Sometimes Hope is off stage

We went to see our daughter Hope last weekend. She was in a musical. “Jane Eyre” – the musical.

It was much better than I anticipated. Not because of a concern about the performers, mind you. But a musical about Jane Eyre?

For all the wonderfulness of the production, however, we had terrible seats. We couldn’t see Hope at all.

No matter how we strained our eyes, leaned from side to side, we couldn’t even get a glimpse of Hope.

So we sat back to watch the show.

One scene had Jane and Mr Rochester, in separate rooms, in separate beds. They walked on stage, carrying candles.

There was another scene in which Rochester’s daughter came skipping in from the back of the auditorium,  out of the darkness on the the stage.

But we never saw Hope.

It could have been a disappointing night. Except that we knew something that no one else knew.

Hope was working backstage.

She was handling props stage right. When the blanket was quickly at hand for Young Jane and Helen, Hope had it ready. When Jane and Rochester needed candles to light their paths to their rooms, Hope lit the candles. When Adele came from the back of the room, Hope opened the door.

When things on stage look darkest or smoothest or impossible, the solution is often not visible.

But wait.

Hope is often working off stage, lighting candles, opening doors.

Jesus and the prostitutes

Jesus, in his last week before dying, is talking to the religious people, the people who were the leaders of the spiritual structures. He told them a story and then said, “the tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the kingdom of heaven ahead of you.” (Matthew 21)

Jesus had gotten in trouble for his interaction with tax collectors and ‘sinners’.  The other day I was looking at these stories and I thought, “these are people who have had to make their livings by selling themselves.’” Tax collectors gave up good relations with their own people, their own tribe, to work for the occupying country. Prostitutes gave up good relations with their own people, their own tribe, to survive.

The people that were listening to Jesus were looking for hope, for identity, for belonging, for someone who would talk with them rather than point at them or demand from them.

And then there were the people who pointed and demanded. The people who defined the tribe. The people who despised compromise. They were the people who did everything they could to silence Jesus, even as the others listened.

I once knew a person who sold her body to survive. She was using the money some to feed her family, some to feed a habit. We tried to help. We told her about Jesus. We gave her money, a place to live. We gave her encouragement and time and what we thought was trust.

I think though, that for at least my part, I missed something. Whatever we were talking about, it wasn’t whatever Jesus was talking about. I think that we were trying to get her to measure up, to live right. And that is no hope at all.

I think, from everything I read, that people with huge gaping holes in their hearts listened to Jesus and thought, “I’m tired of the acid etching my soul. He sounds like he really cares” and even before he died, they found hope.

Which had to make Easter Saturday devastating. They had listened. They had watched their lives turn around. They had been healed, inside and out. And now he was dead. Killed by the people he had said to love. Killed by the people he had forgiven while dying.

It would have been enough to make you give up hope. For maybe a day or two.

Until it was Sunday. And then everything changed.

IV pouches of sunlight

A friend said that coffee wasn’t working. She said she needed an IV of sunlight.

I laughed. When is coffee not enough?

But then I went into my online file of pictures and found some sunlight.

It was, I admit, kind of old. It had been on the shelf for a year and a half. And it wasn’t pure sunshine. There was an iris in the way. But the iris was growing in ground carefully tended for more than a decade by the woman I love. She planted the iris, watered it, worried over it for a growing season or four.

The sunlight was even older. It had been traveling for awhile. It was planted, carefully tended, and intended by it’s Creator for growth and warmth and life.

Neither the sunshine nor the iris were intended as ends. For that matter, neither was the photo which capture the two.

All of the pieces are about people, about stuff to help people.

When I get too much focused on stuff at the expense of people, or accumulating versions of stuff, or piles of words, or attention or books or gifts, I’m doing it wrong.

It’s about using the pouches of sunlight to give life to people around us.

i want to serve

I walked into her room. She recognized me and started to cry.

I pulled up a chair and took her hand.

“I want to serve.”

That’s what she said.

She’s dying. Colon cancer. Four years. A couple remissions.

