Keeping Stories Alive

Last night I dreamed of the beginning of a story. A road choked in chalk dust making driving unnavigable. A dragon responding to missed connections with passive aggressive hospitality. A walk with music in every step.

These are the stories that are organic, that arise from the ephemeral wonder and awe inspiring imagination of our living minds. The stories breathe and flow and expand and contract and narrow inside the constraints of perspective and leap across experiences and have the potential to draw us together. 

I live on the words I use. It may not seem that way from the outside. Or actually, it might be easier to see from the outside. I preach a sermon I wrote. I lead a bible study I wrote. I produce a youtube script that I wrote. Or rather, I write all my sermons, bible studies, scripts, and prayers (or attribute them properly). And these things that I write rise directly from my experiences with the people I am in ministry with. It’s the stories I hear from the people around me that effect the words I choose. 

That cannot be replaced.

And so I’m watching the stories of the Writers’ Guild Strike, and the ways that they’ve asked for guardrails for AI generated writing. Because I care if stories are written by people. We need living, breathing stories. Our stories will keep us alive. 

Not only in our media, but among our people. I’m watching the WGA and the surrounding stories because I can hear echoes in the church. Our financial models are shifting and I am looking at whether I have a job with compensation that can sustain me and my family twenty years from now. I’m wondering what lessons we can learn from watching what is happening now, and how can we care for the people around us as we observe the ongoing shifts. 

Really, what stories do I need to share so our stories can stay alive? 

A Peculiar Way of Being

I have been doing some pondering on being lonely and being alone.

When I was a teenager, I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I was an introvert.

Even in school, in my first years of ministry, this continued.

But there were exceptions. 

My cousin Julie shared this photo of me cooking in our Grandmother’s Kitchen with me this week. I see it as an invitation. I’m probably ten or so in this photo, wearing navy blue bib overalls and a white floofy button-down shirt.

My camp persona. How I love parties. The energy I extend that seemly invites strangers to tell me their life stories immediately. (I’ve learned about more cancers and divorces and parenting hopes and expected vacations than I can count. It doesn’t stop.)

The realizations continue. When I am at yoga, I turn on. There’s something about being in a community of people whose goals are aligned, or at least our bodies are… we face a single direction and hear the same cues, but we are invited and practice uniquely with our own bodies, listening to our limits, which can vary day to day and side to side. 

(I’ve also been considering how to engage yoga outside of an ableist perspective, and if anything, my current community doesn’t expect perfection… our varied expressions are celebrated, but we also are mostly all able to climb the stairs and sit on the floor with ease.)

But I love it. I love who I am there with those people.

See, here’s the thing. I used to think I loved being alone. I used to think that I was best when I was alone. 

But I’m wondering if was I simply exhausted with masking for the people I was with. 

Did I grow up with people who didn’t celebrate my weird and peculiar self and so I learned how to hide it. I learned how to work a room… and in working the room I also learned how to be the most acceptable version of myself.

And in turn, I was exhausted with trying to make myself acceptable, while knowing I’d never be enough. 

I mean. That sounds exhausting to me.

And it surely isn’t a hope I have for anyone else.

I went to two parties this past weekend. And I loved them. I didn’t know more than three people at the first one. And… I was energized. 

I went to another party and loved how I could bounce and flit between conversations. 

I was buzzing when I got home.

It makes me wonder if I am not as much an introvert as I thought. At best I’m an ambivert… it’s all about context. And truly, I keep hoping for a context that will celebrate my weird and peculiar self and what I have to offer the community. 

Because I believe that my full self is worth who I am. I believe that a community that can celebrate my full self is place where I can help others, in turn, celebrate who they are. That’s a community worth investing in. 

And I use community and church interchangeably. Because that is my hope for the church, that it is a beloved community, that it is a place where our differences are celebrated, where our love for each other leads us to listen and care for each other. Where we see the work of those around us and ask how we can help support it. When we can grieve with each other and not expect everyone around us to be happy. When we can be our full selves in our sorrows and joys and everything in between. 

This is my hope for community based in the love of God. And so I’ll keep practicing. And hoping. And being. Who I am. As I continue to expand my imagination of who I might be in Christ, as I sink deeper into the hope of the Holy Spirit. 

Altered Impediments

After 116

After William Shakespeare’s sonnet 116

“Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds” …

Find in me an alteration.

Admit my impediments.

And still hold fast

to the marriage of our

True minds, body and soul,

In nights past

And days yet to come.

In these alterations

We are growing

Breaking

Shifting

Sounding

Crashing

Finding

Creating new iterations of

Our love together as we

Change who we are.

In the finding, then, we

Discover our impediments.

Do we circumvent them?

Ignore our impediments?

Acknowledge them for the stumbling hazards they present?

