The Orchid Thing

Something large and lovely and quietly quirky is happening with my orchids right now.

I have three plants, and all three are in vigorous bloom right now.
All three.
At the same time.
So lovely.

But I would also call it quirky, for a few reasons.

For one, I am no gardener, and that they have not just survived me but are performing so well for me is an amazement in itself.

Secondly, I've had these plants for varying lengths of time; two for a few years already, and one just since last September.  Normally at least one of them is 'happening' at any given time, sharing their joy with me, while the other two are dormant, waiting their turn.  Usually just one at a time is all I get.  Not now.  Right now all three are about as vibrant as they could be.  And, like I keep saying, all at the same time.

But the third reason this seems quietly quirky has to do with a prayer that was offered on my behalf at my ordination eight and a half years ago.

I love how Judy prays.  She is one of the Board of Directors of the Ministerial Fellowship under which I hold my ordination.  On that day, midst the cluster of other ordained leaders who stood around me, laid hands on me and offered their prayers and blessings, Judy described a cascading orchid, breath-takingly beautiful, full of strength, opening in vulnerability to avenues of ministry as yet unseen.  Judy prays in pictures, and her words were vivid and emboldening, marking the significance of that particular moment in my spiritual formation.  I had no orchids then, and found her picture lovely to imagine, but not necessarily holding any special meaning.

Not then.

But I when I arrived home last Friday, having been away for three weeks, still very raw and reorienting following an enormous relinquishment....

And I saw all the orchids there together by the window, being all splendid and spectacular like that....

And when I remembered how each plant came to me...

One from my husband because he thinks I'm beautiful....
One from a friend to remind me of God's beautiful work in Thailand...
One from the leaders at Highview to thank me for serving with my whole heart....

I caught my breath.

I realized that each plant represented a passion of my heart.

And here they were.
All of them being bold and confident and beautiful.
All at the same time.
Right now.
At this very time of my life.

I've been pressing into intimate pictures with God these past weeks.   Down by the water, so still.  Deep in my spirit, so not still.  "Remind me," I've been asking Him.  "Remind me again why we're doing this?"

And then I come home to the orchids.

And yes, I am aware that in many ways I am ascribing meaning to these things, piecing together the puzzle bits from eight years ago, and down on the dock these past three weeks, and the moment of reminding when I got home on Friday.  And ascribing meaning to the giver of each plant.  And the fact that each one is blooming so robustly...right now.  Right now when I need to be reminded that God is orchestrating all things for good, for beauty, for strength, for love.

Yes.  It's what I pull together, holding it around me like a wrap of reassurance against the chill of this new territory upon which I embark.

And its large and lovely and quietly quirky
                                                                           and I love it when He loves me like this.

 

Dancing Prayers of Mindfulness

“Pray continually.”  

1 Thessalonians 5:17

In a letter to a particular community of faith, the Apostle Paul gave this instruction concerning prayer.

For a long time in my spiritual life I couldn’t fathom such a thing.  I had been taught as a child how to pray with repeated words that usually rhymed.  It had to happen beside my bed just before climbing in at night.  And it had to be down on my knees.  What a good gift my parents gave me in helping me understand the importance of connecting with God.  But my child-mind was very concrete, and prayer had very little room to dance then.

On Sundays during the church service our pastor prayed.  They were big prayers, long prayers, very important-sounding prayers with lots of big words in them.  Children squirmed in them.  Some people ‘rested their eyes’ in them.  Looking back, I see this as yet another gift in helping me understand the importance of addressing God respectfully, and the honest blessing over a congregation a pastor gives his or her people.  There did seem to be more room for prayer to move around at church.  But still.  Just here, in church.

Prayer didn’t dance for me until I was much older.  Then Paul’s words made more sense.

I run into many folks who confess that they ‘don’t pray enough’, and I wonder if it’s because of some of the same misconceptions.  I wonder if Paul’s instructions end up just making many of us feel guilty or inadequate in prayer, restricted and stiff, instead of inspiring us toward something that moves more gracefully, more naturally, in ways life-giving and fun. 

What if ‘thinking’ and ‘praying’ could move together in coordinated choreography of communing with God?

All of us have a running inner dialogue going on all the time.  Some of us are more aware of it than others.  Some of us express it verbally more than others.  I’m told I talk to myself all the time, and I confess this is true.  But I really wasn’t very aware of this internal conversation with myself until it became part of a burnout recovery in 1992. 

‘Self talk’ might be another word for it; the messages we’re giving to ourselves on an ongoing basis, whether we fully know it or not.  And in this recovery, it was suggested to me that there could be more positive intentionality in this internal monologue, and that actually it could be turned into more of a conversation.  Not with myself, but with the Someone who cared deeply for me, and who was privy to those thoughts anyway.

“Take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.”  Paul again, in his letter this time to the Corinthians (2 Corinthians 10:5).  Not as a guilt-trip shaming into avoiding ‘naughty thinking’, but as an invitation to a new dance of prayer and spiritual vitality that had escaped me up to that point in my life.  In fact, the shaming part had actually helped to contribute to the rather desperate mental state I now found myself in.

