Windows

There are no windows in my classroom.

It’s pretty sad when the only way I know that it’s raining is the thumpthumpthumpthump of the raindrops on the roof overhead.

When that happens, everything in class stops. All twenty or so students stop whatever they’re doing, look to the ceiling, and wonder if they’re really hearing what they think they’re hearing. Because maybe it’s raining or maybe it’s a TV cart swishing and rattling as someone pushes it down the hall. And is that thunder or just a truck, its engine idling outside?

So, I step out into the hallway to look out the front doors and see if it is really raining outside. And about that time, the smell of rain seeps into the building and now everyone knows the weather. The kids settle back down to their books.

Last year, before school started, I decided enough was enough. I was tired of staring at cream-colored concrete block all day, so I enlarged three photos poster-size and set them up around the room … as “windows.”

One of the photos is of the Viera Wetlands. It shows a white heron standing on an island of green, green shrub, surrounded by marsh.

The second photo is of this old, spiral staircase that sits off of U.S. 1, surrounded by pepper trees. There’s not a building in sight and part of the reason I chose the picture was to spark the imagination of my students. Where does this lonely staircase go?

This year, I hung the third photo on the back bulletin board where I can see it from my desk. It’s a picture of where I walk the beach each summer. And, as my friend Nancy pointed out, it’s important that it’s not some random beach. It’s my beach. Though I don’t own it, it becomes my beach just because I walked it and captured it on camera.

All three photos provide me with something many of us our missing in our jobs … perspective.

It is so easy throughout the day to be overcome by demands and worry. We get caught up in the minutiae of life and lose focus on what’s truly important.

The Bible has a lot to say on worry—mainly, don’t worry. But that is always easier said than done. How do we keep perspective?

Philippians 4:8 has the answer: “Finally brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.”

Even one picture at your place of work to remind you of what is right or lovely or praiseworthy might make all the difference.

A picture of your family, a picture of a vacation spot, perhaps even a picture of your church, may be just enough to keep your faith and your heart properly rooted.

In my case, in my room without windows, I had to bring in photos. I had to have something to remind me of the outside world. My only other option was to knock down a few walls. And I didn’t think I’d get approval for that.

Something Amazing

When I was a kid, summer vacation in upstate New York began at the end of June and ended right after Labor Day. Even without a calendar, I could pinpoint the end of summer by the leaves just starting to change, by an open window that allowed a hint of a crisp breeze into my bedroom at night.

And then I knew school was right around the corner.

Instead of being sad, though, I was excited. I would start riding my bike past the school each day, looking for the posting of our homerooms in the window. Who would be my teacher? Would my friends be in my class?

When I became a teacher, I still got excited about school. And just like when I was a kid, I would count the days until summer was over, praying the days would fly by.

But this summer has been different. This summer has been far too short. If only I could stretch out the days. I’ve enjoyed every day this summer because I’ve spent as many of those days as possible at church.

Now that I’m going back to school, back to work in a week, I’m left in a quandary. How do I balance what I need and want to do at work with what I want and need to do at church?

And I do need church.

In the movie The Incredibles a little neighborhood boy waits every day for Bob Parr (aka Mr. Incredible) to come home from work because he knows that Bob is a super-hero.

One day Bob asks him, “What are you waiting for?”

And the little boy responds, “I don’t know. Something amazing, I guess.”

That is why I go to church, not to wait for something amazing, but to experience something amazing. Something amazing happens to me every time I go to church whether it’s a Sunday morning or a Tuesday night. Pick a day and something amazing happens to my spirit, to my soul, to my heart.

Church has changed me. God has changed me through church. And I’m only just beginning to see what those changes are.

I said a few weeks ago, in my Moment in Faith, that God had given me a new heart and a new spirit through the people at Hope Episcopal Church. What have my new heart and spirit allowed me to do?

Well … now I can hope. Now I can breathe. Now I can accept the blessings of others and let their goodwill shine through in everything that I do.

That is what church has done for me. That is why I need church. And I need church on more days than just Sunday morning.

Where, though, will I get the strength for both work and church?

I don’t know. I just know that I have to trust God. He has always provided when I have been in need.

Leonard Sweet writes in The Church of the Perfect Storm, “There are times when we need to take our hands totally off the controls, and trust the Spirit of God to blow us where it wills. There are times when we need to learn how to be what I call pneumanauts, or sailors of the Spirit.”

So that is what I will do. I will trust God and try not to count the days until school is out and summer begins again.

The Tools We Need

When I told Pastor Debbie that I would be in the Memorial Garden Tuesday morning doing some cleaning, she asked me if I would go ahead and plant the lantana she had bought.

I said sure … as long as she didn’t mind it dying a few days later.

The last thing I had planted was a bean sprout … in fourth grade … for a science project. And I’m pretty sure it wound up in the trash.

