Category: calling (Page 2 of 3)

Final Resting Place

**This piece has been resting in my drafts for over 7 months and I’m just now able to share it. I promise I don’t think about death all the time. 

After my grandfather died, our family tended to the traditional details surrounding death, one of them being a resting place. A grave. The four brothers, along with 3 wives and a significant other, ventured to Hale cemetery .

Aunt Judy, whose first husband had died many years ago, already had a place. Uncle Charlie found his site near hers, and it was decided the whole gaggle of Wingfields would buy their final real estate in that area. Each person wondered about, some showing preference to high ground or resistance to becoming a future walkway. Each couple found a future home, some “across the street” from the other, with Grandma and Grandpa’s presence as the center of them all – if not physically, than in spirit.

It seems like a mundane, even morbid, task to consider where you want your bones to dissolve. Yet intrinsic in our souls, we consider it.

The patriarch Joseph lived in full awareness of it. Raised in his father’s land but sold into slavery as a young man, he spent most of his years in Egypt as a foreigner, robbed of the connection to his people. He lived by foreign customs, likely even took an Egyptian name as he served the house of the Pharaoh.

Joseph’s wish, one he made his brothers and their children swear to, was to join the family tomb. After he died, he remained embalmed in a coffin until Moses led the nation out of  slavery and someone remembered the oath and thought to take Joseph’s bones along for the ride. Eventually he came to rest in a tomb in the land of his father.

Why take such interest in where dead bones lie? Why would the Bible even mention this in the story of the Exodus?

One writer mentions the burial as a final act of maintaining contact with the community, even after death. Our final presence with our loved ones gives some sort of guarantee that we won’t be forgotten, that we will be included and remembered as the local history builds in years.

To be honest, I’ve given thought to this question. While living at a distance from my roots, I’ve wondered where my body would return to the earth. On the one hand, it makes sense to remain close to the community in which you live – where you raise your children, build your friendships, and share your life’s work. Yet something pulls me homeward. How could we consider anything other than finding a spot near JJ’s sister, who already rests? Why would we not be a short drive from other family markers of lives remembered?

Something in my spirit says that in choosing a site in our current county we would be removed from the larger family narrative that comes with joining together in burial.

Which begs the question: If I want to be buried there, why would I not live there? I want to be included in our family’s place on this earth. Shouldn’t I be a part of the living and not just the dying? The life, not only the death?

But Ruth replied, “Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely, if even death separates you and me.” (Ruth 1:16-17)

 

Changing the world while wearing a baby sling

I’ll confess, I have a secret love affair with the most boring books of the Bible. People make jokes about falling asleep reading Leviticus, but I find it a fascinating revelation of the course of life when it was written. Find it no surprise, then, that my current reading is Deuteronomy. (Also, I got a new First-Century Study Bible for Christmas – “Explore Scripture in its Jewish and Early Christian Context” – which probably only furthers my complete geekery, but gives me joy nonetheless.)

The book of Deuteronomy is like a “final thoughts from Moses” letter – do not fear, don’t forget to turn of the coffee pot, do not fear, remember all the stuff God did for you, do not fear… you get the drift. He starts at the finish line – they’re standing on the edge of the desert, in the foothills of the land promised to them decades ago. And he tells the story about what happened when God said, “go!”

Now, I don’t believe this story, or any Biblical account, gives someone wearing a Christian badge the right or authority to start overthrowing cities and homes. These specific people were promised a specific place. They were following a cloud of God to get there. While I love a good analogy, we must be careful to know the limits of our rhetoric. I’m guessing that God did not specifically call you to go and take the really nice house in a neighboring subdivision. I’m just sayin.

So, back to the edge of the desert. God says, go! Actually, He says things like “do not be afraid, I will go with you and I will fight for you,” and encouraging things that you should cross-stitch into your pillow. However, as we know, such sayings sound good but often do little to cut the fear. So the people of Israel pretty much say, “What the hell, God? You brought us all the way over here to die?” You see, they had sent a scouting team and they came back with a 10/12 report that the people were giants and the Israelites had no hope.

To say God was a little angry would be an understatement. He “solemnly swore” (1:34),  which we all knows only happens just before an epic topple, that no one from the generation would ever see the good land. They were all heading back to the desert until a new group of Israelites – ones who would listen – grew to follow through on God’s instructions.

[box] “And the little ones that you said would be taken captive, your children who do not yet know good from bad – they will enter the land. I will give it to them and they will take possession of it. But as for you, turn around and set out toward the desert along the route to the Red Sea.” (Deut. 1:39-40)[/box]

This stopped me in my tracks. I know the argument because I argue it all the time. But what about the children?! I can’t just go off and DO all this stuff because I have little ones entrusted to me. Someone could hurt them. I have to think about their future. I want to offer them the best, and danger is not the best.

