“I’ll be watching you in the checkout line.”

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The voice made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I was in the frozen foods section of a grocery store early Sunday evening, gazing unsuspectingly at the multitude of potatoes. Hashbrowns or fries? Russet or Sweet potato? Julienned or …

“I’ll be watching you in the checkout line.”

The male voice behind me was teasing, mocking. I turned slowly to see a strange man standing behind me. No one else was anywhere in view. For a second I gripped my purse and wondered how loudly I’d have to scream to get the attention of the people all the way up at the front of the store.

I’ll admit that the impulse of fear in me was lying close to the surface. I had graduated from seminary just weeks earlier and moved across the country back to Houston. I left a house full of four close roommates and moved to an empty, four-bedroom parsonage where I was living by myself for the first time in my life in a part of town that seemed to show up on the news every night of the week. And not for fuzzy, human-interest stories, let me tell you. Each night I checked and double checked the locks on my doors. I would lie in bed, unused to the quiet, counting the weeks until the security system I had asked the church trustees for would be installed.

Just this morning I had preached my first sermon as a bona-fide Associate Pastor. We were in a series on The Ten Commandments and the Senior Pastor had graciously switched the order so I, their 28-year-old, single, female pastor didn’t have to introduce myself with “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” (Awkward!) Instead, I preached on “Thou shalt not steal.” It had gone pretty well. People seemed warm and welcoming. But they were still strangers to me. This place was not yet home.

Now, here I was in a public place, being approached by a man I had never spoken to before, and he was promising to watch me in the checkout line. Creepy.

Before I could scream or move or think of a response, he continued with a follow-up line that confused me: “You know, like in your sermon this morning?”

It took me a full minute with a dumbfounded look on my face to connect the dots of stranger-danger with a story I had told in my sermon just a few hours before.

I was a pretty good kid growing up. The only personal story I had to connect with the “Thou shalt not steal” commandment had to do with an incident in a grocery store. I was five years old. I wanted a toy from the checkout line. My mom said no. I forgot to put it back and only realized it was still in my hand when we were walking through the parking lot. I stuffed it into my pocket and lived with my crime buried deep inside, hiding the toy at home and living in fear that someone would find it and know I was a thief. I went on to talk about how even the smallest sin can bury us in shame.

Suddenly the twinkle in this man’s eye became apparent. “I’ll be watching you in the checkout line. You know, like in your sermon this morning? You have a history of crimes in grocery stores!” He laughed and approached with a friendly, outstretched hand. “I’m Bob. I was at the 11:00 service. Hope we’ll be getting to know each other soon.”

Relieved? Yes.

Safe? No.

That was my first taste of a danger that is inherent to ministry. Preachers know it’s important to be personal in our messages. We want to offer a bit of ourselves when we speak and write. It’s important that we let the Scripture speak through our own experiences – so we tell personal stories, hoping the listeners will feel that God’s Word is supposed to be personal, and let it soak into places that are personal for them.

But lots of people aren’t aware that while they’ve been listening and developing a feeling of closeness to us, we haven’t had the same chance to grow close to them. They start off in an introduction with more information about us than we will gather about them in months of casual conversation. And the inequity of that feels a little… odd. Like people who asked very, very personal questions about my pregnancy when I didn’t know their last name. Or others who shared way TMI about their own breastfeeding experiences (seriously? until the kid was 7 years old?), or their sex lives after their babies were born, or … well, you just don’t want to know.  The larger the church the tougher this problem becomes.  Smaller communities have a little more feeling of authenticity.  Now imagine the vast community of the internet.

So I’m confessing. I’m afraid of transparency. I really want the stories I tell here to do their job. I want to speak to you like a close friend, like I’m talking right to you. I want you to know me. And at the same time I’m afraid of you knowing me.

I’ve held back in my ministry-world, keeping some things to myself, maintaining a professional distance for my own sanity. I know this issue isn’t unique to pastors.  Some of you have been there too.  It’s OK not to expose everyone to all of your problems when your job is to take care of theirs.  But at times I’ve overdone it, holding back behind a professional facade to protect myself. I’ve even used professionalism as an excuse sometimes to put distance between me and the people who could have cared for me in times when I really needed support, but I didn’t want anyone to see just how vulnerable I really was.  Holding back my own struggles from my community has made me feel inauthentic. Opaque.

