The Journey of Holy Week: Easter

On Friday a thief, on Sunday a King. We sang these words this morning and wow, how good they felt! Lent has concluded with the joy of resurrection. I pray that this evening finds you resting in the knowledge that the promise of redemption is possible through the gift of Jesus.

47 days of blogging. When I took on this discipline on Ash Wednesday, I never dreamed that I would fall in love with the process. There were only 2 days in that time period that I struggled to find words. This means two things:

1) I have too many words.
2) I think I need to press into my written voice.

I love speaking. I am beyond blessed that I serve in a community where I am able to use my study and stories to challenge the community through teaching. I find such joy in crafting a message. I love finding unique ways to communicate truth and interest face to face. I really thought that writing would not be as rewarding because you cannot control the inflection and tone. I was wrong.

Time and again during this season, you have encouraged me with your insights. I have no idea who reads these blogs unless you tell me that you do. From the messages and comments, I have been given new insights to your lives and experiences. I have heard from friends that I rarely see. I have been able to share one-on-one with those who have reached out in 'me too' journeys. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Many have asked, "What now?" Easter is here, your lenten commitment to write is over. Will you keep writing? The answer is YES! Seeing that this is no longer a Lenten Longing, I would be honored if you would consider following my new blog The View From The Bathroom Floor. I will not post every day, but I will continue to roll out the honesty and struggle and joy and journey that is my life.

I am also going to begin work on a long time dream to write my story in a book. It is a long range goal, with no due date. I have a weird vision for the layout that weaves together my love of church and recovery and faith and doubt and advocacy and failure. All of these things make me who I am and I love the many roads that converge in my story.

Finally, I ask a favor. Please don't stop emailing and texting me with questions and pushback and love. I can't write into a vacuum and pretend that the words are just words. When I sit down to write, I see faces and stories and friendships. I take the struggles that I see around me and use them as food for insight and growth. None of this is possible without the human interaction and shared experience. When I think about the opportunities that I have been given to live out this journey of gift development, none if it would be possible without the encouragement and support of people who have said, GO! Thank you for being my people.

The Journey of Holy Week: Saturday

Because I have spent much of my adult life involved in planning Easter Sunday events at a church, Saturday has always been a day of tension. I know that we are still in the darkness of Friday, yet there is work to do to prepare for the celebration to come. Again, today, I split this tension.

I woke up this morning and intentionally slowed my thoughts. I recalled (in a pre-coffee haze) the pain that we walked though last night. I chose to hold on to Friday for as long as I could. Then I watched a giraffe be born and sat with my own 11 year-old giraffe and giggled as the baby learned to stand. We may have cheered upon success.

I went to 218 (the name for the building where we gather to serve and worship) about 1pm. As I walked in, the cross was still hanging. The thorns were still present. The candles were out and the evidence of a dark night was present. We began to transform the space for a party. The curtains went from the black fabric to the bronze satin. The waters of Baptism took the place of the cross. The drapes of the Lenten season were lifted and you could begin to feel the lightness in the air.

There were four of us working today. One took the time to lint roll all of the black chairs. One made sure that the bathroom supplies were stocked and the floors were clean. We all worked to create space for all to hear that the darkness has gone and we have a story worth sharing.

The last few years, I have gifted myself a guilt free Easter afternoon. This was a lesson that took many years to learn, but here is why. I give all that I have to  Holy Week. By the time that Saturday evening comes around, I have poured and felt and worked and loved the heck out of the journey. The idea of cooking and cleaning is last on my list. I WANT to have a lovely Easter dinner or drive to be with family on the other side of town. But on the years that I have forced this, I leave with little to no resurrection joy. What seemed like a good idea 4 weeks beforehand, leaves me exhausted and downright intolerable by Sunday night.

Two years ago, I let go. I invited a few friends for crawfish on Easter. There was no set table, no place cards, no china. There was no silver or ham or rolls. We ate crawfish on newspaper in the backyard. It was wonderful. This year, we have our pool ready and some hotdogs and hamburgers. Paper plates will be more than sufficient, as we are going to focus on being the Church on this special day.

For those of us with deeply imbedded Southern Jesus-loving roots, this may seem sacrilegious. But for this free thinking, resurrection celebrating pastrix, flip-flops and shorts is exactly what I need. Any and all egg cuteness and bunny crafting will come because someone else played on Pinterest. If there are no vegetables and all desserts courtesy of pot-luck style lack of planning, hallelujah. And when it is all said and done, a nap is defiantly in the plan. I'll be ignoring all swimming teenagers by 2:30pm. Bye, Felicia.

Whatever you are planning to do to celebrate Jesus tomorrow, make it a day where the reason we gather is the focus of your planning. Sing and smile and love and laugh. Walk with a lightness and a spirit of joy. May we see Jesus in all the glory of new life and fling ourselves into a season of falling more deeply in love with our Savior.

