Donna Noble

Donna is getting married on Christmas Eve.

It is her dream wedding. She’s marrying a very handsome man. Her dress is gorgeous. Her friends and family are all in attendance. Everything is going to plan—except for one thing.

Her fiancé betrays her at the last minute and brings her to the spider alien he has been working for (hang with me for a second). This empress has been conspiring with Donna’s fiancé and plans on using Donna to help facilitate an alien invasion.

Enter the Doctor. The Doctor is an alien himself, albeit one who has saved humanity again and again. This time is no different. He saves Donna. He saves the world and by the end of the night is making it snow for Christmas.

Before he goes, he asks Donna to join him, but it’s all too much for Donna and she refuses and then watches him disappear.

But when Donna wakes the next morning, she realizes that her life has changed in such profound ways that she can’t go back to the life she led before. The world—the universe—is so much bigger than she could have imagined.

She misses the Doctor.

So what does she do? She packs her bags and begins to look for him. She has no idea how long it will take to find him or if she will ever find him, but she knows that when she does, she’ll be ready, bags packed.

This story comes from an episode of Doctor Who, entitled “The Runaway Bride.” Though it takes an entire season, Donna eventually reunites with the Doctor.

Donna is just one of many characters from Doctor Who who find their lives changed in magnificent and wonderful ways, who find their knowledge of the world shaken to its very core by the intrusion of this man, the Doctor.

Unlike Donna who actively searches for the Doctor, the Doctor’s most recent companion, Amy Pond is known as the girl who waited. She didn’t go out looking for the Doctor. In fact, as a child, she wound up asleep in the backyard waiting for him when he promised to come back for her.

I think one of the reasons that people fall in love with science fiction and fantasy stories is that they tell the stories of our heart. They tell stories of longing. They tell stories of worthiness. Dorothy frees Oz from the tyranny of the witch. Lucy, Susan, Edmund and Peter help free Narnia from the White Witch. Harry Potter saves the world from the evil wizard Voldemort. All of these children are orphans, orphans of the war, or orphans simply because their parents are lost. All of them find love and acceptance. All of them find purpose.

Why do you think so many of these stories reflect those themes of longing and worthiness? Why do so many of these stories include saviors? Aslan, the lion, sacrifices himself to save Edmund and then rises from the dead. Harry Potter (spoiler alert), known as the boy who lived, must eventually die and then live again so that the world might be saved. Spock, from Star Trek, dies to save the Enterprise and is then resurrected—thanks to the appropriately named Genesis Device.

The reason that these stories appeal to us is that they all tell the same story, a story that was written into our very souls, a story two thousand years old, a true story, a real story, the story of God who loved us so much, He sent His only son to die for us on the cross.

Donna Noble, realizing that she has found a way to escape the shallow life she has been living, leaves her family, leaves everything behind so that she can be with the Doctor. Amy Pond, realizing that there is someone in the world who knows her better than anyone else, sleeps on her suitcase outside in the cold, waiting for the Doctor to return for her.

Donna is a reflection of the disciples who followed Jesus. Amy becomes a Mary Magdalene figure, waiting for her savior to return.

C.S. Lewis knew the power of stories. He knew that the stories he wrote could help us connect better to Jesus. Aslan, himself, tells the children that he is known by another name in our world, and that by knowing him in Narnia for a little while, they might know him better in their own world.

Fantasy and science fiction don’t tell the stories of worlds apart from our own. They tell our story. They tell the story of our world. They hold our world up to a mirror so that we might better see it and understand.

In many ways, they help us connect to the truth of who we are and what has been done for us through Jesus Christ.

Think about it for a second. Think about your favorite stories growing up. Think carefully about how those stories spoke to you. What did they reveal about the desires of your heart? What did they reveal about your connection to the one who loves you more than you can ever know?

Discernment

Roughly a year ago, I stood in the sanctuary with Pastor Debbie and told her for the second time that I felt a calling to the priesthood. Like the first time I mentioned it to her, she didn’t question it. And, in fact, this time she told me that if I was serious about the calling the first step on that journey was signing up for the Conference on Ministry held each September.

In the Episcopal Church, if you want to be a priest, you don’t just simply attend seminary and “poof” become a priest. Before all that happens, the Episcopal Church asks that you go through a yearlong period of discernment during which time you are known as an aspirant.

