The Shared Life

When I was a kid, my parents had both sides of our family over for Christmas dinner. It was somewhat chaotic to have all those people under one roof. Between my brother and me and all my cousins and kids of my parents friends that would gather to celebrate with us, we would have about 10 or 12 kids, all playing together under one roof. I quickly learned that to give my Christmas toys the fighting chance to survive the year until next Christmas, I had to hide them away from my cousins. I was quick to take my most favorite Christmas presents to my room, stash them away in my dresser, under my bed, in the closet so that they wouldn't be destroyed in their shiny newness. I was always so torn between wanting to share with them all the new stuff I got, and wanting all the new stuff to stay in tact for the times I was playing with them by myself.

Sharing is such a child's lesson. A lot of my friends are parents and it's not uncommon to hear them pull their kids aside and tell them to share what they have, split their treat with their sibling, give one of their quarters to the offering plate. It's so contrary to human nature. I've heard my friends have to tell their kids to share, several times in one outing, but I've never heard a parent tell their child that they share too much.

I wish that, for as much as it was drilled into my brain as a kid, sharing was a more natural thing for me as an adult. It's still hard work to even remember to share what I have, and an even harder task to surrender when I remember that sharing is good, and right. Thanks to my parents, sharing my stuff isn't as big of a deal, although still hard at times. Sharing my life, now that's another story.

The shared life is one thing in the Gospel that is the most captivating and the most convicting all at the same time. To forfeit your life, your comfort, your things, your emotions, your safety is a confounding, ridiculous notion. Isn't there something that's just mine? Can't I have one thing all to myself? If I share my life, how will it last the year without breaking?

It's hard to open my life to the possibility of depletion. Sharing in someone's need without having the answer on how to fix or fill the need is like walking backwards blindfolded. If I can't fix it, how can I bare the brokenness? I can give a smile, but can I bare to love enough to shed a tear? I can give a meal, but can I be so bold as to share my fears? I can give a ride, but do I have the strength to walk with you? I can sit next to you in church on Sunday, but can I have coffee with you on Tuesday night?

This is where I'm at. I'm all too often convinced in my own ability to fill myself up with the courage, the strength, the benevolence to give. And when I run dry, I want to run away. I want to run away from the problems of others. I want to run away because I don't have any more to give and I am terrified of the responsibility of making this all work out right. Because if it doesn't work, people go hungry, they stay alone, they stay broken.

The story of the Gospel is the story of a God who shared His very life with His own creation. When I think of meeting a need, I tend to wonder what I can do to fix it while staying comfortable in my own day to day existence. How can I help without really getting involved... Not God though. He actually wore the skin of the broken humanity, confined himself, by his love, to our bodies, to our world, to our emotions, our pain, our suffering.

The shared life is, at times a needy life. It seems to always be a life that is poured out, that's given. It's full of compassion, which means to suffer with. It means whether or not I have an answer, I will climb into your suffering and join you there. This scares me. But this compels me. I pray that this changes me and makes me move and see the world differently.

Friend, Neighbor, Chef

Osborne "Bugz" Waters

He brings together every commitment we have at the Co-op, someone from whom I am learning so much. Osborne will be our one of our teaching chefs when we formally provide cooking classes to the community, both because he pleases the Southern palate and because he creatively uses fresh ingredients from the garden, donated ingredients from neighbors, and non-perishables from the food bank. So he's capable of teaching delicious-cooking-on-a-budget; He's equally capable of teaching us how to give of our lives for our neighbors. Osborne heals with his presence--with good food and extending genuine affirmation. Oh how I hope that one mark of Christians is that we heal people with our presence. Oh how I pray this is East Nashville's experience of the Co-op. Osborne is helping us learn how to do this better.

Saving Lives

I had a friend say the other day: "Pastor, you know, you're doin' a good thing here, givin' people food and all, you know, feedin' people and all, but y'all might be saving peoples' lives too." Interpret it as you will--that lives are being saved from hunger, lives are being changed through the experience of acknowledgement and friendship, lives are being eternally saved through preaching of the gospel and the reading of scripture--but sometimes words are our verbally clumsy way of expressing a more articulate body language. To avoid tripping over myself, then, I'll quickly say what I saw him telling me. He looked at me confidently, though his shoulders were slouched, as one might be just before a confession--courageous but defeated. When we engaged each other, my hand touching his hand, and made eye contact, he stood a bit taller, as though this connection validated his feelings. His face lit up, and he said (as I interpret): "The food was good, but this whole experience has given me new life." Food as fuel that sustains life, keeps our engine going? No. Food and table as a medium by which we give and receive life together, tell truth into each others lives, be mutual, be friends, be the gospel? Yes. We're saving lives because God is present in us at the table. And the food just so happens to be good.
Ryan