The Journey of Holy Week: Good Friday

Today, we remember the journey to the cross. We remember that Jesus was tortured and beaten and rejected. We know that the stone was rolled in front of the tomb and we are left to wait.

During our Good Friday service tonight, the room was filled with candlelight. As the story of the last day was read, little by little, the room grew darker. Only one candle remained, a single candle next to the cross. As the final words were read, Jesus was placed in the tomb and the room went black.

In that moment, a very real darkness was present. A familiar one that I know from days gone by. It was the darkness of depression and hopelessness and grief. It was a feeling that flooded my heart when the stone rolled in front of the tomb with a pounding sound. I helped plan the service. I had read the text countless times. This is not my first Good Friday. I knew what was coming. Yet in that moment, when the finality of it hit, it was a fresh raw wound.

I know that Good Friday is hard. I know that the service is dark. I also know that it is so very necessary to walk through the pain and feel the hopelessness so that the announcement that 'He Is Risen' means so much more.

I read a blog post today by one of my faves. She is a woman that I admire and look up to. She wrote about why this Good Friday feels different. For her, this year was filled with challenges from Jesus people that she had not known before. I get that.

The number of times that I have come to a personal point of spiritual 'next' and realized that I was standing outside the norm or comfortable or safe is too many to count. In the biggest and scariest of these seasons, I have reached for others and there have been moments of feeling like I was standing on a deserted island. Other times, I have found that what I have to say is so unpopular or unwanted that I may as well quit talking.

We have been conditioned to think that when you jump in the Jesus boat, you will always have people. Sometimes, that's just not true. Sometimes your voice is prophetic and painful. Sometimes your honesty is more than people are comfortable with. Sometimes you choose to step out in a new way and those that have been walking beside you stop mid-step and watch you walk away. This hurts.

It is even more painful to hear the commentary and judgement that is lined with calls for prayer, which is really just Christian-speak for gossip. When faced with these moments of bench clearing moves, we stand alone. For me, I sit and cry and shutoff and resent alone. Not one time have I frivolously stepped out in a major faith decision. When I have chosen to leave or stay or draw a line in the sand, I have done it out of a place of hard fought prayerful listening.

Have I always done it well? No.
Have I always looked to Jesus? You bet your booty.

If you find yourself in a place that the space where you heart occupies is dark and still and depressing, Jesus knows about that, and so do I. I have stood on the darkest hills in painful struggle all while others were doubting my motives. I have wept from feelings of abandonment, from painful decisions and from loneliness. All in the name of trying to serve God.

What I want to do in this next sentence is to tell you Sunday is coming. But I can't. It's not time for that. There will be a resurrection, but it's only Friday and for now, our job is to recognize that we have to be smack in the middle of that pain. There is not an instant fix. The first disciples did not have a countdown clock for Sunday because they didn't know it was coming. And for some of us, we don't either.

The Journey of Holy Week: Thursday

Tonight was a special night. I have a new liturgical partner in crime at ECL and we are ridiculously excited about creative expressions of ancient truth. Tonight, we celebrated Maundy Thursday on a 40' picnic table that three guys built this week! It was amazing. Communion in the context of a meal, how...biblical. I wanted to share with you a picture of the night and a word from my reflection. I pray that this is a night where you are aware of the love and grace and inclusive nature of the table.

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9 Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil; cling to what is good. 10 Be devoted to one another in love. Honor one another above yourselves. 11 Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor, serving the Lord. 12 Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer. 13 Share with the Lord’s people who are in need. Practice hospitality.    Romans 12:9-13

This last line is why we chose to eat outside tonight. We cannot practice hospitality by having great meals inside a building that the world never sees. We can have a great band and wonderful coffee, but if we never open the door or invade a parking lot with food or serve the world, we find ourselves huddled in an Upper Room of our own making. And then, the world misses out on this beautiful meal.

Hospitality means getting dirty, and feeding hungry stomachs and being shelter from life’s storms. Hospitality means ushering hope into hopelessness and celebrating fully the joys of life. Hospitality means creating space for students and children to be loved when moms and dads are tired and weary.
When we share life,  we remind each other in acts of service that our mission is to love one another in big, profound, Jesus-sized ways.

The Journey of Holy Week: Wednesday

Days before his betrayal and death, Jesus and his disciples were eating at the home of Simon. A woman, who is identified as Mary, approached Jesus with an alabaster jar of expensive perfume, worth about a year’s wages. Mary broke the jar, pouring the perfume on Jesus. In the ancient Near East, the act of anointing signified selection for some special role or task. Kings were often anointed with oil as part of their coronation ceremony.

In John's account of this story, Mary wipes the feet of Jesus. Anointing the feet models service, discipleship, and love. In a culture in which a woman’s touch was often forbidden, Mary dares to cradle the feet of Jesus in her hands and spread the oil across his ankles and toes with the ends of her hair. Rather than measuring out a small amount of oil, Mary breaks the jar and lets it all pour out. She’s all-in, fully committed, sparing no expense.

