For Everything, a Season: A Journey of Dust (Grad Chapel)

On Thursday, March 20  I had the honor of speaking at seminary chapel as a graduating student. I began my MDiv in Pastoral Leadership in 2003 as a fulltime student, but was blessed with a little boy, Isaac, during what would have been my last semester.  After 11 years I have finally finished that last course!  This is what I shared, adjusted a little for the blogosphere :)

It took me awhile, some searching and waiting and listening before I knew what to share, partly because I was wrestling with my own reality.  Way back, at the beginning of it all, I had a sense of where I would be when seminary was all said and done.  But here it is.  Eleven years later I’m not there. 

I was working as a Pastor of Children and Family Ministries.  It was a delight to pour myself into what felt like a role God had formed me for.  I was butterlies-in-my-tummy excited as I worked.  Each time a child showed a desire to know God more or insight revealing their growing faith, each time I was blessed to hear a mother’s story, or listened to a child’s gripping legend of what happened that week, or an anguished recounting of a hurt in their life – mine was a fulfilling reality.  As I worked with these remarkable children and steadfast parents who were committed to improving their effectiveness at passing on their faith on to the next generation I felt like I was there – right there – in that place I foresaw 11 years ago. 

 

I won’t share the details here, but I recently lost my job.  It was an enormous loss.  

Today, rather than being in that place, I find myself feeling incompetent, disassembled, broken-hearted.   

I’m still grieving.  

I have a good cry most days, though it sneaks up on me unexpected…I’m not sure why I thought I would be able to share this without crying - oh well :P   

This isn't the way I dream of feeling when speaking in front of some personal heroes, and I do wish I had some other story to tell, but I don’t.  What I have is my story.  I asked God, “What story would you have me share?”  And he said, “That one.” (the one I will share), and I said, “Why God?  Not that one.  Nobody wants to hear that one.  How about an inspiring message, that springs from some great passage in your word.”  But he said it again, “That one.”  And I best not push back twice!

So here I am, I am finally graduating with my MDiv, but I am no longer in ministry and I can’t imagine that I ever will be again.  

I’m not there, but I’m here.  And I DO imagine that a graduand chapel is meant to reflect on how Seminary has shaped who I am, and it HAS had a huge impact on my personal formation.  When I came to seminary I was a college student at heart.  A college student at seminary.  Most students were significantly older than me.  (significantly...I guess it was significant to me, lol).  I was happy to be young, but felt maybe I shouldn've been older, or like I was supposed to act older than I was (which would be inauthentic…shudder…haha!).  That’s just how I felt.  Insecure and whatnot.  

During college what I had been taught about Christianity had been deconstructed.  It was really a positive thing, but a disorienting place to be.  I needed to relearn everything I learnt as a child.  What had been taught to me too often didn’t communicate the truth of the passage we were learning (in favor of over-edited stories missing key details for the purposes of getting across one thought), and character formation lessons sometimes unnaturally imported into the text.  I wondered how in my 15 years as a Christian none of the stuff of “Intro to OT” had come up before.  

As I began my time at Seminary I felt I had a good sense of what needed to be reconstructed, but had yet to rebuild a truly biblical worldview, and I wasn’t sure how to get there.  It was through sitting at the feet of Jerry Shepherd and Randal Rauser and Allan Effa and Syd Page that those pieces started to fall back into place.

I wouldn’t trade my time there for anything, and actually, I would do it all again.  All of it. (and I don’t mean if I could go back…I mean a second time).  I am so thankful for my time there.  

Since I’m not where I expected to be when I graduated, I’m going to share a bit about where God seems to be taking me and my family now.  

Since losing my job the one clear direction God has given for our future is for me to return to my psychology foundation and get an MA in Marriage and Family Therapy.  God seems to be directing me to Briercrest.  Going there doesn’t make sense for a few reasons (one being that a degree from a Christian institution is frowned upon in the professional world, and another that it seriously decreases my options for pursuing doctoral work afterward) – but nevertheless, God keeps directing us back there.  

Last week I was there taking another class:  Counselling Systems and Approaches.  For the class I did some work on Existential Therapy and rediscovered Victor Frankl, a psychotherapist who survived the concentration camps in World War II.  Something about his story and his approach connected with me in an unexpected way this time – so much so that I grabbed a copy of “Man’s Search for Meaning” the first chance I had.  His approach, called Logotherapy, is filled out by his experience and personal choices that he had made during this time in his life.  As I learned about him I discovered that he'd had an opportunity to escape to the USA shortly before the USA entered the war.  His visa was waiting for him.  Here’s what he wrote:

My old parents were overjoyed because they expected that I would soon be allowed to leave Austria.  I suddenly hesitated, however.  The question beset me:  could I really afford to leave my parents alone to face their fate, to be sent sooner or later, to a concentration camp, or even to a so called extermination camp?  Where did my responsibility lie?

