Low Day

I’ve had several different people ask me what happened to my blog. I stuck with it for about a week or two, and then it dropped off. I know. It takes a lot of emotional energy and time to write. And then I began making the mistake of checking the stats to see how many “hits” my page had. At first I was curious, but then assuming the costume of people-pleasing and hunting for human affirmation that I often wear to my own detriment, I turned it into a game. Each day: How many hits can I get today? Can I reach 500 before the end of the month? But the thing is, is that there are these low-life spamming softwares that scan random blogs dozens of times a day. Mine was one of those. So, as far as I can tell, there’s really no way to tell how many people were actually reading the blog. Which is good. It should never have mattered. That wasn’t the point of writing it. I started it because I needed the discipline of creative writing in my life. A skill I feel I am losing. A skill I want to hone. A skill outside of church life.

I made a deal with myself that I wasn’t going to write about church, not because I don’t love it, but because I think sometimes church leaders get so sucked into our own little church worlds that we lose touch with the reality that most of the rest of the world is living in. Not everybody gets the privilege of praying, and serving, and loving, and nurturing community, and encouraging other people to live into their best selves for a living. Don’t get me wrong, we deal with a ton of stressors, too, but most days I know I have it pretty good. I can get so steeped in it, so immersed, so manic in my church thoughts, that I forget to come up for air. It doesn’t occur to me to look up and see things. Like that my husband’s eyes are still so very blue. Or that my youngest child now towers over me with the rest of them. Or that the grass has gone to seed.  I noticed it yesterday.  That’s when I wrote, “This time of year it just makes sense not to mow the lawn. Why should I pay for seed when I can just grow my own?”

Low days have a way of boiling in overnight, like a morning storm. They kick me right out of bed and onto the floor, and I pretty well stay there for a day or more. Just for the record, this is not clinical depression. Clinical depression is diagnosable if it lasts for weeks or more at a time. Sometimes I (and I suspect most of us) just have sad days. I can only speak for myself, but I will share with you, the kinds of thoughts and things in my church world that happen that put me there:

1. When I come to terms with the fact that most of the friends I have ever had, have nothing to do with church because a.) they think the church is judgmental, detached from reality, and hypocritical, and they think the story of Jesus is irrelevant and shallow, or b.) because they don’t have time and do not feel it is a necessary priority for their lives.

2. When I come to terms with the fact that the future of the church is probably going to look very different by the end of my life than it does right now. I think that the decline in the American church has not yet been arrested and that it will get worse before it gets better. I think that we will be shedding things like real estate, seminary education, denominational allegiance, and paid clergy. As a clergy person, this just sounds grave and dreadful. I grieve the possibilities of these changes because a.) I have a sneaking suspicion that the most faithful among our churches are most adamant about keeping, funding, and maintaing our buildings, probably because they’ve invested their hopes, wishes, dreams, and money into it over their lifetime. They are the builder generation. They are the bravest and most generous generation of the century. They are also slipping away from us rapidly, a huge loss for our world. b.) Without  seminary education and denominational allegiance, I cannot see what will keep us from continuing the dynamic we learned in the Westward expansion of tucking our Bibles up under our armpits and heading out in isolation, where our scriptures begin to tell us what we want to hear and there is no accountability to challenge us otherwise. We seem to be forgetting that community, where the scriptures are interpreted with the guidance of Christ’s Spirit, is fundamental to the Christian faith. The community is not just the group of people we gather with today, but 2,000 years of community from which we must be willing to learn. c.) Most people I know who serve in ministry do so with their whole hearts and their whole lives. We eat, breathe, and sleep church. I know I am not alone in saying that I would serve the church for free if I could figure out how to find an alternative source of income that would not keep me from fully devoting my attention to the church. If someone can figure out how we can make this happen; I’m all ears.
3. When people hit the end of their ropes and they come to me expecting me to solve their problems. Like when a husband is threatening to go back to selling drugs to make ends meet for his family if I don’t buy their son a birthday present today for his birthday. Like when a young wife complains about having no money after finalizing their bankruptcy hearing and posting pictures of their new handguns on Facebook all in the same week. Like when a disabled man and his wife come to me for rent assistance and food, but her story is blatantly inconsistent in the first three minutes of conversation. When members of the church want programming, like Bible studies with curriculum, and childcare and learning opportunities for their children during church events, but they give nothing financially, not even the value of a cigarette or a Coke, back to the church. When the Council members evaluate my “effectiveness” through measures like wanting worship attendance to increase, but they don’t bother to show up regularly for worship. When a young woman tells me she was raped when she was ten, but she refuses counseling. When a mom takes a bottle of pills and calls me and then turns her back on the church because I called 911which consequently saved her life. Every single week a crisis is presented to me, folks relating to me exactly as they relate to God. So often they are angry with God, the church, and especially me, for not fixing their problems. The church is not here to fix each other’s problems. We are here to abide in community with one another, lending support in a way that the answer arises in truth and love from within. I’m not saying that life doesn’t throw us curve balls. I am not saying that we don't need to carry each other sometimes. I'm saying that Jesus meets us in our hearts before he heals our lives. True change happens from the inside out.

So there I went, talking about church. So be it. I hit a really low day yesterday. Patrick asked me three times last night if I was okay. I never really woke up yesterday. It’s a fog I can’t quite explain. I laid out on a blanket on the lawn the whole day with my face in the Bible and an eager pen begging for a sermon. The fog remained into the evening during the car ride to my oldest son's football game, and through the first quarter. It was not until one of my son's friends tripped rather largely over a step in front of me that jolted me out of it. It made me physically jerk and then laugh out loud. I know, I'm evil. But his demise was a gift to me, more than he can know.

I want so, so, so much for our church to rise, and grow, and thrive, and make a difference in the world, but I can’t make that happen. I don’t have that power. Jesus has to heal the heart of our church before we will see results in our church body. The change has to begin from within. We have to pray, show up (enough for it to be significant to our own lives), give (enough for it to matter, enough for it to be a gift from the heart), work, and know for ourselves that what Christ is doing in our own lives matters. Not until what Christ is doing through the church matters to us will it's significance become evident to anyone else around us.  It's hard to sit bedside and watch something you love dying and to let it take your life with it. But I guess that's the story of God in Christ. The hope I hold onto is that someday it will be worth it. Giving my whole life and my whole future to this. Somewhere after the grave, resurrection will come.  I want so much, with my whole heart, to see it and be a part of it in my lifetime.