This period of discernment involves paperwork, reflection, interviews, more reflection, a physical so detailed that my own doctor said it might qualify me for the space program, and a battery of psychological testing and evaluation. During the discernment process, there are many opportunities for someone, whether it be the Bishop’s Advisory Council, or your own Parish Discernment Committee or even the psychologists, to say no, we don’t think you should be a priest.

I started the discernment process ironically the day before I actually became an Episcopalian. I attended the Conference on Ministry on September 11th and was confirmed in the Episcopal Church the next day September 12th. I was surprised that someone didn’t stop my journey right then. How could I possibly want to be a priest in the Episcopal Church when I wasn’t even an Episcopalian yet?

Every time someone interviewed me, I shared with them my story. I told them how I had always felt a special connection to God even as a child, how in college I had felt called to the ministry even though I didn’t have a church. I told them about walking into Hope Episcopal Church for the first time on Easter, 2010. I told them how everything clicked into place, how God had finally shown me the picture to go with the puzzle pieces I had been trying to put together blindly all these years.

I told them how I knew, how I absolutely knew that this was what God wanted for me, what He had always intended for me. I could finally see how He had used the events of my life to bring me to this point.

Everything made sense now. My life had purpose. All my life I had been afraid, but now I knew that God walked alongside me. There was exuberance in my life now. I was the person in Matthew 13:44 who finds treasure in a field, hides it and then, in joy, goes and sells all that I have to buy the field.

My calling was my treasure.

A few weeks ago, I completed the last of the psychological evaluations. And then yesterday, I received my letter from Bishop Howe stating that I was no longer an aspirant, but that I had been accepted as a postulant.

The discernment process was over.

Of course, discerning God’s plan for our lives is never truly over. Though the technical discernment process is over, I will still be discerning what God intends me to do as I continue this journey. For example, do I continue with the plan of going to seminary part time, or do I find a way to go full time?

Please continue to keep me in your prayers.

Quantum Leap

The television show Quantum Leap is the story of a man, Sam Beckett, who travels through time, righting wrongs, and generally acting as a guardian angel of sorts who helps people who are most in need.

What made Quantum Leap a different kind of time travel story when it first premiered in 1989, were the constraints put on Sam’s journey. He could only travel back and forth within his own timeline (except for the time he went back to the Civil War) and he didn’t travel through time as himself. Each time he “leaped” into someone else’s life. So that every time he looked into a mirror, it was someone else’s face he saw.

The other rule is that Sam can only “leap” after he has fixed whatever problem he is facing in that time period. And he has to “leap” because otherwise he will never make it home.

That is Sam’s goal—to get home, back to his wife and family.

Sam eventually comes to believe that God Himself or some other higher power is leaping him around in time. And when he finally confronts God in the last episode of the series, he asks to be sent home.

But God, in the form of a bartender named Al, reveals something startling to Sam.

He and Sam have the following conversation:

Al: Why did you create Project Quantum Leap?

Sam: To travel in time.

Al: Why’d you want to travel in time?

Sam: To change the world.

Al: To make it a better place.

Sam: Of course.

Al: To put right what once went wrong?

Sam: Yes, but not one life at a time.

Al: At the risk of overinflating your ego, Sam, you’ve done much more. Much, much more. The lives you touched, touched others. And those lives, others. You’ve done a lot of good, Sam Beckett and you can do so much more.

Sam then reminds Al that his only goal is to get home. But Al then makes an interesting comparison.

Al: If the priesthood had been your chosen life, even though the Church might send you from parish to parish, don’t you have to accept responsibility for the life you lead?

In the end, Sam decides (keyword Sam) to continue leaping through time so that he can help others. He sacrifices a life with his family and friends. He leaves them so he can serve God. Though Sam has told himself repeatedly that the only thing he wants in all the world is to go home, he gives it all up, because he suddenly realizes that isn’t what he wants at all.

In this last episode of Quantum Leap, we see God giving Sam a choice. And that is how God works. God always gives us a choice even though He knows what that choice will be.

As much as Sam thought he wanted to go home, he also knew that despite the danger involved with leaping through time, that the ability to change lives as he had been doing was a gift, a profoundly beautiful gift that he could not let go of.

