Sheared

The Lord is our Shepherd....and we kind of fear His shearers, don't we?

No sheep goes willingly to the barber-shepherd.  They don't line up all excited for the relief of taking that winter wool off.  Maybe it's the noise of the thing, the sharp, buzzing, identifying noise.  Maybe it's the fact that every sheep they've seen go in there comes out naked.  I'm not sure.

But I think that second one is kind of it for us.  We're terrified that when God takes those shearers and starts shaving away at our lives, we're going to come out of it naked.  Or worse.  Yes, there is worse than naked: it's called "stupid."

I can say that because I, like probably many of you, had one of those mothers who wasn't afraid to plop her kids up on the bathroom counter and take a set of scissors to their hair.  And the only hope - the only prayer - you have coming up out of that is that at the very least, you hope she didn't make you look stupid.  Like making an oops and taking out a whole chunk in the back.  Or missing with the straight razor and cutting a line up your head (and into your neck).  Or...heaven forbid...a bowl cut.  You don't want to be the kid at school who has to keep explaining "My mom did it."

Some of us feel that way about the shearers in God's hands.  We're sitting there faithfully, giving Him the benefit of the doubt that He knows at least sort of what He's doing, and praying He doesn't make us look stupid.  Of course, sometimes, we need to look a little stupid.  That's part of gaining wisdom.  That's part of realizing what we thought we had and called wisdom was nothing more than fleshly foolishness.  Sometimes, He's trying to shave off a large swath and we start wigging around so He loses control and the shearers run haywire.  Or we get a weird kind of sheephawk 'do somehow.  It's ok; these things happen.  Sometimes, God makes us look stupid.  And in those moments, we ought to shrug our shoulders, admit it wasn't our first choice, and explain, "My Dad did it."  It's part of the process.

Other times, we'll absolutely walk away naked.  Stripped of all our defense mechanisms.  Stripped of our image.  Stripped of our self-importance.  Stripping of the other million little things we were afraid of losing going in.  We're naked, bare, vulnerable.  He's sheared off all we've built up to define ourselves and to defend ourselves.

Were we to see ourselves in the mirror now, we might just look sad.  Like a long-haired dog coming out of the bathtub.  There's sorta kinda maybe a sheep form under there, but naked, it's hard to tell what that is.  It almost kinda looks like us, but less slendoric than a full-fuzzed, immediately-identifiable sheep.  Maybe that's what it is - we think we can tell a sheep by its wool, and when it stands there naked, what is it?  We have to look a little harder then.

We have to look a little harder at ourselves.  What are we without our wool?  Without all the things we fairly looked like, what are we?  We have to figure out what we are covered in little nicks where our wool didn't shear out; it yanked out, with every bit of resistance it could muster.  We have to figure out what we are without a tuft of our beautiful coat left hanging off of us, with our ears sticking out a little funkier and our misshapen heads beading sweat in the heat of the day and every roll of fat hanging off our sides and our beady eyes gaining new prominence apart from our wool.  It's a time to reassess.  A time to reconsider.  A time to re-story ourselves and figure out - in the Shepherd's hands, who is He making us?

And it's a time to look around at the shearing room floor.  To see what He's sheared off our lives.  To look at what used to be so important to us lying in piles and tufts and reams around the room.  And to realize...

It was all fluff.  Every bit of it.

Where is Truth?

If you want to know where truth is, you have to look past drama.

Drama is our gut reaction.  It is seeing the strongest flares in every situation.  It's drama that looks at the circumstance and becomes adamant.  Webster time!  Adamant: inflexible, unyielding.  (And, I just discovered, that is the second definition for the word; the first entry is "a stone believed to be impenetrably hard."  You learn something every day.  For these purposes, that definition also works.)  Because that's what drama is - it is blinded to everything but what it first senses in a moment.  It's got a one-track mind, and drama will derail you.

You know it's true: we're never really mad about what we think we're mad about.  We're never sad for the reasons we think we are sad.  We're never hurt for the reasons we think we're hurt.  There's something underneath the drama that is actual, and that is truth.

It's the difference between being emotional and raw emotion.  If we can move beyond the drama, we'll find a tender place of truth within us.

