Looking at the Pieces

I’m sad.
I really enjoyed Steve Erwin. His passion was contagious, perhaps unorthodox, but a gift for sure.

I actually shed tears as Andre Agassi said good-bye to tennis. I played tennis in college. I wasn’t great, but I loved it. Growing up I hadn’t been encouraged to even consider sports. The summer after I graduated high school I picked up a racquet and determined I was going to learn to play. It was a struggle given my enormous depth perception problem (lousy eye muscles). But I made the team and even played a couple matches. All the players I cared about through the years are now done with tennis. It just made me feel so old.

I’m reading.
This was such a nice relaxing weekend. Nelson only watches sports on TV. Thankfully, I enjoy sports and enjoy watching them with him. When I wasn’t paying really close attention this weekend I was reading. I plucked a book off the bookshelf that I bought at a garage sale: “Not Counting Women and Children.” (by Megan McKenna) I’m liking it. It’s a challenging read, in that it challenges some of the stuff I’ve just taken for granted. I’ll try to write about some of it later.


One of the things that is coming out of the reading is a subtle reinforcement of my taking the job with Dan. Let’s see if I can make this make sense. When I was in college, January of my junior year, I went with a group to Washington DC. We were visiting different ministries and churches and seeing how others “did” ministry. We spent a large portion of the experience working in the very poorest areas. Something changed in me, but over the years I never connected what I was doing with the seeds planted there in DC. Much later I worked in an inner city church in Kansas City. It seemed a far cry from the farm country of Wisconsin where I had pastured before that. What could the two have in common? Um, me.

When we were in Wisconsin we were unpaid and therefore had to go on assistance. I learned how degrading and demeaning the system can be. It sensitized me to the needs and hurts of others as they came to our food pantry and clothes closet. And now here I am considering working again with the disenfranchised, the wounded, the guilty, the overlooked. I’m going to be walking with people most people don’t like—sometimes I don’t like them…don’t like me.

Megan McKenna speaks about pity in the first chapter of the book I’m reading. Jesus was distraught over the murder of his cousin John. He seeks some alone time to grieve, but the crowd is hurting too. They are confused and seek out Jesus. They follow him to the other side of the lake and when he sees them instead of sending them away so that he can fulfill his plan, he has pity on them and spends the day with them healing their bodies and their hearts. Passionate pity.

So I’m wondering about the way life has been unfolding for me. So much seems to have been preparing me for this next phase. Walking through the door seems so natural. It seems like the right next thing to do. No fanfare. Just a rightness. I have so much time until the meeting on the 13th. More time to learn and be ready I guess.

How weird it will be if the door slams shut before I get there. Then how will I make sense of all this. I guess I’ll think about that if the door shuts—but until then I’ll keep reading and seeing how the pieces seem to be fitting all together.