Back to the Shore

There's something appealing about the fact that even Jesus had to get away from it all sometimes. I'm often drawn to the story from Matthew's gospel (chapter 14, starting at verse 13) where Jesus is told some terrible news, and he chooses to take off in a boat to be alone.

The story has a gruesome prologue, one I don't like to dwell on. A relative and colleague of Jesus has just been brutally murdered out of petty vengeance. Pretty awful. An incredible waste of human life and charismatic talent. The victim's name was John: teacher, baptizer, powerfully challenging speaker. And John's students come running to give Jesus the scoop on what's been happening.

We don't know exactly how Jesus is feeling when he hears about John's death. We know only that his response is immediate: I'm outta here. He glides his craft out onto the waves, ready for some alone time.

This is one of those Scripture scenes that can be a lifeline for me. I can climb into the boat with friend Jesus, feeling the anguish of losing a loved one, hearing the soothing sounds of lapping water, taking deep breaths of the calming sea air. I'm filled with the relief of being alone yet accompanied, peace and storm living inside of me at the same time.

But this moment will not last forever. It can't last. There's a fine line between healthy retreating and unhealthy escaping. At some point I need to be called back into life.

When Jesus brings his boat into harbor, he sees lots of people there to meet him. They also have heard about John's death, but their response is quite different. The last thing they want is to be alone. Jesus' insides are torn up when he sees them. They need him so much. He brings them healing. And they have called him back into life.


O Living One, I come to you in this moment, to be refreshed by your Spirit. I'm so grateful that whenever I need retreat, you take me there and you accompany me. Walk with me in every moment. Open my ears to hear you calling, calling me into life... a life where I receive your healing and then can be healing others.

~Kari Henkelmann Keyl

Thursday Thoughts

I wonder why you care, God--
why do you bother with us at all?
All we are is a puff of air;
we're like shadows in a campfire.

I was reading Eugene Peterson's version of Psalm 144 -- just opened up The Message to a random page -- while I waited for my computer to find the website I wanted. And these four lines grabbed my attention.

Like shadows in a campfire... quite an image. Ever felt that way? Like your life and all its accomplishments were as lasting as the illusive shifts of flickering flames?

It's a humbling thought. Humbling can be good in small doses. Depressing in large doses, sure. But I don't mind being humbled if I can feel safe at the same time.

If I'm meeting with my boss, and she's someone I greatly admire, I'll feel that appropriate humility, since she's in the big time and I'm doing the small stuff. If she's one known to throw around her power, that humility is a frightening, smallifying thing. But if I know her to be compassionate and fair, someone I deeply trust, someone who's doing an incredible job at her level while respecting my contribution as well... then the humbling feels right.

Today I'll be packing up the tent and sleeping bag to do some camping over the weekend. One of the things I most look forward to is sitting by the campfire, feeling that sense of utter calm, mesmerized by the dancing flames. Loving the beyond-description beauty. Each flame, each shadow, contributing it's own illusive color to the canvas.

I wonder why you care, God... Are you mesmerized by the dance of humanity, by all of us individual flames, so fleeting, so small, yet each distinct in its beauty? How amazing you are that you can love us, each one of us, and treasure us in your heart. I can't fully understand you, but I can trust you. I trust you to hold little me as precious, to value my contribution to the whole. Help me hold on to this trust, to feel safe, to know that even though my life here on earth is short, that my life in you will dance on and on...

If you find some time this weekend to sit quietly and imagine your place, and God's place, in the universe... I hope you'll feel free to share your musings here. Have a good one.

Peace,
Kari

Steve-o's Devos: This is Not What I Ordered

There is something I'd like you to think about for just a minute. When was the last time you received something different from what you expected to get? Maybe it was a meal at a restaurant, a gift, a promotion....but take a moment to recall that to mind.

A couple of weeks ago I decided to begin doing some home music recording from my piano here at home. I knew I needed some specific software to help me achieve this goal and I wanted something quite specific. Of course, I did not want to spend a lot of money on software. I just wanted an easy to use, cheap way to record music. Through the miracle of the internet, I was able to find and download something almost immediately. "Record your music in minutes" was one of the promises on the site among many others.

