when we remember who we are...even if we forgot

When we walked in to Exponential on Tuesday morning, I really thought I was going to be sick. At best I was going to sob uncontrollably from the despair that refluxed from my heart to a rancorous taste in my mouth. At worst, I thought I would just give up trying or hoping or believing for "different" or "more" or "best" and just forge a six-sided chamber with a big ol' padlock around my soul, lock it, and toss out the key.

I was in a full-on death spiral of identity crisis.

Exponential is a conference for church planters. Based on that fact alone comes some explanation of why my spiraling began. My husband Anthony and I aren't church planters, but instead are moving into the seventeenth year of him - which means us - in vocational ministry as a staff pastor. We've served at our current church for the last decade, and it is also the church we essentially grew up in and where my father himself served on staff for several years. If you didn't catch it, that makes me both a pastor's wife and a pastor's kid. I might have issues.

We walked into that first building at Exponential and it was full of a hundred booths containing thousands of resources for fresh-faced, vision-driven men and women to avail themselves of, mostly for free. There was everything from curriculum to books to web hosting to fund-raising resources to music to database management. The air was electrified with a palpable and literal buzz while networking took place and words like "planning phase," "pre-launch" and "launched" were on many lips as they told each other their stories. It was such a clear oasis of refreshment for so many who are trekking into and through the great unknown of church-planting. It was phenomenal and like watching parched sponges soaking up so much water.

And all I wanted to do was run. Away. Far, far away.

Our church "launched" a long time ago. We've tried a lot of things. We've been fresh-faced and full of ideas. We've been "the flavor." But we've also been forgotten. We've been the trend-setter, and we've been the outcast. We've been rich, and we've also been broke. We've been the neighborhood church on the main thoroughfare through town, and we've had the neighborhood bought, scraped, the land abandoned, and the traffic diverted away from us towards a bypass.

Sitting at a table in the middle of that building, with so much purpose and potential swirling around me, I felt completely and undeniably out of place. Maybe even lost. If I can get brave enough to say it, I felt abandoned.

I sent a text to my best friend telling her as much in far less thought-out words that were also way more full of panic, and asked her to pray. Trying to say it in a way that wouldn't squelch his excitement, I confessed it - a little - in broken and abbreviated phrases to Anthony. Having been to considerably more big-venue conferences than me, he tried to encourage me about pushing through the "consumer" side of things; the ten-thousand-and-one "BEST IDEAS" for all things ministry that one can sometimes feel like are being presented or vended by the booths. I knew there was truth in what he said and it gave me a little comfort, but mostly not.

When I paused for a moment I realized that I believed this conference, through absolutely no fault of its own, was going to be used as one more moment when someone - this time God - would point out everything we still aren't as a church, everything we aren't doing right, all that we should've been by now but haven't taken the right steps to become. That he would turn to us and say, "you're all wrong." And it would hurt like hell.

The only thing I did right in that moment was not run away, and maybe then only because we were a seven-hour drive from home.

I shuffled into an auditorium, climbed some stairs to a balcony on the periphery of the main seating, and sat down. With all the despair and certainty of what was to come I went through the motion of pulling out a journal, a pencil, and a laptop, as if prepared to write things down that I heard the speakers say. If nothing else, in my identity crisis I would at least have the notes serve as some sort of reference sheet of what we should be, delivered by men and women from a platform who obviously knew how to "get it right" in all the places we get it wrong. If nothing else, we could at least emulate them and fake knowing who we are in favor of being like someone else.

For twenty hours and through twenty-four speakers, that didn't happen. Not once; not even for a second. Oh, notes happened...nineteen typed pages of them. But with every twenty-minute talk given by another speaker, dread started to literally drain out of me as if someone had pulled the stopper out of a tub. I didn't know what was coming in its place, but I knew despair was leaving.

