New Houses from Old Bricks

The treasure hunt never ends

June 20, 2011 · Discernment, Vocation, ministry · 104 comments

This has been my longest blog-silence since I started writing several years ago, but I’ll claim this reason: I’m a grad student once again, this time studying for a Masters degree in Business Administration, with a concentration in Nonprofit Management. It’s not where I thought I’d be at this point in my vocational journey, but after the first two classes, it still seems like a good idea, so I’ll keep forging ahead.

This isn’t the first time my own vocational treasure hunt has taken an unexpected turn. And it’s not the first time the treasure hunt pointed backward at the same time it led forward. Here’s the story, at least the part of it I can see. (The treasure hunt is like an iceberg in that way: One only sees a small part of the story compared to what’s going on under the surface.) Continue reading →

Question-ing ministry, part 1

March 16, 2011 · Community, Vocation, ministry, spiritual life · 138 comments

I’m seeing lately how much ministry and church life are characterized by the questions we are asking, perhaps even more than by the ways we are answering them. Each year about this time I have to write an Annual Report as a church staff member. This time, rather than just listing “what we did,” I’ve been pondering the questions that emerged in and through the ministries and relationships I’m involved in. Not surprisingly, there’s lots of overlap with the things I blog about here—young adult spiritual journeys, vocation discernment, belonging—so I’ll post the report, in two parts.

Two related “umbrella” questions span the whole year: How can a church like ours be a resource for young adults (ages 18-30) on their life journeys and spiritual travels? And, perhaps even more importantly, How can the church learn from and adapt to the resources and creativity that young adults offer? This is not the same as asking, “How do we ‘hold onto’ teens and young adults?” It’s not asking, “How will the Church survive if the current trends of declining membership and attendance among young people continue?” Rather, it’s a question about what we value and communicate as a congregation, who finds it possible to belong here, and how open we are to new generations’ own questions and answers.

In 2010 I had the privilege of traveling to several colleges, congregations, and young adult ministries, where I had this conversation with many others who are asking similar questions. Continue reading →

Becoming a better lover

February 10, 2011 · Discernment, Vocation, spiritual life · 106 comments

I spent last weekend on the California coast with a group of college students on a retreat called “Seeking Your Calling, Finding Yourself.” I’ve been leading such retreats for more than seven years now, and while every group is different, it’s interesting to see how certain themes keep surfacing and resurfacing in various retreats. With the group last weekend, I spent a lot of time pondering the possibility of “wrong” choices. Can a choice be “wrong” if you learn something important from it or if something good comes out of it? If not, can you really call anything a “wrong choice”? And if there is no such thing as a wrong choice, why do we bother to seek our calling and practice discernment at all?

I wrote about this in Chapter 4 of my book, but it’s been a while since I talked about it with people. Here’s where the conversation ended up over the weekend: Perhaps there are no “right” or “wrong” choices, only ones which are “more” or “less” loving–toward others and ourselves. Perhaps that is the very best reason to engage in discernment and pay attention to our own clues on the treasure hunts of our lives: so that we can keep practicing love, both giving it and receiving it. We never become perfect at this (something to keep pondering as I prepare a sermon on Matthew 5:48, “Be perfect…”), but we can become more “practiced” and more open-hearted. God loves us no matter what kind of choices we make, but becoming able to give and receive more love makes a big difference in our life, relationships, and work.

As we practice discernment, we gain trust in God, ourselves, and the journey itself–which helps us to love better, as fear loses its grip on us. And as we gain freedom from self-centered anxiety, we become more free for love. We “love” in all kinds of ways–this isn’t just true of romantic love or love shown to family, friends, and strangers. It’s also about the love we practice in our work, learning, faith and worship, and the ways we inhabit our communities and planet.

So with the weekend’s retreat in mind, with Valentine’s Day approaching, and with today being the ninth anniversary of my ordination to pastoral ministry, I’m recalling this hope: “Hope that with the skills we learn on our search for treasure, we will one day love God, the world, and ourselves as passionately as we are loved” (The Treasure Hunt of Your Life, p.158). May it be so.

(Photo by gigaman, flickr/creativecommons)

Jesus’ faith in us

September 28, 2010 · Bible, Community, Vocation, ministry, spiritual life · (No comments)

The gospel text for this Sunday, Luke 17:5-10, presents some challenges. For me, the biggest challenge is the way this parable seems to glorify “duty”–which I frankly have never found to be a very powerful motivator.

Just before this in Luke 17, Jesus has been talking to the disciples about two particularly challenging “duties” of discipleship: 1) correct one another when you’re wrong, and 2) forgive one another as many times as it takes. Given those difficult responsibilities, it’s no wonder, in verse 5, that the disciples cry out, “Increase our faith!” Jesus’ response does not seem particularly helpful, or at least not particularly comforting: “If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it will obey you.” Huh? Then I guess we don’t even have that small amount of faith.

And then, this parable:

“Suppose one of you had a servant plowing or looking after the sheep. Would he say to the servant when he comes in from the field, ‘Come along now and sit down to eat’? Would he not rather say, ‘Prepare my supper, get yourself ready and wait on me while I eat and drink; after that you may eat and drink’? Would he thank the servant because he did what he was told to do? So you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty.’ ” (Luke 17:7-10, NIV)

Here is where I find it very, very helpful to read the Bible with people of different ages. How we read the Bible–or how the Bible reads us–depends on many things, one of which is the stage of life we’re living. Continue reading →

Pluto, you DO belong

August 24, 2010 · Community, Vocation, ministry, spiritual life · (No comments)

This morning the Writer’s Almanac informed me, “It was on this day four years ago that Pluto was demoted from being a planet. Pluto’s status had been debated for decades, but its fate was decided rather swiftly on this day, at the 2006 meeting of the International Astronomical Union (IAU).” I remember that time well, because in 2006 my own sense of self-definition and belonging was in transition, as I’d just left one call in ministry and was awaiting the next. For this fourth anniversary of Pluto’s “demotion,” I’ll repost the reflection I wrote for Religion and Spirituality.com on September 6, 2006:

“I know just how Pluto feels.” That thread runs through many of the comments on the recent redefinition of Pluto by the International Astronomical Union. Pluto’s been “demoted,” some call it, from planet to dwarf-planet.

