Soaking It In

Sometimes when we are paying the least attention we gain all kinds of knowledge and experience that will benefit us in surprise ways later in life. During the time that I quit thinking about becoming a pastor I gained so much knowledge about leading a faith community that I am still sorting out what I learned.

Moving to Dubuque changed everything about my life. The three places that my life took shape; home, school and church, all seemed to be completely reversed. Dad was now home instead of mom who was working in a department store. There was less income, a smaller house with a tiny yard and neighbors so close it felt claustrophobic. School was huge; an overcrowded limestone monolith containing more than 1600 strangers. Church was bigger too. It was more formal, less friendly and it certainly didn’t need the kind of help that I was familiar with offering.

What choice did I have but to make the best of it? That doesn’t mean that I did so happily or quietly. I remember making my family, and especially my parents, miserable at times. In those four years of high school I did my share of rebelling and of being a jerk. But I did some good things too. I got more involved in music. I explored some artistic endeavors. (Don’t ask my mom about the way I painted my bedroom. She still gets the shakes when she thinks about it.) I eventually made some good friends and learned to navigate the changes at home, the hallways and social situations at school and the very different feel of faith in the new church.

While I was preoccupied with my particular strain of teenage angst and ignoring any sense of call to ordained ministry two things became everyday events that would shape my understanding of ministry. First, my dad took a part-time job as custodian of the church we attended and he invited me to join him. I emptied wastebaskets and cleaned floors in the evenings and on Saturdays. I witnessed all the behind-the-scenes activities that keep a church going. I got to know the people on staff; the pastors, the secretaries, the youth director and some key volunteers who were frequently present. I found the people who work at a church to be ordinary people. They had lives outside of the church. They struggled with family issues, grief and stress. They showed up to work exhausted because there was so much going on in their lives. They had good days and bad days. They lost their temper when things weren’t going well and they could be very forgiving and encouraging too.

The second thing that happened is that my dad started processing what he learned at seminary as we sat at the dinner table. He told us about conversations in which he and his classmates speculated on different subjects. What if Jesus had gotten married? What if he had died a different kind of death? What if Mary wasn’t really a virgin when Jesus was born? For the first time I was becoming aware that open-minded speculation about some of the hard and fast doctrines of the church was okay. Suddenly, faith became something that I could participate in beyond memorization and regurgitation. Faith was something that could be tested and explored. God became bigger than my Sunday School lessons and catechism explanations. It was as if all the recorded scripture and theology was a leaping off point instead of a landing zone. It was there to help launch us into a life-long experience of finding God wherever we find ourselves to be physically, emotionally or spiritually.

The lessons I learned when I wasn’t paying attention have done more to shape my understanding of ministry than any class in seminary. They are the places I fight the hardest to maintain my sanity and dignity in this calling. They are the issues that cause me the most heartache and joy. Perhaps being an ordinary person willing to explore extraordinary possibilities is what we are all called to in whatever ministry we serve.

Dubuque

I really can’t talk about my call into ordained ministry without talking about my dad’s call into ordained ministry. For the first 14 years of my life my dad worked at Oldsmobile as an electrical engineer. The summer before my 8^th grade year I learned that this was going to change.

Normally during the summer our family would spend a week or two vacationing in a pop-up camper at a state park somewhere in Michigan with a nice lake and a sandy beach.  We also spent the 4th of July week in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan for a family reunion on my mom’s side of the family. The announcement early that summer that we were going west on vacation to see the Mississippi River made me excited to see something that I had only seen in books and on TV. But it also raised some suspicions. Why now? And why were we going to Dubuque, Iowa to see the river there?

To be honest, Dubuque in the late 1970’s was not a vacation destination for anyone.  I’m sure we must have done some touristy things but I don’t remember much about the vacation. The one “highlight” was visiting Wartburg Seminary. The limestone block buildings, the classrooms, the library and the chapel were like nothing I’d ever seen before. The statue of Martin Luther holding a Bible in front of the small campus and the well-kept grounds reminded me of the university buildings I had seen during cutaways from Saturday afternoon football games on TV. We walked through married campus housing which consisted of a trailer court and a couple of old Victorian houses that had been converted into apartments.

I didn’t quite understand why we were visiting the school you attended if you wanted to be a pastor in the church, nor why it was the highlight of our vacation. Staying in a hotel room with five other people was a new experience but I missed the beaches and campfires. I fell asleep to the loud drone of the hotel air conditioning instead of the muffled sounds of other campers settling in for the night.  This didn’t really alarm me or upset me, though. It was just one more of those weird things that my parents did which my middle-school self didn’t understand.

