But this is huge. Yesterday, while trying to entertain her during a meeting, I wrote words on a card for her to copy (she loves this activity).

And, for the first time that I was really truly certainly her doing this on her own, she READ a word. She looked at the card, looked at me, and said, “but I don’t know how to make a c for cat.”

Now, I would not yet say she can officially read.

But it’s a start!!

And a big deal for a reading-addicted mother!

My pastoral care professor used to say that if you feel lousy emotionally in the morning that’s not a problem so long as you start to feel better as the day progresses. It likely means that you were just working stuff out in your subconscious while you slept.

I’m going to go with that explanation for now. And hope that my subconscious accomplished some incredible thugs last night. We’ll see.

In the meantime , I think the general thing I’m trying to work out stems from the laundry list of things I promise not to vent about.

But, swirling around in my head, three recent conversations related to working motherhood are converging.

(1) One friend of mine commented in the last week that the key right now to making her complicated life work is simply believing herself that she can pull this off. If that’s the case, she figures the people around her will decide it’s working too ( kind of the working mom’s version of the idea that if you think you are beautiful and glamorous, other people will pick up on that projection and agree).

(2) Another friend described the goal for a crazy month as “survival”. Which I’m starting to think is pretty much every parents’ root goal. It’s even somewhat evolutionary, huh? It reminded me of the comment my sister made in the card she sent for Zora’s first birthday: “Congratulations, you kept the baby alive for a whole year.”

(3) Last night after a long and not so fabulous day, a more seasoned working mom than I said the thing that I probably needed to hear: “I don’t know how you do it.” (And whether she realized it or not, I took it as a full-on Holy Spirit moment when God knew that I needed just that).

The collision of these three things: I honestly don’t know either. I have no idea how I pull together a life that involves the needs and demands of a preschooler and a baby on board, and a husband with a job he loves but. Ridiculous commute, and the tensions and pull between areas of ministry, and the ever-growing to-do list.

Some days I feel like I get one little piece of this right. Most days I can also list the pieces I completely bungled. Some days I am ready to pop out of bed and conquer the world. Others I would rather go back to sleep. Some days I can’t imagine this any differently, others I start scheming about the most drastic ways to reconfigure the whole deal.

I imagine this is true to some extent of everyone’s life. And I wish we could all be more honest with each other, and perhaps a little more grace-filled around the places where others bungle things.

But I was raised in the only American family that seems completely uninterested in the Super Bowl. I chose a college which, while it had a football team, has been described as “kind of like a big football school, except the choir is the football team.” And I honestly dread the possibility of having a boy (we don’t know what number 2 is yet, so make no assumptions) because he might grow up to be interested in playing football and Erik and I are not really football parents, as far as we can tell.

So, yes, this article is kind of preaching to the choir when it comes to me.

But, I think there’s a broader application here. The issue around bodies to begin with: girls’ soccer teams where significant numbers of the team have serious knee injuries. Track and cross country (and I DID participate in track, thank you very much, so I am not a total non-athlete) teams where coaches train kids so hard (and wrong) that they wind up unable to run without pain by the time they are 25.

But I also cringe when any extra-curricular activity takes over a teen’s life. It’s partly that teenagers are passionate by nature…if they love something, they LOVE it, and there is often that impulse to immerse oneself in the activity. Eat, breath, and sleep football, soccer, theater, choir, model UN, pick your favorite.

However, what about when adults make it a life of death sort of matter? When a coach tells a kid that “this is your most important season…you can’t miss this practice/camp/etc. for anything”; when the stakes are set so high that it’s impossible to do more than one thing. I mean, seriously, most of us are not going to go pro. And that shouldn’t be what sports, music, drama, whatever are about.

I’m all for commitment to your game, and to some extent, it is absolutely necessary (another athletic foray for me: rowing, in which you literally CANNOT go out and practice unless everyone of your 7 teammates is there…the boat will tip because it’s unbalanced).

But I wish, for the teenagers I know and love, and way far down the road for Zora and #2, that they had a chance, when they were young, and their minds were quick, and their bodies were strong, and their passions were high, to explore many things, but nothing so deeply that it consumes everything they have, and not so many or so much that they never have time to breath.

Zora: Mom, do you like to be close to your Mama?

Erica: You mean do I like to live close by her?

Z: Yeah.

E: I do. Because I would miss her if we lived farther away. Do you like to be close to your Mama?

