It's simple to regard myself a weighed-but-wanting father with embarrassing regularity. Nothing I’ve done has been more chock full of vulnerable and exposing moments of uncertainty as being a dad.
But I had a fresh glimpse yesterday that maybe one of the best parenting acts we ever do is something we don’t really think about as exceptional. It’s just something we decided a long time ago.
The practice? The exceedingly revolutionary act of making Sunday morning participation in our congregation as regular as eating breakfast, brushing our teeth, and locking the door when we leave.
A Presbyterian Gamble!
This past Sunday, as I have done before, I took a risk.
If you were a presbyterian it would have seemed quite a gamble for you too!
I left the pulpit, sat down and opened up the microphone at both of our worship sites…The invitation?
“Tell us where you've noticed God's fingerprints in your life; in rescue, provision, healing or help.”
I've done this many times before, but each time there is a slight fear that no one will speak, we’ll all be crushed by the suffocating embarrassment in the air, and everyone will think me a bumbling fool.
And of course, once you relinquish the mic, you also surrender quality control of what’s said!
But always, these people I adore feel stirred to publicly acclaim the ways they’ve inventoried gifts from Christ at the addresses where they park their cars and eat their suppers.
Defrost the Windshields of our Non-Noticing Eyes
So after a brief introduction and a prayer for God to defrost frozen hearts and the windshields of our sometimes non-noticing eyes, I sat down.
The wooden podium sheepishly stood there, isolated and abandoned before a sea of watching eyes.
Suddenly, a 27 year-oldish millennial with a beard like a blazing red bush stepped forward.
“I sometimes see myself,” he began, “frozen in time as a irresponsible 17 year old...when suddenly I’m stunned to realize I’m actually married to an adult woman!....(congregation cracks up) ---with a son who grows in astonishment of the created world daily...You ought to hear him mimic the bird in our yard...I’m so grateful for a wife who reads Scripture more than I’ve ever dreamed, and always goes to the Bible with questions, and comes away with even bigger ones that drive her more deeply to worship.”
A retired woman in her sixth decade, newly released from a frightening couple of weeks in the hospital, cautiously climbed the stage-steps and could not remain silent about God’s personal visitation while her health was uncooperative and her confidence was spooked.
“I was scared, and praying and praying, and one day, as I pleaded, I looked out the window, and don’t know how else to say it, but I saw the face of God.”
We do not hear or talk of things like this often.
“The clouds, which cannot form themselves, then gathered in the shape of a heart,” she continued. “I was overwhelmed with an experience of God’s affection for me, and began to see everything differently... I just want to say to all of you, that I love you all. And God truly does too.”
Reassuring Nearness
This testament of the reassuring gift of God’s nearness and healing was followed by a bold little brunette, aged 4, who briskly bound to the stage to face the crowd.
Her sweet face was obscured by a podium that dwarfed her, and we strained with care to listen to the melodic little squeak of a voice that was instantly melting:
“I am thankful,” she whispered, “that we got to go to the Dominican Republic, and got to swim in the ocean...”
When her litany of spontaneous gratitude had ended and hearts were already near bursting, a young, soon-to-be father, took her place.
“This week,” he stammered, “would have been the due date of our baby we’ll never get to know.” A miscarriage had brought unwanted grief. With tender eyes moistening, he continued, “but our Lord has turned our mourning into laughter, for we are now expecting twins!”
These were not pollyannaish, pain-ignoring, flip expressions of God-appreciation. Most were gratitude on the opposite side of devastation, loss, or life not turning out any way similar to their wanting. It was instructive thanksgiving for, as Joe Novenson would describe, the “grace to endure” as well as the “grace to overcome.”
Some do not receive both types of grace but are assigned a chronic difficulty to steward.
Grace to Endure
A tough and tender such woman who broke her back some 30 years ago in a car accident that killed her husband, left her crippled, and a single mother of 4---all while serving the Lord as a missionary in Africa, stood with her omni-present crutches assisting her. She acknowledged the fidelity and guidance of God, even in ways not expected through moments not wanted.
As she thanked Christ for a sweet man he’d brought her as a husband in recent years, she insisted on the veracity of the never-leaving presence of God who, as the Psalmist might say, “keeps our lamps burning and turns our darkness into light.”
Historic Community
I haven’t the space to mention the “sermons in shoes,” prepared through frightening, disheartening moments, and stained with tears--sons moved by God-orchestrated reconciliation with estranged fathers, grand-dads delighted in their newly adopted grand-children with special needs, an about to graduate young woman in college leaning on Isaiah 43’s fear-dissolving words that have become a lodestone in her life.
There’s just no way to fully capture the stunning privilege of a mother with grown kids, tearful-but-thankful, though newly through a fall full of funerals, for God’s alteration of her family tree many moons back, through those who meddled adoringly in the lives of her now heaven-dwelling parents, when they were but young college students.
Teenagers on the cusp of college, and mourning parents meeting God in new ways after the violently unnatural feeling of dropping heir oldest child off at college all gave expression to the surprising and persistent action of an attentive God in the particulars of their own vulnerability in this loss-riddled world.
And for what must have been the first time in the history of compulsory education, a 6 year old boy thanked God for his teachers and his school!
When else do 70-year-old widowers/grandfathers and four-year-old little girls listen and learn from one another?
Where else may grandmothers and high school seniors hear of the redeemed anguish in one another’s lives, and realize afresh they dwell beneath the gaze of the same involved Savior?
What other occasions are there for freshly graduated 20-somethings and parents of teenagers to be altered and emboldened by the belief of one another?
I realized anew yesterday, that our whole family gets to experience such oddities regularly by our privileged involvement in what Martin Luther called “the infirmary for the sick and an inn for the convalescing.”
Rebelling Against Cultural Orthodoxy
Our children, and we with them, get to be happily situated in a community of folks who are actively rebelling against cultural orthodoxy by taking God at a level of seriousness that would appall many of the culture-makers, legislators, and “deciders” in our world.
And they were doing so publicly, again yesterday, ignoring their heart language of grumbletonian in which all of them, like me, are so fluent, and practicing and teaching instead, gratitudenese.
As our friends and fellow church family members practiced attributing honor to God for his thoughtful intervention in their lives, they were engaging in a nourishing form of subversiveness we want our kids to adopt.
The late David Foster Wallace, in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again perceptively realized that:
Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the ‘Oh how banal.’ To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of over-credulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law.
In an age of extreme cynicism, we rebel against our world for the sake of the world by publicly praising, noticing, depending on, and responding to Christ and learning to ignore the “eye rolls” we fear.
I am not a fella whose faith would be considered “radical” by anyone’s standard. I wear a lot of khaki pants and white shirts, after all.
But I was touched to realize yesterday that we were and are involved in deeply subversive, radical and counter-cultural practices as parents each time we come together with the folks we’ve tethered ourselves to with membership vows----those, who like us, have been acted on by Christ.
Through no great wisdom of our own, our children and a host of other children as well, dwell among those who refuse to slouch toward the prevailing thoughtless view of the universe which insists that everything came from nothing, all desires must be blindly obeyed, suffering is irredeemable, and that death must be avoided at all costs, because this life is all there is.
I’m floored with gratitude that our brood get to rub shoulders with and be within earshot of all sorts of folks who have endured the most stinging sorts of heartache and haven't been destroyed by it, because they count on a death-defying Savior who comes in the middle of their personal droughts with as much nourishing reality as the rain that’s finally falling just outside my window.
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