A month or so after we returned from that vacation mom and dad gathered me and my brothers together and told us that we were going to be moving to Dubuque the following summer. They told us that dad was going to leave his job at Oldsmobile and go to school to become a pastor. They told us to keep it a secret and not tell any of our friends. I’m not usually good at keeping secrets but for some reason I didn’t want to talk about this.

Throughout the coming year we would talk about moving in quiet little snippets. My grandparents were concerned that we would be living so far away and that my dad was quitting his well-paying job. My brothers and I were concerned about being the new kids in school and about leaving friends behind. I wondered what High School would be like and how I would get along in a class of 450 instead of 30. I hate not knowing that to expect and there was no way I could know what was coming with this move.

The thing I couldn’t talk about was the way I thought my dad was taking my call away from me. I suppose there is a time in every kid’s life when the last thing they want to be is like their parents. Because I look so much like my dad I was accustomed to hearing how I was exactly like him and I was tired of it. Now my dad was laying everything on the line to become a pastor, the thing I secretly thought was my calling. Never mind that I hadn’t mentioned that dream to anyone or that I didn’t completely understand it myself. It just felt that if I became a pastor it would be one more way that I was like my dad. So I stopped thinking about being a pastor. It would be another five or six years before I admitted to myself that I was indeed sensing a call into ordained ministry.

Stranger in a Strange Land

At some point the charms of suburban living began wearing thin on my parents and they started talking about moving again. I was too caught up in riding bikes, building forts and joining my friends in tormenting neighborhood girls to pay attention to what my parents were going through. Even if I had paid attention I imagine it was one of those “grown up” things that I wouldn't be able to understand for years to come..

When it was all said and done my parents bought an old farmhouse and forty acres of land about 25 miles from the subdivision. Neatly landscaped lawns and paved streets were replaced by cornfields and a dusty, gravel road. Instead of being surrounded by similar looking homes the farmhouse was encircled by barns and sheds. The closest neighbor lived over a quarter mile away. The nearest town, and the place I would attend school, was five miles away but the bus ride to get there was over an hour long.

The farm held all kinds of new experiences for me: There were trees on the property that were actually big enough to climb. There were barns to explore. There were fields to play in. The old house still had a coal-fired furnace. Every morning in the winter my dad or mom would go down to the damp and dirty basement to shovel coal onto the fire so the house would warm up for the day. My parents began remodeling almost immediately. Walls were knocked down, a stone fireplace was installed and we started living in what would become and endless construction zone.

Moving from a suburban culture to a rural lifestyle and having to make new friends was difficult enough without having to adapt to a second cultural change. Our new community was predominantly populated by the spiritual nemesis of Lutherans around the world: Catholics.

Evidently 480 years hadn’t been enough time to forgive each other for insults spoken during the Protestant Reformation. There was (and still is to some extent) a fear among parents that conversion was a real possibility and would result in eternal damnation if not eternal parental shame. For five centuries the animosity has run so deep that even today I still get surprised looks when I acknowledge that my Catholic friends are indeed Christians. Nobody was hostile towards us but there was always a sense of awkward wariness.

 The most surprising part was just how Catholic the new community was. I was one of only four kids in my grade who were not released to participate in religious education and attend weekly Mass (and whenever there was a feast day if I remember correctly). In fact, the public school system arranged for the middle school classes to be held in the school building owned by the Catholic parish that stood adjacent to the elementary school. I can’t imagine such an arrangement in today’s climate of church/state separation but it worked out well enough for the community back then.

I learned a lot from my new friends. I learned that they got bored during church services just like I did. I learned that they also wondered why church doctrine seemed so important to adults. I learned that, like me, they weren’t supposed to talk about these things but were to obediently attend worship and learn the rules. What I really learned is that we are more alike than I had been led to believe.

In the Bible, as people move to new places there is a dynamic tension between being integrated into the culture and maintaining a strict separation for purity reasons. (Since each group had its own god/s it’s hard to separate the racial and spiritual reasons for maintaining this separation.) It seems that no matter how strong the urge is within us to meet new people and learn from them there is always someone (sometimes ourselves) telling us that it is dangerous and that we should stay apart.