Z: No. I like to be close to Grandma. I like to be at her house.

E: But what if your Mama gets lonely?

Z: You won’t because I come back to see you and Daddy.

To walk in this garden before the heat of the day has been a slow breath for me through a busy summer.

And I should have known: if I’ve chosen this garden as a metaphor for living these weeks, then the day there are mosquitos, I will feel a few stings, and I will itch through the day, not just from these bites, but from the small irritations and attacks life brings.

But there’s something larger going on as well.

When I started blogging, I made a decision that blogging was a public act. I have a public job…not that I am a celebrity or any sort of major public figure. But, in my own little sphere, as a pastor, I am public. It’s a kind of fishbowl life. Ministry is, modeled after Jesus’ own ministry, incarnational, in the flesh, lived out amongst God’s people. And while they do not own your life, your life is part of the package when you sign on to be a minister. Who you are and how you live are sometimes just as important as what you say.

All of that is an overly intellectual way of saying that when you are a minister, people are in your business, and you have to, at least to a certain extent, be OK with that.

So, when I started blogging, I realized that I had two choices: try as hard as possible to disguise who I am and have a readership made up of those who are near and dear and who I alert about the blog AND anyone else who might happen to track me down OR just be right out there about my identity.

I chose the second and I’ve never questioned that decision. It meant that I had to filter what I write, assuming that not only family and friends, but also colleagues and church members, present and future, would see my blog and know who it was. When you google my name, my blog is one of the first things you get to.

There is often quite a bit that I don’t say on the blog. I try not to vent. I try not to say bad things about people. And, I limit some of what I write about my own life.

When I was pregnant with Zora, I didn’t say much, if anything, about that on the blog. The practical reason: I was looking for a new call, and my blog, being public, was also the place I pointed search committees to for examples of sermons.

Now, I am pregnant again, and eager to have some opportunity to think about that on the blog.

But it’s the process of getting pregnant that may explain why I haven’t written much in the last year or so. Because a big piece of what’s been going on for the last year is something that I know is not considered appropriate to share. It’s one of the things-we-don’t-say of my generation. And, honestly, it was not something I really wanted everyone to know about while we in the moment: infertility.

Almost exactly two years ago, Erik and I threw out the pill and started trying to get pregnant again. It was time. We figured it would take six months at most, based on our experience with Zora. That time, we decided to start trying, figuring it would take 6-12 months, and we were pregnant within a month (honestly a little sooner that we had bargained for). And I was pretty clearly “fertile” pretty quickly after her birth.

And this time, nothing…for the first year, we figured it was just a quirk.
Finally, we saw a doctor. And things got rolling.

In the grand scheme of the infertility world, we got pregnant pretty quickly as soon as there was some medical assistance involved.

But it felt like forever to us while we were going through it. And each month felt like a new level of awful. My lowest point came on Mothers’ Day, when I sat in front of the congregation, watching babies get baptized, all the while being reminded by cramps and flow that, yet again, I was not pregnant.

I shared what was happening with my colleagues…for practical reasons (explaining a sudden departure from church when the clinic called to tell me it was time; the frequent doctors appointments, etc.) and because they are wonderful people.

I shared with some folks in the congregation. Partly because I needed to talk about it, but even, to some extent, as a bit of a pastoral experiment.

Here’s what I found out: if your pastor tells you this is a struggle, you suddenly have permission to share what has happened to you.

I heard about miscarriages. I heard about lifetimes of identifying with the “barren women” of the Bible. I heard about the gratitude for the one child they had and the tinge of grief that there wasn’t going to be another.

The other associate pastor asked me, at one point, if I would ever think about mentioning it from the pulpit. Maybe, was my answer. If the text pointed to it anyway. If I could find a way to say it without being too emotionally raw. If I could find a way to say it without feeling like I was overplaying my own situation in the face of people who had tunneled deeper into the the process. It never really came up in the text, and sometimes I wonder what I’ll do now that I am pregnant if I have a clear opening into the issue of infertility in sermons or other parts of my work.

Meanwhile, it has me thinking about where one sets the personal boundaries as a pastor, when it’s OK to allow the personal not just to inform the pastoral, but to create openings for conversations. It has me thinking about the things we don’t talk about at church: infertility; mental illness; disease related to parts of our bodies that are “questionable”; anything that is taboo, but still wounds people deeply, and cuts into their souls, things that I wish we could open up to the healing light of God, filtered through God’s people.

