Category: God (Page 2 of 13)

Because They Hate Me

November 16, 2016 / Michele Minehart

We keep a pretty firm rule of One Activity Per Kid around here. This year the girls narrowed it down to either dance or tumbling. Of course, one chose dance and the other chose tumbling. They happen on the same day, starting within a half an hour of each other, making my Mondays the most miserable, mini-van living day possible. I tell people, “Of course, they chose different things, because they hate me.”

When I say that, people will laugh, because I had just personalized something that had zero to do with me. The girls chose the activity they liked best. They did not say to one another, “Hey, let’s see how much time Mom can spend in a minivan just waiting on practices to begin and end!” This is clear to everyone. Even to me.

Yet, there’s a slice of worldview hidden in these dramatic phrases. This kind of humor is funny because there’s a sliver of truth brought to the surface and enlarged for all to see. I love great humorists for this reason – they can expose that which we cannot bear to talk about, making it bearable only with laughter alongside.

I’ve used the same phrase to describe the school system when it takes a professional day following a particular hairy weekend (Halloween, time change, holidays), leaving me to bear my children alone while my husband goes off to studentless work. “They decided to cancel school, because they hate me,” I laugh. It’s not true, but why is it so easy to believe it?

It’s actually an ancient framework of operating in the world. I may or may not have the hobby of reading cultural anthropology textbooks for fun (I know; I’m invited to all the best parties…) and I stumbled upon this idea that the ancient Mediterranean civilizations functioned using the concepts of honor and shame as their basic economy. Rich and poor were pretty much set conditions and while money was helpful and important, society didn’t operate from the numbers. Rather, they used honor as the currency. When you did something good, it brought you honor and honor upon your family, tribe and even nation. This is why we read so much about names and living under the name of someone (God, King David, etc) – to be “under the name” of someone was to share in their honor, the means of mobility within culture. This is how you got to “be someone.”

In the same way our current monetary economy functions, honor was a limited good. In order to gain honor, it had to come from somewhere, specifically someone. To take a person’s honor was to shame him. So if you and I had an interaction and I came away as right, I walked away with some of your honor, and you were left with shame. Now, there were lots of rules about how this little economy worked – amendments about gender and class and who could heap shame on you and how this played out. Everything in the culture operated on this – it was how marriages were arranged, business deals closed -the basic fabric of society.

Quite literally, if misfortune came upon a household, it was believed that someone else was walking away with their good fortune. Shame had come upon them, so someone else must have taken their honor. This invisible, but critical, social good was limited, transient and shaped their lives.

As a 21st century reader, we can believe that’s an archaic and potentially even silly way of operating. Yet, we stumble into it all the time. The guy that just cut you off, the people arriving chronically late and setting your work day askew, the parent that won’t do what they’re asked: it’s easy to begin to believe that their actions come from a place of desiring to see your life worsen. We slip into this ancient pattern of “If my life is harder, someone else’s must be easier.” As if goodness is a scarce element we must horde for ourselves.

Friends, it’s simply not true. When it comes the economy of goodness, we get to make our own money. We manufacture it as much as we spend it and have an endless supply. Try it. Once you start in, I promise that you’ll be hooked. You’ll toss it around like confetti. When you start believing you can give goodness to anyone – an especially those who inconvenience you – without running out, your life will improve significantly.

Walter Brueggeman writes that a big work of Jesus in this world was discrediting the myth of scarcity. The Kingdom of God which Jesus so often spoke of was a place of abundance growing from small amounts. When we start to actually live into those realities, you find how often Jesus was right. We do have enough – so much enough, we can give it away without fear that we’ll run out by losing it to someone else. There is always enough goodness if you choose to live into it.

ordinary trampoline — Image via CC by Charlotte.

Ordinary Magic

August 14, 2016 / Michele Minehart

When I was growing up, our friend Erica had one of those big backyard trampolines. Because her parents and my parents were beyond BFF, we spent many hours trying to conquer the butt-knees-back-up and playing add-a-trick. It was magical.

It wasn’t until late elementary that my dad decided to get us a trampoline for our own backyard. We loved it. This set of springs got plenty of wear. Then we reached a point when the only time we played Popcorn was when our friends were over. We didn’t dislike it nor were we bored with it; the trampoline simply lost its magic. It became ordinary.

Watching my own children jump with glee the other day, I reflected on how frequently this happens. We allow the magic to dust off when we make it commonplace, which I believe to be the real reason God tells us to “be holy.”

Much of the first testament gives instruction about how to keep certain things separate: men from women, wheat from beans, cotton from polyester.* Often we read this with a cultural lens that one of those things is less than the other. Not good enough. Even, dangerous. We approach the idea of holiness as if the ordinary makes the holy dirty; hence “unclean” (literally, “polluted” in the Hebrew).

I see this change through the words of Jesus. He tells people, often through parable, to let the weeds grow among the wheat. He says God will sort the sheep and goats. This makes sense, coming from a ridiculously terrible farmer who believes good things can grow in hard places.

The common, the seemingly less-than, can do nothing to change the nature of the holy. Like a life-long islander, we get used to the scenery and forget its magic. The mountains aren’t less majestic or the waves less soothing. We’ve simply made the holy, ordinary.

