Pilgrimage Ponderings

It took me two tries and a little over two weeks, but I've found my spot.

We have a sun room in our house, and I've found the spot where I can sit and think and ponder and pray and reflect.  Now the new house feels like home.

Do you have a spot?  A thinking chair?  A place you return to that reminds your self to see the forest and not just the trees?

Our guest Bible study leader at annual conference was Eddie Fox. One of the things he said was that "Grandparents was one of the best ideas God ever had."

My parents would agree. For several years now, they have been hosting "Camp Ma and Pa." Yesterday they collected all eight of their grandchildren to be together in their house until Sunday. Seven of the 8 are boys, ages 6, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, and 15. The one girl is 3. When I told my dad to have a good time he just smiled and grunted.

They have added at least one new thing this year, probably due to the number of teens and tweeners in the group. They have a chore chart. In previous years they instituted rotating sleeping arrangements so no one grandson gets a better deal than the other.

I am thankful that my children have this opportunity to spend such time with their grandparents and cousins.

I suppose I am just as thankful that I am not there to enjoy it with them.

This was the refrain of my 11-year-old on Wednesday as we were meeting folks and watching the movers unload in our new home.

Perhaps the biggest attraction for him was the Nintendo Wii in the youth room of the church. But he continued to say to me, "Mom, I think we're going to like it here" throughout the day.

The painters finished this morning, I found my hammer/screwdriver tool, and we all slept in our own beds in our own rooms last night after enjoying a huge and delicious meal from one of the Sunday school classes.

All in all, we have received a very warm welcome. And I think my son is right.

Today is move day.

Our belongings, other than the things we have crammed into our two vehicles, are in the moving van.

The house is clean.

My youngest had his opportunity to swim in the pool at the hotel, although he started asking about 11:30 am and he didn't get the opportunity until 8:30 pm.  As you can imagine, there are many places I would rather have been at that particular time in those particular circumstances.  And the whirlpool, of course, was out of order.  But a promise is a promise and little things mean a lot when you are leaving "home" for new adventures.

I have a sneaking suspicion that my children think that the hard part is over.  But I keep saying that we are only halfway there.  We are out of one house but not yet into the other.  We had 5 movers to load us up yesterday and we will have 3 to unload us in the afternoon heat.

I am thankful that I wasn't a wandering Israelite for 40 years.  One week of this every few years is enough for me!

The time is almost here. We have said goodbye to friends, packed and packed and packed. Today we finish up the packing so tomorrow the movers can load us up and the cleaners can come in and work their magic.

It's an inbetween time of living out of a suitcase in our home and wondering what our next home in a new community will be like. What memories will it hold for our family? What new family stories will be born there?

I remember learning in high school Benjamin Franklin's famous words, "Nothing is certain but death and taxes." I would add to that statement another certainty of life: Things change. We work very hard to preserve an illusion that we are in control of our lives and our destinies, but it is an illusion nevertheless. In the blink of an eye, things can happen beyond our control that can alter the course we have set for ourselves.

I believe that embracing the reality of change is key if we are to be able to recognize God's grace at work from day to day. At any given moment, the world around me may shift, or the world inside me may shift. But God's love sustains me throughout.

That's grace, and I am grateful for it.

There's a small conversation going on in our annual conference regarding the kinds of activities we offer for youth. It started when the editor of the conference newspaper wrote an editorial about the appropriateness of taking youth groups to play laser tag. Apparently, at least one youth director has responded to the editorial. I look forward to reading that letter to the editor in a future issue of the paper.

As a parent of three boys and a Christian educator, I have thought about this a lot. My boys play sports and video games, and we have conversations about the values inherent in them and the things that Jesus taught were important. Sometimes those two sets of values are in sync, and sometimes they are in tension. As a parent, I believe it is my responsibility to teach my children how to look at and reflect on the culture from a Christ-centered perspective.

To some extent, youth programming can provide the same opportunity. I am sad to say, however, that I seldom see a desire to engage in that sort of reflection in conjunction with a church trip to play laser tag. Too often the focus seems to be on providing an activity that will encourage attendance. The focus is on making the group popular and "successful."

As I was talking about this whole issue with a colleague today, I made a statement that I will be pondering for awhile. What seems to me to be true about our culture's glorification of war and war games is that the prevailing ethic is one of winners and losers. You can't compete, in sports, in video games, in laser tag, or on a real battlefield, without there being at the end a side that wins and a side that loses.

My comment was that my understanding of the Gospel was that it is about "win-win" rather than "win-lose." So being able to reflect on what it means to follow Christ in our culture becomes not only a good exercise, but an essential task if we are to be clear about how we witness to the love of Jesus Christ for the whole world.

The more I think about my off-the-cuff remark, the more it makes sense to me. But I imagine that others have different ideas. What do you think?

It's a humbling thing to clean out your house for a move. You find all sorts of treasures and all sorts of things that you wish weren't there.

Two of my favorites...

Yesterday I threw away a small book of poetry that I made in seventh grade. When I say "made" I don't just mean that I wrote the horrible, rhyming adolescent drivel. We also actually made the book out of card board, wax thread, and wallpaper samples. I had to stop packing and give myself a therapy session when I ran across it. I had the internal discussion about why I ever saved the thing in the first place, and since I had saved it for all these years, did that mean I needed to keep saving it? After pondering this, writing in my journal, having a short rest and a long laugh with my husband, in the trash it went. And I feel free!