Matthew 13:44-45 says, “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys the field. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it.”

What do these two verses say? Finding the kingdom of heaven, finding God, finding a way to serve God, is like finding treasure, a treasure that we will sacrifice everything for. And we won’t make those kinds of sacrifices with bitterness, but with joy. With joy he “sells all that he has and buys the field.”

With joy.

That is how I know I’m on the right path. For many years, I thought I wanted one thing. Like Sam, I was confused. I thought I wanted what everyone wants, a house, a job, money in the bank.

But now I know that’s not what I want at all. Now I know I would give up all that in this journey to the priesthood. And surprisingly that doesn’t frighten me. It should frighten me and sometimes my brain gets too involved with the process and I am frightened, but then I remember the joy.

I feel the joy that lives in my heart, that sometimes takes my breath away and I know that there is nothing in this world I would want to do, nothing in this world that I could do, nothing in this world that would ever bring me that same joy that being a priest will.

Quantum Leap was my favorite show when I was a teenager and now I know why.

It was prepping me for a different sort of leap.

Weathering the Storm

When I first moved to Florida, I found a small apartment about a mile from work and thought I was set. I wound up living there for six years and they were six very trying years. During the time I lived there the following things happened: three people died, police dogs patrolled the hall outside my door, and my neighbor tried to set fire to my door.

The last year I lived there, I slept on my couch every night with a hammer in hand in case someone tried to break in. When I had to walk from the car to my apartment at night, I carried a cell phone, not so I could call 911 (the phone was ancient and didn’t work) but so I could bean someone in the head with it should they try and rob me (the phone was ancient and huge).

Years later when someone asked me if I had any problems with roaches when I lived there, I looked them straight in the eye and without blinking said, “No, not roaches.”

One night, I couldn’t take it anymore and I called an attorney and asked if I had cause to break my lease. He brushed me off and told me simply no. I cried that night. I cried hard. The situation felt hopeless to me. I was terrified, scared to sleep at night, and I had no escape.

A few days later, a lady at work, whose husband was in real estate, offered me a condo to rent. It was a miracle. It was just what I needed. Despite the cost, I decided to break my lease. But then the condo association informed my would-be landlord that they don’t allow cats and that was it … poof … there went my miracle.

Once again, I felt myself falling into despair.

Today I was reading King’s Cross and the story from Mark chapter 4. Jesus and the disciples are on a boat in the middle of a storm. The waves are huge and crashing into the boat, threatening to swamp it. The disciples are appropriately freaked out, not just by the storm, but by the fact that Jesus is sleeping through the whole ordeal.

So they wake him and say, “Don’t you care if we drown?”

Later in Mark chapter 5, a synagogue ruler named Jairus asks Jesus to heal his daughter. She’s very sick with a fever and it’s urgent that Jesus come quickly, but along the way, Jesus is seemingly distracted by a woman who touches his cloak and is healed. Because Jesus takes a moment with this woman, the child he is going to see dies.

Here are two stories that begin with a portrait of an indifferent Jesus, a Jesus who doesn’t seem to get it. He doesn’t care that his disciples are about to drown. He doesn’t see the urgency in going to heal Jairus’s daughter. He sleeps. He plods. He’s in no hurry.

This is the Jesus we see when we feel helpless. This is the Jesus we see when we are in the storm with the waves crashing around us. This is the Jesus we see when we have lost all hope.

Our despair clouds our vision and we miss out on seeing just who Jesus is.

So who is the real Jesus?

Well, after the disciples wake Jesus during the storm, he tells the wind and the waves to be still and they are in an instant.

And when he finally gets to Jairus’s daughter, he can’t heal her of her illness since she’s already succumbed, so he raises her from the dead instead.

What were the reactions to these miracles? Mark writes that the disciples were more afraid after Jesus calmed the storm than when the storm threatened their lives. Mark writes that Jairus and the others were “astonished” by the miracle Jesus performed.

What do these two stories have in common? They both have people who were impatient with Jesus, who doubted him, who nearly let their worry and grief consume them, and then were ultimately given miracles more astounding than anything they could have imagined.

Timothy Keller asks this question: “Are you trying to hurry Jesus?”