What if these, our impediments,

Are not what they seem?

Can our impediments be our

Invitation to a new path?

We do set where our diversions lead.

What else can be incorporated into our love?

Can our impediments,

Our acknowledgments of them—

our finding the ways we

break each other down—

Can our mutual breaking

Also lead to our mutual support?

Where I am lacking,

Can you fill?

Where you are in need,

Can I meet you?

Where we need to reach,

Can we lean together?

Love alters us.

We meet each other—

True love finding true love—

Love which reveals truth

And revels in it

Among and between us.

Love revealing the impediments

We erected to protect

Our hearts from the

Danger of feeling the

Depths of our emotions.

Our fears prohibit us from

Revealing our true minds…

So when love alters—

When the alterations

Find us—we are arriving

To the core of who we

Truly are.

Love, then, remains at the

Core. Even as we shift,

Alter, change, become.

Are we altering?

Is love itself changing?

Or are we moving ever

Closer to the core of

What love, unalterable, is?

Hope Lies in Wait, 2

I don’t know exactly where it came from, if I read it from Alyssa Cole Riley on Black Liturgies or made it up or from somewhere else entirely, but my phrase for the season of advent is “Hope Lies in Wait.”*

I hold this. This waiting hope. Where hope, embodied, rests in waiting, anticipating a time when hope itself will be fulfilled. 

And so.

Hope lies in wait.

This then, is an invitation to me. For a time of waiting, of rest, of acknowledging that action is not always called for. Sometimes inaction is what is required. Not for the exchange of purpose, but for simply the call to exist without needing to produce something. 

Not all time must be spent, and not all time not spent “properly” is wasted. Capitalism would have you believe that continuous production is the highest quality, but do not get carried away in it. More is not required of you. 

Your value isn’t based in what you produce. 

Our hope can rest, and so can you.

What does the waiting look like? What does your waiting look like? Is it fidgety or impatient or nervous or restful? Or something to be ignored as you line up the next task on your list of necessary accomplishments?

As we wait this advent, remembering the darkness of the womb that echoes the darkness of the tomb, both of which held labor for our Christ, where is life calling you to receive this waiting?

What are you doing to get ready? How are you preparing to celebrate and possibly to mourn? What needs to be let go of, in order to have hands ready to receive the gift of God’s renewed presence?

No. I don’t know what I’m writing. Is this a sermon? A post? It’s certainly not a script for the kids videos. I’m writing to myself, as I wait. As I rest. As I heal. 

And so I return to the reminder, that Hope lies in wait. 

Everything else flows from this. Our hope, then, is not of something that we can do on our own. It may yet be ordinary, because the ordinary holds such joy and we have seen what the world creates when everything and every time is interesting. The ordinary may yet hold joy, and love, and peace. 

What wonder would it be, for peace to be ordinary. For the lion to lay down with the lamb and for our weapons to be transformed into garden tools. Where conversations between people who held each other in high regard regardless of their unique qualities were commonplace. Where parents didn’t have to wonder whether their children were safe and healthy. 

That is my hope.

What if love extended beyond our imaginations? 

What if joy overtook us?

What if hope was fulfilled? 

What if we were ready to receive it? 

Maybe this is a prayer for Advent. Or for you. Or for me. 

*Reviewing my writing history, this was a title I used for post when I was pregnant with my firstborn as I also reflected on my grandmother, Janet’s, death.

Rooted In

It starts tentatively. The tendrils emerge and begin to sink into the dirt. And then, they spread. It doesn’t look like much from the surface, but follow the threads of the taproot and see just how far the base can go.

Entire systems take their place in the network. 

I lay on my back, resting, held by the earth, and followed the root system to the water. There, that’s the creek behind my house. There, that’s the overflow pond for the mill. There, that’s the place where everything runs to the yadkin. There, that’s the edge of this lake, and that one. 

A tree’s roots expand far further than it’s canopy. Trees, even the ones you see overturned after a storm, only show their closest ball of dirt, their roots sink far further and much wider than you can perceive. 

Tree growing in a wadi along the road to Jericho.

Deep and broad, sinking and spreading, settling in and branching out. 

Entire forests talk with each other. 

I can feel the waterways moving together. 

We are all downhill and upstream from someone. 

I am settling in to where I am. There are so many unknowns, but here is one known: the trees taste the sunlight. And they rest in the darkness. 

I can feel the ground holding me up, and my roots sustaining me, as I feed back into the ground. The waters around me, they flow and rush and trickle by, and I am sustained by them. This network, of mycelia, of fungus, of ancient things releasing their lives back into the soil, this too sustains me, as we all turn back towards the earth. 

Another ring takes shape, telling a story of another year, new wrinkles that show where the laughter and tears have taken residence and made their home in my form.