Fran and Phil Mortensen have lived in Fort Wayne for a long time. They have spent forty years focusing on people with needs. To use Phil’s words, he stirred up the riot and Fran got it organized.

They started a church called Love Church. In time, they started Love Community Center. They started a church that would actually care about people who lived at the margins of downtown Fort Wayne. They had services, which is what most people think makes it church.

But.

They provided meals, they gathered clothing and had a clothing bank with racks and hangers and smiling faces. Tthey built a workshop to teach people how to make stuff, they gathered food, they taught people how to use computers, they loved. While Phil went around to other churches to get support and then preached and cared for people at Love Church, Fran made it work.

She kept track of money. She made it stretch. She called people. She organized. She planned. She set things up. She laid things out. She could be as tenacious as a bulldog, but because she cared so much, because she loved Jesus.

I got to know her about four years ago through a monthly networking thing for nonprofit ministry leaders. I spoke occasionally.  She decided she liked me. She constantly encouraged me. During a job transition for me, she prayed, yes, and she told me. And she talked about being encouraged by talking with me.

To be honest, I didn’t understand that.

Jesus talks about loving the unloved, caring for the sick, visiting the prisoners, clothing the naked, feeding the hungry. I acknowledge the concept. Fran did it. She never had any college training, but her understanding of practical love was at the graduate level. Anything I’ve thought about doing that would be about caring, Fran did or made happen.

For Fran to care so much about me was like an ant being noticed by, well by anything.

I don’t think she understood how much I was in awe of her. I think that she would laugh at me, a laugh of affection and modesty and incredulity.

Because here she is, after 40 years of pouring out her life into serving, in her last days, likely her last hours, saying “I want to serve.”

I assured her that she was. I assured her that she had. I assured her that she had been all the Fran that God built her to be. I assured her that she would be serving again in a little bit, this time without the cancer, without the pain. I talked to her about Martha, a person who worshiped by doing, who organized, who planned, who was practical.

And I let her sleep while I held her hand.

Fran gets “so what?” Fran decided that living a life of caring for and about others, making the name “love Church” true, was a so what that matters.

I prayed. I kissed her forehead. I stood up.

“I love you, Jon.”

I love you, Fran.

The extravagance of live

We sat at a choral concert tonight. Indiana University and Purdue University have a shared campus in Fort Wayne, IPFW. Andrew is a junior, but he wasn’t at the concert. Hope is a high school senior, but she’s taking a college class and so she was at the concert.

She’s taking a course called University Singers. She’s the one right in the middle of the picture, in the middle of the front row.

But this isn’t a Hope post. Or maybe it is.

I sat listening to amazing choral music. There are fifty singers. The choir rehearses 90 minutes a day, three days a week. The director has a doctorate in music. The composers, including Brahms and Pachelbel, crafted lyrics and harmonies and sounds.

About 200 of us were reminded of the extravagance of live. To experience these voices live, unrecorded, unprocessed, in real time, was amazing. We had to stop and listen. There was no replay. There is little record. We are stuck with our memories. All that time of preparation for something that evaporates.

But that’s almost every live interaction, conversation, conference. As much as we like the sessions, the posts, the books, we often say, “It was the people, it was the hallways, it was the conversations.”

We’re at a weekend, the opportunity for some of us to experience the extravagance of live. We will, some of us, be off the clock, be face to face. We will, some of us, have to absorb the richness of analog experience at parties and dinner tables and church services.

At some point, listen to that live. Enjoy it. Look for Hope in the front row of whatever you do this weekend.

——————

The next of the next sentence will be here on Monday.

You can read the first three posts in the series here: part one. part two, part three.

someone is always just starting

As some of you know, our daughter got her driver’s license this week.

On  Wednesday, as she was driving us to church, I was thinking about the conversations we won’t be having in the future. The more she drives alone, the less we drive together, the less we get the dad-daughter time that has been wonderful.

I was getting pretty teary.

