Michelle

Practicing the Ministry of Presence

June 28, 2017 By Michelle 18 Comments

Hi friends – I’m still on a blogging break, but I wanted to share my monthly column I wrote for the Journal Star with you. Thanks for your patience and grace as I take a little breather from (most of) my writing.

Three weeks ago, the 33-year-old son of one of my father’s closest friends drowned while swimming in a small Massachusetts lake. According to reports, he jumped from a boat into the water and never resurfaced.

My parents were sleeping when the phone rang. At that point the body had not yet been found and recovered from the lake. My father’s friend, Don, and his wife had learned their son was missing and presumed dead when a police officer had knocked on their door that night. My dad was one of the first people they called.

After he got off the phone, my father dressed quickly and drove the short distance to his friend’s house, where he spent some time with him and his wife. The next morning my dad was at the lake with Don and his wife when the divers resumed their search. He was there again the following morning when the divers finally recovered the body.

Later, in a phone conversation with my dad, I asked him what he had done during all the hours he had spent at the lake. “Nothing really,” he said. “I was just there.”

My dad said most of the time he had sat on a bench a little ways away from the beach where the search and recovery operation was centered. Don came and sat next to him from time to time. They would talk a little bit, and then Don would get up from the bench to be with his wife or another one of his family members.

“He said he wanted me there, so I was there,” my dad said.

Often our inclination is to run in the opposite direction in the face of another person’s suffering or grief. We tend to make excuses for ourselves — “She would rather be alone…The family needs privacy right now…There’s nothing I can really do to help…” – because we are uncomfortable and afraid. When we do summon the courage to show up, we often feel compelled to do something or say something we think, or at least hope, will be helpful.

This isn’t to say that making a meal or mowing the lawn or offering prayers and condolences aren’t valuable things to do when someone you know is suffering. They are. But sometimes, especially in the earliest stages when grief is still registering as shock, simply coming alongside someone who is suffering when everyone else is turning away can be a precious gift.

Baptist minister Reverend Jeffrey Brown calls this practice of showing up the “ministry of presence.” “I find that among the most effective ways to do ministry is to shut up and just be there,” Brown said.

My dad and Don have known each other for 46 years. They both worked as guidance counselors at the same small high school in Connecticut. They are close in the way men of their generation often are. They attend one another’s milestone events, like retirement parties and children’s weddings. They go out to dinner together with their wives, or visit over beers on the back deck. They don’t often talk a lot about personal stuff. Yet my dad was the one Don called when tragedy struck. And my dad showed up.

Sitting on a lakeside bench in the background hour after hour doesn’t sound like much of an offering in the face of unimaginable tragedy. But in his small, unobtrusive way, my dad practiced the ministry of presence. He was there for his friend, and his presence — simple, quiet, and unadorned — was a gift.

When You Are Called to No Words

June 7, 2017 By Michelle 74 Comments

I’ve been thinking about words lately, mostly because it seems I have fewer these days. Back when I first began blogging eight years ago, I posted every day, seven days a week. Over time that frequency diminished to five days a week, then three days, until, most recently, I settled on once a week. Some weeks, even one post feels like a stretch.

I’m not sure why I seem to have less and less to say. Maybe after eight years of blogging, 1,547 posts, 86 columns for the Journal Star, three books, and dozens of articles, I’ve simply burned out.

Or maybe I’ve said all I have to say.

Or maybe, in a world that feels noisier every day, I’ve become more discerning about what and how much I add to the cacophony of voices and opinions.

I’ve been reading Henri Nouwen’s The Way of the Heart. It’s a small book, but it’s packed with powerful insights. Nouwen has (ironically) a lot to say about the value of silence:

“Let us at least raise the question of whether our lavish ways of sharing are not more compulsive than virtuous; that instead of creating community they tend to flatten out our life together.”

Nouwen wrote those words long before the advent of blogging and social media, but I can’t help but read them through the lens of the present day and from my own experience as an author.

