Monthly Archives: January 2008

What does it mean to belong?  How do I belong?  Or, more accurately to whom do I belong?  You know the answer:  God.  Of course.  God is always the right answer, right?  But what does that mean and how does it play out in my life? 

This summer, when we were still new to the area and new to our church, Jeff was involved with the leadership because of his internship, and was already meeting with staff and developing relationships.  I was primarily at home, out in the wilderness (or so it felt) and severed from friendships in our previous hometown.  During the Fall Kick-Off service, we filled the bleachers at the high school football stadium.  The music was rockin’, people were clapping, and the energy was high.  Spirits were soaring.  I stood holding my son, standing next to my parents, alone.  I was surrounded by hundreds of people, family even, my son even.  But I was alone.  As the sermon began, Dutch woke up (he’d been asleep on my lap) and began to cry, so I took him out behind the bleachers.  He was tired and hungry, but I couldn’t get into the car because Jeff had the keys and I couldn’t go and get them because I didn’t want to distract people by walking in front of them (another illogical fear—being an inappropriate distraction to people).  So I paced behind the stadium for the entire service.  You don’t belong here.  Echoed hauntingly through my mind.  You don’t belong here.  Whispered so quietly into my soul.  You don’t belong.  I stood facing a corner for a few minutes to release a little of the built up pressure through tears, but brushed them away briskly as someone walked by.  As they sang the final song, Jeff came out and checked on me.  I got the keys and went to the car to feed Dutch.  As I sat, holding my squirming boy close to my chest, tears streamed down my face.  I don’t belong here.  I turned my face down to avoid being seen, as I peered at the sea of faces now flooding out of the stadium and out past our car.  I don’t belong here.  Groups of people formed, talking, laughing.  I don’t belong here.  Jeff and Dad had to stay for a leadership meeting, so Mom and I drove their car home.  Mom climbed in the back with Dutch and I drove home, silently.  I don’t belong here. 

Now looking back, I can see clearly that that was a lie from the evil one.  But why that?  Why that particular lie?  Why is it so important for us to belong?  We long to belong.  As little girls, we want that best friend.  As we grow older we dream of who we will marry, whose name we will take, who we will belong to.  We have a circle of friends, perhaps a family, perhaps a club or hobby group to whom we belong.  We surround ourselves with ways to belong, and yet—do we really understand to whom we belong?  Do we have that sense, that if all other things were stripped away, that with God we would belong? 

The truth of the matter is that we do belong.  When we were born again, we became part of this family of God—we now belong.  We belong whether we feel it or not.  We belong whether she snubs us or ignores us, whether he dislikes our opinions or the way we raise our children.  We belong despite our differences and we belong despite others’.  We belong. 

When we understand that we belong to God, there is a freedom that allows us to savor solitude.  Solitude is not the same as loneliness.  Loneliness is a state of the heart when we fail to recognize our belonging to God.  Solitude is a blessed state of the heart (and sometimes body) that savors our union and communion with God and is free to enjoy silence or sound, company or quiet.  Solitude is primarily a state of the heart.  Blessed belonging, blessed solitude, produces a peace, a rest, a ceasing of striving that produces a beautiful stillness in our lives that cannot be explained.  In the midst of bills and deadlines and dirty diapers, there can be a peace and tranquility about us that defies logic. In a world where we frantically move from one distraction to another, desperate to not be alone with ourselves, solitude bravely faces the danger of stillness and is at peace with what the quiet heart may find.  Solitude refuses the clutter of a busy heart and freely opens itself up to God’s piercing light. 

This solitude is available.  But first, I must understand that I belong.  I am not alone.  I am not forsaken.  I am not unloved.  I am valued beyond measure.  I am begotten of God.  I am made in His likeness.  I am crafted in His image.  I reflect His beauty and glory.  He beckons me to dine with Him.  He longs for my embrace.  He craves the recesses of my heart and no thing about me does He despise.  In this I can rest.  In this I can be still and embrace the beauty of solitude, where my striving ceases and my heart finds its home.  In God’s presence I belong.  I belong to Him. 

