Where Are Your Treasures?

This afternoon I had finished lunch and was getting ready to write this post, putting the clothes in the dryer so I wouldn’t be distracted. I was headed back to my computer when I suddenly felt pulled to go look for this tripod I needed for tonight.

One second I was walking to the office, the next second I pivoted in mid-step and headed off to my bedroom, to the closet, quietly arguing with myself that I should be writing and not looking for the tripod. The tripod could wait.

For whatever reason, though, finding the tripod became very important. I started looking in my hope chest but the tripod wasn’t in there and honestly I didn’t know where else it would be. I was about to give up and head back to my computer when, once again, something stopped me, turned me around pointed me back to the closet.

In my closet is a trunk I had with me in college. I use it now to hold onto some keepsakes and I hadn’t looked inside it in ages. There was absolutely no way the tripod was in there.

So why was I crouching down and popping the latches to the lid?

Mathew 6:21 says “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” Which got me thinking, what do our treasures say about us and our hearts?

What would these keepsakes inside an old, dirty, stained trunk say about me?

I opened the lid and stuck a flashlight inside. There were clothes, old clothes that I would never wear again and I couldn’t imagine why I had kept them. There was an old tool box, old only because I made it when I was in 7th grade in Technology class. My initials are stamped backwards into the metal because I could never get the hang of working with tools.

There was the elephant I sewed in 7th grade Home Economics. Its ear is still hanging on by the weakest of threads. I could never get hang of working with a sewing machine either.

There was a necklace I wore when I was in Steel Magnolias in high school.

There was a library card and a National Honor Society membership card.

And there was a tin that I remembered once held candy, but now held something else. When I popped off the lid, I saw three things: a medal with what looks to be the Virgin Mary embossed on it, a broken (made that way) Little Orphan Annie locket my mother gave me, and a gold cross and necklace.

I had been thinking about that cross for months. I have only ever owned two crosses in my life, the one I wear now that I bought a few weeks ago, and the gold one I was now staring at, the gold cross I had not seen in years and had not worn since I was a child.

When I was little, probably eight-years-old, my mom gave me an Avon catalog to keep me busy one afternoon. She would later tell me that she had no intention of buying me anything in the catalog, but thought I might be interested in looking at the jewelry, even though I had never shown any interest in jewelry before.

So, I guess she was shocked when I pointed out a gold cross in the catalog and told her I wanted it. And I guess she was even more shocked when she found herself saying yes that I could have it.

“How could I say no to that?” she would tell me years later.

I don’t remember what it was about the cross that made me want it. It’s plain, nothing spectacular. I don’t remember the thought process that went on inside my head. I just remember wanting it.

And now here I find it years later, at this point in my life, and when I wasn’t even looking for it.

Here is this reminder on this Halloween Sunday that I have belonged to God for a very, very long time. And that He has always been close to me.

And as it turned out, the trunk was exactly where I needed to be.

I found the tripod at the very bottom, hidden under the clothes.

Sandy

Sandy,

You missed my story last night, but remember I promised to blog about it just for you.

This isn’t the whole story. It’s only part of the story. I’ll leave you to fill in the blanks.

Here’s the gist.

What if there was no such thing as a coincidence?

What if everything that happened to you in your life, great or small, joyous or sad had a purpose … was God’s way of steering you to just the right place at just the right time so that when He was ready, you were ready to listen and act on whatever it is He asks you to do?

How would you view the events of your life?

What new meaning would they take on?

For example, I’ve lived twelve years now in Florida and every year it seems I meet someone new and somehow it comes up that I’m from Ohio, that I attended the other Miami University. And almost always, whoever it is I am talking to asks, “How did you wind up in Florida?”

Up until a few months ago, I had a very simple explanation. When I graduated from college, I had no plans and my grandparents (who lived in Florida) said, “Come stay with us.” And so I did.

It’s as simple as that, right?

Except that it’s not.

I know that now.

Life is not random.

I move to Florida, but after a month or so, I can’t find a job, not a summer job, not a teaching job, not any job. I’m ready to move back home to Ohio. I call my dad and tell him so and he asks me what it would take for me to stay in Florida. And I say, I need a job, a summer job, like at a bookstore and I need a teaching job for the fall.

Within a week, both things happen.

Years pass and other things come up and I think about moving out of Florida, about changing careers, but in the end there is always something that keeps me here.

Why?

For several years I live beachside, but then decide I want to buy a home of my own. I look in Viera and find a short-sale. I put in an offer and 30 days later close on my first home.

Where is that home?