I remember that when I lived in that horrible apartment I could not understand why such a horrible thing was happening to me. I could not understand why nothing was working out despite how much I prayed. I loved God. I believed in Him. Why wasn’t He answering my prayers?

I wanted God to save me and I wanted Him to do it right that second.

Instead I had to wait and that wait was agonizing.

But low and behold, a few months later, my crazy neighbors were evicted and a few months after that a friend offered me another apartment. I wound up moving out just when my lease was up. I didn’t have to sacrifice any money and I wound up moving to an apartment where I would feel safe and secure for the four years I would wind up living there.

Sometimes the miracle we want is not the miracle we need.

And sometimes the miracle God has in store for us is so much better than anything we could picture.

We have to trust Him.

We have to trust even when it looks like we’re going to drown.

Why, Timothy Keller asks, would you ever doubt God, who as Jesus weathered the ultimate storm on the cross? He says, “If the sight of Jesus bowing his head into that ultimate storm is burned into the core of your being, you will never say, ‘God, don’t you care?’ And if you know that he did not abandon you in that ultimate storm, what makes you think he would abandon you in the much smaller storms you’re experiencing right now?”

Praying for Rain

Last night I prayed for rain. I prayed that Tropical Storm Brett would turn this way and drop a nice non-destructive gentle rain on us for the next week, all in the hopes that such rain would keep my air conditioning-less condo cool.

Then I realized that the repairman can’t work on the air conditioning in the rain.

Which just goes to show how even our most basic, simplest prayers can go wrong and how, more often than not, we’re not even praying for the right thing.

I’ve been rereading King’s Cross by Timothy Keller for a book study I’m leading. Each time now that I read it, I seem to be going through a different trial in my life and each time I read it, I get something new out of it.

In the second chapter, Timothy Keller addresses Mark 2:1-5. These verses describe the scene of the paralytic, the paralyzed man who is lowered through the roof of the home Jesus is preaching in. Keller describes this as a dramatic scene. The house is crowded. There isn’t even any room outside the door to listen and then here comes these men, who cut a hole in the roof so they can bring their friend to Jesus for healing.

We know exactly what’s going to happen next, because we think we know Jesus so well. He’s going to lay his hand on the man and heal him. Everyone knows this is going to happen. It is rather anticlimactic.

Except that isn’t what happens at all.

Jesus looks at the man and says simply, “Son, your sins are forgiven.”

Imagine, Timothy Keller writes, how this man must have felt. He came there to walk again. How is forgiving his sins going to help him walk?

Keller goes on to explain what Jesus is trying to accomplish here. He writes: “Jesus is saying, ‘By coming to me and asking for only your body to be healed, you’re not going deep enough. You have underestimated the depths of your longings, the longings of your heart.’”

It has made me absolutely sad and sick at heart these past few days without air conditioning. Yes, it’s warm, but more than that, I hate having something broken in my life. I hate chaos. I hate feeling helpless. I have a hard time doing normal things when the world around me isn’t perfect.

But what Jesus shows me, what he shows all of us with the paralytic, is that we have such a limited understanding of our needs. Because, let’s face it, even when the temperature is nice and cool in my condo, I still struggle with deeper things. I still feel restless. I still long for something more.

We all do.

We think if only we had a bigger house or a nicer car, if only we didn’t have to worry about the bills.

If only it would rain today.

But those things will never heal us.

That longing we have, it’s for a deeper relationship with God.

And that is what Jesus gives the paralytic. He forgives him of his sins. He takes away the barrier between God and the man.

Only then does he tell the man to stand up.

The Best of Us

This past Monday I sat with a psychologist, a required part of the discernment process for becoming a priest.

We talked about my positive outlook on life. You see when you come across as exceptionally positive on personality tests, the irony is that they think you’re being deceptive.

I made no apologies to the psychologist for my positivity. The best I could do was quote Anne Frank as I have many times before. “In spite of everything,” she said, “I still believe people are good at heart.”

Anne Frank wasn’t naïve. She lived through the worst of the Holocaust and would eventually die in a concentration camp, but she chose a positive outlook because she felt she had to, to believe the opposite, to believe that some people had nothing but evil in their hearts was too horrible for her to live with. So she chose to be positive. She chose hope.

