The Pictures I Didn't Take

There's this website called unphotographable. I love it. And there were so many things this weekend that I didn't take a picture of, and so many that I couldn't have even if I had wanted to. Here are a few of them.


This is the picture I did not take of two little old church ladies- happily walking down the hall hand in hand.

This is the picture I did not take of my friend Tyler dancing to Christ Has Broken Down the Wall, across the stage and down the aisle and around the room, dancing so beautifully that I couldn't help but cry.

This is the picture I did not take of the joy on my friend Justin's face as he received his first reconciling stole, one of a beautiful crowd of 700 joyfully bestowing them on one another.

This is the picture I did not take of a family, the mother offering communion to her two little boys, and the five year old offering it to his mother in return.

This is the picture I did not take of my friend Mittie standing up to sign the chorus of We Are Called and watching it spread across the crowd.

This is the picture I did not take of the Reverend Amy DeLong, standing up to do what she was called to do, still a reverend and still a faithful, loving companion to her partner Val.

This is the picture I did not take of a grown man in tears as he told us about the recent affirmation of our LGBT  brothers and sisters by the Presbyterian Church (USA), or of the tears in the eyes of the crowd as he told us that he believed we would be next.

This is the picture I did not take of 50 young adults crammed into a tiny room to make a plan of action because they are committed to a church that is not always committed to them.

This is the picture I did not take of a room full of people dancing unabashedly in joy and hope.

This is the picture I did not take of 700 people, hand in hand, singing and praying for the church to draw the circle of their love wider.


If you were at Sing A New Song and want to share some of the pictures you didn't take, please leave a comment. I'd love to see them.

Expansion!

Well, instead of the blog post I wrote for yesterday, I have for you all a link to that post on the other blog which I will now be contributing to from time to time. Woo!

http://umonfire.blogspot.com/2011/08/raising-dead-waking-sleepers.html

I hope the flood of blog posts these past few days hasn't been too much for everyone. It's almost been like I'm a real, full-time blogger who's dedicated to writing. In any case, I have one more post about SANS that I'll try to get up later today, and then classes start up again tonight so I'll probably be back to my once a week goal. We'll see how it goes.

I hope you've enjoyed the updates about my experience at Sing A New Song, and I hope maybe you've learned something or gotten a new idea. If you want to hear any of the talks that I referenced, you can watch the videos (hopefully they will all be up soon!) on the SANS website.

http://sans2011.org/multimedia/videos/

I'd recommend any of them. All of the speakers had such great things to say!

If you've been reading all weekend, thanks for making this journey with me! And if you've kind of zoned out, well, things will get back to usual this week. Though I am really excited about my last SANS post, so I hope you at least read that one.

Peace!

The Images of God

Because so many people left early this morning, yesterday's services and closing banquet were the last parts of the conference that many people were a part of, which meant that we've already had the "sending out into the world" feeling. Yesterday's words of encouragement were to remind us that each of us bears the image of God.

What was really awesome, though, was extending that to think of ourselves as bearing the many images of God.

We are who we are.
We will be who we will be.
We are the cloud.
We are the fire.
We are the gentle whisper.
We are the voice crying in the night, "awake!"

God is active in the world, and God is active through us- we work it out in our lives, in the church, in the world.

We have the power of God behind us, and we will shake the earth.

Unity, Not Uniformity

I would sum up yesterday’s many wonderful speakers with this: our goal is to seek unity without losing identity.

The day was bookended with affirmations of who we are as Reconciling Methodists and what it is that we hope for in the future. Reverend Amy DeLong spoke in the morning about hypocrisy and bullying in the church. She encouraged all of us there to resist the temptation to deny who we are, who we have been made to be. In the evening Bishop Joseph Sprague outlined his vision for the “new song” that we are singing; we work for safe jobs and living wages, for education and organization, for peace, and for the recognition and equality of all human beings.

Yet sandwiched there in the middle was the reminder from UCC Bishop Yvette Flunder that, just as we claim our identity as the church despite outcry from those who would claim otherwise, we likewise cannot exclude those who disagree with us from the body of Christ. We are all unique organs performing specific functions and all held together by the skin of the love of Christ, to borrow Bishop Flunder’s (and Paul’s) analogy. We are all the church together, yet that does not mean we lose sight of who we were created to be.