When I posted that quote on Instagram (again, the irony), a reader commented that she didn’t understand the last bit, the part about how shared words can flatten out our life together.

I’m not sure I totally understand what he means either, but I know from my own experience, I often come away from social media feeling flattened — numb, distant, distracted, fragmented — whether I’ve shared myself or read what others have shared. To me, there is a false intimacy and a one-dimensionality there, even as we strive for authenticity, depth, and connection.

Nouwen also writes about the importance of faithfully caring for the inward fire.

“It is not so strange that many ministers have become burnt-out cases, people who say many words and share many experiences, but in whom the fire of God’s Spirit has died and from whom not much more comes forth than their own boring, petty ideas and feelings.

Our first and foremost task is faithfully to care for the inward fire so that when it is really needed it can offer the warmth and light to lost travelers.”

On one hand, caring for the inward fire as my first and foremost task feels selfish to me. As a “Christian writer,” I feel compelled to use my gifts to share the gospel — to offer, to the best of my ability, a little light by which to see along the journey. Caring for my own inward fire — especially caring for it first and foremost — doesn’t feel self-sacrificial enough.

Yet here’s the clincher: that inward light is what feeds my words. If I allow my own inner light to be diminished or extinguished, my words will become a mere clanging cymbal — noisy and persistent, but empty of truth.

The inward light also feeds me. Without it, I am an empty shell without a pearl; a body without a spirit.

“As ministers, our greatest temptation is toward too many words,” Nouwen writes. “They weaken our faith and make us lukewarm. But silence is a sacred discipline, a guard of the Holy Spirit.”

I think, in all these years of writing about faith, I’ve come to fancy myself as a conduit of the Holy Spirit. But the truth is, the Holy Spirit doesn’t need me or my words. The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going.

I think I’ve mostly reversed the order here by trying to care for the inward fire of others before my own. And isn’t that, in some ways, irreverent or perhaps even blasphemous – to assume the soul-care of others is my job, rather than God’s?

I guess this is a long-winded way (again, the irony!) of saying I’ll be quiet in this space for a while – perhaps for the rest of the summer, perhaps longer. I’ve resisted this decision. For a variety of reasons I’ve tried to ignore the nudge. To stop blogging seems both unwise professionally and a little bit unfair to my readers, some of whom have been faithfully walking alongside me here the whole long way (bless you!).

Yet I also know it would be more unwise to keep pushing. I don’t want to become the person who says many words and shares many experiences, but in whom the fire of God’s spirit has died.

Thanks for your understanding and patience, friends. You are very dear to me, and I am more grateful to you than you will probably ever know.

Peace.

How to Chase a Different Kind of Great

June 1, 2017 By Michelle 7 Comments

“Everyone is chasing status, but serving the vulnerable is wide open in every field.” — Andy Crouch

I’m intimately familiar with chasing status. As an author, I’ve spent countless hours strategizing how to sell more books, attract more readers, build my platform, gain more social media shares, and rub shoulders with influential people.

I could tell you that this emphasis on networking and platform is an integral part of my job as a writer, and that would be partially true. But that’s not the whole story. The truth is, I like the status that comes with being a published author. I like the recognition. I like being known. I chase status because I want status.

I’ve been chasing status for a long time, and here’s what I’ve learned after years of hot pursuit: the chase never ends.

No matter how much we achieve, status is ephemeral. We will always want more – whether it’s better book sales, a more prestigious job title, a higher salary, a bigger house, a more expensive car, or a fancier purse. Chasing status is a race we will never win.

This is a lesson that’s taken me a long time to learn, and truthfully, on most days, I’m still learning it.

In his interview, Andy Crouch noted that when we focus our tunnel-vision solely on being the biggest, the best, and the most successful, we lose the opportunity to use our gifts to benefit others rather than ourselves. So many of us it seems, myself included, are wildly spinning our wheels in a fruitless attempt to Become Someone Important. Yet in doing so, we leave in our wakes a vast expanse of potential to make a real difference.

Setting our sights so narrowly on reaching whatever it is we’ve deemed The One Big Thing means we often miss the wide-open field of less glamorous but no less important work available to us.

