50 years – The Fifth Decade 2004 -2014 – The One with the Sabbatical

I turned fifty last month and wrote 4 blogposts looking at each decade of my life. I got as far as 2004, when I was well-established in field administration. This is the installment that brings us up to the present and then “to infinity and beyond”.

Places lived: Mali, Cameroon, Côte d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso, USA. 

Verse:

Jeremiah 6:16
This is what the Lord says: “Stop at the crossroads and look around. Ask for the old, godly way, and walk in it. Travel its path, and you will find rest for your souls. But you reply, ‘No that’s not the road we want!’”

Life-Shaping events:

In 2004, due to political unrest and its aftereffects, I ended up going from being assistant director over one country to full director over two countries. The day before I was elected, we had some sort of group mixer in which we pasted bits of cardboard to a map to represent the different parts of our work. For some reason, I had to carry it home for the night and bring it back the next day. As I picked my way carefully through mud puddles, I had a fear that I would drop the poster in the mud and mess it up. And then I realized that I had a much larger fear: “What if I drop the BRANCH in the mud while I am director?”

It was a difficult time to be director and as the years went by I wondered why I could not be director at a time when all was normal. We were losing staff and the financial resources that went with them. Work in both countries was threatened by instability.  We joked in meetings about making “more bricks with less straw”.

Key verse:

You keep track of my sorrows. You have collected all my tears in your bottle. You have recorded each one in your book. Psalm 56:8

There were a lot of difficult things during this period, so many, in fact that I was overwhelmed by “unexpected tears” during my sabbatical (2011) when I finally took time to enumerate and grieve over them:

Senseless court cases, civil unrest, threats of terrorists, sickness and medevacs of key people, a suicide, personal and family crises among our staff. So much that might have been, that was thwarted for reasons I cannot now see. So many cases also where we were forced to rely on God instead of our own capacities

 I’d like to say that this was a time that I did rely solely on God, but much of the time I relied on my own ability to multi-task and stay on top of a multitude of things. I am someone driven by duty and the work was without end, with not enough people to do it. People often commented then (and still do) on my seemingly limitless energy and my job became one that no one else could imagine doing.

By 2009, I was nearing burnout. I was dry and thirsty and in exile spiritually.

 But God was seeking after me putting books and sermons and verses in my path. I actually memorized:

“I lie in the dust completely discouraged. Revive me by your word.” Ps 119:25

My furlough was due in mid-2010 and my boss suggested that rather than doing a normal “home assignment” in administration, I consider a Sabbatical. This was a window of hope that was opened to me, that somehow things could get better. But even as I planned things to do during my sabbatical, events combined to delay it until early 2011. Read here (in the first post on this blog) about how God began inviting me to healthy practices of reading and meditation and scripture memory in that time of “delayed gratification”.



In the summer of 2010, when I should have been returning to begin the sabbatical but could not, I went ahead and did a trip to Northern Ireland which was truly a drink of cold water to me in a very dry time.

Read: northern-ireland-and-color-green

This was also a time where I was challenged to begin thinking about Sabbath and what it really means for me, the gift that it is. (See here my “Prezi” sermon on Sabbath, which I have given three times.)

Coming back to Mali, I began getting serious about Sabbath and that is literally what carried me through to the Sabbatical time in 2011.

As that time is mostly detailed in this blog, I will not repeat it here, or this could become very recursive. I've included lots of links to specific blog-posts.

Highlights of the Sabbatical would be

• The time at the Boiler room in Kansas City.



Boiler Room Building in Kansas City 

• A month at the retreat center on Lake Thunderbird

• The Oklahoma Freewheel 500-mile bike ride across Oklahoma. 

 

In this Sabbatical time and beyond, God is teaching me the importance of

• Removing distractions
• Creating space for quietness and contemplation.
• Sabbath
• Creativity – including blogging, making candles, music.
• Reading
• Journaling
• The Liturgical year: Lent, advent. . .
• Living in community and interdependence
• Living in simplicity without a lot of stuff. Being evacuated and then having to liquidate your household in short order will do that to you.
• God’s work is Unhindered by what appear to us to be major setbacks.
• The Responsibility for Getting the work done is God’s not mine.

“Do not feel totally, personally, irrevocably responsible for everything. . . That’s my job. Love, God.”

 After the Sabbatical

God knew what he was doing in arranging the sabbatical before one of the most difficult times in my life: the coup d’état in Mali and our evacuation [March-April 2012]. (Read “In the Pressure cooker” parts 1, 2, 3 and 4). I really do not know if I could have survived this time without the Sabbatical preparation.

