Not long ago, I heard a speaker question the reigning popularity in churchy circles of “practices.” For over a decade now, practical and pastoral theologians have been trying to recover for mainline and evangelical Protestants the value of things like fasting and contemplative prayer as vehicles for Christian spirituality. Books, sermons, and retreats have proliferated, much to the good.

This speaker, however, was bothered by the stability assumed by a focus on practices. “Sure,” she said (and I paraphrase), “Centering prayer is good and valuable and all that when my life is well enough in order. But when the wheels are falling off, it’s nearly impossible to find the energy required by practices.” Also, it’s easy for a focus on practices to over-deliver on expectations that keeping them up is a buffer against struggle or misfortune.

Instead, she suggested strategies. Life is hard. The Struggle Is Real. Spiritual traditions and communities like Christianity hold out strategies for dealing with the needs of the day fruitfully and with hope. Prayer as a strategy rather than a practice?

That talk was a few years ago, but it’s coming back to me this week as Lent gets underway and people are asking me what Lenten discipline I plan to undertake or what I plan to give up. I’m actually itching for a Lenten strategy.

My friend Adam launched Illustrated Children’s Ministry in September by selling coloring sheets online for $1 each.

Today, barely six months later, he’s got hundreds of orders for sets of coloring posters for use by individuals, families, or churches. It’s a different thing than he had in mind when he started, but if he hadn’t started with something this would not have been possible.

There’s a story that explains how something became this thing, but it’s not really about one particular story of Instagram shares and web traffic spikes is it? It’s about taking the risk of sharing your thing with the public. It’s about taking the even bigger risk of putting a price tag on it and saying, “I made this and it’s worth something.”

If you don’t believe your posters (or your videos or your sermons) are actually worth something, nobody else will either.

I spent many minutes yesterday trying to make my Google-based email and calendaring system work for my new office setup, with zero success.

At some point I just decided to work with the new office’s program. Do I have a rosy Outlook about it? No. Did I have much of a choice? No. Is it an opportunity to flex a little and learn a different way of working? Yes.

I’m trying to get to “Okay-I’ll-Learn-Something-New” more quickly.

 

 

When you first meet someone you’re going to be working with you look for common ground–shared interests that form a template for how you’re going to get along in those first days and weeks. It’s an important little dance of discovery. When you and your new colleagues watch the same shows or root for the same team it makes everyone more comfortable.

The joy of working with people who care about the same things you do is building things that will become the most enduring kind of shared interest: retreats, sermon series, videos, meeting agendas–all things you’ll look back on later and say, “That was amazing” or “That was terrible” but definitely “We did that together.”

 

I sold the ’99 Honda Civic, and after I handed over its key the only one left on my ring is my house key.

I left the church keys on the desk on my way out. The church cabinet keys I forgot about I returned to Krista over coffee on Tuesday. The car key was the biggest, the heaviest one anchoring us to the life we’ve grown these past eight years, and now it’s gone.

I keep having these little moments of panic when the lightness of the key ring catches my attention and I suddenly believe I’ve left it behind on some convenience store counter or locked inside the house. Then I put my hand in my pocket and breathe a sigh of relief.

New keys are coming. I’m eager for them. Still, I’m going to enjoy a day with only one key.

 

All day yesterday I was ahead of schedule–what schedule there was–because time moves slowly for me in big transitions, and the clock is ticking on the biggest transition of my life.

Saturday morning will come, and I will board a plane with a suitcase and an army duffel bag to land eight hours later in Chicago and the beginning of the next chapter. I will have Sunday to take a breath, and then the train leaves the station on Monday morning–working and living in a big new place.

All that is 48 hours away, and those hours are molasses-thick with dread. Dread slows things down.

I don’t dread the new work or the new church. I don’t dread Chicago for sure. When I think about it, I can’t locate the source of the dread. But it’s there. Fear of failure? Probably. Anxiety about being apart from my family for four months? No doubt. A general dislike of changes to my routine? Yep.

I keep thinking that if there was a way to be airlifted over the next several months of professional and family transition to be dropped off in the place where life is normal and routine again, I would pay dearly for that ride.