Drama turns us outward.  It makes us biting to those around us, because we see our circumstance and even our reaction as their fault.  Someone else's idiocy ruined our perfectly happy, content, good lives.  Drama takes hold of that and muses over a broken world.  A world less than desirable.  A world that can't be fixed.  A world we're always going to have to stand against.  It makes us defensive.  Suddenly, we're living hostile to our world.

Truth turns us inward.  It realizes that all the drama, all the raw emotion of the moment, is not because the world sucks but because there is a raw place within us that has yet to be touched by Love.  Truth takes the moment to pray because it knows there is a question that has to be answered, not by a world but by a truth.  It acknowledges that it is not happy with the circumstance, but it is willing to go deeper and expose the sore spot.  It makes us honest.  Suddenly, we're living graciously to our world.

It's the woman who finds out she's earning less than the man in the cubicle next to her.  Drama puts her on a crusade of feminism, fighting loudly for women's rights, demanding better employment practices, throwing all of her efforts into changing her paycheck.  Truth reminds her that what really stings is the questions this brings up of her worth, what she's been asking for years.  That she's never believed she was good at anything, and here's the proof.  That she's lived her life trying to prove herself and just when she thought she had, she found out she wasn't even close.  Truth exposes that rawness inside of her, and she throws her efforts into healing her heart.

It's the man who lets his teenage son borrow the car only to get a call from the police that there's been an accident.  Drama yells and screams about the totaled car and grounds his son and goes after teen driving laws and speed limits and anything else he can think of and never lets his son live it down.  It rips the two apart.  Truth knows the heart of the matter is that the father knows that mangled mess could have been his son.  He knows they could have pulled his son out of the same ditch in just as many pieces, and he'd have lost something precious.  It brings the two together.

The things we go after when gripped with drama are not necessarily bad, as you can see.  There should be equality for men and women in the workplace.  We should do all we can to protect our children.  But in drama, we go after these things because we're angry.  Or hurt.  Or sad.  We're emotional about them, and we see them as justice.  If we move past drama and into truth, we go after these things because they are right.  We're honest about them, and they are Love.  It's love because suddenly, it's for everyone.  It's not to vindicate us or make us feel better.  It's not for our sake or for our case; it's for building something a little better.  It's for everyone.

Truth makes it love.

And in the interim, on our journey from justice to love, from drama to truth, we pass through some of the rawest places in our own lives.  If we can be honest about them, we may just find an answer to a question we didn't know we were asking.  It's not pleasant to be there, to linger in our woundedness, but if we don't take this moment, there will be more drama.  We can count on that.  Because as long as we let the raw places lay in our lives, this world is going to touch them.

Let's move past drama and into truth, not only to heal ourselves, but to be Love.

From Community to Ministry

This community I've been talking about all week, this little street - I've told you what it means to me.  What it answers for me.  And what it invites me to.  And let me tell you, some of these questions, I've been asking for more than twenty years.

Maybe that's why I'm so in love with here.  Because I have been looking for it for so long.

Having it now is not the end of the quest.  It's not the end of my question, either.  This is the beginning of something new.

When you find something like this, something that answers your questions, speaks to your heart - whether it is community or novelty or stability or whatever that is for you - you can't help but remember how it was before you found here.  Before this day, when time was yesterday and yesterday was heart-aching.  Suddenly, you see it.  You remember all the eyes you've ever seen that are asking the same questions you were asking.  The hearts that know some of the pains you have known.  The lives looking for their answer.

Not everybody is this lucky.  Not everyone settles into a great street; not everyone finds a great community.  In a world that pretends to keep us together while keeping us apart, it's hard to connect to something real, something genuine like this.  Something tangible.  You can't ask Facebook to borrow a cup of sugar.  Twitter's never going to sweat it out in the yard with you.  E-mail isn't going to inflect what love is the way a simple conversation on a porch does.  For all our connectedness, our world is still lacking community like this in far too many places.

We live with the world at our fingertips, but we take great care never to touch it.

I'm telling you - we have to touch it.  We have to reach out to our world.  It's moments like this that make that never more powerful.

