Thank You

When I was eleven-years-old, my dad and I drove down from New York to Florida for Christmas. I remember that Florida was cold and damp and cloudy that Christmas, but we still made it to the beach and I made good on a promise.

I packed some Florida sand in a plastic baggie to bring back to my teacher, Mr. Funk. When I had told him I was going to Florida, it was the one thing he had asked for. That first day back after Christmas vacation, Mr. Funk took that sand and poured it out on the classroom floor. He added water, dribbled out of a coffee mug, and then he took off his shoes and socks and walked barefoot through the world’s tiniest beach.

Now I’m sure some people could say that he was simply being silly, entertaining a bunch of sixth graders who had never seen a teacher barefoot before.

In my mind, though, there is no question as to what Mr. Funk was doing. When he walked around in that sand, he was saying thank you. He could have said thank you a hundred different ways. He could have said “thanks” and stuffed the bag of sand in his desk. He could have opened the bag and run his fingers through the sand.

But instead, Mr. Funk said thank you by making the most of each grain of sand and turning it into a celebration.

Writing this blog has been my way of saying thank you to God, to the people of Hope Episcopal, to my friends and family and teachers, to anyone who has shaped my life in ways both great and small.

While we always honor the enormous and momentous times of our lives, I have tried to use this blog to honor the little things that may have seemed benign and insignificant at the time, but like a snowball rolling down the hill, have built over the years into an overwhelming force of change.

For instance, who but God could have known that the Narnia books my father gave me as a child would, after many years of searching, finally lead me to a church?

And in that church, who but God could show me His presence in the kindness of strangers, in the silence and stillness of a garden and in the wonder and majesty of a tiny, little library hidden behind wardrobe doors?

Who but God could have known that the word “hope” whispered to me in my darkest times was more than a call to action; it was the name of a church I would one day call home.

Who but God could know how beautiful each grain of sand is in my life and allow me to celebrate those times with you?

Thank you.

Where Everyone Needs to Know your Name

Pastor Debbie informed us that she was thinking of removing the back row of chairs at the church.

“That’s where you sit, isn’t it?” she asked me.

“Yes,” I said and felt my eyes narrow just a bit.

It’s funny how we become attached to our seats at church, our parking spaces at work, little things that are unassigned but are somehow very important.

In one of my favorite episodes of King of the Hill, the Hills leave their church after a new family takes over the Hills’ pew.

Hank Hill explains the importance of “their” pew to the pastor saying, “I know God’s up there and He knows I’m smack dab in the middle of the second pew.”

Hank’s pastor then explains that there are no assigned seats in Heaven, so she will not be assigning pews at the church.

Initially, I chose the back row for the same reason I parked so far out in the parking lot that first Sunday … in case I needed to make a quick exit.

It’s been a couple of months now and I know no quick exits are needed, but I still sit in the back row. I tell myself, that like Hank Hill, I sit there so people can find me easier.

“Hey, where’s Kendra … oh there she is, right there in the back row.”

Honestly, though, that’s a sorry excuse.

I sit in the back row, in the same seat, every Sunday because … that’s my seat … there’s nothing rational about it … it’s just where I sit.

I’m so attached to that seat that during the “passing of the peace” I only shake hands with the people I can reach … from my chair.

Last Sunday, during the peace, Diane grabbed my arm and physically pulled me away from my seat. “Let’s meet new people,” she said.

As we moved further and further away from my seat, I found myself shaking hands with new people, but also looking behind me. Could I dart back to my chair? No. More and more people were filling in the gap behind me.

It’s silly … I know … I’m silly.

The thing is when I sit in the same seat and never venture out, people have to come to me and I know that’s not what God wants. No matter how shy I am, God wants me to get up. He wants me out of that comfort zone. He wants me to see the other side of the church. Apparently, there are people over there. And why should I be afraid of them?

Everyone I have met at Hope Episcopal has been nothing but kind and generous. In fact, they are some of the most giving people I have ever met and I need to meet more of them. And I need to be the one to go to them.

That being said, I did tell Pastor Debbie that if she took the row away I might just put the chair back and start the row again.

She thought I was joking.

I probably was.

Be Still

Today’s reading at church came from 1 Kings 19:11-13:

“Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper. When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood in the mouth of the cave.”

I am in love with this passage because it answers a vital question, one that we all ask at some point in our lives—where is God?

And that answer, according to this passage is that God is in “a gentle whisper” (NIV version), in “sheer silence” (NRSV version) or in “a still small voice” (King James version).

In other words, sometimes you have to be really quiet and still to hear Him, to see Him, to feel His presence.