We may have our disagreements. They may seem enough to rip the church apart. In the past, they certainly have. But even disagreement over the very nature of God did not stop the biblical authors: we have in the two creation stories two very different representations of God. We have a God who is distant, who creates with words and stands back from it all to observe; on the other hand, we have a God who gets down in the dirt and works with divine hands to create and participate. But what truly matters is that we are given both! The authors might have disagreed about what kind of God they worshiped, but they could still stand together as God’s people.

We are called to unity in the body of Christ, but unity is not the same as uniformity.

Hope

For those of you who don’t know, I’ve been in Huron, Ohio, since Tuesday. I’m here for a conference called Sing A New Song- it’s a partnership between the Reconciling Ministries Network and the Methodist Federation for Social Action (where I’ll be interning for the next two years), and it’s basically a chance for United Methodists who care about justice issues ranging from LGBT rights to stewardship of the environment and everywhere in between to get together, encourage one another, and dream about and work toward a better future.

So if I had to choose one word to describe yesterday’s kickoff events, it would be hope. Hope for this weekend. Hope for the future. Hope for the church. Hope for the world.

That was definitely the theme of the young adult forum I got the chance to be a part of for a little while yesterday morning. What gives you hope? What do you hope for in the future of the church? What stories (biblical and non-biblical) give you hope and encouragement as you continue to work for peace and justice?

You know what gives me hope?

We do.

For many people (especially in local congregations!), the first thing that comes to mind when they think of young adults is, “Where are they?” But at this conference, 1 in 7 participants are under 35. And that’s after all of the people who were unable to come because school starts this week. That’s awesome.

The message of last night’s kickoff service was that we are the church, too. We—young adults, LGBT, people of color, the poor, anyone who has ever felt hated by or left out of “the church”—we are the church, too. And we can change it. We can choose to live in a better way because that’s what we are called to. That’s why we are here. That’s why we work—because we believe that the church, the world can be better.

We have hope. And we carry hope out into the world.

Sitting Is Bad For The Mind As Well As The Body

Uninspired.
Lethargic.
Apathetic.
Aimless.
Sleepy.
Bored.
Boring.

This is what you become when you watch multiple seasons of Doctor Who uninterrupted.

Goodness, I need school to start again. My brain needs a jump-start.

A State of Mind

This has been stewing in my brain since I was in Texas a month ago. And by stewing since, I mean it’s come up from time to time but I’ve been ridiculously busy and just now wrote it down.

At the end of June I was so very blessed to be able to spend two weeks in Texas seeing dear friends and family, hanging out in my favorite places, listening to country music and southern drawls, and of course eating the most wonderful food on the planet. Seriously, two absolutely amazing weeks.

Then this past week two of my best friends, my roommates from college, came to visit! We spent three days walking all over the city, hitting all the major highlights (and some of my favorite places that aren’t quite so thronged with tourists). We ended every day so tired and sore (and hot and cranky) that we could hardly move, but it was so good to be with them. Plus, watching our favorite movies and having sleepovers every night because we kicked Jeff out for the weekend was lovely :)

So Texas has been on my mind, and I finally just jotted down what I was thinking. It hasn’t had much revision and I don’t even know how to qualify it (poetry, I suppose?), so no guarantees. But here it is.

Texas is not Bible thumpers, raging conservatives, and unbearable heat.

Texas is green trees,

red earth,

and wide, blue sky.

Texas is the dust of a rodeo

and the sound of the state fair;

it’s the roar of a city,

the bustle of people,

junebugs on an otherwise silent summer night.

Texas is smiling speech,

shootin’ the breeze

in that slow drawl,

that musical twang.

Texas is big family dinners

blessed by a deep family grace.

It’s comfort food and

comfortable conversation.

Texas is southern hospitality.

A smile, a wave,

wide arms and an open door,

friends and strangers alike.

Texas is,

it has been said,

an obsession approaching a religion.

It is home.

“A Texan outside of Texas is a foreigner.”- John Steinbeck

"Mission" Trips?

Well this is embarrassing.

I must've written down (or thought of and lost- crap!) dozens of ideas for blog entries in the past month. Some of them I even wrote a few sentences for. I just haven't really been in the mood, you know? So I apologize. Maybe August will be better. Things might skip around, but there's certainly no dearth of new ideas!

In any case, most of you (who actually hung on and still read this) know that I took two of my youth and four other adults from my church out to West Virginia last week for a "mission" trip. I put "mission" in quotes because my feelings about the week-long youth group trips to help the foreign and/or underprivileged have gotten rather confused in the past year.