And, I think it’s time to start blogging again…

I’m the oldest of 4 kids: me, Emily, Mark, Anna. We’re packed in there…Anna is only 6 years younger than me.

A few months ago, Anna started a new job at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. The agency where she works has a weekly staff spotlight, and one of the questions they asked when it was her week was:

“What’s the story your family always tells about you?

Here’s Anna’s answer…

When I was 2 or 3, the youngest of four, I used to sneak out of my room at naptime and head down to the kitchen, where I’d dump the trash can on the floor and eat all the food scraps I could find. As my mom tells it, “That’s when I looked at your father and said– ‘Now this one– she’s a survivor.’”

I think it’s a great question: what’s the story your family always tells about you. We do all have these family stories, and they tell us something about who our families are. My family was laid back enough not to freak out because the baby was exploring the garbage can. And optimistic enough to spin the story into something positive.

And the stories tell us something about who we are: Anna is the super-independent, adventurous survivor of the family. She wasn’t a neglected child, but my parents will admit that by the time she came along, with 4 kids under 6, everything was kind of a blur…

I love family stories…both my own and other people’s families. Think of how many well know stories are some sort of family stories: cinderella; Hansel and Gretel; Snow White Winnie the pooh–all those animals in the 40 acre woods are sort of like a family for Winnie; even Barbie has a family of some kind…all those dolls who are somehow part of her entourage; and comic book and action hero character stories eventually get around to explaining where the hero comes from.

Big parts of the Bible, too, are nothing more than family stories…Joseph’s family story is a bit ore extreme than Anna the garbage eater, but there it is: another story that a family tells to remind themselves about who they are.

And another story about finding your way as one of the youngest in a big family. About family at its best and at its worst, about how families can fall apart and how they come back together, about how families can setroy each other or take care of each other.

It’s not a story about a perfect family: this is a family with a father, Jacob, who shows blatant and unfair favoritism to his youngest children (maybe I notice that because I’m as oldest child!); this is a family where brothers get jealous and lash out at each other; this is a family where a talented child (Joseph) brags about his talents; this is a family where someone gets sent away, and a father becomes so devastated that he barely cares about the sons (and the one daughter) he still has.

Even when we’re very little, I think we know that our families aren’t perfect. Hopefully, not as bad as Joseph’s family. But it doesn’t take long to know that families are messy things. They are places where people grow, but they can also be places where people get hurt.

I asked the kids at VBS this week about this moment in the story, one morning, the morning before we told them that part of the story. I said, “If Joseph met his brothers again, after they were so mean to him, what do you think he would do to them? What would you do to them?”

One boy, with incredible honesty, gave the non-churchy answer: “He should punch them in the eye.”

We know we’re supposed to forgive, but let’s be honest: if your brothers sold you into slavery, what would you do? Would any one blame you if you never let on to who you were; if you threw them in the same prison you were stuck in; if you punched them in the eye?

There are so many stories in the Bible about families, but they are not perfect families. And I, for one, am glad…

Because God uses people and situations that are not perfect, sometimes even really messed up, God uses these things to work out good.

And I, for one, am glad, because I come no where close to being a perfect person. So it’s good to be reminded that God can use even me.

But if there’s one thing that we learn from the Joseph story, it’s that great moment at the end where all the brothers are trapped in a room together.

When Joseph sees his brothers again, of course, he doesn’t punch them in the eye. But he does poke and prod and test, and it takes a couple visits before he can even tell them who he is:

He finally says to them: I am your brother Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt. And now do not be distressed, or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life. For the famine has been in the land these two years; and there are five more years in which there will be neither ploughing nor harvest. God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth, and to keep alive for you many survivors. So it was not you who sent me here, but God

It was not you who sent me here, but God…don’t worry. You did a terrible thing. But God turned it into something good.

See, it’s not just that God uses imperfect people: God FORGIVES imperfect people. And if we’re honest with ourselves, if someone can forgive us, we can learn to forgive other people: to be like God, and to try to make good things come from bad.

Even this story of forgiveness in the Bible is a family story: and not just because there are families in the Bible who desperately need to forgive each other.

Because Joseph and his 12 brothers and their children and their children’s children, and those children’s children, and those children’s children, and on and on and on, they survive the famine. And they survive slavery in Egypt. And they survive 40 years wandering in the Sinai desert…and on and on and on.