I wonder why after all these years I still sometimes slip into believing God sees me worthy of being ground to dust. Matthew - a man that walked with Jesus after coming out of a life where he collected the taxes from his own people to pay to the very men that raped and murdered their sisters and brothers - saw things so clearly: "If your child asks you for bread, would any of you give him a stone? Or if your child asks for a fish, would you give him a snake? Even though you’re evil, you know how to give good gifts to your children. So how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him?"

Hope would've been a good gift this week. Peace in my tumultuous soul would've made all the difference. I got those things, utterly and miraculously. But more than those, what I believe I got - what we got, what we carry with us like vessels - is this:
Identity.

In a room full of 5,000+ people, getting lost in the crowd is not hard. But he kept whispering, "I see you." When thirty-plus experts in their fields pour out their insights, feeling amateur is almost automatic. But he kept whispering, "You can do it. You ARE doing it." When the pull to compare and contrast threaten to tear off our limbs, he kept whispering, "You are all ONE body." When awe and envy and the desire to imitate bored into our pysche, he kept whispering, "Be you, completely in Me."

Every woman and man that was given an audience during Exponential spoke with such authority. And to the last, each one wound us up, turned us around, and said, "Now go. Tell your part of the world how lavishly and infinitely they are loved by Jesus in everyday ways by being uniquely YOU!" We were not charged to turn our churches into mini models of theirs. We weren't told to scrap the old churches or try to follow some delusion of being trendy by forming a new, cooler community of faith. Simultaneously, they called out courage in the ones who are stepping into forming new churches from the DNA up, and renewed courage in those of us that come home to established churches.

Our church has existed for 30 years. About twenty years ago she had her name changed. She's now been called by her current name longer than she was ever the name that went before. Sometimes, often times, I still hear her called by her old name in the community. I got to thinking about that and her diverted road and the other churches that have grown up in the area, some of which now contain people who formerly attended. Those things are hard and painful sometimes. There's a lot there that can exacerbate an identity crisis. But after a week like that of Exponential, those things start to burn off in the light of truth.

We are a people that loves God, loves others, and serves the nations. We are a people that reaches out to all kinds of people with the message of God's love and forgiveness. We are ambassadors of love, mercy, grace, and truth willing to set ourselves up as embassies, to say to the hurting, the questioning, and the wandering "come and see!" so they can find refuge and warmth.

He has called us by his name and we are his.

I expected a reprimand. I knew there'd be an agenda and a bullet list of all that's wrong. I prepared for a crumpling up and tossing of our current M.O. and some elaborate multi-step plan to change everything. But that's because I forgot how deeply known we are. That's not what we got. There's refocused vision and insight, and certainly some needed correction and some shifting to take place. But more than anything there is a very real sense that from this day forward our church could know who she is and be herself fully.

This is what the Lord says: Forget what happened in the past, and do not dwell on events from long ago. I am going to do something new. It is already happening. Don’t you recognize it? I will clear a way in the desert. I will make rivers on dry ground. - Isaiah 43:18-19

Laura's Legacy

It wasn't until the phone rang yesterday evening that we even remembered.  "You know what day it is, don't you?", he said on the line.  Then we all remembered.  It sneaked up on us this year.

Fifteen years later.

She would be thirty-one years old on her August birthday this year, Ma Luffin' Mayun's sister.  Thirty-one.  That thought, of all the innumerable thoughts I have of her, caught in my chest and filled my eyes with tears.  Thirty-one.  She would be a woman, a thirty-something woman.  Like me. 

She would undoubtedly be one of my closest friends and dearest confidants.  We'd walk through marriages and raise children side by side.  We'd laugh together at the elements of family life that only the females pick up on, winking at each other across the room when the family's all gathered.  She would be one of my kids' favorite people on the planet, and I hers.  I would tell her what life growing up with only a sister was like and she would relate from the place of growing up sandwiched between two boys.  She'd roll her eyes talking about it, but really secretly love the brothers' staunch and innate lifelong protection and pestering of her.  She would be an amazing cook, like her mama, but would be determined to put her own spin on things because of that stubborn streak of hers.  Even at thirty-one she'd pile onto her daddy's knee and nuzzle in to give him a hug.