Knowing that not everyone will find a place like this, not everyone will fall into a community like this, not everyone will know love, what can we do with what we've got?  We can build it.

In the past several months, perhaps even years when I wasn't paying attention, my heart has been drawn to ministry.  And I mean drawn.  Particularly, into women's ministry.  I see in my sisters - at church, at home, in this community, on this street, and beyond - so much of what I've been asking that God is starting to answer.  It's not that our stories are the same, that we all live exactly the same lives.  It's that as daughters of God living in a fallen world, we have the same deepest questions.  The same deepest longings and wonderings and wanderings.  There's something about being a woman in the kingdom of God, a daughter, looking for Daddy whether you have daddy issues or not.  It's in us.  It's the fallenness in us, compounded by a million other little things.

I can't invite all of these women I meet to move onto my street.  I can't drag them over to the neighbor's porch or borrow the couple's labradoodle to love on them.  But what I can do is build this community for them.  That's where I'm headed.

I don't know all the details; I haven't planned this out in 20 steps or 200 stages or even 2 years.  But I'm looking around and seeing a lot of tender women searching for sisterhood.  Ministry is about building that one connected story at a time, so we are weaving ourselves into each other's narrative and being the kind of women who stand together, who pray together, who cry together, who sing together, who fall to our knees together, and maybe even who bowl together.  Hey, not everything is so serious.  It's about fellowship.  It's about being around and loving one another and knowing each other so well that it's like we see each other in our pajamas every day.  It's about creating a place where we're just living, where life is as it is and that's ok, where this community grows better because you're in it but you don't have to hold it together.  It's not dependent upon doing or being doers; it's dependent upon love and authenticity.

So that's been rolling around in my heart and in my head for quite awhile, and I just thought I'd spill it. And maybe encourage you to look around and start thinking the same - that whatever you've found, wherever you are that answers something you've been asking forever...there's still someone looking for that.  There are people out there who need what you've found.  In this case, who need a place.

Since we can't always bring them here, let's take here there.  Let's look around and build something for our world, knowing what it means to us to be here.  Knowing what Love is.

What can you build for someone today?

Show and Tell

I just came in from the back garden, where I was cleaning up remnants of shingles around the little plants that are starting to bud.  There's not much out there yet - a few squash and zucchini seeds, a couple of watermelon plants - but I ventured out anyway.  The hope is to plant more once they finish re-siding the garage, but there's no use making the guys work around a garden that they'd likely trample anyway.  It's just easier to wait.  And summer looms ahead.

It's been many years since I've planted watermelon.  Not since I was a little girl.  This year, my niece helped to plant a few.  She loves the things.  And even though she's not here all the time, it will be fun to check in on them with her when she visits.  But the problem is this: since I haven't tended a watermelon garden in some 20 years, I wasn't sure if what I was looking at was a watermelon bud...or a weed.  You may remember, last year, I was growing some spectacular ragweed in the front flower bed before realizing just what it was.  (They were the biggest few plants in the whole bed; such a shame to rip them out.)

A rather large bee, likely a borer but who takes chances, chased me away so I wandered back inside to check the internet.  I typed "what a watermelon plant looks like" into my search engine and click!  Rather than the standard search result of photos at the top, sites underneath, I got a lengthy list of websites describing the early and later stages of a watermelon plant.  After clicking on a few, I found they were just that - sites describing the identifying features of a watermelon plant.  Light green leaves, a little silvery streak.  Close to the ground.

Thank you, interwebs.  You just put words to just about every weed I've ever seen.  And apparently, a watermelon plant.  Which I'm still not sure if I have or not.

I had to back all the way out and head through Yahoo's image search engine to find a simple picture.  Isn't that a better way to get me to understand what a watermelon plant looks like?  (And for the record, it kind of looks like a weed.  Now, I'm in trouble.)

It's frustrating, to say the least.  But I'm guilty of it.  I think we all are.

We're living in a world that wants to know the Answer.  There are hearts thirsty for God, searching for something more.  And we, who have it and who have seen it and who are familiar with what that looks like, are very eager to start talking.  Talking, writing, telling others about Him.  Telling them what love looks like.  It is patient.  It is kind.  It is generous.