What I am learning is that I enjoy life a lot more when I can find the similarities between other people and myself. It’s easy to spot the differences and to be captivated by them making us wary and afraid. Seeing the way we are similar is harder. It often requires looking deeper into ourselves as well as the other. And when we see similarities it often reveals things about ourselves that we would rather not admit.

Moving to a new place always puts us in the position where we need to decide if we are going to stick with the habits and ways to which we have become accustomed or if we will expand what we know about the world and ourselves. The fact that God so frequently calls and leads people to new places makes me think that perhaps there are more blessings to be found for everyone as we learn from those who are different from ourselves.

On the Move

One of the predominant, but rarely talked about, themes of the Bible is moving. The characters in the Bible are constantly moving, asking to move or being asked to move. Adam and Eve are moved out of the garden. Abraham was called to a new land. Jacob moved to escape his brother’s wrath. Later his tribe moved to Egypt to survive a famine. The nation of Israelites wandered in the wilderness before settling in the promised land. David stayed on the run to hide from King Saul. Jesus’ ministry is described in the gospels as a journey towards the cross. Paul’s travels kept him moving to spread the news about Jesus.

We all know what it is like to move. Just thinking about such a change can cause anxiety to well up inside of us. We leave what has become familiar to face the unfamiliar. We walk away from the comfort that we know in hopes of creating a better life. We venture into unknown places, unknown relationships and, sometimes, unknown customs and cultures. Even when our move is nothing more than leaving one job to take another, we experience the same kind of anxiety and change as if we moved across the country, just on a lower level.

So far in my life, I have lived in ten unique zip codes in five different states. I’ve moved more than that, however.. I’ve lived in some towns more than once and have moved to a new residence within the same zip code a couple times. I’ve lived in cities, in suburbs, in small towns and in rural settings. Each transition created its own grief over what it being left behind as well as hope for what possibilities existed in the new place. Each place presented its own mix of new values and cultural assumptions. Each move brought unexpected challenges in addition to surprising gifts of wonder and grace.

The first move I remember happened when I was three or four. My family moved from a modest house in the city to a newly built house in the suburbs. Well, it wasn’t a suburb yet. It was a subdivision plopped down in the midst of a cornfield between the city and neighboring town. The landscaped brick wall at the entrance let passersby know that this was no ordinary, run of the mill neighborhood. These homes with sodded lawns and spindly trees were, in fact, Countryside Estates.

The subdivision was primarily one, main street with a couple of other streets that looped around and came back to main drive. In two or three places streets branched off and dead-ended at the edge of the corn field ready for future development. Since there was only one way in and out of the neighborhood there wasn’t a lot of traffic which made it great for being able to ride bikes when I got a little older. The subdivision ended at the top of a small hill in a wooded lot where some of the older kids made bike trails. It always felt dangerous and thrilling to ride through the woods since I was certain that my mom could sense whenever I participated in this forbidden activity.

When we moved to the subdivision we left behind my neighbor Ernie. I remember him being old because he had grown children but he was kind to me and my brother whenever we were outside. He wasn’t the only kindly older person we moved away from either. In the city we lived between my two sets of grandparents, just a few blocks from each. The subdivision wasn’t too far away but it required some planning to get together.

What I gained in the move was a bigger yard to play in (and eventually mow) and a house where I could have my own bedroom, which, as it turns out, was one of the very few times in my life when that was the case. The move also provided a safe place to gain a growing sense of independence. I started school while living here. As I got older I was able to venture beyond the borders of our yard without constant parental supervision. And I began that arduous task of making friends of my own with all the attendant heartache and joy that entails.

People leave home and move away for many different reasons. My parents moved because they thought it would be best for the family. I moved because I had to. We see both of  these reasons for moving in the Bible too. Clans and communities move because they decide it is in the best interest of everyone to make a change. There is better land somewhere else or they can avoid famine over there. But people also move because someone more powerful forces them: A community is sent into exile, an employer transfers a worker to a new city to keep a job or the government announces that a new highway is being built through your neighborhood.

Moving, like any change, is a varied mixture of outside forces and interior desires. No matter what the motivation, however, not moving rarely seems to be a viable option. (Lots of Bible stories are about people’s reluctance but I can’t think of any stories where people refused to move and found blessings. If you can think of one leave let me know.) While we like to think that making such a change on our own terms is better, the truth is that it is difficult regardless of the reasons. Leaving a place of comfort and venturing out to experience something new is never easy but it seems to be one of those things that we are forever being faced with.