Just a five minute drive from an Episcopal Church that sits hidden off the road behind a forest of pines and oaks.

One Easter day two years later, I sit at the stoplight at Murrell and Wickham. I’m a bundle of nerves. And I have choice to make. Turn left and head home or stay straight and try out this new church.

Turn left or go straight ahead.

God shapes us in ways great and small. He can change our lives at stoplight. He directs our every step.

So that when the time comes, we are ready … to trust, to follow, to surrender.

And there can be no turning back.

How Much to Give

Yesterday, I was reading an article on www.cnn.com by Jamie Gumbrecht on Savannah, Georgia’s First African Baptist Church. It is one of the oldest black churches in America, built by its members in the 1850s.

Gumbrecht writes that the church came about when a white congregation offered to sell their land and building to the First African Baptist Church for $1500, a considerable sum in those days.

And it was even more considerable in light of the fact that most members of First African were slaves, slaves who then had an important decision to make.

Use the money they had saved to buy their freedom, or combine their money and buy a church.

They bought the church.

It bears repeating.

They bought the church.

We’re moving into a time of year when churches start talking about stewardship, tithing and pledge cards.

It seems an awkward kind of dance to me because we don’t go to church wanting to think about money and the economy and whether or not our church can afford to keep its doors open.

So let’s take money out of the discussion completely and instead take a moment to think about First African Baptist Church and its founding members who gave their lives and their freedom because they knew the truth of salvation and grace.

They knew that tithing is not about how much you give, it’s about remembering where your heart resides and who it belongs to.

Tithing is about nourishment, about feeding a spiritual need that is far greater than any physical hunger.

Tithing is about trust and giving to God what is already His … you.

Tithing is giving you, yourself over to God to be put to use for His purpose.

The slaves who built First African Baptist Church gave up their freedom so others could be free. They built their church with a secret compartment in the floor that housed hundreds of fleeing slaves, escaping up the river.

Before joining Hope, I never gave more than a few dollars here and there at various churches I’ve attended over the years. Now that I’m a member of a church, I want to tithe and I’ve struggled with that question: how much? 

Techinical definition of tithing aside--how much?

It helps me to think about First African in Savannah because instead of asking “how much,” I can simply ask myself “have I pledged my heart?”

Have I released my heart to this church and to God?

And if the answer is yes, then I have given enough.

When I Wake

Sunday morning I found myself crying in church again. I had made it through the 8:00 service just fine, but by the end of the 10:15, right after communion, I found myself kneeling and praying and overcome by the blessings I have received over the past six months.

When I look at the people at this church who have touched my life, when I think of all the ways that God has transformed my life, has transformed me—I just can’t fathom, I just can’t wrap my brain around it all.

How can this possibly be my life now?

When am I going to wake up?

One of my favorite novels of all time is Holes by Louis Sachar. It is a book for kids, but its theme of redemption and healing, I think speaks to everyone.

In Holes, Stanley Yelnets finds himself sent to Camp Green Lake for stealing a pair of shoes. Though Stanley is innocent of the crime, he accepts what is happening to him because he and his family believe that they were cursed generations ago when Stanley’s great-great grandfather failed to live up to a promise he made to an old gypsy woman.

Stanley and his father live a life where they always expect bad things to happen to them. They expect failure.

Holes is not only Stanley’s story, though. It is also his great-great grandfather’s and it is also the story of a school teacher named Kate Barlow. It is the story of how all these people’s lives intertwine and how finally the curse is broken due to the inherent goodness and persistence of Stanley.

We all go through times in our lives when we feel like we must be cursed, when nothing seems to go right, when every little thing that can go wrong, does go wrong. We become like Stanley Yelnets and his father. We begin to think that failure is the natural order of things and when good things do happen, we can’t enjoy them because we think that something bad must be right around the corner.

It’s why I’m so terrified of waking up from this marvelous dream.

On Sunday I told Judy B. about that fear, about wondering when I’m going to wake up.

And she just smiled and said, “You’re awake now.”

What a beautiful thing to say. There is no fear of waking up. There is no fear of the dream ending.

Because I’m awake … now.

Is God Listening?

A friend of mine once told me that as long as the doctor doesn’t call you the next day after you’ve had an MRI or other diagnostic test, then you’re probably okay and don’t worry.

Four years ago, I had an MRI done on my back. I was the last appointment of the day. Remembering what my friend told me, I waited the next day for that phone call. I made it through the morning and thought I might be safe. But at two o’clock that afternoon, the doctor’s office called.

