How trying to find a church is like trying to find a husband

I must begin by stating how BRILLIANT my friend Stephanie is. She was the one who brought these thoughts to my attention, and much of the thoughts that are about to come out were first birthed through our conversations: joys and frustrations. This post is actually a combination of what I thought was going to be several blogs.

I think that finding a church is much akin to trying to find a spouse. The beginning is always awkward and usually pretty frustrating. They try to impress. You try to impress. They want you to want them. You hope that you fit with them. It's this right foot-left foot dance that we all play when trying to fit into a new social situation.

The most striking similarity is that we have the high ideals and expectations of what we want in community, in a church, in a companion, but most of the time because we live in reality, we realize that there is a game of give-and-take that we must allow. Just as there is no such thing as the perfect spouse, there is no such thing as a perfect body of believers. Whether you are speaking about the external things we judge by- the style of worship, the location of the building, the comfort of the chairs- or the more "internal" things- the hospitality, the sense of mission, the message that is being spoken- there is no place that is going to give you everything that you are looking for.

So, just as in dating, I must decide what is essential to me. I must try to figure out what I can live with- the fact that he spits a little when he talks, the way he uses his socks as napkins when he's eating and driving in the car, or the way he raises his voice when he gets defensive. What are the things that I can tolerate in an attempt to accept the fact that no one is perfect?

I've been thinking, and blogging a lot about community. One of the most profound thoughts about it came while being whipped around on a tube by "Steak 'Um Bill Walters" at the lake house a couple of weeks ago. No one else in the world would be hanging on for dear life with water splashing in their eyes, and discoursing profound thoughts about community except Stephanie and I.

I think that true community is the cumulative collection of community that we have built thoughout our lives.

That may seem simple, but to people like us- who have traveled so much, me being someone who has somehow forged a life in four places (two states, two different countries) in the past five years- it is comforting to know that I carry with me these communities. I do not leave them behind in search for new community, but I am just adding and building onto the new cumulative.
SO I'm still searching for community here in Birmingham. Still searching for my "mate". I have found pieces of it. I have been going to a church regularly, which is good. I have even been invited into homes. Warm homes, homes of really really good people. Though I still come home to an apartment alone, I have to believe that there is a trail of people that follow me in the door. My cumulative community.

True Annie Dillard

Again, I know, even as i hunt and peck for these letters, that if I write this I run the risk of you not continuing on down to read the two posts from last night (I have been a blogging MACHINE, baby- what a little MoZilla will do for you- thanks to all those who helped get the old laptop running)

I wanted to write out the real Annie Dillard quote. I was paraphrasing before- relying on a two year lapse in memory. But here it is in it's real flesh. I love it. (This is the whole paragraph from whence the quote came.)

" It is still the first week in January and I've got great plans. I've been thinking a lot about seeing. There are lots of things to see, unwrapped gifts and free suprises. The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But-- and this is the point-- if you crouch motionless on a bank to watch a tremulous ripple thrill on the water and are rewarded by the sight of a muskrat kit paddling from its den, will you count that sight a chip of copper only, and go on your rueful way? **It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won't stop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple. What you see is what you get.**"

At the risk of you not reading my newest post....

I think that if I post this, you will miss the really profound post I just wrote (ha) BUT I wanted to brag on my kids, and tell the blog-o-sphere that on Saturday we entered 4 teams in the Vestavia Novice Tournament, and one team one fifth, and another team came in... FIRST.

This is the first time a SpeakFirst team has placed. These are city school kids debating against rich white suburban kids. And they spanked them. And made me proud.

My life for others. He is not fool who gives away what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.

Thicker than.....

blood.

That's what this post is about.

(aside: I do want to say, though, that I have a great post in my head (with all props to Stephanie when due) relating to community and dating- it's gunna be good, so stay tuned)

blood.

I have it. Some people don't. Or not as much as they might need. So I figure, hey- I'm poor, but I can still give away my body for humanity. At least I wasn't selling plasma and pocketing the profit, you know?

I go to the red cross- the blood taking experts, mind you- and I want to point out here, that the total amount of time for this all to transpire was about 2 hours. I was supposed to be at work.

