Participating in Restoration

I wasn’t going to blog about this. In the past someone close has sent me flaming emails and then quickly crawled into his hole effectively making it impossible for me to respond in any manner, much less make an opportunity for healing a breach. This kind of lopsided non-communication is very dysfunctional. I much prefer to talk face to face and one on one.

I believe in community. It is wonderful and beautiful, but it is hard work. Community cannot be created part time or from the couch. It requires sacrifice of personal comforts and we are, if not a lazy species, certainly a self-protective one. Creating community is by nature dirty and uncomfortable, because we human creatures have variant views, opinions, biases, desires, preferences, habits, histories and environments. Tonight I chickened out. I didn’t manage to get someone away from the group to speak my piece.

Last week we talked about the Good Samaritan in worship. A view was expressed that it was ok for someone who didn’t have children to take the chance in helping a stranger: in essence saying that chancing getting shot was ok for someone who is childless. I was immediately angered that there was one, possibly more people in the room who believed my life has less meaning or the plans God has for my life are less valuable because I have no offspring. I was so hurt I was speechless. I have been the object of ageism and sexism and “degreeism” and “singleism” before. This one is new.

From my reflection over the intervening days, I allowed myself to feel that the above viewpoint, from where I’m standing, is hurtful, prejudiced and self-centered. Much as it would be nice to sweep these feelings under the rug, community grows out of difficult times. This is not our church’s first crisis, but one that points a focus beam narrowly on our treatment of each other. I have seen too many churches suffer when hurt is dealt and ignored. Long-standing wounds can fester and eventually sunder a church. To be truly invested in building community means a certain dedication to naming, facing and dealing with the hurt when we inflict it on each other and then making space for healing to occur.

I don’t remember the specifics of all of the prayers tonight, but two phrases did capture my mind: one was something like “embracing our human limitations” and the other referred to putting ourselves in the place of “grace and mercy to participate in God’s restoration.” As a second choice for showing this wound to the group (Who is my neighbor?), I wanted to reveal my pain during prayer time and lift it up to God to help me with, in the hopes that in simply naming it and sharing it, it might inspire some to reconsider their view, but again the issue of children came into play. We were rushing through worship because we had a meeting that went overlong.

I come to The Portico to worship. If there were nothing else, I would come for worship. It is the purpose, the focus, and the raison d’etre for me. I come, I stay; I commit to the later hours. I may not have family members to get on a school bus, but there are certainly plenty of times on a Monday or any morning when I have to be up two to three hours early to be in another town to lead or receive training, or on Sundays to preach- something I do to help keep a roof over my head. There are days I am home from work well after dark. I choose to commit my time and energy to The Portico, and not just to Sunday nights but also to Her health as a community.

A friend said to me today that there is such a thing as stewardship of pain. If we share the stories of our pain and how we came out on the other side, then we are sharing our resources with others. I cannot tell you what to do, but I can tell you what I did when pain came my way.

I will not be sorry to see reactions to this entry here, but my sincere hope is that The Portico community will talk about it face to face, and I encourage anyone who wants to talk to me about it live, to let me know.