But I told her I would give it a try and so, Tuesday morning, I picked a spot next to the arbor and started hacking away at the ground with a trowel.

The ground was sandy, but filled with roots. It was a nightmare to dig through. I wasn’t accomplishing anything other than showering myself repeatedly with dirt, but I kept right on, digging out a hole millimeter by millimeter.

Finally, Pastor Debbie came out to check on my progress.

“I think you need to dig a little deeper,” she said.

I sighed. Sweat poured off my face. I could barely hold onto the trowel, my hands were shaking so bad from fatigue.

“What are you digging with anyway?” Pastor Debbie asked.

I held up the trowel.

“You didn’t want to use the shovel?”

“We have a shovel?” I said.

She pointed behind her. And yep, there it was. A shovel was standing propped up against the side of the church.

Oh … there’s a shovel.

And there is the lesson on stubbornness. Whenever we think we can do something on our own, we’re blinded to anyone or anything that might help us.

Life is a struggle.

Sometimes I think my grandparents and my parents and every adult I ever heard tell this story when I was kid were telling the truth when they said they used to walk to school uphill—both ways—through the snow, because sometimes that’s what life feels like … uphill … both ways.

The good news is we don’t have to do it alone.

The bad news is that we have to first admit that we can’t do it alone. We have to get past our stubbornness. Only then do the blinders come off. Only then do we see what God has provided for us to help us get through.

I had a rough year this past year. I felt the events of my life were turning me into a person I didn’t want to be, someone who was angry and defeated. And then, this past Easter, God pointed out this pink church with red doors and said, “Go here.”

So I walked through the doors at Hope Episcopal and something happened that had never happened to me before in any church that I had gone to. I walked through those doors and in an instant all worry and doubt and fear vanished. I walked through those doors at Hope Episcopal Church and I knew who God wanted me to be, His plans for me. I knew the person I was supposed to be.

Most importantly, I knew I couldn’t get there alone. God had provided the church family that I had long been missing.

When Pastor Debbie handed me the shovel Tuesday morning, I was already so worn out I couldn’t even dig the hole with a shovel, so she took the shovel back and started digging, picking up where I had left off.

There is nothing in this life we’re meant to do alone. God has provided the tools. We just have to open our eyes and see.

The Power of Words

I cry.

Almost every Sunday now, I cry.

I’m beginning to think that the reason I sit in the back at church is so that no one will see the tears … because it’s a little embarrassing.

When I’m not crying, I’m sighing, or taking great, big breaths, puffing out my cheeks like I’m about to blast out a long, melodic run of notes like the great Dizzy Gillespie on a trumpet.

The crying, the sighing, the deep, big breaths—it happens during the sermon or during a hymn. It happens during the Eucharist. It happens when Pastor Debbie says the words, “serve you in unity, constancy, and peace.” It happens during "the peace", with a handshake, with a smile, with a hug.

All these things flood me with emotion.

It is joy. It is healing. It is hope. It is kindness. It is caring. It is love.

It is sometimes overwhelming.

Yesterday, I finished reading Kathleen Norris’s The Cloister Walk. Norris writes that when friends have a hard time understanding why she spends so much time at church, she tells them, “I do so for the same reason that I write: to let words work the earth of my heart. To sing, to read poetry out loud, and to have poetry and the wild stories of scripture read to me.”

I understand Kathleen Norris completely, because the words have been working the earth of my heart for several months now and the seeds that were planted are sprouting and I feel filled with life again.

Words have power.

Words tell stories, even if the word is simply, “Hello.”

And stories, as Kate Morton writes in The Forgotten Garden, have the “magical ability to fill the wounded parts of people.”

We are all wounded. We have all been wounded. Not one of us has reached this point in our lives unscathed.

There isn’t a Sunday that goes by where something … a hymn, a sermon, a scripture … doesn’t speak to me, speak to that wounded part of me.

For me, I know that when I cry or get teary-eyed at church, it is not because of sadness or despair. My tears are tears of joy and thanksgiving because every time I go to church I feel myself being healed, healed of things I didn’t even know needed healing.

So I sing a hymn or I hear the scripture and feel my soul knitting itself back together. And sometimes that soul healing takes my breath away and my eyes fill with tears and I have to remind myself to breathe.

Believe

Sometimes treasures are hidden in books on pages that have no number. Such is the case with C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Prior to page one, there is a note to Lewis’s god-daughter, Lucy. Lewis writes, “I wrote this story for you, but … you are already too old for fairy tales … but some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”

I was able read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe when fairy tales were still very real to me, when my friend Danny and I saw no waste in practicing sword-fighting with sticks in the back yard … just in case… just in case we opened our closet doors to Narnia one day.