Oh the excitement that built up as I watched the installation take place. In literally five minutes I would have located, downloaded, and opened this new piece of software. This program would make all my hopes and expectations come true. I knew deep down inside that this would be the time saving piece I needed to realize what I had hoped to accomplish. Well, as you can expect, the easiest part of the whole process was the installation. Four days of reading manuals, trying special plug-ins for my computer, contacting the software company, and a host of work around solutions from their message board still resulted in little change. With the help of one of my musical and techno-savvy friends I was finally able to get things to work. But from within minutes of downloading this program I was saying (well at teams screaming!) "this is not what I ordered! This is not working as it should." How hard would I have to work to get something to happen that I wanted and did I have the right skills to get the job done?

Those were good questions and also moves us in to recall a little story from Genesis about Jacob. Jake one day sees a beautiful woman and desires very much to make her his wife. But his father-in-law to be, Laban, is not about to just hand his daughter over in marriage even if Jake is a distant relative. How stricken was Jake? Well, he agrees to work for Laban for 7 years in order to prove he is worthy of Rachel, this beautiful girl. What father would resist such cheap labor.

Seven years pass and soon its time for the wedding day. Jake can hardly wait. But as soon as the veil of his new bride is lifted, he discovers that he has married Rachel's older sister, Leah! (This is of course on the day after the wedding.) Now, the Bible does not say that Leah was ugly. In fact, even as crazy as Jake likely was on his wedding night, he did not notice the difference. So they must have been quite similar in the looks department. Still, it was quite a trick that Laban pulls on him. Jake awakes to discover, this is not the woman I worked so hard for! But he must strike another deal with Laban who agrees he can marry Rachel after another 7 years of servitude. Jake does and in this early tribal system is able to finally marry Rachel. That must have been one interesting family to be around.

Now I don't mean to compare marriage with downloading software off the internet, or belittle the weirdness of this story to modern ears. But there is something to be said of what we do see here. When we don't get what we want, or get something different than we expected, we have to make some important decisions. How we respond to the situation says a lot about our character and perhaps a little bit more about our faith.

I think this story is here for us to think about patience a little. I find it amusing that 14 years goes by in less than so many verses of scripture, but that suggests that there is something else intended by this story than just historical narrative of Israel's past.

Time allows us some perspective always. No matter what is going on today in our lives, we tend to forget that their are cycles and rhythms to our lives. This is always clear when we take time to talk with people of older generations who have been around a lot longer than any of us. Seven years may seem like along time, when you are 7, but when you are 70, those same years flit by rather quickly.

Sometimes we do not get what we think we wanted. And sometimes we are able to exchange the "mistake" for something else. This story is a reminder to take time to think about what we believe we need or desire and to consider if it is truly all that we think it to be. The relationships in our lives are there to see us through when life throws us a bit of a curve and when we are connected to one another we gain a perspective otherwise missing.

It is the same for those who follow Jesus. Jesus tries time and again to warn his disciples that the life they think he is talking about is not what they are going to expect. Things will be different once you follow Jesus but it will never be what you think it should be, or want it to be. Along the way though, what you thought you ordered might not have been what you needed after all....Amen.

Dialogo: Wandering and Connecting

Over the past week I have seen more of New England than I think I have in the past couple of years. A friend of mine came to visit and we headed off through the Green Mountains, the White Mountains, a Boston zoo, coastal Maine, and the many "trails" of touristy areas.




Having been born in North Dakota, a speed bump used to get me excited (it's a bit flat there...). But there is nothing like driving through some of the beautiful landscapes we are blessed with here.





Each day we checked the map to decide where we were going to head out and then jumped in the car and began the day's adventure. What fascinated me about all of this is a rather interesting, though not new perhaps, discovery: the unexpected places held the most fascinating opportunities. Whether we left the highway to travel out into a country road, or drove along one of those gray roads unnumbered and unnamed on our map, there were always more beautiful, more peaceful places to enjoy. It was always in those less expected places where conversations fell silent and we enjoyed the beauty all around us.