Thank you, Christians.  You just put words to just about every good deed I've ever seen.  And apparently, a God.  Which I'm still not sure if I have or not.

The best way to get a starving world to understand the Bread of Heaven is to show them.  We've done enough talking, and it's not getting anyone anywhere.  We have the words - an endless stream of them - that people are clicking on, searching through, reading through, poring through and coming up empty.  Still not sure if they've seen God.  Still not sure if they'd recognize Him if they saw Him.

But give them a picture of God, and they will know.  Not a photograph of dusty man in a beard.  Not a caricature of a criminal on a cross.  Give them a picture of Love.  Give them a picture of Healer.  Give them a picture of all God is to you by being that for them.

No, we're not going to get it just right.  That's ok.  But if I know God as Healer and do nothing more than talk about it, people are going to think that's nice, but they'll never meet the Healer.  If I take my peace and scars and meet them at their brokenness and refuse to leave them there, they see Healer and start looking harder for Him.  If I know God as Father and talk about how wonderful that is to an orphaned heart, they're never going to understand what that means.  But if I encourage and love and honor them the way my Father encourages, loves, and honors me, they're going to see Father and start looking for Him more.  If I know God as Love and talk about that love to a woman who stands in the mirror and questions her worth, she'll never understand Love.  She won't be able to.  But if I stand next to her and show her something new in the mirror, if I handle her heart tenderly and open her eyes to see something more in herself, she's going to see more.  She's going to see Love.  And she's going to start looking for Him.

We can talk until we're blue in the face, but the world is not going to find God from our descriptors.  He could walk right past them, and they would never know.  He could stop to help them, and they wouldn't see that it is Him.  Or one of the many deceivers that almost looks like God could fool them and lead them further astray.  That's why we have to show them.  That's why we have to live it out and show them, in no uncertain terms, in no vague words, in no dull, boring, description but in a vibrant photograph a portrait of our God.  We have to show them what He looks like...by loving like He loves.

If we can show the world a picture of God, we invite them to see Him.  To foster His growth and presence in their lives.  The only other choice is for the world to wait and see if their life bears fruit, but by then, it may be too late this season to start over.

What can you do to give your world a picture of God?

Community

I love being a part of this little street.  It's not just that I have a neighbor who will beat up a bad guy for me; it's that this kind of community is the antidote to some of our greatest worries, the answer to some of our biggest questions.

A place like this, it's a niche.  It's that little place in the world where I fit for no other reason than that I am here.  Here, I am surrounded by people who know me.  They know when I come and go.  They see me in my pajamas taking out the trash, in my work clothes with the hole almost unrepairably ripped through the hind end, barefoot or booted up, sweating and friendly or hurried and frantic.  They see me and know me in a way that not a lot of other demographics can....and it doesn't matter because I see them the same way.  Picking up the paper in a bathrobe and slippers.  Mowing the grass with an old man gut hanging over some faded out bermuda shorts.  Sitting on the porch smoking a cigar and talking on the phone just loud enough to be overheard.  Walking the labradoodle (who is absolutely adorable and loves to put my whole forearm in his mouth whilst wiggling his whole body).  Talking to the schnauzer by his nickname..until he's really in trouble for not listening, then using his formal name in a more stern tone.  (On a good day, he's "willie."  But ignoring his owners, he's full-blown "wilson."  Hilarious.)

Around here, we just are.  We're just people with just lives and we're just living and that's ok with everybody.  There's no pressure to prove ourselves or to be something different or something more.  It's alright to be just as we are, and we're woven into the fabric of this street that way.  It's what makes this place work.

The other great thing about that is: no one has to be in charge.  We're not an association; we're more ragtag.  Everything doesn't fall apart if I choose to do something else for a day or if the woman across the street spends a couple of days in her house or if the couple next door has friends sleeping over and doesn't visit as much.  There's not one thing that any of us consciously, purposely, scheduled-ly does to make this neighborhood "work."  It runs on its own, so there's nothing to worry about.  We are free to pop in and out, to sit on each other's porches when the mood strikes us or be homebodies if we're looking for some quiet.  There's no attendance sheet. No check-in.  No assigned duties.  This place is beyond structure.  I love that about here.  Especially in a world where we often feel like we have to take charge of anything we want to happen, a neighborhood like this that loves us to be here but doesn't require such is something rare.  It's a chance to kick back, give it all up, and not worry about how things are going.  It's just to be.