God prepared me and resourced me to lead our group in this very difficult time, using the unique gifts he had given me. He had taught me that I needed to take time for myself, for reflection and contemplation and planning and rest:

“Get up and go! Come back and wield your sword in the part of the kingdom where you can wield it best.” [see blog post]

The time during the coup is one where God sustained me and where my unique giftings came together for that time. People commented that it seemed like I was truly “in the zone.” It is

During my sabbatical, God introduced me to the idea of being a nomad, living simply and relying on God. 2012 was the year of being a nomad. When I did my taxes for the year 2012, I honestly could not say where my tax home was. In this year, I made 15 border crossings, hopping back and forth between Mali, Kenya, Burkina Faso, Thailand, France, and Cameroon. From March to December, I averaged 2.5 weeks per country and was truly “transient” in this time.

And it was during this time that the Lord led me to accept a regional role which would involve setting up in Cameroon and traveling significantly throughout Francophone Africa. This, too, was a step of faith, but God has been good.

It is interesting to see how the administrative skills as well as my crisis management experience in the past years have prepared me for this role.

“These 40 years . . . “

As I was reflecting on the five decades that make up my first 50 years, I began thinking of theme verses for each decade. The week of my birthday, I kept coming back to Deuteronomy 2:7 which was a key verse for my 3rd decade

“The Lord your God has blessed you in all the work of your hands. He has watched over your journey through this vast wilderness. These 40 years, the Lord your God has been with you and you have lacked nothing.”

And then I heard a podcast the week of my birthday and it centered on Deuteronomy 8, which had such a similar theme that I thought it was the same passage until I looked it up.

8.2 Remember how the Lord your God led you all the way in the wilderness these forty years, to humble and test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands. 3 He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your ancestors had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. 4 Your clothes did not wear out and your feet did not swell during these forty years. 5 Know then in your heart that as a man disciplines his son, so the Lord your God disciplines you.
15 He led you through the vast and dreadful wilderness, that thirsty and waterless land, with its venomous snakes and scorpions. He brought you water out of hard rock. 16 He gave you manna to eat in the wilderness, something your ancestors had never known, 

This really seems to be a perfect description of the past 10 years especially but also the entire 40 years I have been a Christian.

[To follow - 5th Decade - part 2, people, bikes, music, books, etc]

Cleaning your Lent Filter

Lint in your dryer is at best a distraction and at worst something that will totally destroy your dryer, or even cause your apartment complex to burn down when it catches on fire. That’s what the humble lint filter is for, clearing away the unwanted distraction of lint and preventing apartment fires. 

If you’re from Oklahoma or Texas, “lint” and “lent” are homonyms (due, if you must know, to a neutralization of the contrast between [ɛ] and [ɩ] before nasals. That’s why we have to say “ink pen” and “stick pin” to differentiate pɛn from pɩn. See, I knew you didn’t really want to know.)

Lent – not lint - is one of the rhythms that the church has followed for centuries. It is a time to confess our resistance to the light, and time of preparation for the death and resurrection of Jesus. A time of considering Christ’s suffering and “rethinking how we are called to take up our crosses”. It’s a time to focus on dying to ourselves and the best way to do that is to “practice denying ourselves through the forty days of Lent, fasting from stuff that we usually enjoy so we can learn to hunger and thirst for God’s kingdom.¹

I come from a tradition that does not practice Lent but in recent years I have been around more people who do and will be doing it for this first time this year. Last year around this time, I was at the Boiler Room in Kansas City surrounded by people most of whom had given up something for Lent: meat, cooked food, sugar, chocolate, even jaywalking – which is harder than you might think if you live downtown and walk everywhere. You’d be surprised how long it takes those crosswalks to change. (Thanks, Beau, for the lesson in respecting civil authority).  

I don’t really claim to pretend that I understand HOW fasting or giving up chocolate, meat, twitter or TV for 40 days could bring me closer to God. Brian McLaren says that fasting doesn’t make him feel closer to God; mostly it makes him feel “closer to pizza.” Sometimes, though, you just have to have confidence that a community has certain practices for a reason and you trust the community enough to engage in the practice. Brian says that fasting helps him feel and acknowledge his weakness in the face of impulses and cravings of his body. Fasting helps him trade something he can see (donuts) for something he can’t. ²

Fasting, in general, or limited fasting during Lent, is a way we can show God we love Him more than the thing we can see before us that looks so appetizing or appealing.³

Lent is really about obedience, practicing obedience to something outside ourselves. Dennis Okholm (quoting Brian Taylor) says,

“We like to think of ourselves as independent rugged individuals who make our own rules. But. . . . if we seek God’s will for our life, every choice we make requires a new obedience. Even in our ordinary lives, we ‘have to serve somebody,’ some institution, some tradition, or some rules.

