Michelle DeRusha

Every Day Faith. Faith Every Day.

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Hear It on Sunday, Use It on Monday: What, Me? A Royal Priest?

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When I was a kid I viewed the priest in my church with awe and reverence. He was clearly special, draped in ornate vestments, sitting solemn and statuesque in a throne behind the altar. He was mysterious, too — a shadowy figure cloaked in dim behind the confessional screen, bestowing God’s forgiveness on me and wiping my soul clean with a few words and the sign of the cross as I kneeled next to the red velvet curtain.
I considered my priest powerful and authoritative, but also distant, set apart from us ordinary people. I remember asking my parents once if the priest was allowed to drink beer or smoke cigarettes. They shocked me when they answered, “Of course,” looking surprised that I’d ask such a question.  But I’d assumed our priest was above such common practices. I pictured him alone in a stark room, sipping water and eating leftover Eucharist wafers. Beer and cigarettes, even fun for that matter, didn’t jive with my picture of priesthood at all.
I think that’s why I am always surprised when I hear myself – regular old flawed, foibly, loudly guffawing me — described in the Bible as a priest, like we heard in 1 Peter yesterday:
But you are God’s chosen and special people. You are a group of royal priests and a holy nation. (1 Peter 2:9).
What, me? You’re talking to me? A royal priest? Yeah, I don’t think so.
After all, being chosen as one of God’s priests is special. It means I am important in his eyes, that I am connected directly and intimately to him.  It means that I am set apart, and that I have a special role to fulfill in his kingdom – a role he created solely for me.
Feels like a lot of pressure, doesn’t it?
Truthfully, I don’t feel cut out for this job of “royal priest.” I’m too irritable. Too impatient. Too self-centered. I’m not solemn enough, or wise enough. I gossip from time to time and complain regularly and am short-tempered with my kids. I’m not priestly at all.  
Of course, I’m forgetting one important fact: that the priests of my childhood were flawed, too. Though they wore fancy vestments, they still battled sin and despair, just like me. Though I thought they bestowed forgiveness on me, in reality, they, too, had to ask God for forgiveness just as often. Turns out, they weren’t much different from me.
What I’m learning is this: God chooses each of his people to serve as royal priests. Some of us wear ornate robes, stand behind church altars and lead congregations through worship. Others of us wear jeans or suits and work in offices or herd kids. But we all share something in common: God chose each one of us as a royal priest, to carry out unique and important work in his kingdom on Earth.
How does it feel to consider yourself as one of God’s royal priests?

The Hole In Our Gospel: What Will They Think?

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I admit, I considered trying today’s Hole in our Gospel Action Item – to wear the same clothes two days in a row – but I chickened out. I thought about how that might feel: to wear the exact same shirt, skirt, shoes and jewelry two consecutive days to work. And I knew I couldn’t do it. Not because I’d feel unclean or rumpled, but simply because I’d be embarrassed.

If I’d been able to explain exactly why I was wearing the same outfit two days in a row to my female coworkers (I suspect many of the men wouldn’t have noticed the wardrobe repetition), I might have forged ahead. “It’s a poverty experiment for my church group,” I imagined myself saying. “I’m experiencing what it might be like to own only one set of clothes.”

But I knew that would have defeated the point. After all, people living in dire poverty don’t have the option to explain why they wear the same clothes day after day. Nor do they have to…because it’s a given for them and most of the people they know.

For people living in dire poverty, owning a single set of clothes isn’t an experiment – it’s a reality.

The reason I chose not to wear the same outfit two days in a row is because I was concerned about my coworkers’ judgment. Would they think I was slovenly? Forgetful? Lazy? Would they suspect I’d had a wild night? Would they talk behind my back?

“…Let not the rich boast of his riches…” (Jeremiah 9: 23).

I’ve never considered that my clothes and accessories might be a badge of pride or a form of boasting. After all, I’m not particularly label or brand-conscious. But the fact that I was unwilling to wear the same outfit two days in a row tells me I am prideful indeed.

Lord, thank you for helping me recognize my prideful and boastful ways. Please help me better align my priorities with you, rather than with societal norms and expectations. Help me value kindness, justice and righteous over material possessions, and desire only your delight rather than the shallow praise of my friends.

What about you? Do you think you could wear the exact same outfit two days in a row to work? Or might you chicken out like me?

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This post is the last one in the series on The Hole in Our Gospel, by Richard Stearns. Six other writers and I wrote a post a day for six weeks as part of my church’s small group study. Want to read other reflections? Click here. And thanks for coming along on the study!

Image: Pedro Mae, the Bolivian boy we sponsor through Compassion. I suspect he doesn’t have multiple outfits to choose from every day.

