bleeding out loud

As Aaron describes it, the idea for a new liturgy was birthed at the end of a really bad day. It grew out of the need to be pastored in the midst of a dark moment. And it has done just that in our home. Here’s what I mean.

Lately, things have been very hard in our house. In September, our five year old started kindergarten; five days a week, all day long. She’s pretty exhausted by the whole thing and has become an innovator at being cranky. Meanwhile, our two year old has recently begun testing us. All that talk about being great parents, forget it. Most of the time, we’re just trying to make it through the day. Loving your kids well is not easy.

Then a few months ago, Trisha sent me an email on a Wednesday afternoon. The kids had put her over the edge, and she didn’t know how much more she could take. Would I please pray for her? When I got home, I could see why. The oldest was arguing while the youngest had attached herself like a koala bear to Trisha’s ankle, whining louder and louder to keep pace with the escalating volume of the argument. Dinner was boiling over on the stove. I needed to create a diversion.

“Girls, come here I want to show you something that I got today.” I went over and sat on the kitchen floor and pulled out my laptop.

“What is it?” our five year old asked?

“Music,” I said. “My friend Aaron gave me this new music that he wrote. You might recognize it. We sing some of these songs at church.” I hit play. By now, the two year old had released Trisha’s leg from her kung fu grip and had joined us at the foot of the stove.

Soon the music was building, and it had a driving beat with big bass drums thumping. Boom, boom, boom. They both started bouncing and giggling, and I got them playing air drums. We were keeping the beat and they started trying to dance in place while keeping the air drums going. The chorus started through the second time and I tried to get them to sing the words with me:

“Oh, you love your children. Love your children. Every daughter, every son. Oh, you love your children. All your children. Help us see you in each one.”

Then through the dancing chaos, I noticed that Trisha was kneeling down watching us from the other end of the room with tears in her eyes. “You love your children. All your children. Help us see you in each one.” It was one of those holy moments that you happen upon by accident in the most ordinary times and places. We hadn’t laughed and delighted in one another’s presence like that in a while.

In the span of a song we were apprehended by something beyond ourselves and became aware that the ground we were standing on, impatient and absent of grace as it seemed, was holy and full of God’s buoyant love.

“The meaning of redemption is to reveal the holy that is concealed, to disclose the divine that is suppressed. Every person is called upon to be a redeemer, and redemption takes place every moment, every day.”

God in Search of Man

“In starting out anew, the church has made a choice. It has forbidden in advance any homesickness for what it is leaving behind. It welcomes and already loves what is lying before it. It is still here; but no longer here; not there yet, but already there. It has a long journey before it, as well as battles, suffering, hunger, and thirst. There is no denying that it is sighing, but still more undeniably, it is rejoicing. And it thinks, speaks, and acts accordingly. The new start of the church consists in this crisis of the still captive, already liberated people of God.”

Lately when there’s something Braylen wants or thinks we need that we don’t have, she builds it out of construction paper.

A Christmas stocking for Clara.

An Advent wreath for the back door.

A star for the top of the tree.

A Christmas angel for our bedroom door.

Mermaid tails for her toy princesses.

A puppy that she named Sparkles and led around on a paper leash for a weekend.

An elephant head.

Last week I was working on a piece of writing about suffering well. The piece was nearly finished, but I was racking my brain trying to figure out how to end it. Endings are the hardest for me, and that seems to be true pretty much across the board; sermons, writing, relationships, etc.

I was wrestling with the question that all communicators would do well to wrestle with. “So what?” I wanted to find a way to show what suffering well looked like and why it mattered, but for whatever reason nothing was coming to me. And I had the sense that the words, the image, whatever it was ultimately going to be, was something I already possessed. I just needed to locate it. “Just wait. You already have what you’re looking for. It’ll come,” the Spirit seemed to say. So I shut my computer and headed for home.

When I walked through the doors, I saw this.

“Can I show you what I did?” Trisha asked. In a little less than an hour, some friends were coming over for a Christmas party. Throughout the Fall we’d gotten together six or seven times with three other couples, mostly to drink wine and to spend intentional time with each other. All of us have kids and don’t have much time or energy to be intentional with but still felt that being with other people on purpose was something we needed to do. Our goal was simple: Get together six times in the Fall, drink wine, and answer two questions: What in the last year has been really great? What in the last year has been really hard? I don’t think any of us expected it to be so holy.

So as Trisha was putting the house together for the party, she wrote a series of short prayers on little pieces of paper, prayers that gave a subtle nod and wink to the things that each of us had shared.

She placed the prayers around some lit candles and in the center wrote a prayer that said, “We call upon your name. We bless you. We ask that you would be near to us and walk alongside us as we enter a new year. We love you.”

It was so moving to me. We remember…we remember…we remember…we remember. Our conversations through the Fall had been a form of suffering well, and these prayers of remembrance were an extension of that. But what struck me about these prayers is that they were a particular kind of remembering. Not the selective memory kind of remembering that shuts out the bad and only chooses to remember the good but an “and yet” kind of remembering that sees the bad exactly as it is, and goes on trusting that life can still be full even in the midst of those hard things.

“Be near to us and walk alongside us” the prayer in the center said, and surveying the dirty dishes and the half empty wine glasses later that night, it occurred to me that God had done just that.