I hear airplane traffic, car traffic, and train traffic from where I sit in my apartment in the morning.

I also hear the crunching of the cats attacking their breakfast kibbles.

The downstairs neighbor just left for work. I felt the closing of her back porch door in the bottoms of my socked feet, and the sound of her steps on the kitchen floor has stopped.

The fat cat ambles from his bowl to the sitting room, making soft padding sounds with his feet but also causing these old wooden floors to creak beneath his weight.

I’m making sound too. The clicking of my typing is muted, but no less part of the pre-dawn symphony.

Before any news or responsibility from the day reaches me, I like to take in these sounds. It’s an almost meditative exercise.

Have a good day.

There it was again, an incriminating-looking photo with a damning caption about a politician, posted to Facebook with no comment. Weeks ago someone close to me posted it too. 60 seconds on Google was sufficient to learn what anyone who saw it should have immediately suspected, that it was inaccurate, deceptive, and fake. I messaged my close one about it, but I didn’t expect that message to have any effect. We believe what we want to believe, right?

But then there it was again, shared by someone else close to me. Except this time, in the comments, was a word of correction from my close one who posted it the first time.

All is not lost. Some people are still listening.

That needs saying, because the ones who are not listening, the ones who have turned to plotting instead, are getting all our attention. Mail bombs and mass shootings demand attention. It’s what they’re designed for. The briefest of glimpses into the closed circuits of paranoid, hateful, racist discourse that feed these plotters induces stultifying despair. So many people tuned exclusively to villainy and conspiracy, and with deadly, deadly consequences.

Yet they are not the only ones, so we can’t give up. Many are still listening. Though we may never learn of their existence, they are there and they are persuadable. To go silent now is to abandon them to the fearmongers, and we know too well what fear wants to make people do. We must keep at it, then, with the clarifying and the correcting, the insisting on the truth of things and in our own discourse and that of our friends and leaders.

Some people are still listening. Now more than ever we need to be talking to them.

 

It’s lock-in night at the church, and not just one lock-in either. Oh no, we’re running three of them simultaneously (only two are youth lock-ins; the third is the 4th and 5th grade one, run by my colleagues, but the one that Kiddo will be participating in). Because why not?

My thinking when I designed the calendar was that two fall weekends committed to overnights at the church was too many, from a staff standpoint, because you already have two weekend retreats calendared for September thru November. That’s four overnights in three months. Three is better.

The pizza is ordered. The board games are out. The knobby balls are inflated. The sanctuary is cleared thru midnight. The movies are downloaded to the iPad (A Wrinkle in Time and Doctor Strange). Consent forms are signed.

What am I forgetting?

Lock-ins are the counterargument to the steady push on church leaders to get outside their buildings. I cut my teeth on that push. My first congregation and I did walks around the neighborhood on Saturdays. I’ve done “Ashes To Go.” I’m sold on the reality that hunkering down within the walls, waiting for people to come (back), and designating 3/4 of each year’s budget to building maintenance is not a winning mission strategy.

A Lock-in is a love song to the church building, though. I’m lucky to serve a church that has a fabulous modern building that feels, in the dead of night, more like a conference center than a church. Before I came here I’d sworn off lock-ins, but I decided pretty quickly that it would be youth ministry negligence to not have one in this building.

Some of the most amazing churches for lock-ins are the oldest ones, the ones where the smell of the sanctuary carpet and the sound of creaking pews evoke something mysterious and ancient. Regardless of the age and state of the facility, though, a lock-in is a beautiful (really!) instance of the church welcoming young people within its walls to experience sanctuary, even if the presenting activity is a game of sardines.

Long live the lock-in.

 

I keep trying to commit us to something to look forward to, but it keeps not working. I registered us for a conference in town and booked a room at the hotel that was hosting it, but Kiddo’s first cheer competition is that weekend, so I cancelled the room and asked for a refund on the registration (still waiting for that).

I bought us tickets to a Saturday night concert, but all of our childcare options are unavailable, so now I’m trying to sell them.

Are things to look forward to simply a casualty of this way of life, of two full-time jobs, school, and a high-commitment extracurricular activity?

I gotta figure this out.

 

List of things to do on your day off:

• Clean laundry
• Prep Kiddo’s school lunch
• Cook tonight’s dinner
• Roast vegetables to have as lunch throughout the week
• Make a stew for tomorrow and the night after’s dinner
• Clean the bathroom
• Walk the dog
• Buy cat food
• Haul window air conditioner units down to the basement
• Bring Halloween decorations up from the basement
• Mail things at the [&$^%#*@] Post Office
• Get Kiddo from school
• Take Kiddo to appointment

It’s not really a day “off,” at least not if “off” means there’s no work to do.