She Skypes

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What is Skype?
Image from flicker.
 
“So do you prefer Skype or the telephone?” she asked, and I thought, “Great. Just great,”when I read her email. “First the blog. Then Facebook and Twitter and TweetDeck chirping at me from the desktop like submarine sonar all day. And now I have to Skype, too? For the love.”
I thought about lying. After all, this was only my second conversation ever with my agent. I didn’t want her to think I was a backward hick from Nebraska who’d never Skyped before, for crying out loud.

I know, I know, your 89-year-old grandmother Skypes.

What can I say? Maybe I am a backward hick from Nebraska. After all, it wasn’t so long ago that we ditched our antiquated telephone, the one with the cord that curled up into a tangled mass resembling something a cat might regurgitate onto the carpet.

Yes, for the record, we still use a landline at our home. But hey, we’re savvy enough to have invested in a cordless phone. That’s progress, right? (Although my cell phone flips open, which I suspect is gravely uncool).

So I considered lying to Rachelle. I considered emailing back with an effortless, “Absolutely! Skype rocks! Skype me!” (Or whatever the proper Skype terminology is – I would have had to Google it first, of course).

But then I thought about how I might have to get up an hour early to take a shower and blow dry my hair and select an outfit that made me look writerly yet edgy yet fashionable. And I thought about how I would have to Google Skype to figure out how to do it and whether or not I had the appropriate equipment. And then I wondered if I would have to clear my counters of empty Yoplait containers and dust the venetian blinds, because who knows how much one can see via Skype anyway? And I thought about how I would have to act suave and unflummoxed, like I Skyped with my plumber and my great aunt Mary every week so that Rachelle wouldn’t realize a profound cyber evolution was transpiring right before her very eyes.

Frankly, all that technological angst over a phone call made me tired. And so finally I thought that perhaps I should simply be myself and admit that my preference is the telephone.

So that’s what I did. And we had a pleasant chat, Rachelle and I. And I wore my too-tight yoga pants and my black Woolrich slippers with white running socks, and I didn’t wear lipstick at all, and my blinds remained covered in dust.

The following week I read this post on Rachelle’s blog, in which she detailed seven reasons why writers might want to use Skype (and yes, I was a hair paranoid that she wrote it with me in mind). She answered many of my questions, and now I am slightly more prepared to maybe, just maybe, Skype with my agent next time we talk.

On second thought I think I’ll make a trial Skype run with my parents first. My mom will tell me if she detects dust on the blinds for sure.

So how about you? Are you Skype savvy? Do you like it? Or are you still using two tin cans like me?

Perfecting the Elevator Pitch

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Descending Memories

I’m still shamelessly grabbing every opportunity I can to tell people I now have an agent. Anytime someone innocuously asks, “So…what’s new? How’s things?” I blurt, “Oh not too much…I got an agent for my book!!!” My officemate surely wants to clap her hands over her ears and run screaming from the room, but she’s been remarkably gracious and patient with my boasting.
So last week my colleague Penny asked the question, and after I blurted my answer, she said, “Oh! I didn’t even know you had written a book.”
Then, when I mentioned to Penny that I’d written a memoir, she said this: “A memoir…huh…interesting. So what’s it about?”
Commence awkward silence.
And then even more awkward bumbling:
“Uh. Well, um…it’s sort of a faith story…I mean kind of a story about religion. Well, actually it’s like a conversion story…about finding God. Sort of.”
Penny laughed. “I think you better work a little more on your elevator pitch,” she advised (good-naturedly).
She’s got that right. My conversation with Penny illuminated two distinct problems. One: I lack a concise description of my book for these very situations. And two: I’m still not very comfortable admitting that I write about God, especially to particular audiences.
You see, I know Penny well enough to suspect that her views may not be exactly in line with those of a conservative Christian. Not that I’m the most conservative Christian you’ll ever meet…but honestly, I worried that once Penny had heard I’d written a “God book,” she would lump me in with however she defined “Christian.” And I wasn’t sure that’s where I wanted to be lumped.
Of course, I didn’t have any idea what her definition was, but I was afraid of it nonetheless. I was afraid of the label. I was afraid of how that might affect our polite office friendship. I was afraid of how that might affect how she thought of me. I was even afraid of what that meant for how I define myself.
I know. All that angst over a two-line elevator pitch.
Maybe I should have thought about all this before I started to write about God.
My awkward conversation with Penny reminded me of a similar one I’d had with my big boss a couple months ago. He’d read my newspaper column that weekend and had stopped by my office to chat about it.
“Huh,” he said, when I confirmed that I wrote a monthly “religion and faith” column for the Journal Star. “I wouldn’t have expected that about you.”
Expected what? That I wrote a newspaper column? That I wrote about faith? That I had faith?
I had no idea what he meant by that cryptic statement, and I didn’t dare ask. Later, of course, I obsessed over it. I figured his comment either implied that I’m so cool and jaded and edgy that I don’t fit the Christian mold…or that I’m so evil and crass and ruthless that I couldn’t possibly be a Christian.
Given the choice, I want to be the edgy Christian. They do exist you know – look at Rob Bell. Or Jon Acuff. They’re totally cool. And not one bit sheepish about being Christian. I want to be like that.
But who am I kidding, right? If you’ve read this blog for more than three days, you already know that I could never pull off Edgy Christian. For starters, I’m a Lutheran. Totally not edgy. Secondly, I don’t wear enough black – in fact, horrors, I prefer shades of turquoise and terra cotta. And third, I don’t even have a single tattoo. And even if I did, that tattoo would somehow look preppy on me.
I’m afraid I don’t have a tidy conclusion to this post. I can’t tell you I went home from either conversation, prayed about it and then comfortably and confidently slid into my place on the Christian spectrum. Frankly I still feel pretty befuddled about the whole thing.
So for now, I’m simply focusing on finding satisfaction and comfort in the process itself, in the growing and learning and becoming whatever God has in store for me.

