Contend - Snow Blast 2016

"Are you going to sit up front with us on the bus?"

My 7th and 8th grade shadows fall easily back onto this old habit, stretching the final hours of camp into long segments of Spot the Differences, Never Have I Ever, and Mad Libs. 

There are certain chunks of time that have long been property of the boys. Half of each bus ride. Snowball fights. The final hour of free time. Space after at least one meal. They stake out their claim, and we pull along whichever girls want to come along for the ride. 

Play pig after the gym has cleared from the whirl of volleyball games and dodgeball tournaments. Throw snowballs and attempt to whitewash faces and generally become soaking wet with the melting mess of it, even when there are pauses for tears and frustrations, the way that there always are when you pile up enough middle school lives, raw and together. 

Listen to jokes and riddles and pass off my phone a couple dozen times, because there is power to this. 

 Power to being clustered around the end of this dining room table as the boys trickle in and my girls filter out. To doing nothing more than listening and laughing and acknowledging when they are clever. To trying our very best at being Love and Grace who are stuck in the middle of that middle school mess that their brains and hearts and bodies are trying so hard to figure out. 

Power to pulling our girls from the group game and crunching through snow banks to take pictures in the empty skate park instead. To watching them be brave enough to drop in when the edge suddenly looks steep and strong enough to prove to themselves that they can run up and out the other side. 

Power to snowball fights where there are no real teams, but the frozen trickle melting down the back of my sweatshirt makes it feel like “throw snowballs at Jessica” might be a favored game. 

To sending girls off to their beds to draw and journal and process and to bringing them back together for raw, honest truth and water works that might just take us all by surprise. Except that it is Saturday night at camp, and they have been saving up all of the feels, storing them away in a bottle for just this moment. 

Because, in the midst of the uncertainty and change that rules their insides, middle school camp is made up of patterns. 

This leader comes down first for quiet time. Then that one. Then that one. This one brings the chocolate covered expresso beans and that one processes what they’re reading out loud.

We pray and read before we talk. Before we gather with the rest of the leaders for an official meeting. Before we pray again. Before we scatter to breakfast with our kids and start these days full of rhythms that repeat, year after year.

7th and 8th grade girls who pass around a bag of conversation hearts and murmur the truths that I have heard from so many lips before them, the ones that I would tattoo on their arms, so that, as they get older, they would never forget.

"We are: called, loved, kept, contenders, cherished, protected, servant, free, children, beloved, forgiven, embraced, befriended, #blessed."

"If we really, truly believed that God is our Rock, we would feel remembered, stable, loved, supported, and safe; and, because of that, we would act courageously and generously."

Ten girls who have a dozen different ways of expressing what the Gospel means to them. Who fill up pages with marker and washi tape, water color crayons and long paragraphs of reflection or creative writing. Because, oh do we ever have some girls who can write.

Girls who pass around packets of Marias and lemon drops while they ask big questions about truth and salvation, about choosing a religion for the convenience that it offers or living in one without really believing it, and about how on earth any of this is fair. About depression and divorce and death, science and theology and life. Who would talk for hours about all of these things that they are wrestling to get their heads around but are also itching to go play a game.

To run around in the dark and giggle and protect each other, to look foolish and to feel clever, to stay up too late eking out details from the one who is going to walk during New York Fashion Week, and to take a dozen more pictures out in the snow.

Goofy hand motions during worship with one of the girls and random dances with the same boys who save a seat for me on the bus and then find a way to have Jessica standing, so that we all three fit into the two person space.

And, the bus home stinks like cat pee and middle schoolers who have not showered, but we get back early enough for Superbowl parties that they may or may not fall asleep in the middle of. Back into the rhythms of everyday life. Praying that, somewhere between the ceiling shaking with the games of sixth graders above us and the floor shaking with the jumping throb of middle school worship, they found a better picture of God.

Freedom's Risk

High school retreat has a tradition of snowing on us the day that we leave, and Sunday morning holds true.

The deer are huddled away this morning, so we are each alone as we crunch our way through the early morning dimness, bringing down kettles for tea, looking for a bathroom that doesn't shriek when you turn on the light, the way that the one in our cabin does. Slowly congregating at these long cafeteria tables to read and pray.

Saturday, we fumble around for matches and firewood. They hand us a torch instead, knowing better than we do that the wood is icy and frozen. That fire might not come as easily as we like.