And then I started looking through her eyes. She was two days away from beginning the independence that comes from having your license. Assuming she has access to the car, she will get to choose when to go shopping, when to go to *bucks. She will deliver herself to events.

No wonder she was getting excited.

On Friday morning, she got her license. On Friday afternoon she took her first solo drive, to the local university where she is singing with the University Singers (as a high school senior). We asked her to text when she got to class. (We also followed a couple minutes behind without telling her.)

“I’m here. Felt great.”

This isn’t a melancholy dad post. (Not anymore). This is a reminder that it is very easy to forget what it is like to be starting something new.

Those of us who already are experienced forget…

• the scaredness
• the wonder
• the confidence
• the energy
• the indecision
• the passion

…of a person who is learning, who had just received permission, who has just realized something new.

In our addiction to viewing the world from inside our own head and though our own experiences, we don’t figure out the ways to help other people learn, grow, dream. We don’t help, we don’t train, we don’t lay out possible next steps, we don’t laugh and cry and delight in the energy of novices.

I forget that I know more about what I’ve been through than others. I judge them by what I know rather than helping them learn. I get frustrated, when I’ve done nothing to make things clear.

It’s the weekend.

• For those of us with kids, it’s a great time to remember what it is that they don’t know yet, that they are looking forward to. It’s a great time to look through their eyes and equip and encourage (rather than constantly warning them.)
• For those of us in churches, it’s a great time to remember how much we don’t understand ourselves rather than being critical of what other people aren’t doing.
• For those of us who understand social media, it’s a great time to think about how to email stuff to the people we are talking with who don’t have any other way to learn (rather than sending them to our blog all the time).
• For those of us with spouses, it’s a great time to stop and think about whether we’ve ever told them how grateful we are that they took us on as a major, and how much they have learned about us without us giving them nearly enough information about what’s happening inside our heads.
• For those of us with skills, it’s a great time to think about our apprentices, our admirers, our followers and say, “I never told you how I figured that out. Let me explain it.” (Rather than “man, when I started, I was perfect. I got this right away.”)

Someone is always just starting. That shouldn’t be annoying. It should be relief.

It means there’s a future.

half

I talk to lots of people about faith. Sometimes it is about having faith. Sometimes having A faith. Or keeping faith. Or keeping the faith. Or sometimes just about Faith.

It’s a hard thing to talk about something this abstract because we want faith to be something we cling to (or that clings to us) when we are going through hard times. We hope that we will have enough faith to make it. We are almost out of faith, and sometimes we lose faith.

It took me a long time to understand the saying , “Do you see the glass as half full or half empty?” (Yes, I digress, but stay with me for a moment.) I didn’t understand how this was about being an optimist or being a pessimist.

A couple years ago that I finally realized that being a pessimist means that the glass, which could be full, is half empty-a clear sign of failure, of impending doom, of dissatisfaction. In contrast, being an optimist means that the glass, which could be empty, is half full, providing at least part of what we need, giving some sustenance, evidence of hope.

The image never worked for me because I figured that it’s a glass, it’s got something in it. Why worry about what could be better or what could be worse? Drink the coffee. Be grateful. Know that you will be thirsty again. Know that it isn’t enough for long. Know that it’s enough for the moment–or for some moment.

Yes, this is optimistic. Yes, this is pessimistic. Yes, this is pragmatic. Mostly it’s accurate.

A guy once wanted Jesus to do something amazing, something miraculous, something impossible. What he wanted was his son to be like other kids, like the kids who didn’t have a spirit that threw them into the campfire.

The man said, “If you can do anything…”

Jesus said, “IF I can?”

And then Jesus says “Everything is possible for the one who believes.”

Though this sounds like a self-help statement, the man knew it wasn’t. He understood, somehow, that the faith wasn’t up to him.

“I do believe. Help me overcome my unbelief.”

And then the healing came.

The truth about faith is that we never have enough, we always have plenty. The glass is always both full and empty. And the amount is irrelevant. What matters is not the amount of faith that can be mustered or saved or summoned up. What matters is being honest enough with the giver of faith to look somewhere and say, “I believe You are there. But you gotta help me do something about the fact that I don’t believe You are there.”