When I think of quietness and stillness, I think of the golf course just outside the small New York town where I grew up. I never played golf there, but in the winter, when the snow blanketed bunker, fairway and green, my dad and I would cross country ski there in the dead of night with only the stars lighting the way.

I have to admit that some nights it was hard to appreciate the beauty of where we were, mostly because it was so cold. Those nights that we skied were the coldest I can ever remember being, so cold that when we got back to the car, my fingers hurt as they thawed in front of the heater.

The other problem was that cross country skiing is hard. Cross country skis are narrower and harder to balance than downhill skis. So every time my dad and I would ski down the tiniest little hill, I would wind up on my backside while my dad swished on through the snow ahead.

Even my dad, thinking he could manage what must have been a bunker in the spring and summer, but was, during winter, a large mound of snow, tumbled head over feet once. I still remember staring down into the darkness at the bottom of the hill—it was very dark—and calling out to my dad.

“Dad?”

Silence and then, "Yeah?"

“Are you okay?”

"Yeah?"

His voice sounded miles away.

I think it was then, as I waited for him to crawl back up the hill that I stopped for a moment and stared at the night sky. Every breath hurt. Every breath meant that the cold seared its way into my lungs. My cheeks hurt. My eyes burned. I couldn’t even feel my mouth. But I ignored all of that and looked to the stars.

This is the thing about the cold. When air is warm and hot, like it is in Florida, it’s thick and hazy and heavy, but when the air is cold, like it was that night, it is crisp and clear and even stars that are billions of miles away seem so close you could touch them.

And it was in this time, this quiet time, when the only sound was of my dad squinching his way back through the snow—it was in this time that I felt God’s presence and His power.

Snagged

I first fell in love with the poetry of E.E. Cummings, I think, because I considered him a kindred spirit. Cummings is most well known for his aversion to the basic rules of grammar so his punctuation, capitalization and even spacing can seem wonky and unstable.

As an English/Language Arts teacher, I’m supposed to love grammar and I do … it’s the teaching of it that I despise. No matter how hard I try, I find it impossible to teach grammar without coming across as wonky and unstable myself.

If the grammar in Cummings’ poetry bothers you, look past it and you will find some of the most beautiful language ever written.

For example, Cummings writes:

“i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky, and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes”

E.E. Cummings is one of many poets who have found beauty in nature and the beauty of God in nature.

In college, I took a nature writing class and I still remember that first class sitting in a circle in the grass outside. The professor, Annie, instructed us to close our eyes, and then after a moment, tell each other what we felt. I’m sure she was hoping for something metaphorical, sensory and beautiful.

But when it was my turn, I’m pretty sure I said something along the lines of … “I feel ants crawling on my leg.”

I wasn’t impressed with nature.

One of Annie’s assignments was to journal, to walk out into nature and observe and write down everything. I used to joke that Miami University (Ohio) had so few trees, that they had printed the location of each one on the campus map. In the center of campus was a spot referred to as “woods.” And if you had any doubt of its “woodsiness,” there was a plaque to remind you. It was possible, sometimes, in these woods, to lose sight of people for a moment or two. There were even parts where the sounds of cars and city all but disappeared.

In those moments, something odd happened to me. The more I wrote, the more I saw, the more I really saw (not vice versa) of nature. The act of writing opened me up to experiences I might have previously ignored. Joan Chittister says that writing “brings us into contact with our souls.” Writing about nature opened me up to something I didn’t know was a part of me.

Now there are times, sometimes early in the morning, when I see a Great Blue Heron fly low, skimming across the top of the water that I hold my breath in wonder of it all.

There have been times in my life that I have felt about God the way I feel about nature. There have been times of distance, distances I’ve been unaware of until I stop for a moment to look for Him.

And there have been times of wonder, sometimes on Sunday mornings, when a hymn or a line from the sermon snags on a piece of my soul and pulls so suddenly that I want to cry in His presence.

And like E.E. Cummings, I thank God for all those moments.

Because He asked me to ...

My friend Sharon hates cats, which means, of course, that I’m always trying to find her birthday cards with cats on them. The card I found for her this year had a picture of a kitten sitting in a dog dish. The kitten’s ears are back and its eyes are wide.

The caption reads: “They dared Mittens to do it and Mittens never turned down a dare.”

When I was a kid, there was very little I couldn’t be bribed or dared into doing provided the reward involved money, books or food. I was six or seven when my parents bribed me to go down the waterslide at the town pool.

“I’ll give you a dollar,” my mom said.

Nope.

