Stuff

These last few days packing and moving has been a part of my work.  I have been sorting and packing books and cards and papers, deciding what to toss and what to save, trying to put things in boxes in at least a semi-organized manner.

Sometimes I stop to look, to read, to remember.  I stop before packing a book that I bought, but haven't read, and I think, "Maybe I will read it now."  I stop to look at a random photograph, a picture taken after a baptism, or during Vacation Bible School one year.  I stop in the middle of sorting a box of cards, to read a thank you note from a child:  "Thank you for helping me cut my pancakes."  I remember then, the "lunch with a pastor" rewards given to students for Sunday School attendance.

I have a lot of stuff.

I have a lot of children's books, I observe.  I did not get these in seminary.  I decide I am going to keep all of these, though they are heavy.  I also have most all of my seminary books still, and my notes.   have sermons.  I have lesson plans.  I have knick-knacks too.  What should I keep?

This is what happens in life.  You accumulate.  At least I do.  Some you accumulate on purpose, and some by accident, just because it goes into a corner and you don't think of it again for a long time.  And then, someday, you move and you consider the weight of all of that stuff.  What it means.  What it costs.  The memories held in the middle of the stuff.  There are different kinds of weights.

One piece of advice I got with regard to leaving my congregation:  Attend to the relationships.  Make time for people.  I think it is good advice.  But there is a hard deadline to be out of the office.

I would much rather be visiting people, talking to them on the phone, having coffee, than sorting stuff in my office.  I would much rather spend all of my time with people than with stuff, except for the time when I see some old confirmation student doodling and memories flood back in.

I wonder if, in the next leg of the journey, I can somehow design my life so that I can spend more time with people than with stuff.  I would like moving to be easier, to be able to pick out and pick up the most important stuff, even to know what it is, and then to spend more time with people, with the people I will leave, with the people I want to remember.

Ten Year Anniversary thoughts....

On Sunday, my congregation celebrated my ten year anniversary at this church. Ten years! It's hard for me to imagine. We had coffee and cake between the services, and people shook my hand and said nice things to me. My parents, and husband and step-son came as well.

There was a basket for cards on the table, but one man wanted to give me his personally. It was a book, wrapped up, with a white rose attached to it. The rose was in one of those little plastic tubes of water, and he wanted to make sure that the water didn't leak out. As he put it in my hands, he said, "This is from (his wife's name) and me."

His wife died this past winter.

They had been married for over fifty years. She contracted polio in the epidemic after World War II, and had been in a wheelchair ever since. Ever since she was a young woman with two small children, she had lived in that wheelchair. He had had the house re-done so that she could do everything from her wheelchair. He had found more lucrative work, as an engineer rather than as a professor, so that he could afford the care she needed. He had spent most of their married life lifting her into and out of the wheelchair. He walks permanently stooped over from all those years of lifting and carrying her.

At her funeral last winter, I saw a captivating black and white picture of her, standing in the shallow part of a river. She was turning and smiling at the camera, and I thought, "I never really knew her."

On Sunday, as he put the book in my hand, he said, "This is from (his wife's name) and me."

The book was The Four Loves, by C.S. Lewis.

I could tell you about the highlights of my ten years by telling you about the programs I have started, by the worship services I've designed, by the Bible Studies. I could tell you about Faith and Fiction, my book group, and the Bag Lunch Bible Study, and the Contemporary Worship Service, and the Empowering Couples Workshop. I could tell you about my favorite Lenten Series (Practicing our Faith), or the Biblical Monologues I wrote one year. I could point to the Animal Blessing Service last fall, or the Prayer Knitters Group.

Or, I could tell you about the failures: the young adults groups that never got off the ground, the Bible studies with three people in them, the Drama Group that I could never get enough people interested in, the time I invited High School students to Faith and Fiction to discuss the book Holes, and nobody came.

But to me, the ten years are all about people: the stooped-over man who teaches me about love; the young couple who got married and moved to New York; people who argue with me in Bible studies and people I run into at the grocery store; a shy woman who is beginning to become a leader; a young boy who laughed when I washed his feet "because the water was so cold!"; a 10th grade girl who carried the candle at Easter vigil and the boy who said he wanted to be a pastor; the woman who stood in the river long ago, and who lived in a wheelchair for so many years.

And the ten years are all about God's faithfulness in this place, among these people, and to me as well. They are about a God's faithfulness to us in our joy and in our pain, in our failures and in our successes, in the past, and as we lean into the future ... with fear and with faith.

Picture is from ten years ago.