The Narnia books shaped who I am as a reader and writer. They also shaped my faith. It is Aslan himself who tells the children in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader “that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.” There as in home, our world. That was how it worked for me. Aslan enriched my understanding of Jesus and God.

But, as Lewis said to his god-daughter, at some point we can’t help but grow older and fairy tales cease to hold the meaning they once did in our lives.

Fortunately, I had another book, a story that would help me hold onto that little piece of childhood, a book first read to me in those in-between years, those middle school years when we struggle at the cusp of puberty with what we can hold onto from our childhood and what we must let go of.

That book is called The Polar Express.

I was thirteen when my teachers herded the 8th grade into the cafeteria and Mr. McCumiskey read to us Chris Van Allsburg’s The Polar Express.

The Polar Express is the story of a boy who has stopped believing in Santa Claus, but one Christmas Eve is whisked away on a fantastical journey to the North Pole. There he meets Santa and is given a bell from the harness of one of Santa’s reindeer.

The bell turns out to be very special.

Only those who still believe can hear it ringing.

As the boy grows older, his friends and his sister all lose the ability to hear the bell, but not the boy. Even as an adult, he can still hear it ring.

At thirteen, I understood this to be a very important thing … that there were some things of childhood to let go of and there were some things, like God, to hold onto even tighter than before. Because the older we get, the harder it is to believe, especially when adult sensibilities like reason and logic get in the way.

Children believe in things with their whole hearts. They don’t stop to question. They invest themselves in the plight of others without stopping to consider.

That’s what adults do—they consider.

Over the past few days, I’ve watched the children at Vacation Bible School invest themselves in the story of Joseph.

For the little ones, when they meet Joseph, they don’t see the actor who portrays him (David from church), they see Joseph … in jail … in the Pharaoh’s palace and they fear for him and they rejoice with him and their emotions are utterly real.

And I miss that—I miss that once upon a time, I was able to embrace that wholly—that completely.

So, I pick up my fairy tales. I reread The Chronicles of Narnia and The Polar Express and I remind myself that you’re never too old to believe with the heart of a child.

Moment in Faith

This morning I spoke at both the 8:00 and 10:15 services at Hope Episcopal Church. The following is the text to what I said:

Barry Lopez, author of Arctic Dreams, writes, “If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.”

That’s what these moments of faith are—they’re our stories of how God works in our lives and we must share them, we’re compelled to share them because the more we talk about God to each other, the more His presence in our lives is revealed.

I struggled with what I was going to say today, not because I couldn’t think of anything, but because it seemed impossible to compress, to shrink down a whole summer of faith into one moment.

Fortunately, I was inspired yesterday by a friend’s blog. My friend Charles wrote on the topic of renewal and included a quote from Ezekiel 36:26. It says, “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you.”

That quote, to me, sums up not just this summer, but my life since I first walked through those red doors and into Hope Episcopal Church this past Easter.

Many of you already know my story. I was a church hopper for 17 years. I had pretty much given up on finding a church. And then one day I was looking online and I found Hope Episcopal and you had a Narnia-themed library and, as someone who has read The Chronicles of Narnia again and again and again, I could not pass up the opportunity to see this library.

But while it was the Narnia-themed library that got me into this church, it was you—the people of Hope—who kept me here.

It was Mike and Robin who sat with me that Easter.

It was Lorraine who gave coffee to Jaci one Sunday knowing how much she needed it.

It was Arlene who was the first person to ask my name.

It was Craig and Judy who patiently explained to me centering prayer.

It was Diane who pulled me away from my seat one Sunday and forced me to meet new people.

It was my Alpha group, Jaci, Robin, Terri, Russell, Marty, Dan, Bob, Judy, Jennifer and Julia who shared their own moments of faith each Wednesday.

And of course it was Pastor Debbie who has been gracious in the giving of her time to just sit and talk and answer any of the thousands of questions I might have.

It has been all of you. God has given me a new heart and a new spirit through all of you.

And I could not be more thankful.

The Joy of Discovery

Some months ago now, a little boy ran to the church right before service was to start and announced to his parents, “I’ve found a secret passage!” He was almost shaking, he was so excited, and I couldn’t help but smile because I knew the secret passage he was referring to.

He was talking about the wardrobe, the one I still hope will one day lead to Narnia, but right now leads to a very awesome library instead.

What I loved was the joy this boy showed, the pure enthusiasm for something new, something special, something that had been hidden to him before but was now visible. And most importantly, he didn’t want to keep that discovery a secret. He wanted to share it with everyone.

Over the past few months I’ve experienced a similar enthusiasm over church and God. I’m not bursting through any doors into or out of the sanctuary—I might get a few funny looks if I did that—but I do sometimes have this urge to shout to the world, “You will never guess what I have found!”