"I have found that through the limits of obedience, I grow beyond the confines of the self with its desires and traps." ⁴

Patrick Morely says that “Fasting releases the participant from the confusion of competing voices. Your personality and temperament will affect the kinds of things that distract from your relationship with God. For me, it’s work. I’ve discovered fasting as a way to slow down my RPM’s protecting my focus on Jesus Christ.”⁵

So I’ve thought quite a bit about what distraction I can give up this Lent season and will be giving up Facebook, as well as probably some sort of food item which I haven’t decided on yet. I’ll let you know how it goes. . . but not on Facebook. 

Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

Footnotes:

1. Shain Claiborne, et al, CommonPrayer: A liturgy for ordinary Radicals.

2. Brian McClaren, Findingour way again: the return of the ancient practices, p. 84

3. Patrick Morely, Aman’s guide to the spiritual disciplines. p. 121

4. Dennis Okholm, MonkHabits for Everyday people. p. 66-67

5. Patrick Morely, A man’s guide to the spiritual disciplines. p. 121

Life in Community, Hospitality, the Body of Christ

I have been living in the Kansas City Boiler Room community for over 2 weeks now.
And it has been a really great experience even for someone who lives in a fairly small missions community in Mali, it is different to live day in and day out with people, to share living room, kitchen, washing machine, to rub shoulders in the morning when you just woke up or to see them at the end of the day when they are coming in from somewhere.

One of the things about the Boiler Room community is that they are intentional about living in community. Obviously this is great for singles and provides space for God to rub off the hard edges. But they also do it with married people and couples sharing the same house.

The Boiler Room Rule (not unlike the Benedictine Rule) says that
"At the heart of every Boiler Room is a living community committed to being:

1. Authentic: True to Christ
2. Relational: Kind to People
3. Missional: Taking the Gospel to the World. 

Dennis Okholm in his book "Monk Habits for Everyday People", which I have only just started, says that monastic communities demonstrate the significance of Christian community to an individualistic society. 

This is the same society that is focused on self  instead of soul. (see my blog post below on this).

I am finding that living in community gives me a chance to practice the spiritual gifts I may not be strong in. I was taught that we all have one or two spiritual gifts that we are gifted with, which will be motivational for us. Mine are serving and administration. But I was also taught that just because we have certain gifts, we are not absolved from practicing others: mercy, generosity, hospitality. . .
Living in community has given me a chance to do this.

• Lots of opportunities to serve but then that is a natural one for me.  
• Opportunities to share freely my food and other things - working on selfishness. 
• I see someone with a need that I have the financial resources that I can help with. So great to be on the giving end after receiving support from so many for so long. And this is different somehow from having random Malians come to my door and say "you are my only hope."
• Opportunities to practice hospitality. 

This last one is one of the Boiler room practices: "to offer simple hospitality to strangers wishing to stay and pray." In a sense, I am very much receiving this hospitality and it has been great to be welcomed with honor. But I have seen other examples.

1. We have a weekly "roommate meal" that everyone contributes to. And often outsiders are invited in. Afterwards we may sit and talk or might have a time of prayer.
2. We had two "couch surfers" come and stay on the couch in the prayer room for the night as they traveled following a band as 'groupies'.
3. The other day one of the guys here ran into two "travelers" on the street and invited them in for the night. They came with their guitars, and their dog "My Dog". And stayed for a few days. They are hitchhiking and riding on trains and dumpster-diving their way across the US. They "busk" to earn money (play guitar on the street) and also do odd jobs. Against all my preconceived notions, it ends up that they are Christians and pretty neat guys! I was honored to share food and conversation with them.

Part of hospitality is recognizing the Image of God in the other person and celebrating and honoring that.
Chesterton says: "It is because in the total stranger we perceive man himself; the image of God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of the wisdom of a mustache.

Living in community also expands your horizons and thinking about the body of Christ.
I keep meeting people who are very obviously are Christians but have tattoos and want to get more more, smoke clove cigarettes and pipes, hang out in bars, make very loud but awesome God-honoring "storm the castle rock" music, folks who do the whole vegan thing and even eat "raw" foods only.

Being in SIL and traveling widely, I already rub shoulders with a pretty wide diversity of people: folks from various christian traditions, different nations and ethnic groups, folks who drink wine and beer, folks who do advent and lent, charismatics and "smells and bells", those who don't watch TV, those with huge families, those who have no kids, those who have chosen singleness, those who are liberal democrats, those who are conservative republicans, the social justice folks...