Instead she's frozen in time at exactly two months shy of being sixteen.  Gone in a blink and without a warning.  June 28th, 1996.

How much she is missed.  Even when we miss remembering.

There have been fifteen years of heartache; steps forward and lunges backward in the healing.  Too many "whys" asked to accurately count.  Fifteen years of learning that sometimes a thing - a circumstance, a disappointment, a loss - just is what it is.  There has been pain in the remembrance and in the forgetting.  Is it still okay to cry?  Is it okay to embrace the moments when the heart seems to lift from the doldrums into - could it be - joy?  Fifteen years of moving, in one direction or another, but moving away nonetheless from June 28th, 1996. 

We are a family with a deep-seeded faith in a Life eternal, a Life beyond this.  Reunions beyond this world are a sure thing and a blessed hope.  But it is not a sure thing that this is always consolation to a father's achingly empty arms, or to a mother's relational heart now missing one of her dearest, or to the brothers' void found when their first companion is no longer in the flesh.  Or even to the daughters-in-law who receive love from such an amazing family, but always know some potential profound relationship is distinctly missing.

I don't think fifteen years makes it easier.  I think it just makes it habit, this living life without her.

But then I remember.  I remember what I know to be true, but what I fear would sound callous or self-serving in others' immense loss.  I remember that her death is the moment that brought Ma Luffin' Mayun back to my heart.  After a month-long courtship, an abrupt end to it, an almost immediate sort of writing-off of him in my heart and mind, four months had passed when the call came to me between six and seven in the morning.  I only knew I wanted to - had to - be where he was.  I didn't know anything else.  My plan was to watch him and gauge how I could help according to what he seemed to need, with a certain measure of keeping myself at arm's length.  Because of her death, I was reunited with this family, this man, and given the opportunity to be a sort of bystander and observer of their lives and their loves and their caliber.  Because of her death I was placed back into a space I would not allow myself to be otherwise - in close proximity to Ma Luffin' Mayun when he was still only "Anthony".  Because of all this, two and a half months later I knew I could love him for the rest of my days, and in eight month's time we were married.  I have been my beloved's and he has been mine for fourteen years.

I remember.  I remember that the broken heart of a mother still had the self-awareness and courage to know she could - had to - still parent children.  I remember that the broken heart of a father could still love a wife, his life partner, enough to trust her knowing they could do it.  I remember that because of her death the wheels were set in motion to pursue adoption.  I remember walking into a restaurant just before Christmas in 1997 and finding my mother-in-law in tears of joy.  "Twins!  We're getting twins!", she would say.  A boy.  A girl.  Born to a woman who had such little regard for them and for herself that she fed a drug addiction throughout her pregnancy with them and birthed three-pound drug addicts.  They would become our own family.  They are thirteen.

I remember.  I remember that she left this world with a deep peace and a deep awareness of Whose hands her life was in, in the living and in the dying.  She was fifteen, so young to have such abiding faith, but she had it.  I remember that her brother would find himself in the unique circumstance of standing in an African prison only months after her death with dirt floors, where prisoners had no more than sheets of tin propped over their heads for a roof.  He would share the story of her faith and the reality that life is but a vapor.  There were men, hardened and violent men, whose hearts would be cracked open by her story.  Men on this dry and barren terrain whose tears would fall and lives would be challenged by the story of a girl two months shy of sixteen thousands of miles away who no longer had a choice to decide how she would live her life, but who had chosen abiding Faith while she could.  Some of these men would yield themselves to the possibility of a forever-changed life.

There are so many things she never was, things she never got to be and never got to do.  Too many events of our lives contain a space where we would rather find her face.  But she used fifteen years well.  She left us in grace and peace, with the depth and wisdom of a woman and not that of the girl she was.

Who would we be if she had never come?  But I have to ask, who would we be if she had never left?

She is missed.  Still treasured and still beloved.  And today it is a consolation that I will see her, that I will know her, again.

Today I remember.