And forget the exact amount in the glass. It will be enough.

I believe.

———-

An additional note of commentary:

And for those familiar with the story, you know that 9 of the disciples hadn’t been able to handle this. Jesus took care of it, and then they said, “why didn’t it work for us?” And Jesus says, “This kind only comes out with prayer.”

Maybe, just maybe, they had been looking for a cool event rather than trying to connect the boy and his father, in conversation, with God. They had been so focused on faith in their power to do cool stuff that they forgot it’s not about having faith, it’s about talking with the giver of faith. It’s about helping people build a relationship.

unlimited

We went driving tonight, Hope and I. Actually, we were both headed to church and so I gave her the opportunity to drive.  She has her permit, needs to get her license, hasn’t had much time to practice recently, and so was kind of forced to have the opportunity.

We started talking about traveling, about going someplace else in the world. She said, “I may not have my license but I have my passport.”

We both suddenly realized the implications of that. She has her passport. I don’t. She may not be able to drive alone yet, but, in her words, “I can go places you can’t go.”

That’s what we’re doing with our kids, I think. We are trying to get them passports to life. We give them experiences and boundaries, values and permission, resources and challenges. We want to provide direction and foundations, but we also understand that though they come from us, they aren’t us. They, as we, are fearfully and wonderfully made, as David wrote in a poem.

“I can go places you can’t go,” she said, “but I wouldn’t go there alone.”

That’s why I’m riding with you, dear child, my fists as tightly clasped on themselves as yours are on the wheel. I’m giving you experience and direction so that when you are alone, you still hear my voice saying softly “the speed limit is 45 here.” And I’m also giving you this: for all my wisdom as a dad, I am incredibly finite. I can wish you well, I can direct you well, but I can’t keep you. But there is a Friend that is closer than a brother. There is a Father from whom all families on earth, Paul writes in a flight of poetic prose, take their name.

You are going places I can’t go, passport or no. But you will never ever go there alone.

8 ways to honor Mr O’Gregor

Forty years ago today, a television program moved from local broadcast to national distribution. I first knew it as Mr O’Gregor’s until my parents had me read the title more closely. Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, as I finally understood it, was my neighborhood and then the neighborhood of our children. In honor of that program, and that ethos, here’s the latest 8 ways list.

1. As you walk into some familiar place today (work, grocery, home), start humming, “It’s a beautiful day for a neighbor, would you be mine, could you be mine.” Not loud enough for anyone else to hear, but loud enough so that you remember to look for neighbors.
2. When you get home, change into a comfortable sweater as a way of realizing that you are in a different place, that you  don’t have to use the competitive values of “out there.” Change your shoes, too.
3. Listen to Yo Yo Ma play anything. The rich melancholy of the cello, which many kids heard for the first time on Mr Rogers, is a perfect soundtrack to the mixture of hope and despair that many of us feel.
4. In the middle of trying to explain something, consider that Fred Rogers knew that we can emotionally understand emotional issues best in story. The much maligned land of make-believe helped a lot of people understand sadness and love.
5. Realize that the grocer or the delivery person or the music teacher or the shopowner may actually be working for the king.
6. Listen for sounds, of trolleys, of fish tanks, of quiet piano jazz, of silence. It’s more rare in our lives now than for Fred, and even he had to resist the temptation to fill time with noise.
7. Consider the possibility that it really is “a good feeling to know you’re alive.”
8. Smile. Unconditionally smile. Once. For Fred.

Please won’t you be my neighbor?
————-

For more 8 ways…

To recycle a month
To cross-pollinate your world
To fall off a horse
To audit my (spiritual) time
To waste the month
To waste your blogging time
To ruin your day
To be thanked
To increase your stress
To explain 2.0 friends to 0.0 parents
To lose your faith
To make yourself angry
To make yourself jealous
To make yourself depressed
To ruin your marriage

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