Sunday, we follow trails of footprints into the warmth, where we read and talk and pray, using words like 'popcorn' and 'shower' to pin down the ways that we are going to connect with the Divine, not because they make God better able to hear us. But, because the long tails of a Western European faith tradition lean towards order and turn taking.

"I like prayer showers." One of the girls shrugs, referring to the way that we pray on Wednesday nights, voices tumbling over each other in ripples and rhythms of connection, but holding space when one of the boys expresses discomfort. Combining the two.

'Order' and then 'chaos.' Questions that don't always have answers. Or, answers that aren't the ones that we are expecting. Risk and freedom, courage and fear all muddled up together.

Because, this weekend, this is how we do.

We tease out the frayed edges, and we do the slow work of mending this thing back together. We line up the stories, the markers, the memorial stones of Faithfulness in the midst of mess, and we hold space for brokenness. For still trying to figure this thing out.

Sometimes it is passing conversations about Hebrew verbs or breakouts where my girls come back with the phrase, "nobody in the Bible was having fun," and it's church speak for phrases that we probably aren't supposed to use with the kids.

There are hundreds of more and less acceptable ways of saying it, and we try out a dozen of them. Acknowledge that life sometimes hurts. Often hurts. That sometimes freedom seems harder than slavery. That plagues are no fun, the walls of the Red Sea can be terrifying, and the wilderness can look empty.

"...looked like the world was falling apart..."
"...hot mess..."
"...sucks..."

That, on the other side, lies the Promised Land.

"You live by, every day, meeting with [God]."

We pile into minivans and suburbans and caravan our way to camp, my seats filled with freshmen who sing along loud to obnoxious songs and a few good ones, who rock the car back and forth and search up old videos to watch their tiny selves dance and giggle and shriek down snowy hills at an octave that only 6th grade boys are capable of reaching.

And, it's all so very, very this group of kids.

From the crowd surfing and dance party that are carefully sectioned off in Saturday night's schedule, to free time basketball and hours spent breaking chunks of ice off of the lake. Breakouts where we talk about suffering and sovereignty and why on earth these ten plagues. Early mornings to pray. Candy canes and wasabi peas. Patterns and repetitions.

Kids who circle up into these groups to pray, and the leaders who step back to talk about the things that we see God doing in their lives. Goofy skits and communion in dixie cups that are growing soft with holding grape juice.

Borrowed gloves and more girls than beds, but making it work anyways.

A soccer ball that connects with a head and a shoulder that manages to take the skin off a nose. Dozens of rocks thrown onto the ice and warm sunlight during free time. Lamps catapulted from beach towels and tables smashed until they fit through a toilet seat.

There is Grace here.

Grace for exploring on the other side of barbed wire fences and jumping into half frozen lakes, even after you have been told not to. For the kids who are with us every week and the ones who are just trying it out. For hikes and prayer, morning devos, and large group games. And, for missing the exit and coming the long way home.

Old habits in Haiti leaders who ask for ibuprofen or bandaids when their boys are sore or bleeding from playing too hard. In kids who laughingly tell their cabin mates that "mom" has extra shoelaces if they need them. In Happy Day hoe downs and quieter songs where hands and hearts learn a little more of what it means to move in surrender. In the ones who want to ask a thousand questions until this crazy, mystery of a thing begins to make sense and the ones who simply want to pull in as close to a leader as they can find an excuse for, until the knots on their insides begin to settle. And, the ones who somehow manage both.

Because, we know these stories.

Not just this Exodus story with its epic sweep and constant echoes. But, these smaller stories. The way that Haiti and John Day and clusters and teaching smaller kids all tie together into this knot of a high school youth group. The way that glass vases shatter when you hit them with a bowling ball. The echoes of our voices in a room that is big enough to swallow us whole, and the smell of maple bars on Sunday morning.

We know how to climb up onto top bunks for cabin time and where to stack the chairs when we are done with them. Know to bring hand towels and soap, but still haven't quite figured out how to keep from muddying the cabin floor with fifteen pairs of shoes or fumble around in the dark without knocking over ever present mugs and water bottles.

It is dark when I leave the cabin in the morning, dark when we finally settle into bed at night. Long hours of daylight and darkness that we fill up in between. The way that God's people always have. Following fire by night and cloud by day. Staying close. Forgetting the miracles almost as soon as they come. But, writing them down.

So that we don't forget.