A few days later I was sitting in front of a computer screen while my doctor flipped through a digital copy of my MRI. I had been complaining of pain shooting down my legs and the doctor had discovered some weakness in my big toe and ankle. The MRI showed my spinal cord stretched out vertically on the screen like a black inner tube. As the doctor clicked through the images, a white spot appeared in the center of my spinal cord and with each click, the spot grew larger and larger.

“That’s not supposed to be there,” the doctor said, pointing to the spot.

“What is it?” I asked.

He looked at me. “It’s a mass, a tumor.”

As I write this, my prayer for you is that neither you nor anyone you love ever has to hear those words. In my case, even though I had a tumor, I turned out to be one of the lucky ones.

Based on its location, the doctor felt it was either something called an ependymoma or lipoma. These are benign tumors. They rarely metastasize. That was the good news.

The bad news is that they almost always grow. And as they grow, they twist and worm their way through the spinal cord and cause direct damage to the spinal cord or cause weakness and paralysis due to compression of the cord itself.

I was told the tumor had to come out.

That was about the time I started to pray. And I don’t think I stopped praying for the next year and a half. Because every doctor I saw said that the tumor had to come out. It was no easy operation. One doctor told me that it was the equivalent of removing gum from someone’s hair, only in my case the hair was actually nerves that could be damaged during surgery, causing irreparable harm.

My choices were take the tumor out and risk paralysis if something goes wrong during surgery or leave the tumor in and risk paralysis if the tumor continues to grow.

I was terrified and I had no idea what to do. Even though every doctor was telling me to have the tumor removed, I kept feeling in my gut that surgery would be a mistake.

So, I prayed. I remember driving home one night, crying in the car and begging God to tell me what to do. I had seen doctors in Brevard County, doctors at Florida Hospital and every one of them told me to have the surgery, but I couldn’t get past the feeling that surgery was the wrong move.

And then I got angry because I felt that God wasn’t answering my prayers. I felt like He was ignoring me. Why was He so silent? Why couldn’t He just tell me what to do?

Here’s the cool thing.

He was telling me what to do.

That gut feeling I had to wait … that gut feeling came from God. Because while I waited, I had more tests done and I went to more doctors, this time in the Cleveland Clinic down south of here.

And over the next few years, we saw that the tumor, miraculously, wasn’t growing. In fact, the last MRI I had showed the tumor had actually shrunk the tiniest of fractions.  At which point my doctor in Orlando actually dumped me and told me I didn't need to see him again unless my symptoms changed.

I don’t know what would have happened had I had the surgery. I don’t know what my future holds, if the tumor will decide to grow again, but what I learned from this experience is that God is always talking to us.

Let me say it again: God is always talking to us.

The question isn’t “Is God listening?”

The question is … are we?

We want God to speak to us in words.  Do this, don't do that.  But really the most effective form of communication God has is to speak to our heart.  That way our brains don't get in the way.

Don't ignore those "gut feelings."  They could be God impressing something onto your heart.

Contrast

Snow is ugly.

Well … end of winter snow is ugly. End of winter snow is dirty-black and slushy and old and lingering.

The first snow of the year always bathes the world in white.

The last snow of the year turns the world gray.

I was in sixth grade when I first started to take notice of spring, when I first started noticing the return of the robins, poking their beaks through the dead snow, looking for something buried in the thawing earth.

I started to notice the trees, the buds bursting on the branches, ready to sprout green, baby leaves.

The air grew warmer. There were still bursts here and there of a chilled wind—winter still trying to hang on, clawing at the edges. But some days, I went without a coat … and didn’t tell my parents.

It was the first time I truly appreciated the spring. It was the first time I felt a sense of relief that winter was on its way out.

I miss the change of seasons of Florida. I miss the contrast of winter and spring. I think spring does come to Florida, but it does so while we are sleeping. Sometime in March we go to bed and outside everything is brown and chilled and while we sleep, spring comes; the branches shed their dead leaves in one final shudder and in the morning everything is green again and warm. It is winter to summer in an eight hour swing.

We need contrast in our lives. We need both the stale, slumbering days of winter and exciting days of new life in spring to appreciate the significance of both.

Terry Esau writes in his book Surprise Me that God is a painter who works with contrast. “Midnight blue is his favorite color … then, all of a sudden … he splashes some bright reds and yellows in just the right places, and suddenly, we understand. If he had started with the reds and yellows, would we have understood? The night explains the day … the dark illumines the light.”