What about you? Can anyone relate to this? Or am I simply the weakest Christian on the planet?!

Linking up with Emily…

Bailing on Boot Camp

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So I quit boot camp. Remember my foray into boot camp that I wrote about here and here? Remember the abs so sore I couldn’t sing in church? The quads so tight simply crossing one leg over the other became a full-body effort? Well, I quit.

After three weeks of living with a pit the size of a slab of bacon in my stomach, I had an epiphany. “I don’t have to do this,” I thought to myself one afternoon at work, as I prepared to drive to the gym. “No one is making me do this. Nothing will happen if I quit.”

And in that moment, a weight was lifted from my chest (and my glutes…and my biceps). I called Brad on my drive home. “Honey, guess what? I have great news,” I yelped into the phone. “I quit boot camp! I’m never going back! I don’t have to do boot camp!”

Brad was non-plussed. “Who’d you think was making you do boot camp?” he asked.

The thing is, I pride myself on my self-discipline. I am a sergeant major’s daughter after all – self-discipline is what I do. And people with self-discipline…well they don’t quit.

What I realized in this whole boot camp fiasco, though, is that sometimes it’s okay to quit. Sometimes quitting is the perfectly right thing to do. Boot camp made me absolutely, positively miserable. I dreaded it from the minute I woke up in the morning until I was finished with that day’s class. While my friends Laura and Wendy felt energized afterwards, I felt crabby and bitter. Boot camp had a negative effect on my life. I hated it. I complained about it incessantly. I actually worried about it.

Sometimes I think we stick with things because we feel we have to – whether it’s someone else applying the pressure or ourselves, we feel obligated to go through the motions. And while I’m not advocating we all morph into unmotivated slackers, I think occasionally we need to let ourselves off the hook. We need to prune.

Maybe it’s a toxic, life-draining friendship you’ve had on life-support for the past few months. Maybe it’s a rigid diet that’s sucking the joy out of your life. Is there something, or even someone, you need to cut from your life? Do you need to release yourself from an unnecessary burden?

Jesus himself tells me it’s okay to prune, because cutting one area allows for growth in another:

“I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful.” (John 15:1-2)

When Noah was first born I decided to create a scrapbook of milestones from his first year. I bought all the required paraphernalia – the cute papers, the fancy scissors, the die-cuts and stickers. And I sat at the dining room table every night and labored over this book. And hated every minute of it. Scrapbooking was not my thing. I am not a scrapper. I know this now.

When Rowan was born, I entertained the thought of making a scrapbook for him for, oh, 3.5 seconds. I felt obligated, of course – what I did for the first-born must be replicated for the second, right? But I let myself off the hook. Rowan does not have a scrapbook. He will never have a scrapbook. And if he ever questions why that is, I will tell him the truth: “Honey, Mommy had to choose between her sanity and a scrapbook of your first year. I chose sanity.”

I cut scrapbooking without a backward glance, and that decision surely freed up the time for something more fruitful [hey, if I still scrapped, I wouldn’t be writing right now!].

So I’m still riding the high of my boot camp bail. I’ve started to run again, albeit sporadically. And I’ve cut back on nighttime snacking to offset the decrease in hard-core exercise. Occasionally I think about the chiseled bodies my friends Wendy and Laura are sculpting for themselves, but I don’t regret my decision. Cutting boot camp out of my life will surely allow room for something else to grow…and I don’t just mean my muffin top.

Do you have an area in your life that could use some radical pruning?