“I’ll give you two dollars,” she tried again.

Sold!

And down the slide I went even though I was incapable of floating, swimming or completing any other life saving maneuver in the water. (I should add that the plan was for my dad to catch me at the bottom of the slide.)

A few years later, I still hadn’t learned to swim and was still super tentative around the water.

“Look,” my frustrated swim teacher said, “I’ll give you a lollipop if you drown.”

I think she and I had different definitions of the word “drown” because despite sinking to the bottom of the pool a moment later, I never did get that lollipop.

Even as an adult, I’m still motivated by incentives. A few weeks ago, I attended a workshop I had some reservations about. But as soon as I sat down, the workshop presenter started passing out free books and all of sudden this was the best workshop I had ever been to!

I like to think, though, when it comes to God, incentives, dares and bribes are unnecessary.

Patty Griffin writes in her song Up to the Mountain:

“I went up to the mountain
because you asked me to.”

Her song got me thinking. How many things in my life have I done simply because God asked me to?

And the answer is … up until recently … probably not a lot.

In fact, I should probably be thankful that God no longer sends giant whales to swallow up people who run from Him like He did with Jonah.

Let’s be honest, God had to bribe me with the promise of a Narnia-themed library to get me through the doors of Hope Episcopal. Of course He knew that He had me as soon as I was in the church.

Because there have been no bribes or incentives since. And I’ve said yes to just about everything asked of me. And all I keep asking Pastor Debbie for … is more. Give me more books to read. Give me more time in church. Give me more fellowship. Give me more time in prayer. I need more. I’ve never been so spiritually hungry.

Kathleen Norris writes in Amazing Grace, “I am still amazed that having been someone who for twenty years would never willingly go to church, I have become someone who now can’t get enough of it.”

Thank goodness for those words. I’m so glad someone else feels the same way.

There will be more, I’ve no doubt, and in the end I will do whatever God asks me to do simply because He asked.

Saying Yes Part II

I like to describe Alaska this way:

In Florida, you look up at the sky and see clouds and, if it’s the middle of summer, those clouds might be grayish-green clouds that tower overhead, fuming and ready to spit, or they might be simple puffballs, drifting along the horizon.

In Alaska, you look up at the sky and see clouds … and then your eyes adjust and you realize those aren’t clouds at all. Those are mountains, the largest, grandest, most mouth-dropping, awe-inspiring mountains you have ever seen, with snow-capped, craggy peaks that give way to green pines at the base. And through some of these mountains, massive blue glaciers dig their way through the earth, churning up dirt and debris that burrow in each crevasse.

There were times in Alaska when I would spend hours just staring out over the water, mesmerized, captivated by everything I saw.

And here’s the thing.

I almost missed out on seeing any of it.

My uncle had invited me on an Alaskan cruise and my grandmother was so convinced I wouldn’t get on the plane to fly out there, she packed her own bags, ready to take my place.

She wasn’t completely wrong. Alaska was farther away from home than I had ever been. I was terrified.

In the end, though, I got on the plane and I'm glad I did.

I made it to Alaska.

I almost didn’t make it to Hope Episcopal. I was so nervous. I had picked Easter for my first visit. I knew there would be a lot of people there. I had never been to an Episcopal Church. I figured the service would be similar to what I had experienced in the Catholic Church, but what if it wasn’t? What if I messed up or said the wrong words?

I confess that I parked unnecessarily far away from the church that first visit. I was probably closer to the road than to the church. I think I was preparing for a quick exit.

God obviously had other plans for me.

As soon as I walked into the church, all fear and worry disappeared … all gone in an instant. God had asked me to go to church and I had said yes even though silly worries had almost kept me home.

Joan Chittister writes in Called to Question that religion “requires us to be more than we ever thought we could become.” I would take that a step further and say that God requires us to be more than we ever thought we could become. And honestly, who knows us better than God?

It’s become a mission of mine at Hope Episcopal to say yes to things that worry and self-doubt would have previously caused me to answer no to.

So I go from being the person who used to sit in the very back of church behind the concrete pillar where no one could see me and I couldn’t even see the priest or the pastor … to the person who fills out the yellow card with my name and address and checks the box that says “contact me.”

God changes you each time you say yes.

And each Sunday, I find myself parking my car closer and closer to the church.

Hope

It was my 6th grade teacher, Mrs. Haley, who first introduced me to Emily Dickinson. At the time, I thought Emily Dickinson was the saddest, most depressed person in history, someone whose suffering rivaled Job’s.