This kind of opportunity likely won’t result in being known or recognized or famous, but as Martin Luther King, Jr., observed, there is the opportunity for a different kind of greatness here.

Last week, as part of my work for The Salvation Army, I had the opportunity to interview Daniel, a recovering crack cocaine addict who is eight months sober, on the road back to physical and mental health, and, having recently completed training, about to begin volunteering as a peer support counselor. As we chatted, the mix of perseverance, strength, and humility I heard in Daniel’s voice touched me deeply.

Writing part-time for The Salvation Army isn’t glamorous work. The story I wrote about Daniel, for example, will be included in a newsletter that will be mailed to fewer than 800 people, and I suspect far fewer than that will actually read the article. That work won’t impact book sales, help me build my platform, or earn me any name recognition. There’s no status in this kind of writing. And yet, talking with Daniel and writing his story was some of the most gratifying work I’ve ever done.

A couple of Sundays ago in church I listened to a soloist sing “Go Light Your World.” It was Senior Sunday, the day we bless the graduating high school seniors and send them off, and I teared up as I thought about the potential of each of these young men and women to impact the world.

The truth is, though, the ability to make a difference has no age limit. Each one of us, no matter how young or old, has the potential to carry our candle, to “run to the darkness, seek out the helpless, confused and torn,” as the song goes. Each one of us has been blessed with gifts we can use not just to increase our own status, but to serve those in need around us.

Reaching out to the Daniels in your world and the organizations that serve them with your God-given gifts won’t make you famous. It won’t earn you a lot of money or accolades or notoriety. It won’t make you “successful” by modern-day standards. But this I know for sure: it will offer you the opportunity for a different but no less beautiful kind of greatness, the kind of greatness that will bless you unexpectedly beyond measure.

Stopping to Build an Altar

May 25, 2017 By Michelle 7 Comments

The boys and I took Josie for a walk at the park on Sunday night. The grass swished around our shins as we ambled toward the pond, the sun golden, the shadows long, the air completely still.

We paused to watch a graduate posing for pictures, her robe a waterfall of scarlet, mortar board bobby-pinned to her shining hair, high heels sinking into the soft earth. Nearby a couple walked slowly toward the water, his hand on her rounded belly.

Noah bent low, aiming his camera to capture a bumblebee tumbling amid the purple catmint, sunlight streaming through the cypress. Rowan crouched over the murky water, seeking frogs who held their breath among the reeds. A flock of geese honked overhead, disappeared beyond the rise. A meadowlark trilled, yellow breast catching the light.

We stopped to watch a deer watching us from the shade, her ears perked. Josie stood still, tail taut, nose quivering.

I’m reading Genesis again in the mornings, beginning at the beginning, not aiming for a certain number of verses or chapters every day, but meandering, taking my time, pausing when a verse or a word resonates. I try to read aloud, whispering as the orioles and cardinals call outside the window in the early morning half-light.

In Genesis 12, God sends Abram out from his homeland on a journey into Canaan. Along the way, when he stops to make camp, the text notes, Abram builds an altar to God.

I noticed, as I read along in Genesis, that Abram does this more than once. Every time he pauses to rest along his journey, Abram builds an altar to God.

Abram didn’t have a church to worship in every Sunday morning. He didn’t have a specific place to go in which to acknowledge God and praise him in community. Instead, he built that place for himself, for his people, and for God. Abram acknowledged God’s presence, not just one day of the week, but every time he paused along the journey.

Church — a place to worship, a community with whom to worship — is a blessing and a gift. I love my church. I look forward to attending worship service on Sunday mornings. And yet, there is often a complacency in my worship. I take it for granted. I compartmentalize my acknowledgement of God into an hour a week. Often, even in spite of my best intentions, God is overshadowed by the busyness and distractions of my Monday through Saturday life, in the rush of soccer practice and orchestra concerts and deadlines and dog walking and laundry.