But aren’t the tumultuous and unsteady seasons of transition the most generative? Can’t they be sources of great learning and transformation?

My last transition was my roughest ever, and it produced a writing project I’m glad got done. Had it been easy, I wouldn’t have made that.

I’m trying to embrace the dread to see what I can make with it.

To prepare for my move to Chicago this weekend I’m making muffins. Dozens of muffins are stacked in the freezer for Wife and Daughter to have for breakfast over the next several weeks. Cherry, strawberry, apple, banana nut, gingerbread–I’m practically changing my address to Drury Lane.

At first it was going to be chicken. Thumbing through the Pioneer Woman Cooks at the local Barnes And Noble on Saturday, I lingered for several minutes over the chapter on “Freezer Food,” where the author extols the virtues of pre-cooked chicken breasts for weeks’ worth of easy dinners. Right then I made my plan: cook scores of chicken breasts this week and secretly stash them in the freezer. Then spring the surprise from the Windy City.

But something made me flinch. If it were me, dinner every night would be the greatest energy drain, and so pre-cooked chicken would save the day. But it’s not me. So I divulged my plan and had my energies redirected to breakfast.

13 years of marriage have taught me to distrust the promise of the surprise and to prefer instead the beneficence of a concrete request.

I’m standing in my living room. It’s a sunny Sunday afternoon in January, and I am bedecked in a Denver Broncos jersey. The AFC championship game is on. It is the third quarter, and the Broncos are ahead, but it is a defensive war-of-attrition type game, and I can’t relax. So I’m standing.

I don’t normally get to watch football games, since the Sunday afternoon schedule of a pastor with a seven year-old and overworked spouse is unpredictable and generally unfavorable to three-plus hours spent watching television. I’m in between jobs for two weeks, though, so this is that rare Sunday when hours stretch out in front of me like empty pages of a sketch book. Still, I’m standing, because standing makes me appear more at the ready to multitask, say fold laundry or fix my daughter’s toys.

There’s another reason I’m standing. A woman is supposed to come pick up a table and file cabinet I listed on the local freecycle site, and 40 minutes ago she called to say she was about 20 minutes away, so I’m pacing in front of the window watching for her, but with no idea what she–or her car–looks like. The table is as big as you’d expect a table to be. She’d better be in a truck.

I spy through the window a white PT Cruiser crawling down the street, and I’m sure this is her. I’m relieved she’s not lost, but I’m irritated she doesn’t have a truck. There’s no way a table fits in that little car, not to mention the two-drawer filing cabinet she also wants. These things have to go, though. They are high on the list of tasks I need to knock out this week to justify moving to another city for four months to begin a new job without my family. We make eye contact through my front window to confirm that we are, indeed, both looking for one another.

I know from the “I Love Cats” sticker on the back of the car and the array of empty boxes spilling from the windows that I’m dealing with a person who not only loves cats (duh), but who also trolls freecycling websites and rolls a car full of empty boxes. I simply want to get this transaction completed and return to the game.

She’s talkative, though, which is surprising for a box-carting cat lady. She’s actually brought the boxes for me, she says, as an exchange for the table and file cabinet. I remember now that I spoke of moving on the phone and make a mental note to stop sharing details of my life with strangers (blogging excepted). I get the boxes out of the cruiser and into my garage and then set to work on getting the table situated. The rear of the car is bigger than I though. It will definitely fit.

We get the table in (she is helping me lift it and quite strong), and then attempt the filing cabinet in the front passenger seat. No dice. The door won’t close. We try three or four different configurations, and all the while she’s telling me that her neighbors will be upset with her when she arrives home with these new items. Curious, I ask, “Why?”

“They’ve sort of adopted me since my husband died and they keep telling me I need to be getting rid of things, not acquiring them.”

I consider for a moment that I am enabling a grieving hoarder.

The job is done, though. She is precariously wedged in the driver’s seat between the filing cabinet and her door, smiling happily as she backs out of my driveway. As she speeds off down my street I spend a thought on the needs people carry around like broken down boxes and how it is so easy to trade one for another.