The appeal of a midterm election is its decisiveness, that it is a straight up or down verdict on performance.

So much can go on indefinitely just kind of working, kind of not.

We keep a bag hanging on the back of a door for unmatched socks, and when it gets full I go through it to look for matches. It is an oddly satisfying activity. Last night I must have found 10 pairs of socks in there.  The feeling of accomplishment that comes with that feat is real.

We need structures for work that is unfinished. For years I’ve used a “Needs Action” email folder; I triage emails to it that I can’t deal with in the minute but that deserve a reply. At least once a week I set aside time to empty it out. Having a place to put those emails manages my stress when they come in. Making time to deal with them keeps me accountable to the people who sent them.

At some point an unmatched sock has to go, though. I find socks at the bottom of my bag that I have attempted to match so many times I can’t accurately say how long they’ve been in there, so I throw them out or re-purpose them. The fantasy that something I have not completed for months and months is going to somehow magically become completed does not serve anyone.

What’s your unmatched sock bag?

 

She’s up at 6:00. Well, she’s awake at 6:00. It’s 6:15 at least before she’s up. She’s dressed quickly enough, and since she prepared her cheer practice bag last night, she grabs it as we head out the door for the Brown Line train.

It’s 6:25.

The train is more full than usual for so early on a Sunday morning. I notice the runner bibs on passengers. There’s a run happening, and runners are boarding at every stop. Women. Men. Families. I remember that the high school student I recruited to lead worship at 11:00 this morning is doing this run first, then coming to church.

Because of the race route, the Red Line trains are going over the top through the loop, so we may as well stay on our Brown Line train instead of transferring to the Red Line at Belmont, in the cold. It just means that when we get off we’ll have about a 15 minute walk.

There’s a Starbucks beneath the Brown Line stop at Chicago and Franklin. When Daughter comes to church with me this early, Starbucks is the least I can do for her. We’ll pass two others between here and the church, and I suggest we wait, so that we won’t have to carry drinks and croissants along with our bags, but no, she wants it now.

She decided a couple weeks ago that she’s a chai latte person, so chai latte it is. It occurs to me while we wait that the 66 bus will cut several blocks out of our walk, so as soon as we have our hot liquids we join the small crowd standing on the sidewalk outside. The crowd includes one of the church receptionists, who I just saw at the church yesterday afternoon as I was preparing to officiate a wedding. He sizes up our situation in a quick glance and says with a smirk, “You got screwed too, eh?”

I like him. I consider for a minute that, for me, coming to church this early on a Sunday is a central feature of my life and calling. I’m preaching and leading worship today, wearing a robe and stole. He’s got a couple other jobs, and this one scheduled him for the early Sunday shift up against a late Saturday shift. I’m glad we’ll ride the bus together, even for just a few blocks.

Daughter disappears with the bell choir Director once we get to church, because she plays with her daughter during rehearsal at 8:00, while I’m leading worship. The bell choir Director doubles as Sunday School staff, so she’ll take Daughter to Sunday school at 9:30, where she will stay through two more worship services I’m leading. I won’t see her until after 12:00.

She gets those dumplings she likes for lunch, then we’re in a Lyft headed for cheer practice, a 40 minute drive. Her cheer uniform is on under her clothes, and her hair will have to get done in the car. She needs to use my phone’s selfie camera as a mirror, and as she does I snap a picture.

I want to remember these days.

I don’t really want to be in the room where it happens.

I have stumbled a time or two into that room and spent all my time there looking around, squirming from the feeling of being out of place, taking short little terrified breaths trying to manage the certainty that the next interaction will be the decisive one, the one that reveals that I don’t belong in this room and that I slipped in–unwillingly even–with someone else who does.

Maybe having an impact is less about fighting your way into the room where it happens and more about doing what’s needed when you find yourself in it without trying. Yes, social climbing is gross. But nobody is served by your imposter syndrome and the shrinking it makes you do when you think you’re in a room with people more important than you.

 

I loved running in to my next door neighbor last night out among the trick or treaters in our neighborhood, mostly because he’s a cool, laid back guy with a Mississippi drawl who always has something interesting to share from the realm of throwback music or television and so is just fun, but also because he was done up for Halloween and his getup was perfect.

He was Prince, ala Purple Rain. Purple jacket, ruffle shirt, wig–the whole deal. But he’d added his own touch. He carried a basketball. Having no idea why he was carrying a basketball around trick or treating, I complimented it. “The ball’s a nice touch.” His eyes lit up. “Right?” he said. “I’m glad you got that. Nobody else gets it.”

Uhhh . . .

I played along. “Really? Oh man!” I was caught too far off base on this and was about to be picked off, until another neighbor saved me by admitting her ignorance and just asking what the basketball signified.

“Because that guy could ball, man!”

I didn’t say anything else, but I nodded along as if I knew that, as if everybody knew that.

It’s a thing. Prince was an amazing basketball player.

Of course my neighbor knows that.

Doesn’t everyone know that?

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.