Without a doubt, for the first decade of the 21st century, I led a very boring, stagnant life. Every day was the same. Nothing ever changed. Days were something to be counted and not something to look forward to. Though I had nothing to complain about, I was leading as Thoreau writes, “a life of quiet desperation.”

On January 1, I sat in the parking lot at Barnes and Noble thinking about the last ten years and finally begging God to do something in my life. I told Him I could not live the next ten years the same way I had lived the last.

But as Pastor Debbie continues to point out to me, there are no such things as wasted years. God has a plan and sometimes He has us in a holding pattern while He gets things ready for the next part of our journey.

Within three months of asking God to change my life, I found Hope.

The blessing of those ten boring, holding pattern years is that thanks to them, I have contrast; I have something to compare with the wonderful things that are happening in my life now.

Where my life used to be routine, where nothing surprising ever happened, God manages to surprise me now virtually every day with something new.

Spring has come into my life.

And it wouldn’t have been nearly as meaningful had it not been preceded by winter.

Hope is a Journey

Below is the text from my Moment in Faith given this morning at the 8:00 and 10:15 services:

A few weeks ago, I was standing outside of the school with another teacher. Both of us were waiting for the rain to let up before we slogged our way through the swamp to our cars. We were just standing there watching the rain and the heavy, dark clouds and finally Susan asked me where I was going.

“To church,” I said.

“On a Tuesday?” she said.

I grinned. “I’d go every day if they’d let me.”

For the longest time, she just stood there and stared at me.

“It’s changed my life,” I told her.

And she nodded. “I know it has,” she said.

It’s one thing to simply tell people how God has changed your life. It’s something else though—something wonderful and beautiful—when people can see that change for themselves—when they can see something new about you in your eyes, in your smile, in the way you walk, how you speak.

And I know what people see in me. It’s an emotion that has filled me and carried and lifted me these past six months.

It’s joy.

C.S. Lewis says that anyone who experiences joy will want it again—which is probably why I keep begging Pastor Debbie to give me more things to do around here.

For me the culmination of that joy was here one month ago when I was confirmed by Bishop Hugo. As you may remember, as soon as I knelt before Bishop Hugo, I started crying and the tears continued when Lorraine and Judy and Robin stood there with me, when they lay their hands on my shoulders and back.

It was like I was being made new. It was the single greatest blessing, greatest healing, greatest joy, I had ever experienced. And I cried because I felt—I saw a glimpse of the depth of God’s love. And it was almost more than I could bear.

Confirmation day was the end of one journey and the beginning of another for me.

Lately, Pastor Debbie’s been throwing around a certain phrase a lot. Maybe you’ve heard her say it.

Hope is a journey.

It’s certainly been a journey for me.

In her sermon last week, Pastor Debbie spoke of the faith story she wrote in seminary. In her faith story she wrote about the One who would come and save her. She writes that, “He said if I followed him he’d take the weight I’d been carrying and show me the way to have life like I’d never imagined.”

Just after my confirmation one of my friends commented that though she didn’t know much of my past, she knew that whatever it was that I was carrying was very, very heavy. She said that since I had found Hope, she had seen that burden vanish. I seemed happier, lighter.

I grew up watching my mother suffer from a horrible, debilitating disease. When I was eleven I attended my best friend’s funeral. Yes, my burden was heavy. But in those years, I never gave up hope; I never doubted God’s love. And the beauty of God’s love is that you don’t have to do anything to earn it.

When I came to Hope, God took that burden from me without me even asking him to do it. It was as if he said, “You’ve carried it long enough.”

And that is why I’m so filled with joy, because of God’s love.

This is the journey of Hope. This is the journey of faith.

It is my story.

But it’s your story too.

Something Unexpected

Last night on Glee, high-school student Rachel and her friends stood around the hospital bed of Burt Hummel, the father of one of their classmates, and sang to him. Rachel sang “Papa Can you Hear Me” and as she later explained, each student was alternating singing to Burt and each song they sang was a prayer.

It was impossible for me to make it through the episode without crying, and I was moved not just by the behavior of the characters but also by the writers of the show who took a chance and presented religion on a mainstream television show in a way that was respectful and open-minded.

After the show was over, I sat down at my computer to try and write my post for today and I was stumped. Lately, it’s been hard for me to write, to capture in words the emotions that I’m feeling. If I had half the talent of Rachel from Glee, I guess I could sing how I feel, but instead, I’m left staring at a computer screen, trying to reign in the emotions so I can put together a coherent thought.

