Dear Praying Friends,
When I lived in Costa Rica back in the 1990s, huge flocks of green parrots would settle in the tree outside my office window around the start of the rainy season. One parrot squawking close to your ears is painful. Try a thousand of them! Even with a closed window, it made concentrating difficult.
A tree full of squawking parrots is a fitting metaphor these days—the tree, of course, being my brain! Last year following my Mom’s decline and death, voices of anxiety, sadness, discouragement, and frustration squawked in my ear relentlessly. I suppose that was to be expected. I even tried to be patient with it. While the intensity of the grief itself has subsided, a lot of those “parrots” still remain in the tree, even a year and a half later. Their squawking mostly revolves around an accusatory question: “So what is your purpose now?”
When I was caring for my parents in their failing health, my purpose and calling were clear. It wasn’t easy, but I was absolutely confident that it was the ministry God had called me to at that time. And in the years prior, back in the days when I was usually engrossed in some creative multimedia project, I was working in the center of my wheelhouse, where my gifts and passions intersected. I miss that, and I find myself wondering how…or when…or even if…that sort of thing will be a part of life again. Some ask me, “So what are your plans?” My plan is as it ever has been—wait for the Lord, and do the next thing, big or little, that has to be done. Somehow there’s always a next thing.
 But of late those “next things” look like random bits and pieces and doo-dads piled together without any discernible pattern. When people ask me, “So what exactly do you do?” I fumble for a meaningful answer. It’s a little like asking me to describe the contents of my kitchen junk drawer…there are paper clips, notepads, pens, a charging cable, small tools, batteries, Altoids, a Vietnamese banknote, and a tube of hairball medicine. Some useful and necessary things, and some weird and random things. Hard to explain in few words, and even harder to make sound interesting or coherent! So right now as I write this prayer letter, one of the parrots is sitting on my shoulder, squawking, “Do you actually have anything to show for yourself?”
When I look at the things I’ve been involved with, it’s not a short list. For the ministries of Main Street Church, there is always post-producing our weekly programming, maintaining the various websites and communications. That hasn’t changed much. And the past few months have been dominated by wrapping up the editing of a self-published book written by a Utah colleague and friend who is a former LDS bishop. I’m hoping it will be done and out the door the first part of 2023.
I’m still active in my volunteer position as board treasurer of Flourish Mid-Columbia, managing communication, participating in several discussion groups, and serving on the leadership team of the Flourish Young Adults ministry. In addition, I was recently invited to volunteer with the marketing and communication team for the Ingalls Creek Center. Nature abhors a vacuum, and apparently so do calendars. So…there is no lack of things that keep me occupied. Even so, I’m still dogged by the question, “Am I doing enough?” Or perhaps more accurately, “Am I doing the right kind of enough?”
Last month I attended a “Living Well” retreat at Ingalls Creek, for people in transition, focusing on the latter half of middle age. One recurring theme was the tension between doing and being. I’m learning that I am too quick to derive my sense of worth from what I do. What I can show for myself. What I can produce. I unconsciously assume that others, God included, use the same criteria. So when my “output” looks to me like an up-ended junk drawer, I mentally translate my own frustration with my inadequacies and perceived failures, into God’s disappointment. Now I know—cognitively, anyway—that this is not God’s voice; it’s one of those obnoxious parrots shrieking in my ear.
The irony is that I spent fifteen years in the Utah Mormon environment, in which busy-ness is next to godliness. Weighty questions like “Am I doing enough?” and “Am I doing it well enough?” and “is God disappointed with me?” are baked into the culture, and strangely, I now find myself wrestling with those same questions in a way I’d never experienced before. I had spent those fifteen years trying to throw light on a gospel that begins and ends with Jesus Christ and what he did, and not us and what we do…and now I realize that this a message that still needs to sink into my own bones!
With much of my work being day-to-day maintenance and administration, I was feeling starved of meaningful creative outlets. So this past spring, I splurged and took a ceramics course at Columbia Basin College, the local community college. I did it mostly to scratch that long-neglected creative itch. I enjoyed it, and I’m glad I did it, and I have a couple of lop-sided pieces to show for it. And you know, I could even see myself getting into ceramics—I found that I loved the clay and glaze as a medium, and doing something creative with my hands for once was refreshing. (However, I quickly discovered that it wouldn’t be an affordable hobby for me to pursue in earnest.) So that was an enriching pause; but the real struggle I continue to face is discerning what this chapter of life is supposed to look like. Here and now, I have much to be grateful for. External drama is minimal, and “the boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places” (Psalm 16:6). The real drama happens in the space between my ears. When the “clay” of daily work and life doesn’t take a coherent form, or make much sense to me, it beckons me to put my trust in The Potter who sees things that I can’t.
Truthfully, of all the prayer letters I have written, this has been one of the hardest to complete. I started banging it out back in September, scrapped it several times, then edited and re-edited this one more times than I can count. When the days feel small, and random, and disjointed, and I wonder about the value of my paltry offerings, Zechariah 4:10 challenges me, “Who dares despise the day of small things?” It reminds me to trust that even those things which, for all appearances, seem of little consequence—a few measly loaves and fishes—can be multiplied and used by God for His purposes.
 |
FOR YOUR PRAYERS…
- That I more clearly discern the Lord’s voice amid the cacophony of other voices, many of which are less than helpful. Fear, anxiety, discouragement and frustration continue to squawk loudly at times; pray that I may hear and heed the voice of the Shepherd, however he leads!
- That the Lord, in his good time and pleasure, would reveal a worthwhile project or undertaking for me that would ignite creativity, benefit others, and energize me with a greater sense of purpose and calling; but in the meantime, that I might be content with today’s mélange of mundanity.
- That I may rest in the love of God who receives me and values me, not for what I do, how much I do, or how well I do it…but because of Whose I am.
Blessings in Christ,
|
|
