Tagged by Sabrina

My good friend Sabrina blog-tagged me with the following.

Six words that sum me up today:

1. Child
2. Saint
3. Pressed
4. Scruffy-looking
5. Excited
6. Uncertain

I would generally tag Sabrina and Kerri for this sort of thing, but they've both done it already. (I think you both took a longer view than I did....)

If anybody else is interested, here are the rules (and no, I didn't follow all of them):

1. Write your own six word Memoir.
2. Post it on your blog.
3. Link to the person who tagged you.
4. Tag 5 more blogs with links (leave a comment on their blog with an invitation to play).

Sunday School musings

I helped out with a Sunday School class today. This is the first time I've done this in years. It's also the first time in years I've been in a room with that many kids under the age of 6. (Hats off to full-time lower elementary and preschool teachers.)

I like little kids. I like the requests for help because they haven't learned how to do it themselves yet, and the stories they tell, and the casual unconcern with which they admit you into their lives (sometimes Chloe's parents stand on her bed to change lightbulbs).

I wish time with these kids wasn't a trade-off situation, but it is. I love adult Sunday School classes. I love the participation and the intellectual stimulation. I still miss college classes, and the adult Sunday School classes are the closest I come to that. As I can't be two places at once, I am only in the children's class now. (I wish Sunday School followed the Harvest Time model of having a leaders' class at a separate time. To work with kids AND to have a forum to keep interacting with the adults...that would be ideal. Sandra, are you reading this?)

Being a Sunday School teacher also means markedly less time socializing in the hallways. I'm okay with the part where I am there to help guide the kids to their classroom. The part where I wait at the classroom for twenty minutes after class...that's the part where I need to watch my attitude. 

I'm a punctual person, as a rule, although Harvest's disregard for clocks has sort of beaten me down a bit. But I still believe in respecting other people by respecting their time, and it can be hard for me to cultivate kind feelings towards my brothers and sisters in Christ who don't come to pick up their kids after their class is over, instead of using the Sunday School classroom for all the free babysitting potential it holds. I have trouble not thinking, "You go home and sit with family. I go home and sit alone. Can you please let me talk to a few people in the hallway for five minutes?" 

Then again, I guess maybe sometimes the parents with so many kids wish they could go home and sit alone, too. 

In my time with the children's Sunday School ministry, I am going to focus on what it means to serve for the sake of Christ. I am going to practice putting these children (and yes, their social butterfly parents, too) before myself. On simultaneously disappearing so that Christ appears, and on revealing myself in some of those vulnerable places I try to pretend don't exist. (Like the place that really liked having people stop by to say hello to me as I stood in the doorway waiting for parents to show up today. I appreciated that a lot.) I'm giving thanks for people who have done this sort of work for years, even though their efforts were often taken for granted. And that's just for starters.

It's going to be good.

EARTHQUAKE!

This morning I was lying in bed, trying to get back to sleep, and then my bed was moving and my dresser was making creaky noises. VERY weird. My first thought was of the relative structural integrity of the building, but then I listened hard and it wasn't windy outside. Then I thought I was imagining things, but I remembered the creaking dresser and the fluttering from Apollo that had followed it.

I went to the local news website this morning to see if maybe it was an earthquake, even though that seemed kind of ridiculous because I live in West Michigan. But it WAS an earthquake! Bizarre! And kind of cool now that the scariness is over.

Anybody else feel that?

Mourning to Dancing

God is gracious, and things are looking up, and today was a humbling set of reminders of how inadequate I am and how much God knows what He's doing.

For now, I am content. (I still covet your prayers on the move, as only God can keep me in this contentment and I feel myself prone to wander.)

Sitting sad and lonely....

Tonight I hung out with the oldest child-teenager-type I know, and we went to this park and ran around in the the dark a lot and scared some creature that scared me back by jumping into the water as I ran past it, and went on swings and flipped playground tiles to read "HI!" and stuff like that. It was nice. Kind of like a dose of antidote to my life for the next few weeks.

Because tomorrow I will go back to work and prep for the big moving weekend that's looming overhead, and I sort of want to cry because I hate moving and I hate change and at the same time I hate how stagnant I am and how my stomach twists into knots over things like not having enough boxes at hand, because how ridiculous is that?