So I’m experimenting with transparency here. A toe in the water. We’ll see how it goes. I’ve already revealed more about a tough part of my life in one sentence on the “About” page of this blog than I told most of my church for three years. I feel a little panicky about that. Like being snuck up on in front of the frozen foods.

So, please, go easy when we bump into each other in the grocery store. Remind me who you are again. Tell me a little about you before you jump into my business, even though I’ve voluntarily let you all up in it here. Let me get my bearings in this new world where you know me. And please, help me know you too.

How transparent are your pastors or church leaders? What do you think that level of transparency does for the people in the community? What do you think it does to them?

Mother’s Day Sermon 2011

Mother’s Day, 2010
Last year, Drew was born in March and I was on maternity leave for the following two months.  (By the way, my husband once referred to maternity leave as my “little vacation.”  Once.  I think I corrected him with a heavy dose of postpartum screaming.  Those were an intense couple of months and I’m amazed that Jim and I both survived!)  My first Sunday back at church was Mother’s Day, and I was asked to preach.  This was a little intimidating, considering most of the topics I had been meditating on for the last many weeks had to do with a) poop b) breastfeeding or c) poop.  Our church was in a year-long series through the Bible called Bible 360, and my sermon landed right in the middle of the Wisdom Literature, in the book of Proverbs.  My sermon was addressed to Drew, so I called it: “Proverbs for My Son.”  Somehow I came out of the sleep-deprived, poop-saturated-brain-haze, because lots of people said kind things about the sermon.  Many people even cried a little, and that’s the gold standard of preaching.  If you can make ’em cry, you’ve won.  They teach us that in seminary.

If you’d like, you can WATCH the video through our church’s website here or LISTEN here.  Or you can WATCH or LISTENthrough iTunes by selecting the May 8, 2010 sermon.

I will say that being back in the pulpit after so many months was a huge high for me.  We didn’t even attend church in those two months after Drew was born.  This was the longest I’d been away from Sunday morning church since, um, my first year of college.  OK. My first three years of college.  I was starved for community and adult conversation, and standing up to speak in front of our congregation after my long  hiatus from church was incredibly meaningful for me.  Being able to put motherhood and pastorhood together in one message felt like the culmination of a long dream.  I get a little trippy anytime I can be both a pastor and a mom at the same time.  These are my two lifetime dreams, and to have both of them come true at once is pretty breathtaking.  It was an incredible Sunday for me.  I can’t say the same for my iHusband, Jim, who had to leave after the first sentence of the message with a screaming newborn who didn’t understand that he was supposed to sit through the message and listen.  Darn Preachers’ Kids.

Mother’s Day 2011
You know what they say about being asked to do the dishes?  If you don’t want to be asked to do them again, just drop a dish.  Evidently I didn’t drop anything in 2010 because I was asked to preach Mother’s Day yet again this year.  I had a couple of discussions with my fellow-pastors (They’re all fellows, by the way. All 8 of them) about why they would prefer not to preach on Mother’s Day.  Mother’s Day is treacherous waters where preachers are concerned.  You have to strike just the right balance of proclaiming the Gospel, worshipping God, and worshipping the moms among you.  Say too little about mothers in your message and you’ll get some pretty dirty looks. Fail to mention them altogether and you’re going to hear about it before you get out the door!  It may not be a religious holiday by most calendars, but in the church it is a high and holy day.  Mess with Pentecost. Ignore Lent.  But don’t touch Mother’s Day.

A couple of preachers I know even call Mother’s Day and the Sunday closest to the Fourth of July: “Throwaway Worship.”  As in: “Well, we’re not really worshipping God this Sunday, but we’ll get back to that next week.”  I was told again and again by different people that my sermon needed to be “all about mothers” or an angry mob of moms would follow me home with pitchforks.