The good news: we can reverse this. Actually, when you read many of God’s commands and you find this great reversal at work.

Three meals a day, every day, often made from the same thing? The people could complain of another bowl of lentils but God says to bless them. Give thanks for the rain and the sunshine, miracles outside of your own control, required to make them grow. Did you know that the most devout Jews pray a toilet prayer (my term, not theirs), thanking God that all systems work like they’re supposed to? If ever there was a place to mix the ordinary and the divine, the bathroom is a good starting point.

My cousin works in the bridal industry. Every day, she sees young women on the cusp of what they imagine to be the most amazing day of their lives. Each and every one of them are special and unique; yet she can see 5 of them in a day. The 300 dresses hang on the rack as inventory. They’re numbered.

But when a bride walks out of the dressing room, sometimes with happy tears, it’s no longer a pile of satin or lace – it’s the dress. At least, to this bride, it is. Laura’s job is no longer to take measurements and find a matching veil; it’s to honor the magic amid one of her most ordinary days.

And this is the work for most of us. Teachers may tie shoes or plan lessons on long division or recount the events of the first world war. Ordinary, everyday stuff. Or, they’re inspiring children to ask questions, to follow their curiosity and find solutions to problems. Inspiration. Literally: to breathe into. (You know who did that first, don’t you? That first, holy work of making things come to life? Oh, yes, I just compared teachers to Genesis 1.)

A dentist or a doctor might feel as if they’re diagnosing or prescribing, but to the person who finally feels relief, they’re doing the holy work of healing.

We tend to make the magical into the monotonous. It’s just another day, another school year, another student/customer/patient/client. But we can seek the divine spark in the most ordinary of all things. By the nature of creation, God’s fingerprints cling to every day, person and place. The work of holiness is to see it and honor it as such.

*I’m being funny. I know the cotton/poly blend was not an ancient stumbling block. But something was, because Deuteronomy 22:11 exists.

Begin at the Beginning

March 30, 2016 / Michele Minehart

I had one of those moments last week. A time where I could hear the kids screaming from two rooms away. Dinner needed cleaning up, the bigs needed help with their homework but refused to be helped, and the youngest wanted to take another bath. I remember laying (okay, hiding) on the bed, thinking, “Never would I have imagined that this would be my life.”

Then, I thought, “I wouldn’t trade it for the world.”

It’s not perfect. Far from it. Put aside the constant messes, which ticks up my anxiety pretty quickly. Our voices are constantly rising, though not nearly often enough in song. The kids sometimes don’t get along, with one particular child constantly sneaking into rooms and stealing candy, legos or drawing on private notebooks. And did I mention how LOUD it is around here?

Here’s the thing: it’s good. I have a good life. I have good kids. I have a good husband and a good marriage. I’m not alone. Lots of us have some good things going for us. Good jobs, good friends, good retirement plans, whatever’s in your bag.

For us go-getters, this can cause problems. We say, “what will make it better?” I’m all for that. While I applaud a striving for betterment, it can take us down a dangerous path, toward the idea that only when it is “better” – usually envisioned as perfect – then it will be good enough. And do you know when that will be? A day short of never. This leads to constant dissatisfaction and an inability to see the goodness in some of the most simple and beautiful of things.

It’s fine to improve. You’re reading words by a girl who keeps a Life Plan. I goal set. I consider the most time-efficient way to shower. (Seriously.) So these words don’t come from some lazy, “oh, it’s fine” sit-around-and-watch-COPS deadbeat. Don’t think I’ll dismiss striving for excellence as futile.

In the Christian tradition, we tell the story of a long, long time ago (think, the beginning) where there was a guy, a girl, a snake and two trees. Short story made even shorter, some bad choices were made and now we know why the world is filled with suffering.

Here’s what we forget: in chapters one and two of the book of beginnings, God creates everything and calls it – what? say it with me now – good. He calls it good. Water, plants, sky, sun, bugs, animals, fish… good, good, good, good, good, good, good. When he gets to his finale, the human, he says it’s very good.

Not perfect.

In our current state, we’re aware that we live with hardships and challenges, personal shortcomings and collective failure. On the tough days, when you know you messed it up or screwed someone over, we’re hyper-aware of this secondary way of being.

In our modern life, we need not look far to be told how imperfect we are, how we’re getting it all wrong. Advertisers capitalize on our awareness of imperfections all the time – that’s why wrinkle creams and flashy cars exist. They want to sell us something to cover up the not-so-great. There’s no need to convince us of our un-goodness. We’re totally aware, thank you.

As we long for something better, we turn our eyes to what we think we ought to be. That first story; the beginning. We want to be good again.

But we think good means perfect. So we don’t find the good. We don’t know what good looks like anymore because we’ve been told it needs to be skinnier, shinier, faster, sleeker and with toddlers that don’t throw fits. Also, it’s supposed to be easier, and if you’re doing the work, and it’s hard, you must be doing it wrong, because a good life should appear effortless.

Let’s return to our real beginnings, the one where God looked us up and down, in all our naked glory and said, “that’s some of my best work yet.” In the beginning, God made us in the image of God, an image we still reflect.

We’re not perfect. But we’re good.

Category: God (Page 2 of 13)

Because They Hate Me

Ordinary Magic

Begin at the Beginning

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