At the same time, of course, people are going to notice if I'm gone for a day or two.  They aren't going to hound me or beat down the door, but the next time I'm out in the driveway, at least one or two of them are going to mention they haven't seen me in a few days.  They're going to ask how things are going and open the door to a conversation.  These are people I can talk to if I need such a person and people who won't push me if I don't.  And I get to be the same for them.  Noticing when they're gone for a few days, asking how vacation went, expressing condolences on the loss of the cat (which used my flower bed as a litter box, so I have some mixed feelings).  But not pushing anybody into anything.  It's not group therapy; it's just group life.  Camaraderie.

And if I ever needed a cup of sugar, I have a few doors I could knock on.  And a few cups of milk I could give out, too.

This is the place I live, but it's also the place I love.  It's easy to define our ministry, our work, our service, or even our importance in terms of what we do on the clock.  What our title is.  Where we are 9-5 (or whatever swing shift we might work).  How many reports we run out.  How big our profit margin is.  What people count on us for.  But in a place like this, you can't quantify it like that.  You just live your life and be a little part of this place, and one day you look around and notice that you do make a difference here and this is a great place to love.

I love that this is a place to love.  Where I feel like I'm making a difference and I have something to be here; I have a role that only I can fill, something I can offer from the depths of my heart.  I serve here, but at the same time, there's no pressure to be "on."  The woman I first talked to, the one out trimming her tree, we talk fairly often these days.  She's older and usually alone, except when her bipolar son drops by to wreak havoc.  Her husband is deceased, so it's just her and the cats.  We started talking a few weeks ago while I was weeding in the front garden, and it turns out we have a lot of story in common.  We know some of the same brokenness the world has to offer, but we also know the same Healer.  She goes to church across town.  I've dropped off our women's newsletter at her house for encouragement.  She's the kind of person who says she's praying for you and you know she means it.  But sharing our stories that day, we found our hearts more kindred than we had imagined, and she just looked at me with a strange heart in her eyes and said she knew there was a reason we became neighbors.  And now friends.  She just stood on the sidewalk saying she loves me and do I know that?  When I see her now, I see a different way she looks at me.  Not because I've ministered to her.  Not because I've put on an act and shown something incredible or awesome or holy.  Not because I'm "working" her.  Just because I am and somehow, knowing each other as we do, I sense in her eyes that she sees hope in me.  Hope for something in her heart, something unanswered but I haven't pried.  I'm something for her.  And for me, she is another example of that older generation, that strong woman - like the line of women I come from - my mother to my grandmother to my great-grandmother.  Somehow, she answers something in me, too.

It's just one example, but it's the heart of the thing.  There is something I am here.  Not something I do, but something I am.  That's what this kind of community does.  It draws me into being a part of it and encourages me in all I am and all I could be.  I want to venture out, to serve here, to love here, to offer what I can here even as this little street offers me what it has.

It answers the deepest questions we have.  It strengthens and encourages us.  Because this is the kind of place, the little community, that is an invitation to simply be and you find a new worth and a new purpose in yourself because it's a place that validates your being, validates your very core, based on nothing more than what you are.  Not what you do.  Not what you say.  Not who you know.  But simply what you are.

I think we're all looking for that.  I think we're looking for that place where it's ok for us just to be and to find some validation that not only is it ok to just be, but that it's worth something, too.  It matters that you are who you are.  I think we know that when we look at how and why God made us just this way.  But in a place like this that can't define by any other terms what that looks like...a place that just takes you as you...it means a whole lot more.

Take some initiative and find your community.  Find your place like this - where you're not in charge and you're not putting on a show and you're nothing more than what you'd be on a slow Sunday morning in your PJs with your coffee and your doughnut....and weave yourself into a good story for no other reason than that community matters.  Community is the place that both invites you in and feeds you.  It makes you more, without your even realizing it.  And even though your community might not necessarily be your neighborhood, you'll find it is your home.