The Adventures in Prayer series is done–so now the real work begins, praying! It’s been an awesome journey already. Now I’d like to share with you other insights from some of the books I’m reading for seminary. Hopefully these things can connect with your minds and hearts even if you haven’t read the material.  I’ll admit I’m strapped for “extra” time now that I’m in seminary and have a busy little boy, so I’m “cheating” by sharing with you things from my classes.  I hope you enjoy! 

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The title of Quick-to-Listen Leaders intrigued me from the start because this term God is repeatedly impressing upon my heart that listening is the key character trait that he wants to develop in me.  From my counseling class to my prayer class to this class, I sense that this theme is surfacing time and again, and I believe this is something that most leaders are weak at, to say the least.

 When I first began thinking about listening, I thought through the qualities of those people I knew who were good listeners, and those I knew who were poor listeners.  In my mind I “interviewed” those people, as Ping & Clippard encourage us to do.  What was sad that that I realized that the pastors and spiritual leaders in my life are among the poorest listeners I have ever met. (My husband, upon reading this, reminded me that our current pastor is an excellent listener, so he doesn’t count!  I haven’t spent enough time with him to know.)  The connection I discovered was that the “higher up” the person was in spiritual leadership the worse that person was at authentic listening skills, generally speaking.  The people I know who are the best listeners are lay people who genuinely love others and who have a miraculous ability to “enter in” to another’s world, pushing aside all other distractions and zeroing in on the speaker, even asking engaging questions, as active and not passive listeners.  Karen Zyp (my mom), Mindy Haidle, and Tom Jones top my list as listening heroes.  

There were also several key things that highlighted my own listening weaknesses.  The line, “Keep the conversation spotlight on the other person’s agenda without pushing for your own” (90) really struck me.  I can easily feel that the conversation is out of control unless I have some input or some way to relate to what the person is saying, especially if the person is relating something that I feel is not an accurate representation of reality.  But I need to be careful not to try to correct their thinking before the time. If a person just needs to share how they feel it is not my job to correct their feelings. 

 The two parts of the book that I found most helpful were the list of helpful and unhelpful questions and the discussion of personality types.  The connecting questions, clarifying questions, and wondering questions were all excellent. When I think of my friend Mindy, I am always amazed at how she asks such perfectly crafted questions to really get at the heart of what I’m talking about.  My questions always seem shallow or contrived. 

 The timing of this book was perfect.  The night that I finished the book we were hosting a casual dinner get together for 8 young couples from our church, all with young children.  Since we are relatively new there, but actively involved in leadership, we saw it as an opportunity to both connect and meet people in our same stage of life, and promote a young-marrieds ministry, of which there is none.  The Search to Belong provided an excellent guide for us as we prayed through what the group should look like.  Then Quick-to-Listen Leaders provided the guide to help us prepare to be listeners throughout the whole evening.  We both agreed that the goal of the evening was to listen to these people, to get to know them without seeking to be understood or known ourselves (as our primary objective).  Rather than telling them our ideas of for a ministry, we committed to listening to their ideas.  We committed to being slow to speak and quick to listen.
 So the questions and ideas from this book were invaluable!  We sat down and discussed what kind of “connecting” questions we could ask each couple. We knew several people as mere acquaintances, but had never had a very significant conversation with any of them, and are very dissimilar from many in terms of life experience and vocation.  So, discussing connecting questions was fabulous.  My husband was blessed when he initiated conversation with one guy whom he had always had trouble connecting with.  He always sensed the guy was disinterested and we were amazed that they even showed up to our event.  But Jeff began asking connecting questions about his job, and they discovered that the guy was working on a project with the company that Jeff just left (in a town over an hour away!).  It was an amazing “small world” situation, which opened a door to talk about construction and utilities that created a bridge between these two seemingly dissimilar men. 