Resuming- I went to the Red Cross. They asked me lots of questions about my blood. Is it conditioned in a body that weighs enough? Check. Have you taken it to another country? Check. (but not a "dangerous one"). Have you allowed it contact with any other suspicious blood? No. On and on we went about sex, prostitution, diseases... I felt like I was in the Old Testament. Finally I was deemed donor worthy, and all allowed to advance to the next level of the game.

In this level, I was poked, prodded, my circulation cut off with a rubber tourniquet , my circulation cut off with a blood pressure cuff, all while continuously shifting and changing the characters- each nurse calling someone else to "check this out". Finally one nurse thinks she's up to the task, and she digs in.

People say that it's like a "bumble bee sting" and then you don't feel it. BS. I felt every single time I squeezed the freaking ball to give away ever millimeter of blood. It hurt. A lot. Then the vain blew. My whole arm is blue and black and they didn't even get a pint of blood.

I ate some cookies and left.

I think about ministry with the people that Jesus called "our neighbors". A lot of time it's hard. It hurts.

And sometimes in trying to give life to someone else, our veins blow, and the whole thing gets called off.

Messy fellowship.

In a church bulletin I got this week someone wrote about the 48 laws of power, one being:

Infection: Avoid the Unhappy and Unlucky
You can die from someone else's misery-- emotional states are as infectious as diseases. You may feel you are helping the drowning man, but you are only precipitating your own disaster. The unfortunate sometimes draw misfortune on themselves; they will also draw it on you. Associate with the happy and fortunate instead.

When I read this I see the words and the ridicuousness of it all. Of course that doesn't make sense- that is totally contradictory to the gospel message. But when I look at my life. The words of my life, and who I choose to associate with, and sometimes I think we have to take pause and wonder if the words of our life don't read the same as the theory of power.

Because it's easier. It's happier. It doesn't hurt. You don't bruise. I don't want to give blood again. I don't want to hurt again.

At the Car Wash, yeah.

I have like five blogs running around in my head, rattling their cups along the bars in my brain, wanting out, but I haven't taken the time to sit and creatively compose their bodies yet. Instead of giving you something meaty right now, I want to tell you two stories from my new life here in Birmingham. One good. One...well not as good.

So I found a new simple pleasure in life. I remember reading Annie Dillard writing about how when she was young she used to put pennies on the ground and then hide and watch people find them. She loved to see their reaction when they found her pre-planted "lucky penny". But with inflation and pseudo-maturity, our backs became too stiff to reach for the lucky pennies. I wrote her words on my planner for a year, stating something like, "It is a sad thing when life becomes too hard to pick up a lucky penny, for we know that our life is, always, strewn with random change waiting for us to discover it." I discovered a lucky penny the other day. A simple life pleasure. The car wash. Growing up we always went to the "do-it-yourself" carwash, finding some kind of self-satisfaction from saving a couple of bucks and getting a little foam on our feet. But the other day I splurged and drove through one at a gas station for the first time. HOW COME NO ONE EVER TOLD ME ABOUT THIS?!? It was the most wonderful 2 minutes of my day, perhaps. The lulling of the water, the back and forth like I was a child being gently rocked. I don't know what else to say, except I don't know if I will ever pick up a foam brush again. It may be worth budgeting. heck, it may be worth going mudding, just to "need" a car wash. It was magical.

The other story takes a slightly different direction. It involves cleaning as well, but not the same end result, I'm afraid. I live in a very small apartment (room with a kitchen and bathroom) and don't have a washer and dryer. There is a laundrymat on the corner where I live (in a somewhat shady part of town, I will concede, but not dangerous). So I walk my basket over on Friday night, somewhat perturbed already that 1) I have nothing else to do but laundry on a Friday night, and 2) I really need to do laundry on a Friday night because I needed clean clothes to run in the next day. So I put in my clothes... put in my laundry detergent....and put in my money...all the essential components of the task at hand. I jam in the money, and the washer doesn't start. So my human inclination is, of course, to jam harder. It still doesn't work, so I try the one on the left... and the one on the right, and I notice a trend of not working. So I look up at the sign, and see that it says "No loads will be run after 8:00." I ask the man next to me drying his clothes what time it is, and he ....and he says 8:11. Right. So now my clothes are not only dirty (these are running clothes, so there is not hiding their filth) but they now have detergent on them, as well. So I'm throwing the clothes back in the basket, and as I get the last thing, I notice that there is something at the bottom of the washer. What is that? I look into the washer again...
it's poop.
Yes. There is poop in the washing machine.
That's the end of the story because really I don't know how things like this happen to me. I'm sure there is some kind of metaphor I could make here, something profound, but really. It was poop. Mingling with my clothes.