I tried to explain this ‘thoughts as prayer’ practice in a Bible study group setting once, just quickly, without very much background.  The response I got from one person was ‘That sounds exhausting!”  Clearly I hadn’t explained things well.  Because far from being exhausting, on the days I can relax into this, I find it both energizing and calming at the same time.  Once I was able to tune into what was going on in my head, how I was thinking about any given moment in any given day, and once I was able to choose what I would and would not allow to influence my spirit and my life, it was just one step away from changing that from merely talking with myself, to talking with God.  And then one day I looked up and I was pretty sure I was ‘praying continually’, at least most of the time.  Not every day.  Not all the time.  Fatigue and self-centeredness sabotages some more days than I’d care to admit.  Some days I am distracted and fussy and not praying at all.  But over time, gradually, turning thoughts into prayers has become more and more of a way of being.

It’s obvious, of course, that this casual, natural way of turning thoughts into prayers won’t replace a more concentrated time of being before God to mediate on behalf of others, or seek His guidance on important decisions, or any of the other ways we do indeed come aside to pray in a more concentrated way.  Like the casual conversations I have with my husband Ken throughout the day, compared to the more intentional times we sit down to work things out, make decisions, or even just to give each other undivided attention.

But one seems to enrich the other, I think.  The deeper times become the springboard for the running conversational prayer, and the natural conversations feed into the more concentrated conversations.  Like that. 

The mental health benefits of this for me have been nothing short of life-changing.  Whatever scraps of sanity I can now claim are because of this dancing prayer-thought habit.  God is always so Present in the moments, and the dance of it keeps me free and focused.

But the other huge and most significant benefit has been the fostering of an ongoing, real and deeply anchoring intimacy with God.  Praying continually undergirds all the other practices I employ and enjoy to keep my spirit open and fresh and alive. 

Like an invitation to be set free in a Divine dance of grace and love.

Brave Quiet

“In repentance and rest is your salvation

In quietness and trust is your strength,

But you would have none of it.” 

Isaiah 30:15

Long solitudes are rare but revealing.

They wrap around the bruises,

press warmly into aching places,

                                        like quiet Love. 

No noisy expectation,

each day unfolds a silent mystery of Presence,

simply waiting,

simply being,

simply knowing.

I am due, long over.

But I only know this from inside the quiet.

In the busy I don’t register my need,

                                                 deep as it is.

In this gift of time and space,

I can open cluttered places of my soul

for kind inspection. 

Disorganized thoughts reshuffled,

inaccurate feelings reframed. 

I take them out,

touch them gently,

hold them for a bit and then

put them back more correctly into my story.

A long story.

A good story.

This chapter

right now

is a short one,

but hard,

confrontive,

painful,

disorienting,

reinventing,

inspiring,

exciting,

terrifying,

requiring all of me to be at hand,

to be brave.

And the silence is my bravery. 

And my healing.

Repentance.

Rest.

                           Quietness.

                                       Trust.

And I will have ‘all of it’ as it is offered me

Here in this rare long solitude,

Making me brave again.

The R-Word

Whatever it is I’m doing right now, it’s hard to find a word for it.

Many have called it ‘Retirement’ but despite the elements of having finished something that has been a long time vocation, that word doesn’t quite fit me right now.  It conjures up pictures of ending all work-related endeavours and taking up hobbies or volunteer positions to pass the time or make important contributions in ways not possible when employed.   All good, and perhaps that time will come.  But ‘retired’ isn’t how I see myself for this next phase of my life. 

‘Resting’ is accurate for the moment.  Away on an island at our summer home with limited internet, no schedules (including meetings!), and little to no social engagements for a while, a much needed time of rest and recharging is certainly underway.   The press of this past season with a final push at the very end has spent me in every capacity, as I expected it would and intentionally offered.  Now these still waters, visits from the beaver, mornings and evenings where no human-made sound interrupts nature’s worship – my desperate soul lays down in it to sleep deeply.  But ‘resting’ isn’t the overall plan for this next phase of my life.

‘Relinquishing’.   Now there’s a true thing that’s in play.  This moving from one thing to the next has required from me one of, if not the most delicate and defining relinquishments of my life.  And while things officially passed from one to another at the end of May, the deeper letting go in the deepest places of me began many months before, and, as I am experiencing now, seems likely will continue for some time to come.  The kind of releasing, the letting go of this kind of treasure doesn’t happen in one fell swoop, as marking a moment as it may be.  There is a cellular level to this kind of offering.  Cherished loves are not glibly dismissed from the heart.

So, yes, ‘relinquishing’ is definitely in play.  But it describes what was, not what’s coming in this next phase of my life.

So what word is there for this?

A phone message left by a friend, who himself has done this not-retirement thing already, includes an off-handed semantic that captures something for me.  He won’t wish me a happy retirement, he says.  Instead, he wishes me a happy,....what?  ‘Reinventment’, he says.  Yes!  That's what this is!

There’s something being re-defined, re-focused, re-invented right now!  There’s a sense that all that’s come before, everything, even all the wretched things in my story I wish I could erase, plus any skill set, any learnings, any experience or (possibly?) wisdom I may have gathered along the way – all of it is coming together now in a new way that is powerful and strong and beautiful and important.  There’s a re-inventing of my life and ministry toward a new focus, fanned by new passions and energy and ideas that would not have been possible in an earlier rendition of me.  There’s a clear understanding that this time of my life, right now, almost 61 years old, is ripe for the new thing in a ‘reinventment’ of all God has been fashioning for me from the beginning.

‘Retirement’ is a fine word.  And its use in the plethora of cards and emails and letters that have been so lovingly presented to me in these past weeks is well understood and fondly received.  But a real retirement is yet to come.

Right now I am in a phase of ‘reinventment’.   

Because really, I’m just getting started.