 When it came time to come together and all share, Jeff asked the connecting question, “How did you and your spouse meet and marry?”  It was the perfect way for all of us to connect.  The stories were infinitely varied and had us laughing and even crying.  Everyone had their own chance to share and be heard, and we sought to model good listening skills by focusing on the person speaking, asking clarifying and wondering questions, and giving listening cues. 

 When the time came to listen to their ideas and needs for a ministry we were amazed.  Our gifting and passion is to teach the Bible, but we’d been very careful not to push people toward needing to study the Bible more, since we thought most everyone was interested only at a social level.  So, we determined not to give any ideas or even suggestions to start but just to listen.  What we heard was amazing!  We figured many couples wouldn’t want to commit to meeting regularly.  Some couples there are not even regular attenders of church so we didn’t have high hopes. But each couple, every single couple, articulated that what they really want is to meet regularly to study the Bible in depth, and to have occasional times (like that) of dinner and fellowship with our kids.  Our eyes were like saucers—they were basically articulating our exact  same desire for the ministry, but they’d said it, not us!  We couldn’t have orchestrated the thing any better if we’d tried, but what was remarkable was that by listening instead of telling them, we let go of control and were able to not only let God move, but let the people in the group have a sense of leadership and ownership and value because listened to them. 
 By the time people left, every single couple said, “please call us and let us know when we can do this again!”  We thought we wouldn’t get any sort of commitment, but they all committed!  Again, we were amazed at the results when, like the two books said, we allowed people to be free and when we let go of control and listened.  Talk about two well-timed books!  Thank you, Lord.

In my Prayer class, we are reading a book entitled Space for God. This highly unconventional book includes everything from Scripture to Van Gogh paintings, all designed to help transition our souls into communion with God and contemplation of the deeper realities of life. This may sound like fluff. It is not. The book is not fluff. The idea is that we have become so frantically busy that we have no space for God. As Robert Louis Stevenson says, “There is a sort of dead-alive people about, who are scarcely conscious of living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation .. They have dwarfed and narrowed their soul by a life of work, until here they are at forty, with a listless attention, a mind vacant of all material for amusement, and not one thought to rub against another while waiting for the train.” I do not want to be that person. But often I am. Often I cannot stand the thought of just stopping, just stopping and sitting with my son or watching him play with a toy or gazing in his eyes or smelling his cheeks or tasting his kisses. I’m not content doing nothing with him the same way I’m not content doing nothing with God. I don’t think I’m alone in this. We are a people who cannot stop. We don’t slow down enough to see. We don’t see into the spiritual realm, we don’t have communion with God, we don’t drink of the depths of God’s amazing presence. We have become bored with life and too afraid to sit still, for fear of what we may discover. We dull our minds with entertainment, afraid to be alone with ourselves.

Hence, this class. This class is an attempt to cultivate a prayerful, meditative, deep, reflective, contemplative life that steeps in the presence of God. The assignment, for this book, is to spend one hour each week interacting with the book and soaking in God’s presence. One hour. Not a lot. But that’s one hour more than before, and one hour more than the norm.

Coming to this task, I am more than aware of my being a beginner. In prayer I am a beginner. In the spiritual disciplines I am a beginner. In this attempt at living a contemplative, deep inner life I am a beginner. I am aware of my need for some structure, (i.e. one hour block of time with a book to read) in order to aid my attempts. As I was reminded at a leadership retreat this weekend, some people are naturally structured and some aren’t. I am. Tell me to sit quietly and meditate for one hour and I will run the other direction. But the book provides me with some structure, a springboard, if you will, for diving into the depths of God’s presence. So as I came to this book, painfully aware of my status as beginner, I read Postema’s thoughts on this very topic: “One cannot begin to face the real difficulties of the life of prayer and meditation unless one is perfectly content to be a beginner and really experience oneself as one who knows little or nothing, and has a desperate need to learn the bare rudiments. Those who think they “know” from the beginning never, in fact, come to know anything … We do not want to be beginners. But let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything else but beginners, all of our life.”

