April

It was my first day. I was walking into a job I knew nothing about, in a place I had never been, to equipment I had never seen, and as I stood at the back door to the kitchen, at least someone had left the door open. I was going to be able to walk right in instead of standing there knocking like a newbie. 

I saw the ovens, the coolers, the walk-in freezer. A row of lockers. A bunch of stuff I didn't recognize. I heard all the noise, the banging pans, the shuffling of boxes. 

I could turn around right now and walk out and nobody would even know it, I thought to myself, overwhelmed. I could quit before I even started. I could leave and say I got lost or something and maybe try again later or tomorrow, if I wanted to. If I didn't want to, I could just make a clean break. No harm, no foul. 

Then, a woman popped around the corner and with great excitement shouted, "Oh! You must be the new one!" 

What a welcome. 

"The new one." 

Her name was April. She was in charge of the salad bar. She would become one of my best friends. 

And she's the only reason I didn't walk out. I mean, how could I, now that I'd been spotted? 

That job was one of the most fun seasons of my life. It sounds dumb for someone who had just graduated with her Master's degree, but I really enjoyed my season in food service. It suited me. It stretched me. It exposed me to things I had never known before. It gave me new skills. It created new opportunities. It completely changed the experience that I had during the pandemic, when I suddenly became "essential." That job was such a blessing to me in a season when it seemed so strange that it would be. 

It was my doorway to my next thing, and the one after that, and suddenly, somehow, the place I am now. Really. Being in the schools put me into the classroom, which introduced me to a later new friend, who introduced me to her mother, who opened the doors for me in health care, where I am now thriving (and where I always wanted to be anyway). 

All of that was made possible by April, who spotted me in a vulnerable moment and greeted me with joy and ushered me into a place that seemed so overwhelming at first but quickly became a place I absolutely loved. 

It reminds me to notice persons. To step out and say something. To greet them and bring them in. To help them take that first step in a moment when they're thinking to themselves how easy it would be to just turn around and walk away. 

I can be really introverted. I can be really shy. I can be really insecure. But I think often of that first day, my first day, and the way that April came running to me with such excitement and how much that one moment changed for me. How much it made possible. How good it all turned out - in that season and the next one and the next one. And I think that maybe I ought to get over myself a little bit and step out and just say hi. 

Oh! You must be the new one. 

Come on in; let me show you around. I, for one, am glad you're here.  

Prostitutes and Mothers

There's a story in the Bible, in 1 Kings, that you're probably familiar with. It's the story of two women with two babies. One of the babies dies, and the women are left fighting over the living baby. They find themselves in front of King Solomon, who determines who the child's actual mother is and returns the living child to her. The story is meant to demonstrate Solomon's wisdom. 

And it does. 

But it also demonstrates something else. 

Every time I have heard this story preached, I have heard about these women. About these mothers. When I think about this story, I think about these women. These mothers. Two mothers of two babies, one who unfortunately died. A wicked mother, even, perhaps, who is willing to cut a living baby in two, but mothers nonetheless. 

Then, I read the story again. 

At the very beginning of the story, the Bible tells us that "once, there were two prostitutes." Yup. You read that right. These two mothers are introduced to us first as two prostitutes. 

You would think this would stick out to us. You would think we would remember this. You would think, as obsessed as we are in our culture with sexuality and sex, in general (and as judgmental as Christians tend to be on the subject), the fact that these women were prostitutes would always be part of the story. 

But it's not. 

Because the emphasis of the story is Solomon's wisdom, and we wouldn't want to take anything away from that. So they become mothers. 

But do you see how easy that was? 

We, who tend to be so judgmental about sex and about prostitutes, especially, choose to identify these women as mothers, and we seem to have forgotten entirely that they were prostitutes. It's not an important part of the story when we tell it. It's a detail that just...faded away. 

This is an important reminder for us, for those of us who are tempted to make judgments about other persons based on things we think we understand. What if we identified those we are tempted to judge as something else? What if they were more than our stereotypes? What if we could push aside the words that seem to carry so much weight and see them as something else? 

What if we saw every prostitute as a mother? Every gay man as a brother? Every drug addict as a sister? 

We are, after all, the family of God, aren't we?

You forgot they were prostitutes. Admit it. You did. 

What else could you forget about people? 

Faith

Here's where all this talk about my blind dog comes back to meet us: at the simple matter of faith. 

See, I am noticing how hard it is for my newly-blind friend to navigate the world using senses that she's apparently never paid much attention to, and I've reflected from time to time on how well my own senses pick up in an emergency. But the thing that I really think about is how my faith works in moments when I need it, but am not sure how to find it. 

We all have those moments. Those times when everything we seem to know is called into question, when the darkness settles in thick for a season, when something seems to almost choke us out. Everything that we thought we knew isn't working, and we need to rely on something else to get us through. 

We have prayed the prayers, read the verses, sung the songs, even lifted our weary hands into the air in worship, and nothing seems to be connecting us to the source of strength that we really need right now. Try as we might, the practices of our faith are failing us. 

This is where the substance of our faith has to come in. 

This is where all those disciplines we've invested ourselves in come to help us. 

This is where our auto-pilot has to kick in and carry us through. 

This is where so many of us fall. 

It really is. This is where so many persons who have thought they were faithful have fallen because their faith has failed them. They have no auto-pilot. They just kind of went along with things, floating in the streams of life, trusting that if they ever needed it, these currents would carry them. 

But all of a sudden, the waters shifted and now, life has them swimming upstream, but there's no muscle memory for their faith. They haven't exercised it, so it doesn't know how to push back. All it knows how to do is be carried along and suddenly, being carried along just isn't good enough. 