Throughout these days though, we spent time in conversation. My friend and I spoke about all kinds of topics and probably talked more in the past week than we have throughout all the years we have known one another. It was a chance to connect, to regroup, to share, to open and heal any old wound, and to catch up on where God had led and is leading us. Like the unexpected gray roads, the gray areas of our lives also turned out to be places where sharing and conversation were the most fascinating.





It is perhaps no small wonder that Robert Frost's "The Road Less Travelled" kept coming to my mind and along with it the thought that Jesus invites us all to take a similar path, one that runs counter to the expectations even we may have for ourselves and our lives.





I encourage you to meditate perhaps on where your journey has taken you these past few days, months, or years. When have you found yourself in one of life's gray areas? What discovery did you make? How did it enrich your life? (Feel free to share them here.)





May you find peace as you reflect on these questions and others that may also surface during this process.

Dandelion Whine

Last week was a pretty incredible one for me, hanging out with 400 or so people in Machias, Maine, scraping off old crumbly paint, slapping on the new protective coats, basically helping out lots of homeowners who are living on the edge of making it or not. It was an awesome group effort. I will never forget the dear people I worked with and the just-as-dear people that we served.

Our teams of 6 went out to different homes all over the countryside, doing what we could to accompany God's people in need. It would have been enough of a spiritual high just to be getting away from all my own worries and stresses to focus on someone else's need. But what added so much more was the focus on God's presence in all that we were doing.

Each day we were tasked with the job of looking for God to show up, of watching out for signs of the Spirit's activity. Then when we returned to the big group, we reported our "God Sightings" right alongside our "Progress Reports" on the work completed... both truly of equal importance.

I don't know about you, but I think I spend much more of my time looking for signs of trouble than for signs of God. Watching for God-sightings might seem presumptuous (as if insignificant little me could really know what God is up to), but it changes my outlook considerably. Sitting here at my desk, trying to catch up with all the work here left undone for a week, is not much fun. But if I could keep all those worries that sap me of energy in balance with my God-sightings...

Jesus once told a great God-sighting story about a farmer who planted good seed in good earth. But then a nasty neighbor snuck in at night with weed seeds galore, maybe blowing dandelion fluff all over the farmer's wheat field. When the farmhands saw all the weeds coming up with the grain seedlings, they were all whiney-like. What kind of seeds did you plant anyway? And what are we supposed to do now?

The farmer's cool. He knows that weeds happen, plotting enemies exist. Got to go with the flow. Don't yank the weeds now or you might mess up the tender roots of the good stuff. Let them all grow together until harvest day. We'll sort it all out then.

There are so many ways this story can point at truth. For me today, I'm seeing that my life is a field of weeds and wheat growing together. And if all I can see are the weeds that need to be pulled, that's not much of a life. Sure the weeds are there, all the negatives I whine about and the worries I think I'm drowning in. But there's plenty of wheat to be spotted as well, if only I have eyes to see. Can I just let it all grow, around and inside me, the wheat and the weeds together?

God, I'm afraid I'll always be just a weed-spotter. Forgive me, and open my eyes wide. Help me see the good stuff growing, too. Help me see YOU... here, there, and over there too... and, most of all, inside of me. Give me patience to handle the weeds even as you fill me with the energy my God-sightings bring me...

So what happens to our farmer and farmhands on those late autumn harvest days? Well, they're probably warming themselves by the bonfire kept toasty by the dried-weed kindling, even as they celebrate all the grain they're storing up for the winter. And, who knows? Maybe they're even indulging in a little dandelion wine...

~ Kari Henkelmann Keyl

Steve-o's Devo's: Focus, focus, focus....

Think about how you spend your day for a moment. How much of your day is spent in motion without really thinking about what you are doing? From the moment we get up until we head back to sleep in the evening, much of our life can be a series of generic moments that blur casually from one activity to the next.