How glorious! My status as a beginner in the life of contemplative prayer and meditation is nothing to be scorned or ashamed of! I am beginning. I am gloriously beginning, which means I have much in front of me. Just as it glorious to be at the beginning of a delicious meal, I am at the beginning of a delicious journey. I have much to anticipate … in fact, I’m beginning to drool.

I’ll probably include parts of this chapter someday in my book, The Sacredness of the Mundane.  It is this very topic, the Prayer of the Ordinary, that I’m passionate about communicating to people, especially women.  So much of my day is what we’d call “ordinary.”  Thus, so much of my day should be filled with the prayer of the ordinary.  Right now I just put Dutch down for bed, I prayed for him, simple, honest, heartfelt prayers for his present needs (sleep, health, joy, development) and his long-term needs (a heart for God, obedience to parents, a godly spouse, a passion for serving God).  At times perhaps I agonize too much over simple decisions, but to me it is part of praying the ordinary—I want to ask God about every decision and learn to gently listen and be quiet and still enough in my heart to hear His voice. 
 Just as the writer was digging a ditch for the glory of God, I change diapers, grade theology papers, play with matchbox cards, write position papers on women in ministry, make dinner, and read my hermeneutics textbook, all for the glory of God.  And, as Foster says, not only can I pray about these things, but these very things become prayer, as I do them for His name and sake:  As Ignatius of Loyala said, “Everything that one turns in the direction of God is prayer.”  Let it be. 

Chapter 13 is entitled Meditative Prayer.  I have never much understood the practice of meditation, perhaps because the term has been so marred through its current, secular, more-popular meaning of emptying our minds of anything that is good and allowing ridiculousness to fill it up while we twist our bodies into strange knots.  But this chapter really seized my heart.  Foster distinguishes these two types of meditation: “It is the ethical call to repentance, to change, to obedience that clearly distinguishes Christian meditation from it eastern and secular counterparts.  The story of Jim and Jogging Monk touched my heart, because I am certainly Jim, unable to slow down enough, unable to rest and let go and receive from God or meditate on a simple text for that long.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s words are perfect: “Just as you do not analyze the words of someone you love, but accept them as they are said to you, accept the Word of Scripture and ponder it in your heart.”  Now, there is good caution here.  I have been trained to be oh so careful about placing myself in the middle of scripture, because plenty of what is written cannot be directly applied to me.  How often well-meaning young believers have perhaps “claimed” promises in Scripture that were never meant to be claimed as promises (i.e. Prov. 22:6)!  But that is not what is meant here, this is a different idea entirely.  This is for those place in scripture with clear meanings (we probably wouldn’t meditate on problem passage in the New Testament that scholars argue over—although perhaps it might help the arguments if scholars meditated more!), where we need to learn to move from our heads to our hearts. I am challenged in this way:  I read through the Bible, is its entirety, each year.  This year is my 10th time through the Bible, and I love this spiritual exercise because I love getting to take in the whole of scripture, plus it keeps me on track with reading and keeps me from getting lazy!  However, as I read this, I’m challenged.  Is reading through the whole Bible a thing of pride right now? Would I be willing to let that discipline go and say, read only 52 verses this year, meditating on one verse for an entire week?  That sounds like more than I can handle, and I don’t want to jump from one extreme to another, but it does make me wonder.  I do know one thing for certain, less quantity and more quality, at least for a season.  I need God to do a fresh work in my reading of Scripture, to engage my heart more than my head.

Ok, I admit this isn’t a review from the next chapter in Foster’s book–it’s better: It’s application! 

We are now back in school full-time, and this is my first term as a full-time seminary student and full-time Mom.  Already I’m seeing that finding time for homework and studying is going to require more creativity than I’d ever dreamed.  More than anything though, I just hate having to leave Dutch at home to go to class.  Once I get there, I’m in love all over again–truly seminary is the most challenging, stretching, life-changing, eye-opening, horizon-broadening, faith-building thing I’ve ever done.  I love learning and growing and the professors and students there are like perfectly sharpened instruments in the process.  But leaving Dutch in the morning is so hard, even though I know he’s happy at home with Oma and Papa.  As it is right now, we are gone at school all day on Mondays and Tuesdays. 