Until, one day, one of the children’s children’s children has a baby named Jesus. A baby who is God’s own son, but also a great great great ever so many greats grandson of Joseph’s father Jacob. Part of Jacob and Joseph’s family.

And Jesus is God’s answer to all of us, daughters and sons of God, who need so desperately to be forgiven.

Our God is a God of forgiveness.

And that means that we can forgive others, even our families.

And even when the hurts feel to big to get over, too much to bear, we can know this:

We are part of this one big family, God’s family, messy as it is, but a family where we are all children of God.

And where we are all forgiven,

And where we can all learn to forgive.

This is our family story…
Thanks be to God!

Worth reading even if you are not a Presbyterian, and particularly if you are interested in youth, massive youth events, music genre debates in the church, and the beauty of a denomination having both a left and right wing to inform each other.

First, John wrote this post.

And then he followed up with this one.

I have not been practicing what I am about to preach…I’m home for one week after 3 weeks of traveling, and I leave at about 6:00am tomorrow on another youth trip. in a sermon about doing and being, about taking time to sit contemplatively at the feet of Jesus, I will be quoting other people frequently. Because I had a week of very busy doing–faxing forms and sending e-mails, organizing and filing, unpacking and cleaning and repacking, preparing for the trip, not to mention dealing with the demands of a 3 year old who is coming off a few disruptive weeks…a whole lot of doing, not leaving much time for being.

I am by no means an expert on being. I’m muddling through this with the rest of you who get busy and forget to sit and be quiet and listen.

And maybe that’s the way it should be for the preacher this week…in order to address the problem, I’ve been living it more than thinking about it!

We are, says author Wayne Muller,
enthralled in the trance of our work. It is all important, it must be done right away, it won’t get done without me, I cannot stop or it will all fall apart, it is all up to me, terrible things will happen if I do not get this done. I have to keep working because there are I have things to buy and there are bills to pay for those things and I have to buy faster computers and more expensive telephones to help me get more done so I can keep up and make money to pay the bills for the things I need to buy to help me get these things done…..There are always a million good reasons to keep on going, and never a good enough reason to stop.

I find that to be a frighteningly accurate description of our relationship to work, whether that work be in an office, from our home, in schools, in factories, in fields. We live by the clock, by our calendars and schedules, and we are always trying to cram in more and more efficient use of time and energy. We’ve even seen some creep of this mentality into the work of raising children: calculations of the monetary worth of a stay at home parent’s tasks, and suggested child-rearing practices that are centered more on the clock than the needs of the individual child.

In spite of technologies that are supposed to make us more efficient and leave us with more time for leisure, we find that we are increasingly tied to e-mail, phones, computers, employers, and efficient achievement and consumption.

And we even tie our children into this schedule. I am not making a value judgment here, simply observing that only a few decades ago, children’s and teen’s leisure time was less scheduled and more open…and, we adults all seemed to turn out OK. I suspect that most of us actually would prefer that sort of free-form experience of childhood we had for our own kids, but we are pushed and tugged by our schedules, the expectations of friends and neighbors, the desires of our kids, until even our children get sucked into
the great hamster wheel that that is middle class life in North America.

Even our sense of leisure has become quantified. In the 1970s, an economist named Stefan Linder wrote a book called (I love this title) The Harried Leisure Class. He wrote:

We had always expected one of the beneficient results of economic affluence to be a tranquil and harmonius manner of life…what has happened is the exact opposite. The pace is quickening, and our lives in fact are becoming more hectic.

Linder’s theory was that as labor was more and more specialized and productive, there was an increase in the monetary value of each worker’s hours, and thus an increase not just in the value of work time, but in the value of non-work time(from Judith Shulevitz, The Sabbath World, p. 21-22). So, think about it, that means that even the hours you have for leisure: vacation, hobbies, work around the home, even those hours suddenly have a high monetary value.

For instance, here’s my own (somewhat faulty) logic about this: I love to sew and knit. So do many of the other women in my family history. My grandmother talks about her older sister Kay’s skill in taking the coats of the older children in the family and recutting and retailoring them into smaller coats for her. That was a necessary skill for a farm family in the 1930s, but knew Auntie Kay and I knew her work, and I know she sewed and knit not just out of necessity but because it was an activity she loved, a source of beauty, creativity, and leisure beyond her factory job as a young woman.