Should I foster my brain child, logotherapy, by emigrating to fertile soil where I could write my books?  Or should I concentrate on my duties as a real child, the child of my parents who had to do whatever he could to protect them?  I pondered the problem this way and that but could not arrive at a solution; this was the type of dilemma that made one wish for a hint from heaven…

It was then I noticed a piece of marble lying on a table at home (p. XV).²

 

His father explained that it was part of the tablets on which the 10 Commandments had been inscribed from the largest Vienna synagogue, burned down by the National Socialists.  

He asked his father, “Which one is it?”  

His father replied, “Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you.”

That was the moment he decided to stay with his father and mother and let the American Visa lapse.

 

What he shares in this book is a haunting tale – and I couldn’t get over this one little detail.  He could have escaped it all.  But, an encounter with one of God’s commands brought him to stay – a knowing sacrifice.  

In the past, hearing about concentration camps felt distant – almost unreal – so far from my own experience that I couldn’t share it with them, like I sometimes struggle to know the suffering of Christ inside.  

Sometimes I wonder if there is something wrong with me when I don’t hurt deep enough inside when I remember his body and his blood.   

In the same way I have struggled to enter into the sufferings of the Jewish people during the war.  But this time was different.  His story and his approach got to me, as he shared his suffering and how he found his way through it. 

I don’t mean to compare our experiences.  Really.  As I read the book I felt guilty.  What I’d been through, and what he had been through…well…they couldn’t be compared.  The truth is I don’t believe you can compare two people’s experiences of loss or suffering.  I finally found relief as I read that Frankl himself felt this way, too.  This is his viewpoint:

To draw an analogy:  a man’s suffering is similar to the behavior of gas.  If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber.  Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little.  Therefore the “size” of human suffering is absolutely relative. (p. 44)²

I connected with his story and his approach because it acknowledges suffering and the need to have it mean something, in a way that (in my opinion) other approaches don’t.  

As I was losing my job I went for counselling myself.  The approach the therapist used was Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or CBT.  The basic idea behind CBT is (to put it simply):  You are what you think.   The goal was to help me create positive thoughts moving forward.  

It was a very positive experience, and I think helpful!  In cognitive behavioral therapy, though, you don’t spend much time reflecting on the past or what it felt like and what it meant.   I found myself still thinking “This isn’t complete yet.  I need to find some way to make meaning out of what’s happened.”  And that’s just what Frankl’s approach is all about.  Dealing with the meaninglessness of life.

As I studied him, I found my thoughts coming back again and again to Ecclesiastes.  Ecclesiastes deals with how, as fallen beings, man has become earth bound, frustrated, with no firm foundation under the sun on which he can build on to find his meaning.¹

What is all this toil for?  What is my purpose in it all?

He looks to nature, and history, and wisdom, and wealth only to find them frustrated.  Cyclical nature, endless succession of birth and death, circumstances that he cannot understand – the best he can do is exist and make the best of what comes or give up.  But, he attempts to find meaning under the sun, and as he does this he can only BE frustrated, because our meaning can’t be found down here.

 

Frankl recognized the human will to meaning.  He saw, first hand, how a man with meaning was able to live and even to die for the sake of his beliefs.  Man needs “something” for the sake of which to live. 

 

There are a lot of different themes that I could choose to explore here:

I could explore the social constraints and injustice, the limitations of existence, but also how within those limits we can find our freedom, how within those bounds we can find that we have choice – a space where we can live as creatively and expressively as we like.  I could talk about how freedom also brings with it responsibility – “God will bring into judgment both the righteous and the wicked, for there will be a time for every activity, a time to judge every deed” (Ecclesiastes 3:17).

I could explore how man is designed to live a meaningful existence:  Before the fall we knew all we needed for living.  But by our choice we opted for our own knowledge of good and evil over God’s.  We cut ourselves off from God and the clear light of God’s direction.  And the answers just aren’t to be found down here! 

The alternative is faith, we don’t and won’t understand everything, but we can look for the hand of God as we go about our days.¹

Sometimes I’m tempted to think I deserve good things, or that sinners should be promptly punished, but God, he has a proper time for everything.  

A time to be born, a time to die…

A time to plant and a time to uproot…

A time to kill and a time to heal…

A time to tear down and a time to build…

A time to weep, and a time to laugh…

We might behave as though we have endless time and close our eyes to the fact of death, but God wants us to face that fact,¹ and that is the theme I want to focus on today.  Recently we celebrated Ash Wednesday.  [Celebrated?  That doesn’t seem like the right word...]  On Ash Wednesday, we contemplate our sin and our death.  We discover our place in relationship to God.  We discover our meaning and our purpose.  Ecclesiastes returns to this theme a number of times.  

3:20      All come from dust, and to dust all return.

4:1-2     I saw the tears of the oppressed—
              and they have no comforter…

² And I declared that the dead,
    who had already died, are happier than the living,
    who are still alive.

5:15    Naked a man comes from his mother’s womb, and as he comes so he departs.