Welcome to my life. Car Washes and Washing Machines.

Amazing Grace

I'm reading the book Amazing Grace, by Johnathon Kozol. I feel like I read it with my mouth open, not sure what to do with the words that are entering my brain- where to put them. In these days post- 'trina where people are saying things like, "Is this really America". I read the stories in this book, of people living in New York, and I think, this book has been out for almost ten years. "Is this America?" I want to share a part of what I read recently, about the author talking to a minister.

"Although Mott Haven is routinely called the deadliest neighborhood in New York City, he tells me that the homicide rate may be as high, or higher in Hunts Point. 'I remember a young couple in my congregation with a teenage son and two young daughters. They joined our church for Easter and rededicated their existence to the Lord. Two weeks later, the son came home and found his father down in the living room, his mother in the laundry room down in the basement, both shot dead. What message do I give these three young people? I know that no words I can speak will ease their pain."

I ask him how he understands his mission as a pastor in this neighborhood.

"We are not literal fundamentalists here at Bright Temple," he replies. "We see God as a liberating force who calls us to deliver people from oppression. The apparent consensus of the powerful is that the ghetto is to be preserved as a perpetual cathc-basin for the poor. It's not about annihilating segregation or even about a transformation of the ghetto, but setting up 'programs' to teach people to 'adjust' to it, to show a 'functional' adaptation to an evil institution. That is pretty much the good behavior that the segregated asks for in the segregated.

"As a religious man, I see it as my obligation to speak out against this, not to bend the poor to be accommodated to injustice but to empower them to fight it and try to tear it down. We are not about amerlioration here. As a church we speak prophetically. We speak not of 'misfortune' but 'injustice'. We also look at the unjust.

"Do people in the neighborhood', I ask, "use language like 'injustice"?

"He presses his hands flat on his desk. 'How often do you speak of the the air? If something touches every aspect of existence, every minute of every hour of your life, it needn't often be spelled out. But it is always there, a quiet understanding.

Come all you who are thirsty, come to the waters, and you, who have no money, come, buy and eat!

Come, buy wine and mile without money and without cost. Why spend money on what is not bread and labor on what does not satisfy?

I have been spending a lot of money on a lot of things that are not satisfying lately.

But, This weekend I spent time at the lake with five other absolutely amazing souls. Women that I have known for over five or six years. We have watched each other grow, and now we gathered to bless one who is starting a new phase in her life. As she has lavished us with love and grace over and over, she will now learn to do the same with her husband. Every one of these girls are amazing in their own way. The ability to sit and be completely at rest, at complete vulnerability, and yet complete saftey, for a whole weeked was something that I really haven't felt in a long time. I knew that there had been something missing for a couple of months, but this weekend, I tasted of the bread, wine and milk that completely satisfies.

If we believe that God's Spirit rests in each of us, then one of the truest forms of worship would be the love that we share with each other though, and to, that spirit. The fulfillment of the body. I think that I came as close to that as I will this side of heaven. I praise God that in all my wonderings, my searching for community, my feelings of lonliness and rejection, that there are people out there that love me, and support me and share a spirit of unity with me, in spite of all my wonderings, my struggles with community, and my feelings of lonliness and rejection.

It spits in your eye and then embraces you

I was listening to NPR this morning, and a reporter who has been assigned to China for the past 6 years is leaving, so he was giving his "goodbye report". It was so interesting, because it was basically him showing all the great contraditions that come from going to China- the loving and loathing at the same time. The feeling that somedays you have it all figured out, and somedays you want to give up on the whole country. But at the beginning he starts it off something like this "it's 6:00 and I'm just leaving my office. I walk outside to the hustle and bustle of the busy streets and I hear a man clear his throat loudly and spit veraciously, just missing my shoe, and I thought, boy and I'm going to miss this place" and all at once I am grossed out, but strangly missing it, too.

Here is the link to his thoughts, I was ENTHRALLED. I def. think it's worth listening to:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4827736