But what if “off” means working in a restful mode? What if “off” is less about the number of tasks on the list and more about the nature of those tasks and the feeling of time as you complete them?

I give you Off Mode.

Off Mode catches up on podcasts while working through the list and calls a friend in between items. Off Mode watches last night’s “The Walking Dead” over a leisurely lunch and then may take a power nap after. Off Mode clears the deck of the things that built up from last week’s On Mode and tries to set up the coming week’s On Mode for success.

Off Mode is work, but if you do it right it’s restful work.

Yesterday my colleague and I led an adult Sunday school class about the Bible that paired Biblical storytelling with an introduction to the historical critical method. I told the Genesis 1 creation story, then he explained the documentary hypothesis. Then we took questions. It was fun.

We wanted the class to be a fresh experience with Scripture, to feed congregants with the information about the Bible they seem to love but also to sprinkle on a different kind of encounter with scripture than maybe they’re used to in the same bite. Throughout the conception of the class and all the preparation, I assumed that the historical critical morsels would be the easy ones for people to digest.

I should have learned about assuming by now, because a portion of the class required defending the premise of the whole project against the assertion that treating Biblical texts as stories or as specimens for academic investigation is faithless and betrays a belief in Jesus. I’ll have that conversation any day. It’s just that’s not the conversation I thought we were having today.

Yeah, I ought’ve learned about assuming by now.

My former Head of Staff and I used to sardonically observe that deaths in the congregation came in bunches. Whenever someone would pass, my boss and I would spend the next couple of days looking sideways at one another, waiting for news of another, silently eyeing our calendars with dread. It was eerie how often that news came.

It isn’t limited to death. I am noticing deaths accompanied by diagnoses and hospitalizations on all sides these days, going back to the end of August. I share this not to be grim but to point out that our work happens in the midst of all this and most of the time cannot account for it in advance. My “September Calendar” Bullet Journal page did not contain any funerals or midnight emergency room phone calls, and yet those things were prominent features both of the work the month required and of the climate in which I did all the other September stuff.

I think that made my work better.

Our preaching and planning, teaching and organizing are only sometimes addressed directly to contexts of human frailty, accompanying people in and speaking to encounters with mortality. Yet the rest of the time the specter of illness and death lurks behind projects that are otherwise future facing and hopeful–Confirmation retreats and session meetings.

I wonder if that doesn’t make those projects stronger. I wonder if seasons of heavy contact with all manner of human deficiency don’t lend perspective and humanity to our attempts to project strength and health.

 

 

 

My spouse used to ask me on the Saturdays that came before preaching Sundays, “Is your sermon done?” I developed a standard answer: “It’s never done. It only exists at varying stages of preparation.”

She doesn’t ask me that anymore.

It’s a serious answer, and not just for sermons. One of the features of church work is that Sunday presents an immovable deadline for much of what we have to do. Sunday is coming, and that doesn’t always sound like good news to those of us who fret about our preparation. There is the sermon to prepare. Or there is the class, the youth group, the meeting–Sunday is coming and with it things we are expected to lead, ready or not.

So what is ready? If time zipped ahead to Sunday morning right now and you had to go with only the preparation you’ve already done, could you?

You could.

Your preparation extends further back than this week. And you’re not the only one preparing; God is too. God is preparing you, and God is preparing the community in ways nobody sees.

Let’s do our work to prepare, then. But not as if the whole thing depends on us.

The lights are flickering in an adjacent room. In the morning, during the staff meeting on the third floor, I can see them through the window dimming and rallying in my peripheral vision. 90 minutes of this, off to the side of discussion and debrief, debate even. Light disappears, light’s on again. Every time I fall for it. Every time I look, my brain tricked, attracted to what feels like motion.

Later, I don’t have to turn my head to see the fluttering lights during our Service for Healing happening in the second floor chapel, where wooden chairs are angled in rows that, for one side, direct worshipers’ gaze to an ominous corner of floor-to-ceiling windows and out onto Chestnut Street, but not before the mail room on the second floor of the adjoining building, where the fluorescent overhead light is dancing spasmodically.

I’m watching the lights. I don’t really want to watch the people in this service because it’s a service in response to sexual violence and it doesn’t feel right to pay close attention to people who came for such a service. I expect if I look up to see women, and women at this service probably aren’t here to have a man watch them.

So I watch the lights. Against a backdrop of dusk when the service starts their staccato routine is faint, but by the time worshipers begin milling about the space lighting candles and receiving oil to their heads and hands the lights are performing prominently. The movements and the music–the lighting!–of worship are all grace and delicacy. The electric stutter stealing my attention is neither.