Living a positive life is not easy. Two days after I met with the psychologist, the air conditioning in my house broke. It’s Florida. It’s July. It’s a little hot without air. I called out the repairman, thinking it would be a quick fix. But here it is five days later and I still don’t have air.

It’s never a good thing when the repairman tells you that you have a worst case scenario problem. It’s never a good thing when the repairman dumps you because the job is too big for him.

At first, I was very angry at the situation. I felt helpless and just flat out angry and bitter. The bitterness turned to tears but on Friday morning I woke up with a kind of acceptance. Just like with my car accident a few months ago, things are always going to happen to us that are beyond are control and once we admit that, we can better turn it over to God.

Even in the midst of sweltering heat and increasing humidity (this afternoon, the humidity got to my light fixture which lost its grip on the ceiling and plummeted a few inches and is now hanging precariously by a wire), I try and look for the good. I try and look for my pockets of light.

I found three this past week. I found it in the first air conditioning repairman who after charging me $200 for the work he did on Wednesday, returned the money to me on Friday, saying his conscience wouldn’t let him keep it considering the air still wasn’t fixed.

I found it in the downstairs neighbor I didn’t know I had who let me and a strange man (the repairman) into her condo after knowing me all of twenty seconds so we could check the pipes that ran through her unit. We had a good chat and after living here for three years, she’s the only neighbor I now know by name.

I found it on Friday afternoon when I got home from the store with my new room air conditioner and discovered that getting it up the stairs was going to be impossible. Behind me a man was wandering around, checking out my condo building, looking like he was waiting for someone. That someone turned out to be me. He offered to help and carried up that massive box to the second floor.

I thank God for those people because I believe, like Anne Frank, that people want to do good, that people want to do the right thing and that we should work in this life to give people every opportunity to do that.

Doing good for others feels … good. It feels right. It completes us because when we do right by others, we have a Jesus moment as we become the people God intended us to be.

With the air still broken, there will be lots of opportunities for me to see the good in others. There will be lots of opportunities for God to use a bad situation and turn it into good.

A Different Kind of Revelation

A few weeks ago, my friend Judy took me to a small store in Vero Beach called Trafalgar Square. The trip was a belated birthday present and Judy had kept our destination a secret, right up until the moment we pulled into the parking lot.

As soon as I walked in the store, though, I knew where she had brought me. The smell of old books slid along a breeze as I opened the door. And for a moment, that smell brought me back to a childhood of wandering used bookstores and libraries.

Trafalgar Square isn’t a used bookstore. Though it carries antique books, it also carries various odds and ends, both old and new, with a distinctly British flare, from canes to books and games. It is a store where it’s possible to get lost in those childhood memories.

When we walked in, Judy went to the woman behind the desk and immediately asked her to show us the fore-edge books. The woman then led us up a few stairs to a glass cabinet, where she produced a key, unlocked the cabinet and withdrew a very old Bible. I believe she said it was 17th century. It was a marvel in and of itself, in excellent condition.

I wanted to hold it, but I was too afraid to ask and the woman wasn’t done showing the book’s secrets.

She opened the book, grabbed the edge of the pages between her fingers and thumb and fanned the pages out. Instantly a picture emerged.

This Bible was no ordinary Bible (though what Bible is). It was a fore-edge Bible. Someone had painted along the edges of the pages so that when the book was closed the picture was invisible. But when you fanned the pages, the image appeared. And if you didn’t know to look for it, you might never see it.

She showed us other fore-edge books, all in phenomenal condition. She showed a book by Byron and hidden there on the fore-edge was a picture of the author himself.

It was an amazing, hold-your-breath, kind of moment.

This morning, in my children’s talk, I told the kids about the first time Pastor Debbie led me through the woods, late one night, to see the bridge that had been built there among the trees. I told them how it was a special moment because it was dark and I was afraid of the dark and I couldn’t see a thing, but what a wonderful surprise it was to find this beautiful bridge in the midst of the darkness. A bridge, carved in part, from the surrounding trees.

Our lives are filled with revelatory moments, moments when something magical and transformative happens. A book holds a secret painting. Moonlight and flashlight reveal a bridge in the midst of a darkened wood. A space shuttle launches its final mission and the last astronauts of Atlantis see the blue sky give way to the vast expanse of God’s universe.