I completely disagree.  Anything we worship in place of God becomes an idol for us, and the Old Testament is clear on what God thinks of idols and what He does with them.  I had no desire to preach a sentimental sermon about the sweetness of motherhood, or how “God couldn’t be everywhere, so He created mothers.” (In my top 5 most hated church signs of all time. And that’s sayin something. I really hate cheesy church signs.)  So I chose a text about idolatry.  From a book of the Bible that never mentions a woman.  I told my own mom what I had chosen and she looked a little scared of what I might say.  But as riled up as I get while preparing for a sermon, thinking I might go all “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” on people, I always soften things up a little before stepping into the pulpit.

And once again the response was good.  No broken dishes on the floor, more than a few tears in the congregation, so I guess I’ll be struggling with the same questions again this time next year.

I’d love your feedback if you’d like to WATCH or LISTEN through our church website. Or you can WATCH or LISTEN via iTunes by choosing “Icons and Idols” on May 8, 2011.

What do you think is the place of cultural holidays and national holidays in Christian worship?  Who was being worshipped on Mother’s Day at your church?

Written a couple of weeks ago the night after a funeral.  A pastor is usually called to a family’s home the day of or the day after a death, in the middle of their turmoil and grief and family issues.  In the next few days we field calls from different family members with different experiences, memories and emotional agendas, possibly make more visits, and prepare the service and our message.  I’m usually so emotionally exhausted the night after a funeral that I sleep it off for 9-10 hours.  This was written on just such a night.

Choose your words carefully

I did a funeral today for a man in his 40’s, the father of an 8-year-old girl. Funerals are one of the toughest parts of my job as a pastor.  I always feel guilty saying that, as if the stress and struggle of the funeral for me today was anything in comparison to what the man’s wife or daughter are going through.  But funerals are hard in different ways for everyone involved.

Oddly enough, funerals are not hard because I’m uncomfortable with the topic of death.  That’s actually not a problem for me.  As a biologist, I’m pretty pragmatic about the whole life/death cycle.  Instead, I struggle in the preparation for the funeral because I want to find just the right words to comfort the family and others who are grieving.  The words spoken at a funeral can do a lot to put a family on a path towards healing. Conversely, they can do a lot to cause them pain, even if that’s not the intended effect.

At my own grandmother’s funeral the pastor went on and on about how much pain she had been in towards the end of her fight with bone cancer and how good it was that her suffering had ended. I’m sure he was deeply affected by having seen this very faithful woman suffer so much, but I’ll never forget my father’s comment, spouted in anger after the service: “I’ll never forgive that pastor for dwelling on her pain like that!” It was so hard for my dad to be reminded about his mom’s struggle on the day he was hoping to move on to focus on her relief.

So I always feel quite a bit of pressure to say the right things.

It gets even trickier when I’m not sure I can say anything positive about the person’s faith in God or make claims that they are in the arms of Jesus at that very moment. I don’t want to give false assurances. I want to be plain about how fleeting life is and how it magnifies our need for God’s grace and a hope for a life beyond this one. But I’m not going to make promises that someone is with Jesus when their life showed no visible signs of knowing or following Him.  I’m not the kind of pastor that brings that sort of thing up, dangling hell in front of a grieving family to try to get their ticket to heaven punched out of fear, but it’s a careful dance, knowing how much to say and how much not to say.  It’s a question that often keeps me awake the night before a funeral.

One of the best things I feel I can do at a funeral is to bring out the positive parts of someone’s character (that’s easier with some than others!) and then point back to God as the source of those characteristics.  If every good and perfect gift comes from God (James 1:17), then the gifts given to and through this person are no exception.

Family resemblance is sometimes described as “spit-n-image” here in Texas, as in: “That boy is the spit ‘n image of his dad!”  But that phrase originally had so much more power, before being shortened from its original “spirit and image.” What it was meant to describe in the beginning was the way someone resembled someone on the inside (spirit) and outside (image).  I talk about resemblances within the family in front of me, and then I talk about how we’re created in the image of God, and how our positive characteristics are simply reflections of his Spirit and image in our lives.  The closer we grow to God, the more we resemble Him. The more recognizable we are as His children.