The body of Christ is a wonderful family - even if I don't agree 100% with everyone, we have great fellowship together. So when you meet those folks our there who are different from you, look for the image of God in them before you judge and celebrate with them what God is doing in them and through them. And see what you can learn from that. 

Bread and Glitter Art Exposition

The Kansas City Boiler Room community (church) where I am staying hosts a large community of artists, many of whom have their art studios in the building.

On Friday, April 8, 2011, they had an art exhibit in the sanctuary area where the church meets. The art will stay on the walls for the next few weeks.


In addition to the art, there was also an art journal that accompanied it and several live musical performances.

Oh, and there was bread and glitter out on tables. The bread you could eat, and I guess the glitter as well, if you wanted to.

exhibit on how to make compost. There was also an article on this in the journal and a presentation to the group. The desire is to promote community gardens that feed back to the community and help the poor.

posters and t-shirts to raise awareness of the problems in Japan with the earthquake and tsunami. Order them at: http://lovesickclothing.storenvy.com/products/73681-help-japan

A video piece representing forgiveness. The woman is breathing on the glass which reveals the words "I forgive" etched on it. The flowing salt-water behind represents both water and salt which are symbols of forgiveness. 

Not pictured are some other art pieces including a hand-woven blanket, some sculptural pieces, and some cupcakes (very tasty).

All in all this was a pretty neat exhibit, especially since I have met many of the artists. It is a very cool thing for a church to do, I think.

Unplugged wells: Everybody Dance Now

Since God began working in my life last last spring, there have been two big metaphors he has used:

1. Coming back from exile
2. Refreshing Water of Life

Some of the water verses I have gotten into are:

Ps. 119:25 - I lie in the dust, completely discouraged; revive me by your word. (The water metaphor is implied)

Jeremiah 2:13 "For my people have done two evil things: they have forsaken me - the fountain of living water. And they have dug for themselves cracked cisterns that can hold no water at all." (Turning your back on the joy and life that God provides and looking for it in alternative places).

John 7:37-38 "If you are thirsty, come to me! If you believe in me, come and drink! for the Scriptures declare that rivers of living water will flow out from within.

Fast forward to this weekend at the Boiler room annual weekend retreat.
There was a good time of worship and prayer in the morning and then we had the afternoon off by the lake (see previous post).

After supper, there was another time of worship led by an outside team - husband and wife, on guitar.
One of the songs he led us in was one he had written based on

Numbers 21:17 There the Israelites sang this song:
“Spring up, O well!
Yes, sing its praises!"

The image was of a well that had been filled in and no longer providing water. Apparently, enemies would fill in wells, to prevent others from using them. The Israelites sang to the well and it was unclogged and water flowed again. 
The song we sang based on this was "Open up the wellspring in my heart". We sang it first for ourselves and then turned and sang it for the person on our right and our left.  


Sunday morning we had an unpacking of what had happened the night before and people were coming forward and sharing. One guy shared how he really felt the Lord speaking to him about unclogging the wellspring in his heart. The leader asked people to stand who felt the same way. I stood along with about 15 other men (all men - very interesting. Later there was another issue shared and they asked people to stand and this time it was all women who stood).

The neatest part of this story for me was what came NEXT on Saturday night. Unbeknownst to me, there was a guy there named Cory who the Lord had told to give up drumming for a season. During the retreat, the Lord told him that the time was up and he was released to drum again. (He only shared this later). He was waiting for a time to drum but did not want to insert himself in worship led by an outside team, so told the Lord he would need to something overt.

About three minutes later, the worship leaders said, "If there are any drummers, Let them come forward". So this guy literally explodes onto the scene, accompanied by 3 or 4 others. He was WAILING on the djembe drum. They were playing several djembe, a drum set, snare and cymbal. Folks started dancing.

(This community is fairly charismatic in worship style but my impression is not that it is one where there is frequent dancing. I have not really seen any up until this point).

Okay, if you know me very well, you know where this is going. I have dance in my bones and it frequently comes out when most others are happy to just sit or stand. When this drumming started, let's just say the dancing sprang out of the well in my soul. And I danced like David for a good hour or so.

People saw me dancing and said, "You must dance like this in Africa" but I said, "No, not really. There is not a lot of dancing in church in Mali and in other settings it is normally the women who dance".
I was surprised to say that I had not really danced like that in 20 years or so. And it was a really great gift from God.