Image via CC by ‘‘ ِ Abdallah Al-Qahtani

Image via CC by ‘‘ ِ Abdallah Al-Qahtani

I’m a firm believer that the Bible doesn’t have random, meaningless writings in it. God answered these people with reference to the children they feared loosing because it was probably one of their grumblings against doing what God said to do. It was a scary command, one they weren’t convinced they could actually succeed, and to top it off, mama had an infant on her back and a toddler on her leg.

God gives a different version of good parenting than my natural inclinations. He says that we are to be faithful to him first. When we’re not faithful to follow God’s instructions, instead of protecting our children we are handing them our battles. In our desire to give them the good and right thing, we must, in faith, step out and do the hard thing. We must answer God’s call.

When this particular generation of Israelite parents declined God’s command, they also forfeited giving their children the opportunity to grow up in a land flowing with milk and honey. Because they were afraid to fight for it. Instead, they took these babes back to the desert to wander around. Their children buried their parents under sand and rock in the middle of nowhere. And these parents left their children without a legacy of faithfulness. Instead of telling their children, “we believed God, so we did it and now we live a blessed life,” they had to rewrite the narrative to say, “we didn’t believe God – please don’t make the same mistake. All eyes are on you, my child, to take these people into the place God promised because I didn’t.

Many of us want to raise children that love God and others. We want good, Christian kids who will turn into faithful, loving adults. That’s fantastic. But what will get us there is probably not charts and prizes for memorization of the Bible (though, that’s a nice thing to have scripture hidden in our hearts) but rather a front-row seat to watching parents believe God and live faithfully. The studies out there are clear: the number one influencer on a young person’s faith isn’t a stellar youth group. It’s parents who value their faith and live like it.

I’m not talking about curbing language because it’s “not Christian” or making a show of reading the Bible. I’m talking about the way in which you respond to God’s call on your life. When you take that thing, that I-have-to-do-this thing and turn it into something for the glory of God, and your children have a front row seat to watching it unfold, that leaves an impression. When mama has to leave for a small group or a meeting or an event and comes home glowing in a way that only means she experienced God – that sticks far more than mama staying home and saying that it’s important to be like Jesus.

If we don’t do the work God has set in front of us, the scary thing to which we are called, that which needs God’s presence or a complete failure is sure, than we will hand off that battle to our children. That’s not keeping them safe. That’s not giving them a good life. That’s handing down the wrong legacy.

God asks us to stop hiding behind our children, using them as a basis for our fears. Instead, we are to step into a faithful life that will give them an example of what it means to follow God.

 

 

**Obvious but I’ll state it anyway: Don’t do stuff that puts your kids in direct line of danger and just “hope for the best”, please. This is about how we use parenting as a shield for our fears. God isn’t into child sacrifice – just read the book. 

a bedtime story with don

still in my amazing, thought-provoking book. woke up in the middle of the night rehashing some main points, wondering if I was prone to play the victim, villain or hero in my own story. i agree, counting sheep would probably be more effective.

tonight’s passage: “I was watching the movie Star Wars recently and wondered what made that movie so good. Of course, there are a thousand reasons. But I also noticed that if I paused the DVD on any frame, I could point toward any major character and say exactly what that person wanted. No character had a vague ambition. It made me wonder if the reasons our lives seem so muddled is because we keep walking into scenes in which we, along with the people around us, have no clear idea what we want.”

so i got to thinking. what do i want? sure, there are lots of things – starting with wanting jj to graduate. soon. living opposite, inconsistent schedules is waring me down. but it seems that recently the things that i want (health care, normal schedule) are seemingly transient. that will change with life – it always does. but what do i really want?

i started thinking about the people around me. my sister really wants to raise well-rounded kids. and she wants to do the work of it herself. i’m not saying that moms who work don’t want to raise well-rounded kids, it’s not a mutually exclusive thing. but i’m saying that my sister puts her life into it. she reads, she studies, she asks around. and she puts a lot of herself into raising her kids. jj and i were once discussing life for our children if something should happen to us; i said that of anyone i know, my sister would do the work of reading up and learning how to deal with kids in such a circumstance and finding what the best approach would be. granted, especially with raising children there will always be someone to disagree with “best” but having done the work of understanding the entire scope, sister would be able to provide a very reasonable answer to all decisions. but sister wants to do the work of raising a family.

my friend wants to make life better for those stuck in a cycle of misfortune. if it’s offering an ear or a bit of advice, encouragement, or just empathy (a newly named but always present gift of hers), she wants to help see these people to a better situation. she also really wants to get married, but that’s in the same boat with me wanting jj to graduate :).

i have another friend who loves to build things. he’s an engineer by trade, a tinkerer by home and a twilight church trustee. he wants to see ideas realized right in front of him.

another friend loves to preform music. he loves to see it affect people. he wants people to be changed by music.

i’m sure this is all directly tied into a sense of calling and purpose. mine has only come in a vague revelation. i can tell you what elements are a part of it, but i cannot clearly “step into the horizon” as don says. so maybe this is something i can work on. what about you – what do you really want?

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