Now, more than twenty years later, I read Dickinson with a different eye and am learning to appreciate her humor, but also, surprisingly, her hopefulness.

Dickinson wrote the following lines on hope:

“Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all.”

The line here that stands out the most to me is “and never stops at all.” Hope never stops, it never fails. It sits in your soul and sings and no matter how bad things get, it will never stop singing. I guess the only question is: are you still listening or have you shut hope out?

One place where hope seems to sing the loudest is at the cathedral, St. Anne de Beaupré, located just outside Quebec City.

When I was thirteen, we took a field trip to Quebec City, a long distance field trip. It was more than ten hours on an old, rickety school bus. We stayed over Memorial Day weekend and out of all the sites I remember, it is St. Anne de Beaupré that still moves me to this day.

St. Anne de Beaupré is known for its healing miracles. People come to the Basilica to pray and are cured of cancer, of paralysis. People enter the Basilica in wheelchairs and leave St. Anne walking.

The first thing I remember seeing in St. Anne were two enormous columns that stretched to the ceiling and were covered—every square inch covered—in the canes and crutches of those who had been healed, of those who came to St. Anne de Beaupré hurting and left whole and new.

Even for a cynical thirteen-year-old, it was a powerful image. People came to St. Anne de Beaupré humming along with that tiny little song of hope and became a part of a whole choir of hope. And even though I was not in need of any physical healing at that point in my life, I was not immune to the song of hope. It washed over me and as I crossed the street to visit the life-sized Stations of the Cross that sit on the hill opposite St. Anne de Beaupré, I was almost overcome.

Years pass and sometimes the song of hope seems faint, almost a memory. When I walked into Hope Episcopal Church for the first time this past Easter morning, the song of hope grew louder. It had been a tough year for me. I had been disappointed by so many things.

And here was this church reminding me that God is good always … always.

And that the song of hope is never silent.

Saying Yes Part I

Years ago, I was out on playground duty at the Catholic school where I taught when a small boy ran up to me and handed me a necklace.

“I think this belongs to Jenny,” he said. “She’s in Sister Mary’s class.”

I put the necklace in my pocket, not really thinking much of it. Kids were always finding things on the playground, usually trash.

A few minutes later, I spotted Sister Mary standing in front of the school, and I handed her the necklace.

“Oh praise the Lord,” she said. “I prayed this morning that the necklace would be found and here you are.”

It was an odd moment for me.

I had never had a role before in the fulfillment of someone else’s prayer. Or, at least, I had never stopped to consider how God uses me.

Sometimes we get so caught up in God answering our own prayers that we don’t stop to think how God uses us to answer each other’s prayers.

Two years ago, my mom called me, frantic, saying there was something wrong with her father, that he didn’t sound right on the phone. She lives in New York and, at the time, my grandfather was living here in Florida only a few miles down the road from me.

My level of concern should have been low. It wasn’t the first time she had called frantic about my grandfather and he had always been okay in the past. And, most importantly, he didn’t live alone. He lived with his girlfriend.

Instead, I interrupted my mom after about ten seconds and told her I would drive to his house to check on him. Fifteen minutes later, I was standing in his living room.

I knew the moment I saw him that something was wrong. He looked like a lost child, confused, lonely and afraid. He wouldn’t look me in the eye and I had to crouch down and peer up at him in order to make eye contact. His girlfriend explained that they had called the doctor and the doctor had said to take him to the hospital but my grandfather refused to go.

“Grandpa,” I said, “we’re going to the hospital, now. You need to walk outside and get in my car.”

Perhaps it was the tone of my voice, something I had perfected teaching 8th graders every day, but he got in the car. Only later, at the hospital, did we find out he was having a stroke.

He recovered and while I don’t know that my getting him to the hospital made a huge difference, I know it comforted my mom that I was there, and I have no doubt that God sent me to my grandfather that day.

When I think back to Sister Mary and the necklace and to my grandfather and his stroke, I am reminded that the world does not revolve around me and that God will use me to help others.

Hope Episcopal was the first church I walked into and didn’t immediately think “how can this church serve my needs?” Instead, I had a John F. Kennedy moment. I didn’t want to know what the church could do for me. I wanted to know what I could do for them.

As I get to know the people of Hope, I discover more and more that no one happened upon the church by accident. There are no coincidences, only God-things (as church members are fond of saying), moments in time when God’s presence is so obvious it can’t be ignored.

God will use you for your own good and for the good of others, and sometimes all He needs for you to say is “yes.” Yes, I will take this necklace to Sister Mary. Yes, I will go check on my grandfather. Yes, I will go to this church.

Yes.