Tonight at 5:30, Jeff got done with class and I was anxious to get home.  I only have one two-hour class on Wednesdays, but since we only have one car, I just spend the rest of the day doing homework while Jeff is in class for an additional 4 1/2 hours.  So, we’re tired, scarfing dinner out of a tupperware that I heated in the microwave, and we’re both drained and anxious to see our little boy.  Jeff is so jazzed about his Christianity & Culture class that he talks non-stop all the way to the Gladstone exit.  I’m dreaming about giving Dutch kisses, hoping we get home in time to play for a little while before he has to go to bed.  Suddenly he says, “Oh no!  I forgot my computer at school.”  I close my eyes, frustrated.  Instantly I’m ticked: Why can’t you remember stuff?  Now we’re going to totally miss out on Dutch’s time to play and traffic is bad and you’re so busy talking about seminary stuff that you can’t remember …  mid-thought I realize that I am a horrible, ugly, nasty dragon inside and I’m being a b—-.   Jeff takes the next exit and I call home and let Dad know we’re going to be late.  As we wait at the onramp light, slowly letting cars go one by one, it’s quiet and Jeff is discouraged.  “I’m sorry, hon.”  Of course I say it’s ok, but I can tell we’re still both just frustrated and tired.  It’s not so much the computer, it’s the fact that he has 16 credits, plus his internship, plus tutoring middle schoolers two days a week, plus teaching an entire day in Corvallis at Cornerstone, plus now attending Foothills staff meetings, and trying to be a husband and father someone in the middle of it all.  We drove back to school in slience, and when we arrived, even though the building is supposed to stay open until 10pm, all the doors were locked.  Of course.  So, Jeff takes off to try to find janitors while I sit in the car and watch the minutes go by.  Then, I remembered that that morning my time prayer-journalling had been cut short and I’d wanted to continue writing out my prayers to God later.  I need it right now, I thought.  This is the perfect time to pray.  So I pulled out my laptop and began writing to God.  Blunt, honest, frustrated prayers.  Then I remembered someone I’d read in my prayer book, about seeing frustrations and interruptions and asking God, What are you trying to tell me through this?  So, I asked God (although I still had an attitude), what He wanted to speak to us through this little minor but frustrating episode.  Just then Jeff returned to the car with laptop in hand, and somehow both of our hearts had changed. 

As we drove, we now had love in our hearts again for each other and weren’t blinded by frustration.  But, we both realized that what the situation had brought up was  a genuine concern:  Jeff had way too much on his plate and felt overwhelmed and I felt like he didn’t have enough time to spend with Dutch.  Then, in what I now see was God, we realized that simply dropping Jeff’s Wednesday classes would solve the entire problem.  Though it means prolonging graduation, we both agreed that we are not doing this to hurry to the finish line, and wisdom and maturity would say that doing things right, having time for family and God and rest and minsitry, is more important than getting a degree done speedily.  With the Wednesday classes gone, it also means that I can just zip in and do my 2-hour class while Dutch is napping and be back home so we only have to be away from him for one day instead of 2!  Yay! It also means I don’t have to pack two lunches and two travel dinners for that day, and Jeff will have an entire free day to study.  And…it means that his weekly schedule is flexible in case something else opens up ministry-wise.  We couldn’t have seen it coming, but before we knew it, we both felt like a HUGE weight was lifted off our shoulders.  By the time we got home, we were in high spirits, tumbling on the floor with Dutch and listening to him “tell us” about his day. 

We certainly didn’t handle everything right.  Both of our initial reactions to the simple detour were immature and selfish.  But how God is not put off by that!  He still used the situation to slow us down and frustrate us just enough to show us that something needed to change.  And by the grace of God we listened and obeyed.  I don’t know the significance of that decision, but I sense that He was pleased by it.  By simply saying, You’re right God, we were taking on too much and we want to obey you in this.  We trust you God.  

I pray that this helps me to be quicker to ask God, What do you want to tell me through this little inconvenience, Lord?  Teach me to listen.