When I was a youth, summer mission trips weren't really what my church was about. We definitely went to summer camp- the Bible study/devotion/quiet time/worship 8 times a day, messy games, staying in cabins kind of camp- every year, but I don't remember ever even hearing about a summer mission trip. Maybe they were there and I just couldn't afford them, but they definitely weren't regular things. When I started meeting people later in high school and in college who had gone on mission trips every summer, I was jealous. That sounded so awesome! Spending a week helping people and hanging out with my youth group friends? Yes, please.

And right there, in my own response to it, is the issue that I've become aware of after a year of youth ministry classes. How much help do we really offer in a week, and how much is the trip really just about improving relationships between and widening the awareness of the youth who go on the trip? Sure, we do a small service. We fix up a house or we sponsor a VBS or we work in a food kitchen. On my own trip last week we shingled one house, put up safety bars on the deck of a second house, and completely tore down the tiny, rotting deck and wheelchair ramp of a third to build new, safer ones. Not a bad week's work. But the real change, as I have heard in class and now seen in my own experience, is in the group that goes. Putting seven (or twenty, or fifty) people together for a week, working toward a common goal, creates a perfect environment for forming new relationships and strengthening old ones. It reminds those of us who can afford to go somewhere else and donate our time and energy for a week that we truly are privileged. But surely there are other ways of doing that, ways that don't look like the privileged reaching down to pull the lowly out of their sad lives. How arrogant are we?

So there's that argument. But the most significant change I saw this week was neither of those things. In fact, it outweighed the first and invalidated the second. There was one moment on the third day of the trip that brought it home for me, and the rest of the trip was instantly changed.

When you drive down the windy mountain roads of West Virginia the houses you see range from fairly new and beautiful to fairly near to falling down. One of the homes we worked on looked pretty nice from the outside. The woman who owned it had said that if we needed a restroom we could just come inside; we were so dehydrated from working outside all day, though, that it was the third day before I managed to keep enough water in me to actually need to take her up on it. When I did, I managed maybe three steps inside before I felt literally slammed by revelation.

This home, pretty on the outside and housing this wonderful lady and her beautiful boys, was in the process of "remodeling" on the inside. The floors were plywood. There were no doors to any of the rooms; one room didn't even have a wall. The whole place was dark. My breath caught but I managed to keep walking, use the restroom, and get back outside to process.

What this woman had done by not simply letting us rebuild her home but letting us into it was nothing less than bravely and wholeheartedly opening her life to us. The lunchtimes that we spent talking to her, playing with the boys- as one of my (extremely wise) youth said in our Mission Moment in church on Sunday, those were the most important parts of the whole trip.

See, the work that gets done on a mission trip is important. The ways that the people who go are changed are important. But the most important thing, the impetus for the change in everyone involved, is actually sharing life with someone who is nothing like you- or very much like you, after all. You can just drive down the roads past the houses, sit out on the lawns, even climb on the roofs, but it isn't until you actually go inside that being there matters. It doesn't have to be literally going inside; not everyone can or wants to open themselves up like that. But going inside that person's life, getting to know him or her as a fellow human being just trying to figure out what life is about, that is what matters.

When I went overseas for the first time two years ago, one of the things that struck me most was just that people lived there. It sounds obvious, I know, but it was a strange feeling to realize that in this city that I was just visiting for a few months, where everything was new and strange, people lived. Some of them had lived their whole lives there. People actually live all over the world and their lives look very much or nothing like mine, and I almost never stop to think about them. Now that I was there I could just sit and watch, like some crazy life-sized ant farm, or I could actually go live with them for a little while.

That, to me, is what is important about mission trips. That is the most lasting change. Sure, I put up a roof this week. But in 10 years, that will need to be fixed, maybe even replaced. And sure, I was reminded that I have a responsibility to use my privilege to make the world a better place. But I, like most people, need reminding of that pretty often. It's so much easier to just cruise. What matters, though, is that there are connections between lives that didn't exist before last week. And no, those connections may not always be strong. People get busy, people forget. But the thing is, I think what we're called to as Christians and as humans trying to make this life make sense is to make those connections to people wherever we are, whoever they are. We are called to live together, to open up our lives and our selves to one another, to have relationships that matter, and yes, to lend one another a helping hand. It's easy to take the distanced, sterile route through life, but is that really living?