I got friends in low places

Being 31 and single presents me with all kinds of challenges. Friendships become harder to maintain as those your close to get married, start families. There are times when it seems like you've made permanent residence in no-mans-land. I'm always so tempted to re-evaluate and compartmentalize my relationships. I wonder if I should make more single friends. Shouldn't I spend time with the people in life that are where I'm at? It's so much easier to maintain friendships with people that have the same schedule, lifestyle, finances as me. I don't have to work as hard when I can surround myself with people that can just do what I want to do...

This morning I went to a breakfast honoring Mrs. Juanita McCoy. She's devoted so much of her life working at ENCM, helping the community of East Nashville. I haven't gotten to know her as well as some of the other volunteers, but the times that I have met her have been blessed and the things I hear of her service are noble, to say the least. Her footsteps seem more than worthy to be followed. And now she's retiring. So... a bunch of us all got together to cook, eat and fellowship and to say, as humble as possible, thank you. There were all kinds of people in the room. Many were older than me, some where younger, some were married, some were single, some had kids, some did not. Some where white and some where black and some were from California and some where from right here in Nashville. All this diversity, in one meagre room, celebrating a life spilled out.

This got me thinking about my thoughts on the kinds of relationships I peruse. I think I'm asking the wrong questions. Do I need a community with more single friends, more friends my age, more friends that are like me... wrong questions. It's important to have a community that you have stuff in common with, but if I've learned anything in my time so far at ENCM, if there's one common theme that threads itself through my stories so far, it's that God is very pleased to take what I think I need, place it on it's head and redefine it all together, especially in regards to community and relationships. The lessons I've learned over and over again have been that when you open yourself up to the other, to the different, you see God work in ways you've never seen before.

So maybe the question is how do I open myself to all kinds of relationships, and how do I see the ones that have so much potential but are framed by the differences that most people allow to keep them from deep relationships? How do I let God direct my path in such a way that my friends, and my community exist of so many different kinds of people that I'm constantly learning and teaching new things? And most of all, how can I be an active participant in that kind of community?

Mrs. Juanita influenced all kinds of people, not just the ones that looked like her and had the same life experience as her. That doesn't happen by compartmentalizing and categorizing people. It's done by being open to some pretty amazing, diverse relationships, given by an amazingly creative God. And what I'm learning is that it starts in giving. It starts in being poured out. That is so hard. I don't want to be poured out because I'm afraid of being empty. That's the truth. I'm afraid of being empty. Me of little faith... Thank God for saints that go before us, living a life wide open for us to learn from. And thank God for his faithfulness.

Every Sunday evening I get to church a little early to help set up for Emmaus fellowship. To the casual passer-by it looks nothing like a church service. There's no choir, no pews, no hymnals. There isn't really a pulpit, no one is wearing a suit. The smell of body odor replaces the typical newly bathed and perfumed congregants in a typical church service. There isn't one person standing in the front while everyone sits watching him wax religious.

That's not to say that Emmaus Fellowship isn't a church service. It is church.

You know how Jesus says that the kingdom of God is like a mustard seed? I wonder why he chose something so small. If you threw that mustard seed into a jar full of other seeds, you would have to look really hard, and really close to find it. At Emmaus I'm learning to look past all the things I used to think classified God's work or His moving and I'm realizing that He moves in small ways and seemingly insignificant ways and he turns a meal with homeless and working poor people into a church service.

So last night after we ate, we sang a few songs, some were impromptu, then Ryan got up to read Scripture and start our time of prayer. Our friend TomKat was leaving, probably because he was done eating. He hadn't yet realize that we were offering more than a full stomach at Emmaus...so Ryan reminded him we were going to read Scripture and pray and invited him to come and sit. He did and sat right in front of Ryan. Ryan read the scripture about how Jesus says he's the bread of life and if you feast on him you will never go hungry. Then we started to pray...

At Emmaus we start by praying for our service and ministry, then we move onto praying for our communities, then we pray for ourselves. After that we take and offering and then have dessert. During the second stanza of prayer, TomKat prayed out loud. Then he ended his prayer with the most sincere "I love you, Jesus" that I've heard in a while. He then began to cry and confessed to all of us that that was the first time he's ever prayed. He's probably in his 60s.