And I can’t help but think that we should live our lives in a constant search for these moments, moments that surprise us, moments that touch that imagination thread that weaves through our souls.

It is these moments that push us closer to God.  In these moments we can almost see Him, even if what we see is only an atom or sliver of who He is.  It is still enough to wow us.

Fear Not

When I was seventeen I was cast as M’Lynn Eatenton in our high school’s production of Steel Magnolias. You may remember the movie in which the part of M’Lynn is played by Sally Field. It is a role probably best known for the scene in which M’Lynn breaks down crying (in the cemetery in the movie, in the beauty shop in the play). It is heartbreaking and heartwrenching to watch as this strong woman bares her grief for the world to see.

The irony for me in portraying M’Lynn is that it wasn’t this scene that put butterflies in my stomach. Having an emotional explosion on stage didn’t frighten me in the slightest. I loved being on stage. The irony is that the only nerves I ever felt were backstage, behind the curtain, moments before I made my entrance in scene one.

I would sit backstage, hugging my knees to my chest, while a friend stood behind me and rubbed my shoulders. I felt like I had swallowed piranhas who were viciously trying to make their escape through my stomach wall.

It was brutal and agonizing.

But the moment I stepped out on stage during the first scene, the very second I stepped through the door and was blinded by the spotlights, all those piranhas vanished. All worry disappeared to be replaced by a surge of adrenaline and endorphins. I loved being on the stage. It was a beautiful, beautiful thing.

How did such a thing happen? How was I able to leave the fear behind? I think I was partly helped by those spotlights. If you’ve ever been on stage, then you know that when the spotlights are on you, you can’t see any of the audience. So when I stepped out on the stage, it was like I was stepping out into my own private little world. I was able to compartmentalize the fear and embrace the adrenaline, using it for good.

I keep thinking of Peter stepping off the boat to walk on water out to Jesus. I keep thinking about how he was doing it. He was actually walking on water, until he stopped for a second and saw where he was. He lost the moment. He lost his focus and realized that what he was doing should be impossible and that was when he started to sink.

Fear, in that way, keeps us sedentary. It keeps us from moving because the task we are given seems impossible.

Recently, I finished reading My Year with Eleanor about a woman, Noelle Hancock, who takes a quote from Eleanor Roosevelt—Do one thing every day that scares you—and decides to live that for a whole year.

Fear can be a wonderful thing sometimes—it keeps us out of nasty situations, but, as Noelle learned, fear can also keep from doing things that are perfectly safe and that we might enjoy. And if we let fear run our lives, we can become very depressed, unhappy people.

Noelle takes herself to task, forcing herself to do scary things from the small—sending back a meal at a restaurant that hadn’t been cooked to her liking—to the big, swimming with sharks, climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, giving up sleeping pills.

And while it seems unlikely she will ever swim with sharks or climb a mountain again, she discovers that she loves the person she has become, that she loves life more, that she’s happier and freer than she had been in a long time.

I told Pastor Debbie some weeks ago that nothing I have done at Hope has been comfortable for me. Everything I do there sends the piranhas back to my stomach. But that isn’t the point. The point is that even though I’m afraid, I don’t let that fear stop me from doing new things, mostly because I’ve put my faith in God and I trust the people He has put in my life.

And it also helps that I've wound up loving everything that I was initially afraid of.

Today I did the Children’s Talk during the 10:15 service (the children’s sermon if you will). It was my second time, my first being just last week. Like last week, my hands shook and my stomach was in knots, but the second I got to the front of the church and sat with the children, all fear vanished.  And much like I was in Steel Magnolias, I loved being there.  I loved talking to the kids.  I loved sharing with them things I had learned.

Today’s topic was on fear. I pulled out an old Bible Storybook that my grandparents had given my dad and he had given me and I showed the kids pictures of Noah and the Ark, Deborah leading the Israelite army, Joseph in Egypt and Daniel with the lions.

“How do you think Daniel felt?” I asked the kids.

Silence.

“How would you feel if you were surrounded by lions?”

“Scared,” a girl responded.

“Daniel,” I said, “was probably very afraid, but like everyone in this book, when he was afraid, he turned to God and God was with him.”

God is with us always.

We are saved from the lions of life.

Fear not.