We know what this must feel like, because it’s a universal human experience: losing status, being left out, or having our universe defined in a way that kicks us out of the place we expected or wanted. Continue reading →

Coveting my neighbor’s talents

August 8, 2010 · Bible, Community, Discernment, Vocation, ministry, spiritual life · (No comments)

I just returned from the Invitation to Service event, where I experienced yet again a reason I need to keep talking about finding one’s calling: because I forget key principles myself if I go too long between telling others about them.

For example: One of the principles of calling (”vocation”) is that you start with the gifts and talents you get, which are not always the ones you want. I’ve spent much of my life and ministry mourning the gifts I didn’t have or wanted more of, which diminishes the gifts I do have. This makes it hard to follow wherever my calling is taking me because I’m always wanting to go somewhere else. (It reminds me of Parker Palmer’s line from Let Your Life Speak: “Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you.”) I was hoping that I’d be immune to this by now, but I needed another booster shot this weekend. Continue reading →

Getting it all figured out (or not)

June 15, 2010 · Discernment, Vocation, spiritual life · (No comments)

I have a love-hate relationship with deadlines. Love the way they force me to complete projects; hate the stress they create. Overall, I’m pretty good with project deadlines. But I have a terrible track record with life deadlines: the ones that begin, “By the time I’m _____ years old, I will have….”

I have a birthday coming up this week and my twenty-year high school reunion coming up next month, so I’m considering such deadlines, and the biggies that I have failed to meet. For example, I have not moved away from the West Coast, pursued further graduate education, or had children. In my earlier years, the years in which people frequently ask “where do you hope to be in ten or twenty years,” I had imagined “completing” all those things by this point. (Instead, I moved back to the West Coast, found myself immersed in the joys and challenges of campus and congregational ministry, and got divorced.)

I also would have imagined having some things figured out by now: how to balance my personal and professional lives, for example, and how to savor the world as it is and work to improve it at the same time (as E.B. White said).

Fortunately, as hard as it seems to remember this, imposing deadlines on myself couldn’t be further from the point. Continue reading →

Resurrection faith: trust + openness

March 30, 2010 · Bible, Discernment, Vocation, ministry, spiritual life · (No comments)

As I circle around an Easter sermon for Sunday, the mixture of familiar and surprising, old and new, is fascinating me about the resurrection story this year.

Each of the four gospels has a unique way of telling the Easter story of Jesus rising from the dead. This year is Luke’s turn to tell the story, and I was struck by his emphasis on “remembering.” Isn’t the whole point of resurrection that we don’t have to remember the horrific events that came before it–Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion and humiliation? And yet the “two men in dazzling clothes” at the empty tomb say this to the women who had come to finish their embalming work on Jesus’ body: ” ‘Remember how (Jesus) told you…that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.’ Then they remembered his words…” (Luke 24:6-7).

Whatever is happening now on this first day of the week, it has continuity with what has come before–with Jesus’ words. The empty tomb signals that something has changed, but some things have remained true and trustworthy: God’s promises and will to save and make whole. The love and friendship of Jesus. The call to follow him and serve one’s neighbor.

I had started preparing a sermon about this continuity, with the help of a commentary I read which calls resurrection “the vindication of Jesus’ preaching and the validation of his ministry.” In others words, what was true before the resurrection is still true now. But then I noticed a totally different sermon getting woven through it. This was a sermon about discontinuity. Continue reading →

Extravagant love: experiments in stewardship

March 23, 2010 · Bible, Community, Vocation, ministry, spiritual life · (No comments)

At my church, we’ve been talking about “Experiments in Grace-Full Living” during this season of Lent. That’s forty days before Easter of pondering and practicing what it means to be faithful–to go out on the limb of uncertain results for the sake of Love–to “sin boldly,” as Martin Luther famously said, “and believe in the grace of God more boldly still.”

I think it’s my lifelong Lutheran wiring that always eventually turns my attention from what we are called to do (”experiment in grace-full living”) to what God is doing in and with us. In last Sunday’s sermon, I raised the question of whether God, in a way, also conducts such experiments in grace-full living. Continue reading →

The State of a Vocation

February 10, 2010 · Discernment, Vocation, ministry, spiritual life · (No comments)

Eight years ago today, I was ordained into the Ministry of Word and Sacrament in the Lutheran church. Anniversaries offer the opportunity to reflect on the state of one’s vocation–sort of like a wedding anniversary invites one to reflect on the state of the marriage. On my ordination anniversary, I think back on this “relationship” in its early days. But instead of remembering flowers, candy, and a special song, I often remember the hesitation, incessant questioning, and fervent prayers: “please, Lord, choose someone else.”

But wait. This sounds like the standard resisting-the-call-to-ministry story, so common at least among Lutheran pastors and maybe others too (i.e. “God just kept calling until I couldn’t say NO anymore”). So let me say this: Being a pastor is a truly joyful vocation that expands the heart and mind and keeps one close to people and things in life that really matter. Continue reading →

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