In the end, the muddy footprints don't matter. In the end, it is Holy. The garbage that I find tucked into nooks and crannies of the minivan and the tarps full of intentionally broken glass. The lives that we have smashed together in a weekend of the sort of community that might be more "real life" than the "real life" that we say we're reentering. It's one of those retreats that's going to take a little coming back from. A beginning, a pause, a repetition, not a full story in it's own right.

The heater blasting in the background while we sing song after song on Saturday night, keeping the room warm while slush turns back to ice outside, even though my mental picture is a sunrise rooftop on the equator.

Carrying chairs down from the rooms where my high school youth group once held a winter retreat, played these same games, sat at these same tables, felt this tangible sense of the Holy.

A car ride home where we twine together Haiti and Royal Family, middle school ministry, elementary Sunday school, and a hundred thousand moments that have brought us here. Hours of dress up tent and swimming holes. Broken shower heads and ninjas through the church. Tap tap rides and familiar Sunday School rooms.

"...and God saw the children of Israel, and God knew."

We didn't start these stories this weekend, and we certainly didn't finish them here. There is messy work left to be done. But...

God is faithful. Freedom is possible. And, Christ is our reward.

Flinging Yourself Godward: Grace

 There is a picture saved, somewhere a few weeks back in my camera roll, a phrase that caught my attention. It talks about Mary, that teenaged girl who responded to the impossible by bursting into song. Mary, it says, "flung herself Godward."

As if God were a direction, or every direction, that we could simply stumble into when we were too tired, too frightened, too overwhelmed for a graceful decent. As if the Holy were waiting for our unsteady feet, ready to catch us with the gentle breath of a lion and the solid warmth of a golden mane.

Flinging ourselves Godward.

As if it were as simple as that. Throwing ourselves towards the Divine with the easy faith of first graders who lean forwards, heavy, into the cradle of our hands, sixth graders who bump past or drop their head onto an arm, seventh graders who kick at feet, freshmen and sophomores who drop a shoulder in a younger, not quite forgotten, way of greeting. Littles and not-so-littles who draw close when they don't know what comes next.

Human enough to know that there is Someone waiting to catch us. Or, at least, human enough to know that we need Someone there.

One of the wonderful things about working with students is that they force me to learn in order to be able to teach. To research answers to questions that they haven't yet asked. To put words to thoughts that rattle around, unarticulated, inside my head. And, to remember.

To remember the power of proximity. To remember that sometimes having the right words isn't as important as they things that we say with our bodies. That sometimes it is worth more to stand elbow jostling close, to steal hats or examine pocket knives or hold out an arm for these dizzying circles that accompany the words to "Happy Day."

To stand outside in the snow so many times that our ears ache with the cold of it. To slip and slide on powdery sidewalks and make snow angels in the parking lot because it hasn't yet fallen enough to stick to the grass.

To light candles and watch movies and crowd into noisy basement circles where the world is a mess and we are a mess, and yet we are flinging ourselves Godward together.

Praying over the top of each other in a tangle of thoughts and voices. Talking about the future and the present and the past. Playing these games on Sunday evenings that are no more than a circle of chairs with more bodies present than our two years ago selves would have dreamed possible.

It certainly isn't polished or perfect. There are dancing through wildflowers moments and slogging through mud ones. Times where everything seems right, and times where we are certain that we are doing everything wrong. Long hours where we wrestle in prayer for these kids, for ourselves. And, longer ones where we lift up our heads, fling ourselves Godward, remember that there is Grace for unsteady feet.

Last year's word was courage. Courage to sit and wait for a youth pastor and courage to do so much more than sit while we waited. Courage for always changing plans and high schoolers who let Haiti adventures burrow deep into their hearts and souls. Courage for doubts and questions and truth. For making space to listen to each other speak.

This year's word is grace.

Grace that is a direction, every direction, waiting for our feeble attempts at humanity to push us, stumbling, into arms that fold over, protect, turn on the lights and send the darkness scattering to corners.

Grace that will surprise us and startle us and leave us frustrated, because, surely, in this situation or that one, Grace is not the answer.

Because, Grace isn't easy.

Every impatient corner of my soul wants to trade in this lavish Grace for Solutions, instead. Don't tell me to love my neighbor. Don't tell me to look closer when I'm already squinting and I can't see the beautiful past the ugly. Don't whisper that there are some questions that don't need to have answers, that the asking is the most important part of the game.

