Being the Weirdest One in the Room

Following Christ is not my best thing. Seriously. It is hard. It is a fight from the moment I wake up to the moment I give up the struggle, close my eyes and go to sleep. This is why I blog. Maybe following Jesus is hard for you too, and I’m pretty sure we need to stick together.

My most recent struggle is that I don’t feel understood because, quite honestly, I’m weird. I won’t go into my weirdness’s here but suffice it to say that I am never comfortable in a group, always having the gut feeling of being the odd person out. Maybe that is how everyone feels? Or maybe that is an introvert thing? Or maybe it is a blessing? No idea.

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But today while reading my daily devotional, the words of a prayer by Francis of Assisi spoke to this very point of my weirdness and not being understood. It said, “O, Master, grant that I may never seek so much to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love with all my soul.” This selfless prayer made me see the selfishness of wanting to be understood and the beauty of being understanding rather than judgmental. It made me see through the eyes of Christ.

“O, Master, grant that I may never seek so much to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love with all my soul.”

~Francis of Assisi

So now, when I find myself wallowing in self pity, I must obediently bring it to my Papa and let him do his thing. Hopefully, this is helpful to some other weird person out there. May He give us all a glimpse of others through his eyes so that we can console, understand and love them.

You Are Never Too Old for Stories

 I love stories! If you ever went to Sunday School as a small child, you heard Bible stories. They were often accompanied by ancient pictures hung so high around the classroom that you must tilt your head way back to see them. I guess that was to keep our grimy fingers off of them. The lucky ones of us attended a church where they had a flannel-graph of the characters and the child who was most trusted got to stick the character on the flannel board when the teacher gave them the ok.

Then at some point we aged out of Bible stories and flannel-graphs. I don’t know who decided this. Maybe they just ran out of G-rated stories for littles since most Bible stories are definitely of the rougher variety. When I was a teen going to church, I loved it when I got to listen to an animated version of a Bible story told by an inspired youth director. They were so enthusiastic that they often included choreography which was frowned upon in my church. As an adult, I must admit that I still love an artfully told Bible story in the sermon. It takes me back to the time and place in which it was written and gives me a new understanding of a story I have heard a hundred times before.

As you can tell, I was privileged to hear the Bible through many different folks. In my daddy’s final years of life he told me that it was Hurlbut’s Story of the Bible by Dr. Jesse Lyman Hurlbut that led him to know Christ. Dad later became a minister. He told me that his mom used the scant money she had to buy this book from a door-to-door salesman. This would have been in the 1930’s(almost 100 years ago!). Dad said he devoured that book. It contained 168 stories of a continuous narrative from Genesis to Revelation.

Sometimes I feel that we ruined the Bible when we divided it into chapters and verses that can be quickly plucked out of time and cultural setting and posted on social media. The essence is lost and it becomes a weapon to reinforce our point of view. I believe the Bible was meant to be read as stories and not as a rule book or as history lessons and definitely not in individual verses plucked out of context, although I have been guilty of all of this.

Knowing the setting of a story is vital, yet somehow these stories transcend time and place and touch our hearts today. They take us into worlds we can never know and teach us lessons from other cultures and timeframes. Just as every book or movie must first introduce us to the cultural mores before it tells us the story, so must those Bible stories. And I can’t help but think that this is the correct way to read the Bible. We must step back into the strange traditions and rituals of the time when the story took place to truly understand it. For example, look at the ever-popular story of Daniel in the lion’s den. If we did not understand Daniel’s backstory and his heritage and the traumatizing events that took him to this strange land, we would not be getting the full story. And if we didn’t get the full story we would be missing out on much of the application to our own lives.

Reading the Bible without any knowledge of the culture is not really reading for understanding. It is an eyeball exercise in piety. The Bible is uniquely recorded by people from different centuries, cultures, socio-economic status and careers; including everything from kings to fishermen and felons to prophets. And the various characters include slaves, beautiful queens, hookers, virgins and eunuchs. The attitudes encompass everything from gratitude to bitterness and anger. The stories are so riveting that they are the stuff of movies like The Ten Commandments and the beautifully inspired stories in the series called The Chosen. Maybe it is time for us to take a trip through time and re-visit those ancient stories. And we need to do this in a most delightful way. Enjoy the journey.