My true confession is that I am a packrat. That is bad enough in itself. It was bad enough to have to face this stark reality as we unloaded for the garage sale and later hauled off 5 large bags of hand-me-downs to the thrift store, some of which had never been worn by my children. In other words, someone had brought us hand-me-downs that weren't quite the right size, so they got put in a closet until they were the right size, only to remain until they were outgrown. At least they are in decent shape for someone else.

But tonight's find takes the cake. We were cleaning out the attic and found a container of dirty clothes. I will not explain how they got up there, which I don't know, or how I know they were dirty. But they were.

All I can say right now is that the James family is now fully buying into the notion of an ANNUAL spring cleaning. And I promise myself to do better from now on!

week, or month to blog and get ready for the yard sale, and manage the childrens' end-of-school-year schedule and go to annual conference and finish packing for the move to Gaffney (Hooray, I can say that now!) and get the house we are in clean for the new parsonage family.

And did I mention the day job? My life is already full to overflowing 99 percent of the time. So when there are extra things squeezing in, something's gotta give.

I'll be back, but I'm not sure when!

I am still pretty preoccupied with reflecting on some of the discussions regarding church membership that took place both in the local church legislative committee and on the floor of the General Conference plenary.

To the pastor who told the plenary that she regretted receiving into membership the bride who only joined in order to get married there and who had never darkened the door since, I want to ask, "Why doesn't your church have a wedding policy that says you have to be a member for a year in order to not pay the wedding fee?"

This pastor expressed that she should have shown pastoral discretion and told the woman she was not yet ready for membership. I find myself wondering why she did not.

We had several discussions about the role of the pastor when folks want to join the church. There was discussion of the need for the pastor to have discretion as well as concerns about a pastor having "unbridled authority" in the church. I think it says something about us that the discussion focused on the pastor's role rather than the role of the person coming for membership. I'm just not sure what it says.

The other issue that arose was that all organizations have standards for membership and we should have high standards for members of the church. I have two thoughts on that.

First, the church is not a fraternity or a civic organization like the Rotary club. It is not, in my theology, something we earn the right to belong to. I shudder to think where the church would be today if Jesus had expected Peter to get his act together before he left the fishing business to be a disciple. I wonder what might be different about our church if Paul had decided that John Mark needed to leave the community of faith until he could get his act together and if Barnabas had left him alone to do that. When Jesus called people, they followed. That was the first step in getting their collective acts together. May it be so with us.

Second, after living through two general conferences, not to mention the every day struggles of local churches and our annual conference, it seems to me that there might be no higher standard for living together as the community of faith than to commit to receive everyone who comes as if they were sent to us by Jesus himself. What I am thinking about has more to do with just tolerating those who believe and think differently than I do. I am talking about receiving them into the fellowship as gifts from God whom we are called to love with the love of Jesus Christ.

Anyone who thinks that's easy obviously hasn't spent much time or effort living day to day with the people who call themselves Christians.

In light of all the conversation about the "worldwide church" and what that means for United Methodists, I have been struck by the current devastation in Myanmar.

One of our family jokes is that whenever we are in the car and one of the boys says, "Where are we going?" my husband often answers, "Burma." This started when the boys were much younger as a way of stopping their questions, since they had no idea where Burma was, only that it was very far away.

I had no idea where Burma was myself until hearing a Women's Division speaker talk about our church's ministry in the recently renamed Myanmar on a conference trip to New York and Washington several summers ago.

The speaker was sharing about the "Bible Women's Program," in which lay women are trained in Bible study and also in areas such as health and nutrition so that when they go back to their communities they can teach the Gospel--that Jesus loves all and wants all to have abundant life.

We learned that day that one woman in Myanmar had to travel on foot for 3 days to attend the 2-day training and that when she returned to her community she might be at risk from the government if she dared teach what she had learned. But she was full of faith and joy at being able to participate. Needless to say, that story stuck with me.

Fast forward now to the General Board of Higher Education and Ministry dinner at General Conference. We ate dinner with a Methodist college president from Myanmar. He did understand some English, I think, but spoke little during dinner. I'm not sure if the language was a barrier or if he just had difficulty getting a word in edgewise with our chatty bunch.

At any rate, when I heard of the cyclone earlier this week, I thought about him. I wondered where in Myanmar he lived and if he was able to return home. And as I read in the newspapers about the difficulty in getting aid to the country because of the military government's resistance, I wondered if our church would have any better luck.

So I was thrilled to discover last night that UMCOR is at work through Church World Service. And that there is already an UMCOR Advance set up: #3019674, Myanmar Emergency. You can even print out a church bulletin insert or make a contribution here: http://new.gbgm-umc.org/umcor/work/emergencies/ongoing/myanmar/.

I think it would be easy for us to be sorry that this happened to those folks and to pray for them and let it stop there. After all, they are on the other side of the world. Yes, they were hit as hard as Americans were by Katrina, but what can we do?

I give thanks that our worldwide United Methodist church is at work all the way in Burma. May we who have some idea what they are suffering be generous in our response.