I am not sure what the equivalent of this moment would be in modern culture, but it would be appalling. The shock of the onlookers, the feeling of watching a sacred and personal moment, the anger at the waste of resources. I can only imagine that I would have been one in the corner fussing about how Mary was doing it wrong. 

But, I have Mary's in my life. They are generous, bold, gracious, servant women that in spite of the norms or the comfortable, they choose to jump in the middle of a touching moment to honor and revere those they love. Women like Mary, that surpass the appropriate and pour out their love and generosity in self-sacrificing ways. I've seen them in the hospital room and the nursery. I've witnessed them in moments of pain and celebrations. I've seen them hold a weeping child and nurse a sick loved one. I've seen the way that they hold a hand through the diagnosis and refuse to walk away. 

In each of these moments, I have watched as the rest of the world stood by with their list of norms and to-do's and could not understand what was drawing them to a kind of servanthood that is foreign to most of us. The kind of love that causes you to give up something precious all in the name of expressing the gift of relationship. 

The coming days are hard. 

We will eat. 

We will pray. 

We will sleep. 

We will deny. 

We will forsake. 

We will weep.

It will be a long 3 days. So, for tonight, spend a moment with the Savior. Pour out your love for Jesus in a new way. Walk deeper into the truth that he is worth giving your best for. And sit at his feet for a moment, oily hair and all. 

The Journey of Holy Week: Tuesday

I don't really like the last few days in the life of Jesus. Up until that point I think much of what he did was endearing. Sure, he spoke a truthful word, but he loved kids, honored women and healed...a lot. When we read about the last few days of his life, the tone seems a bit more hurried. It's almost as if he is trying to pack in all of the important things that he wants to say. The words are pointed. He fusses at religious leaders, he curses a fig tree, he tells stories that point clearly to a lack of faith. More than ever, I hear this need to communicate with those that may still be listening.

I have found this to be true of those that I have watched grow older, as well. It's as if with the compounding gray and the declining health, the gift of time seems fleeting. When the awareness of fewer days becomes a reality, the need to share truth is more pressing. I certainly don't think of myself on the downhill side of life, but as I've made my way up the mountain, I feel a since of freedom to share truth from my experience. At the same time, I see many opportunities to share my passions in the years to come, and Jesus knew that was not going to be his story.

It is not lost on me that one of the groups that Jesus had the harshest words for - all the way to the end - was the religious leaders. I am more and more and more and more convicted every day that as we step out in the ministry of Jesus, we are going to be held accountable for the ways that we lead people. I never want a human to cross my path and think that they are unlovable. Feelings of unworthiness and exclusion are incompatible with Jesus. As a leader in the church, I will fall on the side of love and grace. Every. Single. Time. Now, sometimes love FEELS harsh. I'm a mom to two teenagers, so I understand this on many levels. Jesus didn't promise us an easy life,  free from pain. But, he did promise us a comforter in the pain.

So wherever you find yourself on this Tuesday night, draw deeper into the truth of his final days. He wanted us to hear the depth of his love in the truth of his words. He gave us example after example of how to love. Now, it's our job to do it.

The Journey of Holy Week: Monday

If you read the account of the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, you notice that immediately following the story of Palm Sunday comes the story of Jesus clearing the temple. If you have not read this recently, I encourage you to look in either Matthew 21, Mark 11 or Luke 19. For those who would like to pick apart the scholastic holes or intensely study the differences in these accounts, we can do that another day. For today, I have two questions.

Jesus is headed for a brutal end. He knows this is coming. He sees the writing on the wall of the call on his life. This leads me to believe that if he is spending his last days once again sharing with the world that it time to get our act together, this is important business. So question #1 - What do you need to clean up in your life to be ready to receive the gift of Resurrection? Are you hosting a swap meet of values? Are you trying to make space for the unimportant rather than holding the court of honor for the sacred and holy?

For me, this week is about returning to a space of sacred YES. I spent tonight doing yoga with my oldest. I will spend much time this week in my faith community. We will intentionally slow down. If we rush right through this week with packed calendars and full days and hurried emotions, we will find ourselves there on Sunday morning as well.

The same is true about our churches. For those on church staffs, we WORK this week. We want it all to be perfect and polished and excellent. We know that for some folks, this will be the last time we see them until December 24th. Here's the truth, if we are not journeying with Jesus through this week, everything we try to polish up for Sunday will be empty. May we take tomorrow and Wednesday to walk though our worship spaces and pray that people will encounter the depth of the gift of new life. May we weep with those who are experiencing death and yet claim with them, even when they can't that resurrection is the promise.

I feel certain that if Jesus was to walk through our lives and our churches and see us spiffing up the carpets and scrubbing the bathrooms and planting new plants on the front walk, he would check our hearts. And if he found that our polish and pretty was about the exterior only, he would flip the tables of our churches and our hearts just like he did in scripture.

May the Savior find our hearts ready for the journey of this week. All of it.