But there are times when I begin to think about an sewing project, and discard the idea because I begin to calculate in my head what the cost would be, not just of materials, but also of labor, and I figure that my hours are worth enough that I would be better off “splurging” on the purchase of a pre-made dress or coat. With 8 years of post-high school education, my labor hours are worth more than Auntie Kay’s were. (And, stated that way, it chokes me a bit even to say it, because the truth is that in our family today, a pair of slippers knit by Auntie Kay is an incalculable treasure…)

Even our leisure is quantified. How many us get back from a vacation and find we are exhausted because we tried to do too much, to get the full value out of that time away?

Put simply, we need more rest. Both the kind associated with sleep and the kind associated with Sabbath. One of the early Christian monks was once asked by younger monks what they ought to do when the monk next to them fell asleep during longer prayers and liturgies. He answered: “For my part, when I see a brother who is dozing, I put his head on my knees and let him rest.” (A Sourcebook About Sunday, p.148)

Yes we need that kind of rest: file away this idea in your head: there’s a writer who recently decided for the season of Lent, instead of giving something up, she was simply going to get more sleep. I might do that some year, although, since I will have a one month old infant by the time lent hits in 2011, this might not be the year.

But we also need more Sabbath rest. The word in Hebrew for this kind of rest is menuha. Abraham Heschel, one of the great rabbis of the 20th century, describes it this way:

[It] means more that withdrawal from labor and exertion, more than freedom from toil, strain, or activity of any kind. Menuha is not a negative concept, but something real and intrisically positive…to the bibilcal mind, menuha is the same as happiness and stillness, as peace and harmony….it is the state wherein humans lie still, where in the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest. It is the state in which there is no strife and no fighting, no fear and distrust. The essence of good life is menuha.”

(from Sunday Sourcebook, p. 161-162)

And there’s one more thing Heschel says about menuha. The ancient rabbis thought that, since it was not a negative concept, not an absence, but a presence, it had in fact taken God work to create it. That the seventh day of creation what not an absence of God’s creative power, but in fact the action of God creating rest, stillness, menuha as a good for God and for all of creation.

I think that tells us this: Sabbath rest doesn’t just happen. There is an active component to carving out, to prioritizing, to creating, the time and space to be still. It is not simply there for the taking. We know all too well that we do not live in a time or a place that supports our creation of rest.

We have to make a choice to do it, whether we can do it for a whole day once a week. Whether we can only catch it in snatches here and there.

But there must, for our spiritual health and well-being, be some pattern to our lives, where we stop, where we rest.

I’ve been talking in concepts, heady quotes, through most of this sermon. I only think it’s fair to leave you with pictures.

Psalm 52 is the Psalm the lectionary gives us for today. I can’t figure out what it has to do with Mary and Martha, and I’ve decided not to read you the whole thing, because it has its own issues and tricky bits. It starts with a condemnation of people who are wicked, who put their trust in things other than God. It’s pretty harsh.

But near the end, it gives us this picture:

Psalm 52:8

But I am like a green olive tree in the house of God. I trust in the steadfast love of God forever and ever.

There it is: a green tree in courts of the Lord, fed and nourished by the water of life. trusting in the forever and forever love of God. The love of God that is unbounded by time and space, but schedules and value of work hours.

Can you picture yourself as that tree? Happy and content simply to BE in the house of God, rooted down, stretching up. And simply by being the tree you are supposed to be, the things that you do: growing green leaves and flowering, and swelling olive fruit.

And think of Mary and Martha, then. Of Martha, hurrying and distracted by the schedule, by the calendar, by the expectation of what she ought to DO. Asking Jesus to give her some relief by reminding Mary to get up and get busy.

Maybe what Jesus says to her is not critical, but said in love for her as much as for Mary. “ Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; but there is need of only one thing.”

We don’t know what happens next, but I’d like to think that Martha wipes her hands on the kitchen towel, and sits down next to Mary, next to Jesus. That the bread comes out of the oven a bit too brown and there are some dishes that don’t get washed as quickly as they should. That the neighbors notice that no one is taking care of the kitchen…
But that Mary and Martha both get some menuha. And are able not just to do, but to be.

May we all be the tree, rooted in the good soil of the word. Nourished in the water of baptism, growing toward the blessing of God’s rest.

And my we all be Mary and Martha, stopping to rest, finding time
in the middle of what we have to do
to simply be in the presence of Jesus Christ.

Amen.