Most of the day is spent performing the tasks of our vocation. Some of that time is spent dealing with the everyday physical needs that our body requires. But what about the rest of the time? What do we do to keep our focus on the important things of life?

I read an article this past weekend about how difficult things are getting for us here with the increased costs of living (i.e. gas--the media's latest crisis). But one comment really struck me. A woman, now in her 80s, commented that she did not know what all the fuss was about. After all, she lived through World War II when the country was forced to ration meat, gas, and a variety of items that you needed to save coupons for in order to get. Then you had to decide what you truly needed before using up what you had saved for all those days/weeks. She said that folsk today just don't know what it means to sacrifice things and that we are too concerned about what things we have rather than what we really need.

This comment struck me because it made me wonder about how we can currently be a part of a specific group based on what we own rather than who we are. For the last half century, people have worked hard to try and segment us into specific market niches, a special grouping can create synergy for a product and then the product can be re-marketed to another segment of the population. You can see this happen with brand loyalty or a particular store loyalty. The Gap is one great example of a company trying to re-engage its 1990s customers with new children--the Baby Gap is born! Of course, many of those returning customers discover that the Gap no longer makes clothes that fit their new middle-aged shapes!

But we have had a period of time in our history when we could get whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted. We might like the diversity of options available to us, but while so many things try to appeal to different things, we lose sight of who we are...and much of the time of whose we are. The focus on our wants, transformed in our thinking into "needs" has significantly altered the way all of us spend our time and money. So what does this have to do with God?

Paul writes in Romans 8 (linked above for you to check out) about this--funny how things stay the same the more the look like they have changed! Paul points out that when we spend all of our time focused on our selves, obsessed with our own way of living and making sure that we try to live it, we rarely get a chance to really live. If it takes all our time and energy to try to show the world who we want to be, it leaves little room for living out who we really are. Ultimately, Paul notes that if we spend all our time worrying about our selves, we spend very little time focused on God. There is not much room for God when we sit staring into our selves. Paul goes so far as to call this self obsession a "dead end".

But the good news is that on the road to life we don't have to stay stuck on a street warning "No Outlet". None of us turns down a street with a sign like that expecting that it is lying to us. Yet, we spend a lot of our time and energy living on a path that goes no where, devoid of a spiritual awareness and focus. What we can hope for is that if we find ourselves on one of those "No Outlet" streets in life that it perhaps will have a nice little cul-de-sac for us to turn around and head out into life's main road.

A life lived with God is a life on the open road. It is a life lived with grand vistas, a bigger picture, an opportunity to see and experience new things often unexpectedly.

Consider this summer a road trip taken through God's eyes. Stay focused on ways God is present and consider spending more time thinking and wondering about God. It might just give you a different outlook, a sharper image that bridges the gap and makes you alive in new and exciting ways.

S.A. Kennedy

Dialogo: Give it up

"But to what will I compare this generation?"

This is Jesus' question at the beginning of a passage (in Matthew) calling us to consider following him in our daily living. It is about giving up the things that we are involved with to take on a different burden. This passage is often a bit puzzling (you can click above to read it) but I just wonder about the last part of Jesus' statement: "For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light."

Each of us have things in our lives that can really wear us down. It might be a relationship that does not live up to all the romantic notions we had (realistic, or unrealistic). It might be a job or career path that has not gone the way we had planned. It might be wondering about whether we have the money we need to pay for basic things like food and clothing and housing. It might be a sense of fear for the world.

Whatever these things may be, this is a good time to find some encouragement in these words by Jesus. It is not about forgetting about these problems, but about turning to live a different way that defines us by who we were created to be, not who others think we should be, not what our job may define us to be, but by how God created us to live.

As you head into the coming long weekend, consider what burdens of heart, soul, or mind you need to let go of so that you can say "Yes" and follow Jesus into a new way of living.

Feel free to share a practice you use to help redirect your spirit.