The man whose funeral I presided over today loved to do big generous things for others.  He would donate things out of his own pocket and let people believe they came from his company.  He would do things for his mother-in-law and let her assume that his wife was the one behind the blessing.  He was extravagant with his little daughter, treating her to a weekly breakfast out to eat with Daddy, a scavanger hunt for her Christmas present, a luxury suite while they were on family vacation, and a million little things that she will remember as his gifts to her.  Since his cancer diagnosis he even shared the research he did about cancer with other patients in online forums, trying to help them get the best treatment possible. He sometimes encountered other patients who couldn’t afford the same kind of treatment he could pay for.  At least once that his wife knows of (there are probably more) he sent them the money so they could receive treatment even though this was an incurable form of cancer.

This man was extravagant and understated at the same time. He loved doing big things… anonymously.  I would call that a reflection of the Spirit and image of our generous and invisible God.  The One who blesses without asking for anything in return, who creates for the sake of beauty, who loves without condition and forgives without looking back.

How about you? What’s the most helpful or most damaging thing you’ve heard said at a funeral?

Some of my favorite worship moments come through people’s testimonies.

My friend Rob Renfroe says: Our testimonies are powerful because it’s hard to argue with somebody’s story.

This is incredibly true when the story is told as poignantly as through the lens of Ben Wyman, the most talented video artist I know.

Here’s one of my favorites, about my friend Bryce and her daughter Grace.  We were in a worship series called Amazing Grace, and it seemed so perfect to end the last Sunday with a story about a little girl named Grace. (Video is about 4 min).

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I met Bryce when Grace was less than two weeks old and they were preparing for her first eye surgery.  It’s been a long road and a lot of surgeries and treatments since then, but Bryce and her husband Chris have been amazing parents to this wonderful little girl.  Bryce is an anaesthesiologist in the army, making her one of the smartest, most beautiful, and bravest women I know, all at the same time.

I hope to share lots of stories with you here.  I hope you’ll share yours with me as well.

Welcome to Reverend Mother.

Chasing two dreams

I’m a pastor and a mom.  This is a blog about having a foot in two worlds, and being imperfect, inadequate and available to God in both at the same time.

I’m not sure how many pastors have nursed a baby between worship services on a Sunday morning, or how many have had to quickly change clothes before going to an Administrative Board meeting because their nicest suit just experienced “the fountain of youth” during a diaper change.  Life around our house has plenty of screaming and tears (sometimes even from the baby!) but more often lots of chances at laughter and many, many reasons for thankfulness.

Before Drew was born I was secretly afraid that by adding “Mother” to already full life of “Reverend” I would never be able to give myself fully to either.  That I would be divided between two worlds, always wishing I was somewhere else and feeling I wasn’t doing my best in either role.  But in the last fourteen months I’ve been amazed that the part of my brain that loves deep thoughts, great stories, and theological insights didn’t turn to mush.  Instead, I think it became more active and alive.  My son has given me more passion for ministry and desire to seek out the deep things of God.  He deserves to grow up in a world where people think deeply, love passionately and laugh a lot.  I hope to share that world here with you.

Mother's Day Sermon 2011

Mother’s Day, 2010
Last year, Drew was born on March 4 and I was on maternity leave for the following two months.  (By the way, my husband once referred to maternity leave as “my little vacation.”  Once.  I think I corrected him with a heavy dose of postpardum screaming.  Those were an intense couple of months and I’m amazed that Jim and I both survived!)  My first Sunday back at church was Mother’s Day, and I was asked to preach.  This was a little intimidating, considering most of the topics I had been meditating on for the last many weeks had to do with a) poop b) breastfeeding or c) poop.  Our church was in a year-long series through the Bible called Bible 360, and my sermon landed right in the middle of the Wisdom Literature, in the book of Proverbs.  My sermon was addressed to Drew, so I called it: “Proverbs for My Son.”  Somehow I came out of the poop-induced-brain-haze, because lots of people said kind things about the sermon.  Many people even cried a little, and that’s the gold standard of preaching.  If you can make ’em cry, you’ve won.  If you’d like, you can WATCH the video through our church’s website here or LISTEN here.  Or you can WATCH or LISTEN through iTunes by selecting the May 8, 2010 sermon.