One of the reasons it’s so hard to write, so hard to talk about how I feel, is that the joy never ends. Ever since I walked into Hope last Easter, I have felt nothing but joy. Sure, I still get annoyed at work and frustrated when things don’t work out the way I planned, but overrunning, overlapping all of that is this sense of joy, this excitement at the wonderful and unexpected detour my life has taken.

Something new and unexpected happens to me virtually every day. Every day I can wake up and know that something will happen today, something I could not predict and whatever it is, it won’t be frightening; it’ll be wondrous and holy and magical.

Take, for example, this past Monday night when my mom revealed that she wanted to be Episcopalian now because she wanted to belong to the same denomination I do. In the past, I probably would have greeted such a revelation with some skepticism.

But I’ve changed over the past six months and so when my mom said she wanted to become Episcopalian, I knew what she was trying to tell me.

She was trying to tell me that she wanted to be closer to me even though she lives in New York and I only see her once or twice a year. This was her way of connecting to me, a way for her to feel like she was part of my life.

Most importantly, I realized that the part of me that would have written her off in the past—that part of me was healed. I didn’t doubt her. I didn’t question how serious she was. I accepted her at face value and rejoiced that she was being so supportive.

So, I got online and found her several churches in the area she could try.

I hope she finds a church. It doesn’t have to be Episcopalian though that would be amazingly cool. But I hope she finds a church—I hope she finds a church family who can do for her what the people of Hope have done for me. Because she needs that as much I did, maybe even more so.

And if she does find that church—how wondrous will that be.

Everything is New

The first time I saw snow—real snow, not the tiny, little dew-drop snow that fell on Charleston when I was living there—was in the Howard Johnson’s parking lot in Norwich, New York, the town I would call home for eleven years.

I was five-years-old, and I still remember racing out into the parking lot with my mom and dad to see this beautiful thing. The sky was dark and from it fell what looked like tiny stars that gently touched my hands and my face before vanishing, melting in an instant.

But what melted on me, clung to the cold pavement and the hoods and roofs of cars, blanketing everything in white.

A second later, my parents introduced me to a custom common in the north—the snowball fight.

What I remember next is laughter and joy. I had never felt so happy. I had never seen my parents as happy as they were in those few minutes that snowballs darted here and there, arcing in the night sky.

I tasted snow for the first time that night, fresh from the clouds above and it tasted like cold and ice and earth.

I still carry that joy with me. That memory is still strong.

There is a joy in things that are new, like the joy of a first snow, or the joy we feel when we ride our bike for the very first time, the joy of the first day of school, the joy of learning to swim. Of course those things are usually mixed with a fair amount of anxiety too, but it’s the joy that always breaks through.

And the firsts we experience as children are usually the most joyful of all.

What has happened to me over the last five months is a reawakening of that child within. Suddenly everything is new. Everything is a first. And I’m suddenly so happy, I can’t stop smiling.

A few weeks ago, Pastor Debbie asked me to fill in one Sunday as a lector. I was so excited I could barely contain myself. I had wanted to be a lector for so long. I told Pastor Debbie that I felt like I was being called up from the minor leagues.

I was so excited that I completely forgot that when I ended the reading with “the word of the Lord” that the congregation responded “Thanks be to God.” And so when they did respond, I was almost knocked off my feet by the force of those words spoken by a hundred people.

It was amazing.

Just last week, I served as an acolyte for the first time. Again, it was something I had always wanted to do when I was a kid, but never happened because the church I was attending didn’t allow altar girls at the time and by the time they did, I was too old to serve.

But in the Episcopal Church, acolytes can be children or adults and I saw a need for one at the 8:00 service and volunteered.

And again, it was amazing. I was overjoyed. I didn’t have much to do, light the candles, take the gifts, present the offering to Pastor Debbie for blessing. I carried the gospel. Mostly, I just stood there grinning because it was beautiful, it was so wonderful to be there—up there, at the altar during the service, and especially during the Eucharist.

The liturgy is a beautiful thing and experiencing it as a member of the congregation and experiencing it up by the altar as an acolyte are two very different, but equally blessed things. I don’t know that I prefer one experience to the other.

But there is an awareness of something holy when you stand up at the altar. The Eucharistic Prayer feels more present, more defined. There is a certain connection there that I had never experienced before.

It was a joyful first for me and it won’t be a last. Kay Redfield Jamison writes in Exuberance: The Passion for Life, “ As C.S. Lewis has observed, anyone who experiences joy will want it again.”

Without a doubt.  Joy lingers.  Joy makes us search out those experiences again.

Even joys we experienced as children.

Because, after all, there are still days I miss the snow.