We came upon a man half-hidden at the bottom of the hill. He’d parked his bike under a lone oak tree, and as we approached him, he sat up to greet us. I glanced at the book in his hand, The Mill on the Floss, curious about his choice.

We chatted for a moment. The evening was remarkably beautiful, we agreed. After a minute or two, the boys, the dog and I continued on, and when I turned back to look at the man, I saw he’d lain back down and been swallowed up by the tall grass, his bike the only sign that he was still there.

Later that night, the boys asleep, the house dark and still, I thought about our walk in the park – the light, the stillness, the man under the tree, the Meadowlark trilling, Rowan loping, the light on his red curls, Noah bending low to capture a bee on a bloom.

I thought about Abram, about stopping to build altars along the journey not once in a while, but every day.

First Notice, Then Choose {thoughts on putting down the phone to be present}

May 17, 2017 By Michelle 13 Comments

Last Saturday my family spent the evening with some good friends.

The kind of friends where it’s perfectly acceptable to sit on the floor so you can be as close to the appetizer platter as possible, instead of on the sofa with your legs crossed and a napkin on your lap.

The kind of friends where you know that the container on the right side of the fridge is where the dog food is kept and the container on the left side of the fridge is the actual trash can.

The kind of friends who invite your parents, too, and you don’t even cringe when your dad’s quips are laced with damn and hell right there in the living room because you know for real it’s all good.

As I was sitting on the floor that evening, gobbling up the salami pretzel rolls and soaking up the comfortable conversation, I realized I rarely snap photos with my phone when we’re hanging out with these friends.

That’s actually quite noteworthy, because I typically take pictures of everything — flowers and birds and food and dogs and landscapes and people. It’s rare that a scene or an experience in my life goes undocumented, and I typically share most of these photos on Instagram and Facebook.

Strangely, though, I can’t remember the last time I snapped a picture of these friends and me and shared it on social media, even though I see them often. And I realized it’s because when I am with these friends, I’m wholly immersed in the real-life experience of being with them, rather than documenting the experience of being with them for someone else.

That night at my friends’ house I dropped olive after olive into my mouth and tasted the saltiness on my tongue. I couldn’t stop laughing when the whirling dervish cotton-ball puppy chased my son in circles, yipping and nipping at his ankles. I reached for yet another olive and listened to the conversation, full and satisfied in all the best ways.

And never once did it occur to me to pick up my phone. Even when I mused over the fact that I wasn’t picking up my phone, I didn’t pick up my phone.

It’s more than a little telling that the act of not documenting an experience was so rare, I noticed it.

“Absence isn’t going to return to us easily,” observes Michael Harris in his book, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection. “Every technology will alienate you from some part of your life. That is its job. Your job is to notice. First notice the difference. And then, every time, choose.”

I appreciate Harris’ words, because the fact is, unless we make the radical decision to move to the Montana woods and live off the grid entirely, our lives are going to be infused with technology. There’s no avoiding it; nor, really, should we. Technology is a gift — I remember this when I click Google Maps anytime I need to drive beyond a 10-mile radius of my home. It’s okay to choose technology.

As Harris reminds me, the point is not that we shouldn’t choose technology at all, but that we should consciously make the choice, ever single time, of whether or not we will do so. Too often — and I know this is true for me — we engage with technology subconsciously, out of habit. We reach for our phone. We check our inbox and then, fifteen minutes later, we check it again. We snap a photo and then another.

Last Saturday night I did what Michael Harris suggests, something I don’t normally do: I noticed the difference between not documenting and documenting. I noticed how the simple act of leaving my phone untouched in my purse did, in fact, create the space for a richer, fuller experience.

I don’t have any photos from that lovely evening to accompany this post – nothing to document the experience, nothing that shows what we ate, what we wore, who was there. But when I think back to that evening, I remember that one of my sons ate every last strawberry on the platter. I remember the cotton-ball puppy and the candle flickering on the wall. I remember the stories that made us laugh and the warm, comfortable conversation. Most of all I remember that in that moment, I didn’t want to be anyplace else but right there.

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