In My Place

I was making communion bread the other night.  It's something I enjoy doing, something I volunteered to do a while back.  That's where I like to be.  I like baking in my kitchen.  I like playing with my kids.  I like listening to sermons in my pjs while I fold laundry.  That's how I like serving God, serving my church.  I want to be the proper church lady who bakes food for Sunday morning and teaches the three year olds about Moses and listens attentively as her pastor preaches.  That's what I can offer, that's my place.  Or so I thought.

This past year, our church went through a transition and we got a new pastor.  I was excited to meet him, to learn more about him, to hear him speak from the pulpit.  Imagine my surprise when our first conversation involved him asking if I preach.  Um, NO.  Not at all.  So I invited him over to the house for dinner.  So he could see me in my place.  So he could eat the food that I cooked, so he could meet the children I chase around all day.  But he came with other plans, and that night, he gave me a date, told me to get ready.

Well, okay, maybe, I thought.  Maybe I could get up on a Sunday morning and talk about orphans or why it's so important for adults to care about children.  I told my pastor that if he ever wants to address those issues, I'd be happy to help.  A few weeks later, he called with my first topic: giving.  He asked me to talk during the time of offering, something about why we give money at church.  Again, I thought, Um NO.  I don't even have a paying job, I have no income.  What could I possibly say about giving money at church?

Our pastor came over to the house again.  It was after I began talking during the offering; he wanted to make a video about our family.  And once he'd gotten the footage, he turned to me again with a date and told me to get ready.  He wanted me to do a *sermon* (cue fainting and hysterics) on prayer.    All I could think is, Why me?  What do I have to say?  What could I teach?

There are two ways to learn something: school and experience.  I love school.  I love sitting in a  classroom and taking notes and reading books.  I love the smell of libraries and the quiet of study halls.  I went to school for years, excitedly shopping for new folders and notebooks every August.  I went to college and studied political science with an international focus.  I briefly minored in French but dropped it to graduate early.  I never studied the Bible in a classroom.  I was never in a theology class, or even a philosophy class.  When I left college, I started working.  I took a job as a flight attendant and later at a bank, and I received on the job training, since my degree had little to do with either position.  When I became a wife and later a mother, I tried to learn from books.  I studied for these new roles, ones I wanted to badly to succeed at.  But in both situations, experience proved the better teacher.  Our families are ridiculously unique and personal, and we just have to figure it out as we go, what works best for us.

For me, it turns out that life has been a much better teacher about God too.  In the last ten years, He has become real to me in a way that I doubt I could have been taught.  Apparently God has more He wants me to learn, from a new place in His church.  The time has come for me to get up from my seat, and not just receive, but to give, to instruct.  I took the advice of my friend, Mandy, to talk about my experiences.  I don't know the big, theological words for this stuff.  I've never read the Bible in its original languages.  And maybe that's better.  Because no one can argue that my experiences are wrong the way we disagree over ideas.

So I stood before my church, the people who have loved and supported me and become some of my closest friends, and I talked about the changes in my heart.  I talked about who I was before, the events in my life and the reactions I had that put distance between me and God, and how it was hard to pray.  And then I talked about what happened to change my thinking, how Jesus became real to me in my early twenties and over time prayer became an easy and integral part of my life.  This experience is echoed in a book I'm reading called "The Way of the Heart" by Henri Nouwen.  He writes,

 "Real prayer comes from the heart...The prayer of the heart is a prayer that does not allow 

us to limit our relationship with God to interesting words or pious emotions.  By its 

very nature, such prayer transforms our whole being into Christ precisely 

because it opens the eyes of our soul to the truth of ourselves as well as to the 

truth of God.  In our heart, we come to see ourselves as sinners embraced by the 

mercy of God.  It is this vision that makes us cry out, 'Lord Jesus Christ, son

 of the Living God, have mercy on me, a sinner.'  The prayer of the heart challenges 

us to hide absolutely nothing from God and to surrender ourselves unconditionally

 to His mercy.  Thus the prayer of the heart is the prayer of truth."

And in this way my experience has taught me and my studying merely reinforces (and much more eloquently so) what I know to be true.

Ready to leap