7:1-2     It is better to go to a house of mourning
    than to go to a house of feasting, for death is the destiny of everyone;
    the living should take this to heart

When face to face with eternal things – when we contemplate our death – we reach a deeper insight into God’s purposes – our purpose.  We remember that life does not go on forever, and it moves us to look below the surface of our experience.¹

Born from dust, and one day to return to it, I found myself contemplating these things when my first son, Isaac, was one year old.  

My doctors kept increasing a medication that turned out to be the cause of my illness.  I knew it was, but for whatever reason they couldn’t consider it.  They couldn’t question their perspective, regardless of the evidence against it.  

By this time I was too weak to move.  Whatever position I fell asleep in was the one I woke up in.  I woke up feeling stiffness and pain but couldn’t turn my head to a different position to find relief.    

Nathan would leave for work in the morning.  Isaac would wake up around 8 and I could hear him playing, but I was too weak to get him.  We left toys near his crib so he could reach them when he woke up.  And 2 hours later, around 10, he put himself down for a nap.  

Sometimes at noon I was able to wake and had just enough strength to start the crawl down the hall to get to him, make it down the stairs, and grab a bottle of milk and a handful of cheerios before passing out strategically on the ground where he would play until Nathan got home around 3.  When Nathan got home he dressed and fed us.  Then he’d do the dishes and the laundry.

But some days weren’t this good.  I would hear Isaac wake up from his nap at noon, hungry, and I couldn’t get to him. I had that helpless, desperate feeling inside because I knew he needed me.  

These were times when I was so weak it was work just to breathe.  Sometimes I thought that if I didn’t think to take another breath I would stop breathing.  I felt conflicted because I really didn’t know what the best thing to do was.  

We tried to be open about what was going on with our family.  We shared how bad it was with our friends and with our church. I felt angry that no one helped my husband.  And I felt angry that no one helped my son.  I asked my doctor if there was somewhere he could send me while we got this figured out because there was no one taking care of my little boy, but they didn’t grasp how bad it was either.  (If I made it to the doctor it was a pretty good day, so they couldn’t see it with their eyes.)

During those times I could hear Isaac crying by himself – so hungry – down the hall (and no doubt soaked through his wet and dirty diaper) that I had to ask myself what the right thing to do was.  I wasn’t really alive.  Not really.  My doctor told me to expect to be like this forever.  And as long as I was there, no one would take care of my son.  I can’t imagine many good reasons to give up my life, but to provide food for my child, loving arms to lift him up out of his own filth and hold him and love him in ways I couldn’t…felt like something I could do to take care of him.

There is a time to die.  He knew his time was nearing.

I do believe there is a time to die.   

And it would have been easy to pass away.  It took more effort to keep breathing.  But my husband lost his dad when he was young, and I know that’s something that stays with you for life.  I did not want Isaac to grow up feeling like it was his fault.  So, I chose to keep breathing.  And I’m thankful, because who knew?

Who knew that an unexpected pregnancy – my now 5 year old Oliver – would bring me to a doctor who was the hands, and the feet, and the ears, and the wisdom, and the healing power of Jesus?

Who knew I would ever have the strength to return to school and graduate from Seminary?

Who knew I would have the strength to raise 3 mind-blowingly awesome children (and be pretty good at it)?

Who knew I’d not just have the physical energy, but the creative energy and passion to pastor other people’s children and walk alongside person after person in their own suffering and struggle with the meaninglessness of loss and existence?

And that’s just to name a few things.  Who knew?

I’m glad that there was more written in God’s plan for my life. 

I’m glad that I haven’t reached my number of years yet. 

I am alive. I have a purpose.  I have a meaning.  And I know that there is no meaning apart from God. I know that God has a proper time for everything.

We naturally want to grasp the whole plan for our lives (to see all the pieces, and know how they’re supposed to fit together).  But we don’t get that.  Still, there is a lot to enjoy about life – food and drink, satisfying work, the laughter of a child.¹   

Ecclesiates 7:14 helps me to keeps things in perspective:

When times are good, be happy;
    but when times are bad, consider this: God has made the one
    as well as the other. Therefore, no one can discover
    anything about their future.

I don’t know what God has planned for my future.  I don’t know if it is good or bad.  I don’t know if he will one day ask for my life, or the life of my husband or my daughter, or one of my sons.  But if he does, I pray that I will have spent my life walking the path of righteousness, pleasing God myself, and that I have moved my family to live lives that fulfill God’s purpose for them in life, and in death.  

 

And, as everything under the sun has already been done, it seems fitting that I don’t need to write my own conclusion.  

It is written already.

“Everything is meaningless!” 

Now all has been heard;
               here is the conclusion of   

       the matter:

Fear God and keep his commandments,
    for this is the duty of all 

    mankind. 

For God will bring every deed into judgment,
    including every hidden thing,
    whether it is good or evil.  

 (Ephesians 12:8, 13-14)

 

¹ See:  Wright, J. Stafford Wright.  Ecclesiastes.  Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Vol. 5. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1991.

²Frankl, Victor.  Man's Search for Meaning.  Boston:  Beacon Press, 2006.