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.

Blazing Trails

In my third through eighth grade years my family lived on a 40 acre farm in Michigan. We raised some chickens, occasionally some ducks and a pile of barn cats. My mom insisted on having a garden in which to torture her sons with the spirit-breaking task of pulling weeds 45 minutes a few days each summer while paying five cents for each ice cream bucket that we filled. That was the extent of our farming. Two fields were rented out to a neighbor who planted corn in them and there were two fields that had been hay fields for the previous owner. Since we didn’t raise livestock we let the grass grow tall in those fields.

We called these two unfenced hay fields of tall grass “the weeds” to distinguish them from the areas of cut grass around the house that we called the lawn. My brothers and I spent hours playing in the weeds every summer. There were no trails so we would blaze our own, carrying our bare arms at shoulder height so they wouldn’t be cut by the slicing blades of grass. Sometimes we would turn around and follow our new trail back out and sometimes we would make a new trail through to the other side of the field.

Standing on the edge of the field I could see where we had been. I don’t remember any of the trails ever being straight. Each one meandered and twisted through the tall grass. Sometimes they went around patches of nettles or around a rock but most of the time the crooked path was simply due to the fact that something inside us told us to step over this way or follow the slope of the land that way. Or, more likely, there was nothing inside of us that insisted that we travel a straight line.

 As a kid it would have made no sense to stand at the edge of the field and wait for a path to appear so that I knew where to go. I knew that playing in the field was fun and a large part of the fun was creating our own trails. We learned painful and irritating lessons about nettles and cockleburs by walking through them. We would be startled and excited by a noisy pheasant taking flight being flushed from its hiding place in the weeds. We would avoid the corner of the field where we could smell that a skunk den had been built. We were scared out of the field for days when a ground hog bull rushed its way past us low in the grass.

Had we stood on the side of the field waiting for a path to appear we would have missed all of this.

That’s the problem with waiting for God to reveal each new step in our lives. It completely ignores the fact that we learn through our experiences. It actually disengages us from the fullness of life that is given to us as a gift. But the biggest problem is that it immobilizes us with fear. When we wait to be absolutely sure of God’s next step for us we become anxious that we will miss it. We hesitate, afraid that it is too soon to move. We fret that we may have missed our opportunity and now it is too late.

The Plan

For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.

-Jeremiah 29:11

I believe that God does have a plan for us. However, it is not as specific as we sometimes wish that it would be. Instead, what if God’s plan for us is to set us free from fear (fear of harm, destruction, death etc…) so that we can live in the fullness of this life? What if God’s deepest desire isn’t to create a world full of obedient people but is to see the gift of this life experienced in all of its glory and tragedy? What if the point is to be blazing trails through the field of life instead of standing where we are in hopes that a straight and narrow trail with fences on both sides appears to lead us to the other side?

So then, if we are truly engaged and are blazing trails through this field of life, what does it mean to “wait upon the Lord?” What exactly are we waiting for?

A bit more about that tomorrow…