I will say that being back in the pulpit after so many months was a huge high for me.  We didn’t even attend church in those two months after Drew was born.  This was the longest I’d been away from Sunday morning church since, um, my first year of college.  OK. My first three years of college.  I was starved for community and adult conversation, and facing our congregation after my long  hiatus from church was incredibly meaningful for me.  Being able to put motherhood and pastorhood together in one message felt like the culmination of a long dream.  I get a little trippy anytime I can be both a pastor and a mom at the same time.  These are my two lifetime dreams, and to have both of them come true at once is pretty breathtaking.  It was an incredible Sunday for me.  I can’t say the same for my iHusband Pro, Jim, who had to leave after the first sentence of the message with a screaming newborn who didn’t understand that he was supposed to sit through the message and listen.  Darn Preachers’ Kids. 

Mother’s Day 2011
You know what they say about doing dishes?  If you don’t want to do them again, just drop a dish.  Evidently I didn’t drop anything in 2010 because I was asked to preach Mother’s Day yet again this year.  I had a couple of discussions with my fellow-pastors (They’re all fellows, by the way. All 7 of them.) about why they would prefer not to preach on Mother’s Day.  Mother’s Day is treacherous waters where preachers are concerned.  You have to strike just the right balance of proclaiming the Gospel, worshipping God, and worshipping the moms among you.  Say too little about mothers in your message and you’ll get some pretty dirty looks. Fail to mention them altogether and you’re going to hear about it before you get out the door!  It may not be a religious holiday by most calendars, but in the church it is a high and holy day.  Mess with Pentecost, ignore Lent, but don’t touch Mother’s Day traditions.

A couple of preachers I know even call Mother’s Day and the Sunday closest to the Fourth of July: “Throwaway Worship.”  As in: “Well, we’re not really worshipping God this Sunday, but we’ll get back to that next week.”  I was told again and again by different preachers that my sermon needed to be “about mothers” or an angry mob of moms would follow me home with pitchforks.

I completely disagree.  Anything we worship in place of God becomes an idol for us, and the Old Testament is clear on what God thinks of idols and what He does with them.  I had no desire to preach a sentimental sermon about the sweetness of motherhood, or how “God couldn’t be everywhere, so He created mothers.” (In my top 5 most hated church signs of all time. And that’s sayin something. I really hate cheesy church signs.)  So I chose a text about idolatry.  From a book of the Bible that never mentions a woman.  I think I scared my own mom a little when I told her what I was doing.  But as riled up as I am in sermon preparation, I always soften things up a little before stepping into the pulpit. 

And once again the response was good.  No broken dishes on the floor, more than a few tears in the congregation, so I guess I’ll be struggling with the same questions again this time next year.

I’d love your feedback if you’d like to WATCH or LISTEN through our church website. Or you can WATCH or LISTEN via iTunes by choosing “Icons and Idols” on May 8, 2011.

What do you think is the place of cultural holidays and national holidays in Christian worship?  Who was being worshipped on May 8 at your church?

Written a couple of weeks ago the night after a funeral.  The church is usually informed that a member has died the day of their death, and a pastor is sent, that day or the next, to the family’s home in the middle of their turmoil and grief and family issues.  In the next few days we field calls from different family members with different experiences, memories and emotional agendas, possibly make more visits, and prepare the service and our message.  I’m usually so emotionally exhausted the night after a funeral that I sleep it off for 9-10 hours.  This was written on just such a night.

I did a funeral today for a man in his 40’s, the father of an 8-year-old girl. Funerals are one of the toughest parts of my job as a pastor.  I always feel guilty saying that, as if the stress and struggle of the funeral for me today was anything in comparison to what the man’s wife or daughter are going through.  But funerals are hard in different ways for everyone involved. 

