Today I pulled on my Cheer Dad T-shirt and hit the street with a stack of business sponsorship letters for Daughter’s cheer team and their big bid to The Summit national meet in Orlando. First to the dentist for a check-up that turned into a cavity filling. With the right side of my face numb I made my pitch.

Then to the local coffee roaster, where I buy a 12 oz. bag every Monday. He was in the middle of a batch, so I left him a letter on the counter. Next the vet, then the local grocer.

I am that parent, haggling total strangers to support my kids’ activity. Only it’s not just my kid, and this is the thing I didn’t really get about this before. It’s the other kids too. It’s the team. It’s all the parents similarly haggling strangers and selling candy to coworkers and arranging car washes and setting up a Gofundme.

See what I did there? I’m also that parent who shills for donations on his blog.

Several people, about half of them youth from the church, helped me out last month by spending about 30 minutes on the U.S. Congregational Life Survey, a project required by my Doctor of Ministry program. I got the results back last week and have been looking over them. Here is one particularly interesting finding:

Nearly 3/4 of both youth and adults who took the survey said it was either “very important” or “important” to build relationships with people who are not Christian, yet almost none of them said it was equally important to share their religion or spirituality in those relationships.

I recognize myself in that finding.

Many of us have internalized the imperative to embrace difference, to work for broad acceptance of a multitude of faiths and experiences. And I think it’s pretty clear that we have experienced our faith to be a barrier to that imperative. I remember an Elder years ago who was surprised to learn that the church Session would be studying evangelism, how to talk about our faith with people outside the church. She said, “I didn’t think we were supposed to do that.”

I think our discomfort with discussing our faith with people who don’t share it is a moral commitment, at its best. It is a commitment to openness and welcome, and it is informed by a painful awareness of the ways in which Christian faith in particular has, in its worst cultural expressions, wrought condemnation and division. Hesitation to share it, given that assessment, is a healthy corrective.

Yet in its worst manifestation, my reticence to talk about faith with people outside my faith community is a fearful tucking away of something that makes powerful public claims into the private pockets of my personal life. It’s a deference to questions over answers and tolerance to truth. That’s a problem. Because the challenges of our public life are crying out for people of faith to work for the common good, and to do so while articulating the convictions that motivate them.

$9.99 per month is a lot less than what I’m paying now, so I figured Apple’s shiny, just-announced newspaper and magazine subscription service was worth trying for at least the free month. Three of my subscriptions are in their catalogue already, plus more that I’ve thought about reading.

It is by now a worn out debate between paper and pixels for reading, and I have had it with myself since I got my first Kindle. I go back and forth between subscribing to print publications in a fit of civic and literary aspiration and then letting them lapse because of the cost and the lack of overall time I spend reading them. But the financial reality of this newest opportunity is hard to ignore. I’m trying it.

As soon as I remember to take my iPad home with me. Until then I’ll read the New Yorker that I stashed in my bag on Monday.

It’s so simple. You just put the lentils in a small pan with your garlic and cardamom pods, a couple of cloves, some ginger, then cover it all with water and bring to a simmer. Then let it sit for like half an hour. Maybe stir it a couple of times.

It’s so simple and relaxing I did it last night when I got home at nearly 9 pm. I’m doing it again right now, at 6:30 am. I don’t really need to making this second batch; the one I made last night, though small, will probably be enough for the office “pot luck” today. But I have more lentils, and I have the spices. The rest is water. Why wouldn’t you make another batch?

It’s a gift to do the thing that makes you happy.

Group games. An artistic project. Closing worship.

These are all elements of most Confirmation retreats, and I am used to running them all, ’cause it’s my job.

Only it’s not.

This past weekend all of these elements were run by volunteer leaders, ’cause that’s actually my job–inviting, enabling, and supporting the leadership of others. How often I forget that. How often I over-function.

I’m learning a couple of things about this. First, these leaders are smart and creative, and the activities they are leading with me are by no means the most challenging things they do in their lives. They are accountants, parents, marketers, medical professionals, and so much else. Second, failure to invite their leadership is a consequence of anxiety and poor planning, both of which can be managed.

In three years at my current congregation I have led seven Confirmation retreats, all to the same camp in Western Michigan. We sleep in the same cabins, meet in the same room, and eat in the same cafeteria. And the same mealtime seating arrangement always prevails: the boys sit at these tables, and the girls sit at these tables.

But on Saturday evening this past weekend I emerged from the buffet line to find that the 15 students on this Confirmation retreat had, without asking any of the adults, pushed two tables together to form one long dining table, and they were squeezed around it shoulder-to-shoulder .

Sometimes communion happens.

The 2018/2019 school year is the tenth time I have led a Confirmation class from start to finish. It is also the tenth different version of Confirmation I have led; I change something about it every year, because I’m always dissatisfied with something about it.

This year I wrote a new curriculum–based on the Apostle’s Creed–and I redesigned the “faith statement” assignment at the end. This weekend our students will work with a new assignment instead of the old one on their spring retreat, because at the planning session for that retreat the leadership team gave me very helpful feedback: the old one was abstract and complicated. I agreed.

So the new one is not a statement of faith but a narrative. You can view it here. Here is the heart of the instructions:

Now, as the year comes to an end, we ask you to share what this process has meant for you. Your Confirmation Faith Narrative will be shared with Pastor Rocky, the Confirmation Circle Leaders, and the Session of Fourth Church (the elected group of Elders who are responsible for receiving people into Active Membership). The prompts below are offered as a guide. They suggest that you structure your narrative in three sections–the past, the present, and the future—so that what you write will be less of a statement about what you believe and more a story of your life in faith. You are not expected to answer every prompt; they are there to guide your story.

I enjoyed redesigning this.

I have to keep reminding myself that parenting is not a test of technique. Children are human beings with wills and agency, not instruments to be manipulated to produce desired outputs if only their parents know the right inputs.

Technical advice to parents of infants, toddlers, tweens, and teens creates the impression that there is a right way to get them to sleep, to control tantrums, to coerce them into liking broccoli, to help them master homework, to manage their relationship with a phone, to coach them in sports, to get them into their dream college. There is a corollary impression too. If they don’t sleep well, eat broccoli, or excel at sports; if they can’t control their use of Instagram; if they get wait-listed–then you did something wrong.

So much is out of parents’ control. It’s what makes parenting perhaps the most interesting, fulfilling, and devastating of all human experiences.

I stand holding a chalice half full of juice and utter, “The cup of salvation” over and over to worshipers coming forward for the sacrament, who lift a square of white bread from a basket held by the server to my left and then dip that bread into my chalice. It’s like nothing else. It’s actually kind of messy, because, from cup to mouth, the bread leaks juice onto the floor. By the time the server and I are offering the elements to one another a fractal splatter pattern is splayed on the stone tiles.

Yesterday the splatter hit my wrist. The worshiper responsible for it was aghast and breathed a hushed and wide-eyed, “I’m sorry” with her hand half covering her mouth. Nothing to apologize for. I liked seeing the purple splotch there on my arm, the way it changed shape as gravity pulled the edges of it downward to run over those two little veins.

The cup of salvation.