discussion in the classroom as I should be. It was kind of liberating to know I’ve always struggled verbally articulating my thoughts.

A tradition that takes place every year at Winchester Friends is a renewal of our commitment to stay as pastors. I’ve made one lifetime commitment (my marriage) so I’m pretty happy to take the rest of my life a year at a time.
Each year the Ministry and Oversight goes through an evaluation of the ministries of the Meeting and our involvement, as their representatives. This past month the clerk of the committee commented during the evaluation she felt the meeting was growing spiritually. Of course that is good to hear, but since that meeting, I’ve been thinking a lot about what spiritual growth looks like.

Even though I have one of the best jobs in the world, there are things I hate about pastoral work. One is the elusive nature of completion. As pastors, we spend most of our time and energy working on things we will never see completed, developing relationships that never can be measured and reading and studying things that most people never know about or care to know. At the end of each day I watch my husband fill out his daily diary with the events and people we engaged that day. I am at times overwhelmed with the knowledge that what we’ve done that day is just a drop in the bucket for what could be done or what is in store for us the next day. In such a lifestyle, how do I measure growth, much less spiritual growth? And what is it that the clerk saw when she mentioned that she felt the meeting was “growing spiritually?”

I am who I am today in large part because of a father I did not know very well. I was the oldest of 4 children and was14 years old when he died 40 years ago in a car accident. At the funeral the song “In the Garden” was sung. My grandparents said it was his favorite song. I did not know much about my father’s spiritual life or his relationship with God. I do know it seemed important to him to seen at church with his children even though, more often than not, he would barely make it home in time for church after a night of drinking. He and my mother had been drinking the night the single car accident took his life and severely injured my mother. I struggled during the funeral as I listened to the words from “In the Garden”. I could not reconcile my father’s lifestyle of drinking and abuse to a relationship where God walked with him and talked with him.

I was a Christian when my father died, but his death and other crises, failures, and sins in my own life have greatly influenced my Christianity. I am not enticed by a Christianity that doesn’t affect how I live. I am not interested in a relationship with Christ that doesn’t make a difference in our world. Spiritual growth for me needs to be tangible. Spiritual growth for me is the ability to see God’s spirit at work in a person’s life through relationships, through lifestyle, through activities and involvements. Spiritual growth is a growing awareness that every moment the Spirit of Christ is walking with me, offering insight and wisdom and nudging me into the places where I can indeed be the visible expression of God’s love for our world. This kind of spiritual growth for me is hard to articulate in a sermon for worship. I am blessed by a husband who is able to do that on a regular basis and who challenges me spiritually each week in worship. I admire people who are able to preach.

It has been too easy for me just to say “I don’t preach”. My offer to help Ron in his ministry was obviously God pushing me to into a new place because I need to grow. It isn’t very comfortable. It is much easier to plant in the garden, make muffins for Sunday School or be available to someone who needs to talk than it is to preach and challenge those gathered in worship to experience God in a new or deeper way. For me it sometimes seems easier to be politically and physically active doing “good” than it is to study, meditate, and pray. And yet my real passion is allowing Christ to be my present teacher, Lord, Savior and friend in all that I do. I’m in the process of preparing for that first time to speak in meeting for worship. I know I need to find a way to articulate spiritual growth. But more importantly, I need to find a way to articulate the joy that arises in my heart as I walk with Christ. When all is said and done, I would rather people remember the great joy I shared with God and not my great scones.