I'm having trouble remembering that I'm not alone, and that I am not the only person pulling her weight, and that this will pass, and fairly soon. I'm having trouble seeing much meaning in the unglamorous drudgery of the next few weeks. I'm having trouble not feeling sorry for myself over working next weekend when my parents will be visiting my brother.

You can pray for me, if you think of it. That helps. I certainly need help. And maybe a hug....

Help Wanted

Last Monday morning Meghan was in a lot of pain, and needed prayer, and so I fasted for her by not slacking off via the internet at work—no checking email or surfing during non-lunch hours, even for one minute segments when I thought I had "deserved" it because of either really boring or really strenuous work I was doing. It was perhaps an unusual sort of fast, but for me it meant more than fasting from food (ironically, I usually see eating as a waste of time). Monday night the news was good, and God had answered the prayers of many, mine included.

So I've kept this up, and every day when I'm tempted to check my email "just once" I have been praying instead. I say all of this not because I am a stellar Christian but because I am a weak one. I know that all it takes is one day to derail all my fine attempts. I also know that I need accountability, which is one reason I'm bothering to write about this at all. 

Another reason is that it helps me to have a main focus for a fasting prayer. Last Monday, for instance, I prayed for Meghan. Today I will be praying for my Uncle Dick, who will be at the Cleveland Clinic undergoing a procedure called deep brain stimulation that will, please God, help calm the tremors in his body for an extended period of time. (If you would join me in this prayer, I know my entire family would be grateful.) 

If you have any specific requests, let me know. Because I need a focus that seems to bring the reality of God nearer, and because I think that's part of the reason He gave us community, after all.

"And He will yet deliver us, you also joining in helping us through your prayers, so that thanks may be given by many persons on our behalf for the favor bestowed on us through the prayers of many." (2 Corinthians 1:10b-11)

"If you don't know, I'm not going to tell you."

That is perhaps the most stereotypically female thing I think on a regular basis. And not that I always listen to that impulse, but it is almost always there. Because if you don't know, you haven't tried to know. You don't want to know. You don't care to know, which means you don't care about me, and so if you don't care, then neither do I. (On the other hand, if I don't know, I probably won't ask. Because if you haven't told me, you don't care if I know.)

The above is a good illustration of the meaning of the phrase "a vicious cycle." And is also a nice defensive way of masking the pain that follows barking your shins against the unknown.

This morning I listened to a teacher speak of the inherently unfathomable nature of the infinite (meaning God), and I recoiled inwardly. Even when we continued to elaborate in the class discussion that the fact that God is unknowable means that we will never lose the joy of discovery when it comes to our ever-growing knowledge of God...even when the teacher pointed out that finding out new things about people we know and love can often be enjoyable...even when I thought about how a repetitive task with nothing new to learn begins to wear on your energy reserves.... All of those examples helped, but....

Tonight my pastor spent the first 30 minutes or so of his sermon talking about how the OPC has left "wiggle room" when it comes to origins, so that people can believe in various origins models as long as they believe God created everything out of nothing, and the historicity of Adam and Eve, and some other points that he didn't get into but are in a big report the OPC did in 2004.

And I went home and I cried.

Because THEY CAN'T ALL BE RIGHT. God only created ONE way. And so, whatever you believe about origins, that means that there are a lot of people wandering around wrong. And that extends to other areas of faith and practice, like what you believe about Sabbath observance, or the end times, or the role of women anywhere.

Doesn't God understand that some of us want to know how far we can walk on what days, and whether or not it's okay to lead an animal to water as long as we don't make it drink, and how long our hair should be, and how short is too short for clothing, and what sort of people it's not healthy to talk to and for how long we maintain that sort of distance, if we maintain it, and, and, and.... (Sometimes, many times,  I want the comfort of restrictions instead of this bewilderingly confusing freedom.)

So tonight I cried because I don't know much of anything, and because I have equated knowledge with love. Then came the voice (and I think it must be of the Spirit) that told me I don't have to worry about knowing so much, because I myself am fully known (1 Cor. 13:12b), and because I am meant to know a love that surpasses knowledge (Eph. 3:19).

Someday I will know everything I am meant to know about God and how He has worked in the world. 

Meanwhile, I know everything I need to know, and probably everything I am able to handle so far.

Meanwhile, "if you don't know," I will fight to tell you. Because that's what love takes in this world, and I want to love beyond knowing. And because you might care, after all. You might just be human, like me. 

Fallen. 

Flawed. 

And constantly progressing on our way to greater things (Phil. 3:12).