There is a way that keeps believing even when it doesn't seem possible. There is a way of deep knowing in the depths of your soul that can't be shaken, even when none of the things you've depended on are working. 

We read the Bible so that it gets down in our bones. We sing the songs so that they get woven into our hearts. We pray the prayers so that we know what the voices sound like - ours and His. And then, on the days when the Bible seems boring or stupid, the songs seem trite or annoying, the prayers seem worthless, the postures just aren't working, there's something deep down in the fabric of our being that still knows...still knows even in a season when it can't be reminded...and that faith - that faith - is what carries us through. 

That's what I really think about as I watch my blind girl try to navigate her world in new ways. 

If everything you think your faith is came crashing down tomorrow - if you lost your church, grew weary of your Bible, were annoyed by the repetitive choruses of worship songs, forgot your voice, didn't recognize God's, or could barely lift your weary hands, would the faith that you have established as the background, as the foundation, as the structure of your very life have a way to carry you through? 

Would you still be able to believe if you found yourself in a season when you couldn't connect? 

If not, what would you need to start doing differently, today, right now, to start establishing that kind of faith in your life? 

Because I promise you - those seasons are coming. They come for all of us. 

Are we ready? 

All Your Senses

When we talk about having different ways to experience the world and whether or not we're paying attention, one of the examples I always think of right away is the smart phone. 

I was a late adopter to the smart phone, only getting one in 2015 after becoming stranded on a deserted highway in another state and unable to access any resources that would help me to find my way home. It seemed prudent, then, to finally upgrade to a device that also carries the internet (and that doesn't require counting minutes on my plan). 

Honestly, I'm not a fan. 

One of the complaints that I have about my smart phone is that in case of emergency, it's absolutely no help at all. Maybe I just don't know how to use it as adeptly as kids these days, but give me my old flip phone, and I can get help. 

Picture it: you're in a car accident and your smart phone lands just out of reach. You can feel it, but you can't see it. How are you going to call 911? 

Maybe you know how to voice activate your phone or whatever. I don't. But give me my old flip phone, and I only need to feel it. My fingers can feel where the buttons are, and I can dial 911 without ever seeing my phone. Same thing if it's in my pocket. If I'm out walking around somewhere and sense danger, I don't have to pull a flip phone out of my pocket or give any audio clues that I'm seeking help to get it; I can just stick my fingers in my pocket and dial the numbers. Bam. Done. 

This blows the minds of some of the younger folk. The same folk who are amazed that I can type without looking at the keyboard. But the truth is that it's just a product of paying attention. It's a product of knowing where my fingers are and what happens when they move this or that way. It's a product of understanding what a keypad feels like. 

Keypad > Touchscreen any time, every time. 

But you give today's kid an actual phone, and they don't know how to use it. Their entire world is visual, with a little bit of audio mixed in. They don't have to use their sense of touch the way that my generation had to, so in case of emergency, they don't have that built-in back-up system that knows where they are in the world and how to navigate. They've never had to pay attention to it. It was my part of my daily existence. 

This is what I'm talking about. I'm talking about knowing what your world feels like. What it smells like. What it tastes like. What it sounds like. Not just what it looks like. 

In case of emergency, in case of failure, could you navigate the world in a non-dominant way? Have you been paying enough attention to know where you are if all of your visual cues were taken away? 

This isn't just about our physical senses. This is also a faith question. We'll get to that tomorrow.  

Paying Attention

How much attention are you really paying to your life?

If you read last Friday's post about the woman I was supposed to pray with but didn't, you might think this has to do with that. But it doesn't. Not really. 

This is another post about my newly-blind best friend. (My dog.) 

See, one of the things that has taken me most by surprise in all of this transition is how little attention she seems to have been paying to her life for the last 11 years. 

She has lived in the same house. With the same floors. With the furniture in the same places. With her food and water in exactly the same place. Going up and down the same 4 steps off the back deck and the front porch. Walking the same neighborhood streets. Crossing the same crosswalks. Peeing in the same little piece of easement at this one neighbor's house. (We even call it her potty spot.) 

Yet, she lost her sight, and she seems to have absolutely no clues remaining as to where she is. 

She's constantly walking into things. Things that haven't moved in 11 years. She can't find her food and water bowl. Like her nose doesn't know to alert her to these things. She skitter-foots every time she crosses the threshold from the laminate flooring to the old linoleum, like it's something weird and new. Like this whole big world she lives in, even this little part of it that I would have assumed she would be intimately familiar with, is completely foreign. 

Like her eyes have been literally the only thing she's been paying attention to for her whole life. 

Now that she needs her other senses, it's like she's never used them before. 

I can hold a piece of cheese in front of this dog's face, right in front of her nose, and she will still move her nose in a bunch of circles before she figures out where it is. I can put her at the edge of the stairs, and she won't know that the edge means it's time to step down. (She's learning....we're getting there.) I can take her for a walk and verbally identify landmarks for her - houses where other dogs live, fences she likes to sniff at - and she'll walk right into them anyway, like they aren't even there. Like she's never noticed them before in her life. 

It makes me think. 

It makes me wonder what the dominant things have been in my life that I've been depending on, what I trust to guide me. It makes me wonder how many other ways I'm experiencing the world at the same time without even paying attention to them. It makes me wonder if I'm paying attention at all, and how much attention I'm paying. 

I think it's a good time to stop and think about the ways I'm living and what they mean for the life I'm living and what they mean, most importantly, if the life I'm living somehow changes in some dramatic way.