But, do.

Because, I need the reminders.

I need to remember that Grace has been out of hand since the beginning, since "Bereshit bara elohim," since the moment, long before man, when God chose the world, the universe, set it apart, appointed it for this great drama of Incarnation. Grace has been out of hand since Creation.

Stumbling towards Grace, flinging ourselves Godward. Becoming a better story.

"She flings herself Godward," says Elizabeth Johnson about Mary's Magnificat. "Flinging yourself Godward" is faith defined in 3 simple words

— Alethea Allen (@AletheaAllen) December 21, 2015

Joy Candle

Joy.

We never do quite get the candles to light this week, defeated by the cold desert wind that buffets every corner of the building. And, I have to wonder a little at the folly and the strangeness and the beauty of this all.

There's a sticky hand in the candle tray that belongs to a child who is already counting down the weeks to her next prize, even though the last one was never brought home. We play a different game, because I have yet to laminate new books of the Bible cards, and they protest at the change, playing, but still asking for the other one, the old one. Smash booking happens at the speed of light, but the new girls settle in afterwards to spend long, quiet moments duct taping their covers.

We talk about kids' camp and Royal Family Kids' Camp and stumble our way through Christmas carols, and the birthday girl leads us through the Advent liturgy.

Joy is such a strange word to use for this often harried process.

When we trail long chains of connected middle schoolers up and down these stairwells in search of paper puzzle pieces and this video is probably the only thing that they will remember from the talk. When they are sassy and full of life and when they quietly explain that they weren't here last week because their dad was too mad to go to church. When we're right in the center of this muddle that is the holidays.

Joy is 'grace recognized'.

Grace that piles up like these burned out matches. That echoes through little ones who pop in and out of range.

The 6th grader, who sets himself down one step below me at lunch, as tentatively close as school rules allow, narrating the important movements on his game and fully expecting that I am watching the rest of them, is vibrating with fear. Fear for break. For transition. For a thousand big and little things that a crowded cafeteria doesn't lend us the space to go into.

And, it doesn't look like joy.

But, I can see the Grace. Amazing Grace. Because, transitions haven't always been this easy for him. As we sit here and talk about the games that we used to play in my reading group, the cookies that I once brought them from Cambodia, the matching bracelets for all of us, Grace makes the space to remember.

Once upon a time, back in the cookie, bracelet, game playing days, when I had a different phone case and went by a different name, he was a tiny little second grader who responded to a temporary change of rooms by climbing up onto the table, curling into a ball, and screaming like the zombies were coming. Terrified.

To sit here now, almost quiet, so different from the little one who refused to let go of my sleeve once he was finally coaxed off the table, is Grace upon Grace upon Grace for this kid who still hasn't quite figured out the art of making friends in a world where you change schools several times a year.

He's working on it. Always trying new strategies. New groups of kids. And, I am reminded once again of the not yet-ness that is the point of Advent in the first place. The waiting and the growing and the hope that there is something better yet to come. Doing our best and trying new things and finding Grace in the places where our healing still looks an awful lot like a broken world.

When the wind blows out our match before the tiny flame can quite do what we thought it was supposed to, as if we could control wind or fire any more than Holy Spirit, there is still Joy.

So That Our Light Will Show

Sunday.

As my 5th grade girls slide and tumble over each other in the hallway, pick up rug burns and snatch at papers that rip beneath their fingers, a Peace candle flickers quietly in the background.

We stood, huddled on a tiny dry patch of pavement to burn through the half dozen matches that unpracticed fingers require to light these two tiny flames. They are braver this week than last, more certain that the laws of nature will keep this sudden whoosh of ignition from jumping out to burn them, and they rotate through the tasks that they have chosen, much the same way that my sisters and I used to.

Story is a running countdown of how many minutes until they can light the candles, lead each other through this simple liturgy, play a game in the hallway while a now-seventh-grader pauses on the stairwell to see if she recognizes it from her own days in this elementary school rhythm.

"Advent means coming. Jesus is coming."
A little blond with her brother's deadpan sense of humor volunteers to lead us through the words, a half dozen voices echoing the response over and over and over again. "Prepare the way of the LORD."
"Let's wait together. Let's sing while waiting."
"Prepare the way of the LORD."