Oddly enough, funerals are not hard because I’m uncomfortable with the topic of death.  That’s actually not a problem for me.  As a biologist, I’m pretty pragmatic about the whole life/death cycle.  Instead, I struggle in the preparation for the funeral because I want to find just the right words to comfort the family and others who are grieving.  The words spoken at a funeral can do a lot to put a family on a path towards healing. Conversely, they can do a lot to cause them pain, even if that’s not the intended effect. 

At my own grandmother’s funeral the pastor went on and on about how much pain she had been in towards the end of her fight with bone cancer and how good it was that her suffering had ended. I’m sure he was deeply affected by having seen this very faithful woman suffer so much, but I’ll never forget my father’s comment, spouted in anger after the service: “I’ll never forgive that pastor for dwelling on her pain like that!” It was so hard for my dad to be reminded about his mom’s struggle on the day he was hoping to move on to focus on her relief.

So I always feel quite a bit of pressure to say the right things.  It gets even trickier when I’m not able to say glowing things about the person’s faith in God and our assurance that they are in the arms of Jesus at this very moment. I don’t want to give false assurances. I want to be plain about how fleeting life is and how it magnifies our need for God’s grace and a hope for a life beyond this one. But I’m not going to make promises that someone is with Jesus when their life showed no visible signs of knowing or following Him.  I’m not the kind of pastor that brings that sort of thing up, dangling hell in front of a grieving family to try to get their ticket to heaven punched out of fear, but it’s a careful dance, knowing how much to say and how much not to say.

One of the best things I feel I can do at a funeral is to bring out the positive and wonderful parts of someone’s character (that’s easier with some than others!) and then point back to God as the source of those characteristics.  If every good and perfect gift comes from God (James 1:17), then the gifts given to and through this person are no exception. 

Family resemblance is sometimes described as “spit-n-image” here in Texas, as in: “That boy is the spit ‘n image of his dad!”  But that phrase originally had so much more power, before being shortened from its original “spirit and image.” What it was meant to describe in the beginning was the way someone resembled someone on the inside (spirit) and outside (image).  I talk about resemblances within the family in front of me, and then I talk about how we’re created in the image of God, and how our positive characteristics are simply reflections of his Spirit and image in our lives.  The closer we grow to God, the more we resemble Him. The more recognizable we are as His children.

The man whose funeral I presided over today loved to do big generous things for others.  He would donate things out of his own pocket and let people believe they came from his company.  He would do things for his mother-in-law and let her assume that his wife was the one behind the blessing.  He was extravagant with his little daughter, treating her to a weekly breakfast out to eat with Daddy, a scavanger hunt for her Christmas present, a luxury suite while they were on family vacation, and a million little things that she will remember as his gifts to her.  Since his cancer diagnosis he even shared the research he did about cancer with other patients in online forums, trying to help them get the best treatment possible. He sometimes encountered other patients who couldn’t afford the same kind of treatment he could pay for.  At least once that his wife knows of (there are probably more) he sent them the money so they could receive treatment even though this was an incurable form of cancer.

This man was extravagant and understated at the same time. He loved doing big things… anonymously.  I would call that a reflection of the Spirit and image of our generous and invisible God.  The One who blesses without asking for anything in return, who creates for the sake of beauty, who loves without condition and forgives without looking back. 

How about you? What’s the most helpful or most damaging thing you’ve heard said at a funeral?

Some of my favorite worship moments come through people’s testimonies. 

My friend Rob Renfroe says: Our testimonies are powerful because it’s hard to argue with somebody’s story. 

This is incredibly true when the story is told as poignantly as through the lens of Ben Wyman, the most talented video artist I know. 

Here’s one of my favorites, about my friend Bryce and her daughter Grace.  We were in a worship series called Amazing Grace, and it seemed so perfect to end the last Sunday with a story about a little girl named Grace.

I met Bryce when Grace was less than two weeks old and they were preparing for her first eye surgery.  It’s been a long road and a lot of surgeries and treatments since then, but Bryce and her husband Chris have been amazing parents to this wonderful little girl.  Bryce is an anaesthesiologist in the army, making her one of the smartest, most beautiful, and bravest women I know, all at the same time.