Moving Furniture in the Rain

 On this week of Valentine’s Day it is appropriate that I introduce you to some beautiful people that have blessed my life. I have been privileged to know many amazing, kind and loving people. As we all know, there are many people who talk the talk but don’t walk the walk. And for me, the ability to discern the authentic people from fake rule-followers came at a steep price.

It was a period of life many years ago, in which I felt shunned by my Christian family and friends that I met these special people. My isolation came from my guilt and gave me eyes to see the truth I never would have known without going through that. I learned that sadly, many folks including myself, were only rule-following Christians and had no use for folks who strayed from that path. I took the road through heartbreak and poverty and while I was sorry for my mistakes, I wouldn’t trade it for the insight I gained from it. I learned to see the world in a way that I never would have if I hadn’t veered off the path that was laid out for me. It made me change the channel. It made me look for and listen to other points of view other than the one I was born into and I am so thankful for this.

It was authentic Christ followers who stepped up and helped me when I was alone. Meet Pat and Bob Bicknell. Bob was the head of the music department for Wayland Baptist University and he and Pat had two lovely children, Sharon and David. Pat saw my loneliness and was a friend to me. She saw my lack of income and came up with a way for me to earn money while staying home with my baby. What a blessing! She employed me to sew smocks for her daycare workers and she also employed me to pick up her kids from school and keep them until she came home from work. I spent many hours caring for Sharon and David while thoroughly enjoying the companionship and added income.

After I graduated I needed help moving to a nearby town to live and work in my first teaching position. I felt like I knew the Bicknells well enough to ask them for help to move. I will never forget Dr. Bicknell struggling to move my washer and dryer through a small door on that rainy that day. I still feel bad about that and I know now that it is only the most beautiful people who will help you move your furniture in the rain.

In the following years I remarried and the Bicknells moved away from that college town. Forty years later, I have tried to find them to thank them but can only find a tiny digital footprint leading to a general area of Texas. I will see them again someday though. And when I do, I will run up and hug their necks. What beautiful people!

The Greatest "Aha Moment" of All Time

 I love aha moments when I get to discover a new connection or all the pieces of the puzzle fall together. The feeling I get leaves me with joy that wants to bust out like Julie Andrews singing, "The hills are alive", on top of a mountain in Austria. I usually make everyone around me listen to my connection hoping they will get as excited as I am. I am annoying that way.

Yesterday I got that little thrill of making a new connection. I was in the Texas State Capitol building with my husband. He was there to visit with a state representative about school safety. He gave his business card to the representative’s aide. The aide commented that his school had the same mascot as ours and we quickly connected the dots and realized this aide was from my hometown in New Mexico. It put me in a happy place for the entire evening and I wanted to share it with anyone who would listen.

Another example of an aha moment has happened when I finally understood a difficult concept that I had been struggling with for a while. Or another was that wonderful moment when, as a teacher, I saw the lightbulb come on in a student and the student quickly began explaining to other students what they figured out.

Jesus disciples were clearly C+ students. They were witnesses to unspeakable greatness but just couldn’t put it all together. That is, not until the last moments in the presence of Jesus on this earth. After Jesus had risen from death, when he was beside the lake where he cooked, ate and talked with his disciples came the greatest aha moment in history. It can be found in Luke 24:44-48.

He said to them, “This is what I told you while I was still with you: Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms .” Then he opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures. He told them, “This is what is written: The Messiah will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance for the forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.”

I can just hear the disciples’ collective, “Ooooh”! All the pieces finally fit together perfectly in their minds. And they had a front row seat the whole time. We can guess what their reaction was since we know what began there spread and continues more than 2000 years later. Thankfully, gratefully, we know they finally understood and became A+ students.