They giggle and slide and yell to each other in barely contained stage whispers as they take turns hunting on the floor for which book of the Bible I have most recently called out. We pack up our bins, blow out candles in the dripping rain, and settle back onto the floor in the main room, hand over hand as we sing the words to these clapping games. Shoulder to shoulder as we lay on our bellies for a hand tapping one that twists our arms into a human knot.

Building in memories for the days when we don't have a candle to remind us of peace.

7th grade girls talk about not feeling God, about wondering how this Old Testament LORD and this New Testament Jesus could possibly be the same, about moving past the point of easy answers.

And, I am grateful for this. Grateful for a church that makes the space for 5th graders to thumb through pages and run through hallways as they learn to navigate their Bibles. For middle schoolers to admit that Lewis' Trilemma doesn't answer all of their questions, that reading the Bible sometimes leads to having fewer answers than before.

That makes room for both certainty and doubt.

Now, we’re being honest, that piercing truth that reveals a little of the hurt in their souls, and I can’t help but think that heaven is going to be a little like that. 

People say that it is going to be beautiful, and I fully believe that it will be. But, I think it’s going to be the sort of beauty that catches us by surprise at first. Eternity will be beautiful, but it also has the opportunity to be raw, at least at the beginning. Because, I don’t think that we will have forgotten the things that we saw and felt and did on this earth, the things that were done to us. Instead, I have a picture in my head of healing, as we eat up as many years and decades and centuries as it takes to learn to let the veils fall from our eyes, to learn to speak truth.

The book of Revelation says that there will be tree there, in the middle of the city of New Jerusalem, with leaves that will bring healing to the nations. Not leaves that have but leaves that will. Leaves that will bring healing to the raw pain of humanity and draw out the beauty of a creation that was fashioned in the image of the Divine.^⁠And, I think of the way that a wound itches as it heals, the way that stories itch at our minds just before they are ready to spill out. And, I think of my kids who seem to know that, somehow, in their lives full of secrets, the truth changes everything.

There will be stories in eternity. Stories that span generations and people groups and continents, and stories that happened in the blink of an eye. We’ll see God in those stories, because He’ll be right there, next to us, pointing out His fingerprints and His presence. Our words will weave together as healing and beauty and truth that always comes back to the Truth that is Jesus.

And, I love that. I love that because it means that, like so many aspects of the Kingdom, there is no need to wait for eternity to begin to experience eternity. The Kingdom is already here, but not yet fully present. Because, we can tell stories right now. 

I can sit down here, and type words into this computer, and I have the opportunity to capture a slip of Divine healing, of eternity and of peace.

Because there is peace; even in the hard stories, there is peace.

We don’t like to think that. We like to think that Christ’s peace comes best through quiet mornings and a gentle sunset. And, it does come that way. Creation whispers the soft peace of a Creator, but it also groans with the longing for the return of a Redeemer. It groans, and, as part of Creation, our souls groan with it.^⁠In every moment of peace there is discontent and in every moment of quiet there are a thousand voices and memories begging for our attention.

You are a soul, just as much as you are a body, and it is because you have a soul that you are discontent. Because, a soul is meant not just to soak up the peace, but to work and to be busy, side by side with Creator. God didn’t breathe into the lungs of humanity and then leave them prone in the garden to soak up sun beams and enjoy the mist on their faces. God breathed into the lungs of humanity and gave them a job to do, a garden to care for, a world to explore.^⁠You are discontent because your soul longs for the kind of work that it was created to complete.

Your soul longs to work in community, to nurture beauty, and to bring forth things that have not always existed. Your soul longs for the garden.

And, those memories, those voices from the past that whisper in your ears and in your heart and stir up things that you would prefer were long buried? Those are more than just symptoms of a broken world. Those are signposts, flickering reflections in the dark that point to something better yet to come. Because, you were made with a memory on purpose. 

You were made with a memory wide enough and deep enough to capture the majesty of a Creator and the wonder of Creation. You were created to hold onto stories, created to let the past intertwine with the present, to let the faithfulness of yesterday inform the decisions that you make to trust tomorrow. Because, we have a God who tells stories and gives stories and is, purely through His being, a story of the most epic flavor. And, that God gave you a memory to weave stories of your own.

The God who was neither in the strong wind or in the earthquake whispers in His still, small voice,^⁠ and He whispers that His light is brighter than the greatest dark that your story could ever contain. 

“All we’re doing here is laying in color, very dark, so that our light will show.” 

Bob Ross (The Best of the Joy of Painting, Ep. 1029)