It’s not that I didn’t know God before. I’ve always known Him. My dad has an audio tape of me when I was around three-years-old where, with a little prompting, I say, “I love Jesus.” After that, I go on to sing from the soundtrack of Grease and discuss my boyfriend from church, Andy. Three-year-olds have very short attention spans.

God's attention to me, though, never waned. When I was older and staying with my grandparents and sleeping in my mom’s old room, the mountain of blankets I piled around my head was not enough to keep the monsters under the bed at bay. But the stories I read to myself at night, the stories of Daniel and David and Moses, were more than enough to convince me that God protects all His children.

As a teenager and young adult, I knew that God was with me. I knew He stuck by me through my saddest days, but also rejoiced with me during the best of days. But during those days, I was mostly churchless and I learned to hold my relationship with God close to my heart. I didn’t want to share Him with anyone. That behavior wound up making me a very lonely Christian.

And then I found Hope Episcopal and I got to talking to people and I realized that this God who had been with me all my life wasn’t just my God. He didn’t belong to me. He was everyone’s God and everyone had a different relationship with Him than I did. Amazingly, every time I talk to someone about God, who He is and what I know about Him grow exponentially.

Remember how it is when you go back to your hometown after being gone for many years? Remember how small everything seems?

That’s how it is with me. When I look back to my childhood and what I understood God to be, my understanding was so small. I thought I knew God. But what I knew was hardly anything.

And now what I know of God grows every day.

Each day brings more joy as I get to know God better.

And like the little boy who wanted to share his discovery of the secret passage with everyone, I want to share my joy with you.

Grace

In her book God Never Blinks, Regina Brett describes the first time she attended a Jesuit Retreat House Healing Service.

She writes, “At first I cringed. I pictured a TV evangelist beckoning … touching my head, screaming ‘Demons be gone!’ and people dropping to the floor and flailing around like guppies out of water.”

Instead, she faced something quite different. At the service, one song after the next was played and the message was always the same.

God loves you.

Brett writes that she went through a whole box of tissue during the first song alone and “that the tears cleansed [her] wound.”

Last Wednesday at church, we sat around in a small group and discussed whether or not God heals today. We talked about physical healing, emotional healing (like Regina Brett’s) and spiritual healing. At the end of our meeting, we said a group prayer, inviting healing into our lives.

And then the strangest thing happened. A man walked into the room. He looked like he was off the streets, unkempt, missing a few teeth. He apologized for interrupting and then he asked us to pray for him.

A few minutes later, I handed him twenty dollars, and then I walked into Pastor Debbie’s office and cried.

When I was six-years-old I broke my arm on the playground and I broke it bad, so bad they had to knock me out at the hospital in order to set it. It’s the only night I have ever spent at the hospital.

They put me in a cast up above my elbow and I would go through yet another cast before it was all said and done. When the doctor removed my cast for the last time, my arm looked so pitiful. It was small, shrunken and still misshapen.

My grandfather called me “crooked arm” for years.

Like bones, souls can be broken too. Instead of wearing casts, we put up walls to protect ourselves while our souls heal.

But at some point our souls do heal and those walls, just like my cast, have to come down or else the soul has no room to grow.

And, just like my arm, the healed soul can be tiny and sensitive, but free of its walls the soul can flex its muscles and grow strong again.

Since coming to Hope Episcopal, God has taken down many of my walls, some even without my knowledge.

When I saw that man the other night asking for prayer, I didn’t stop to consider his motivations. I looked at him and saw him for what he was.

Broken.

And I remembered how once I was broken too … broken in a different way … but broken nevertheless and I remembered how it is God’s grace that has made me whole.

The same words that healed Regina Brett at that healing service are the same words that healed me and they are the same words I said to that man that night.

God loves you.

Emmanuel

I walked the beach this morning.

It’s sort of ironic to me that a few years ago I lived a block from the beach and never went but now that I live seven miles away, I’ve discovered the joy of beach walking.

Sometimes though, when I walk the beach, the sand is too hard and each step I take jars my back and rattles my teeth.

Sometimes the sand is too soft and the tide has pulled away leaving dunes that I struggle to climb up and over.

Sometimes the waves toss thousands of little shells on the sand that bite and dig at my feet.

Sometimes it is so hot and the sun is so blinding that I think I’ll pass out before I reach the half-way point.

And then sometimes there are days like today, when the sun is still waking up, hiding behind the clouds. The water and the sand are cool and it’s early enough that the air smells of salt spray and not suntan lotion. The waves are light and the only surfers are the scores of pelicans floating out into the ocean.

These are the days I cherish, not just the days when everything is perfect … but all the days, even the days when I struggle.

No matter where I am, God is there. Kathleen Norris writes in Amazing Grace that “Even when we feel most alone … God will find a way to let us know that he is with us in this place.”

He is with us when we struggle. He is with us when we weep … from sorrow or from joy.

He is with us.