WOW. I've been to a lot of church services with amazing music and dynamic preaching. I've heard the most eloquent and beautiful prayers. I've seen the sun shine through the most beautiful stained glass windows. And all of those things are wonderful, but they are easily turned into the seeds in the jar that I expect, the big ones I notice, and sometimes the ones that are hiding the mustard seeds. In some way, last night I felt like I was all wrapped up in a mustard seed kingdom.

Grace and Peace,

Melis

God is good all the time...

It's Monday morning. I almost always need a little more time to wake up, a little more coffee in my cup and few seconds to get my brain around the start of a new work week. This morning was no different as far as the time and the coffee go, but my brain can not be swayed from it's current trail of thought. I went to bed thinking about God's goodness and I woke up in the same thought, as if I'd laid it on my pillow when I drifted off to sleep and picked it up as soon as my eyes opened. 

It's not that I ever consciously doubt God's goodness. I'm not that bold. But I'm sure I doubt it when I worry about something, or when I hold tight, stifling those things in life that are meant to grow and move and change. In those moments of held control, I doubt that God can handle my fears or that there could be more for me around the corner of the place I sit so comfortably. That kind of doubt seems to be a constant struggle for me. And here's the thing, whenever I get there, my purchased plot at the bottom of despair, God shines a light of goodness so bright, I have very little choice but to follow it, leaving behind my sorrow and moving into the promise that is His love. And the funny part is that His goodness never quite shows up the way I think it would, and never the way I plot that it should in my limited imagination.

Such was the case this weekend. Friday night, I couldn't shake a feeling of unrest. Something just felt off or sad and I couldn't seem to find the contentment I was seeking. I prayed myself to sleep and in that subconscious state of prayer that mingles with sleep and has you saying all kinds of crazy things to God, Wesley Sanders popped into my brain. And for some reason I figured that I had to go visit Wesley and that thought seemed almost like a solution, an answer to my sleepy prayers.

Wesley is the man that Ryan blogged about a few weeks ago, the man on our video. Wesley is one of the few folks I've met at ENCM that I've developed a true friendship with. Wesley has been in a rehab program for alcoholism for the last 2 months. I haven't visited him. I've had every intention of doing it. I've even printed out a picture to bring to him for his room. But what is that saying about good intentions?

Saturday morning I woke up with no memory of my prayer the night before (these are the downfalls of praying yourself to sleep). I didn't go to see Wesley. That night, the same kind of restlessness, sadness in my prayers and the same kind of solution. Wesley popped into my brain again and I thought I had to go see him. I knew Sunday would prove impossible, but I made a point to be awake enough in my brain to make a promise to myself or maybe to God to go see Wesley on Monday. 

I had a full day planned on Sunday. Aside from the normal church service I attend at 9, and the 1pm Emmaus service, I had a baby shower to help host and the new Emmaus service/meal at 5:30. After morning church, I  went to lunch with a friend I hadn't seen in so long and headed back for the last 1pm Emmaus service.

I was late and in a rush. When I got to the church, I walked in and was stopped, mid-stride. I blinked. The man standing with Ryan looked a lot like Wesley Sanders, but so different too. The man standing next to Ryan was clean shaven with tightly cropped hair. He had glasses. His clothes were clean, almost crisp on his slimmer body. He looked clean and bright-eyed. This was Wesley, but the truest version of the man I know. This was the real Wesley that I caught redemptive glances of on a random sober encounter with him. This was the Wesley I knew, yet the Wesley I had yet to meet. 

He hugged me. I was so genuinely excited to see him. I looked him over once, twice. I almost made him turn for me to really see him. I told him I was so proud of him, standing in front of me. I told him I was sorry for not visiting him. He told me that he had come by various places a time or two, trying to find me, to see me, to show me that he was gone but not for good, and that he was getting better. I hugged him. 

We walked together into the service and sat next to each other. I couldn't believe he was there. In my prayers last night, right next to me today. At Emmaus Fellowship we are diligent about our prayer time. We make sure that we take time to allow the congregation to pray aloud for our ministry, for our communities, for our families and for ourselves. When we got to the part where we pray for our communities, for each other, Wesley grabbed my hand in both of his hands and he prayed for me. Wesley Sanders prayed for me. He prayed that God would be with "his little friend." The trail of tears started to pour from my face. In that moment I realized something. Going to see Wesley wasn't the answer to my prayer, my restlessness, my sadness. My seeing him, bringing him encouragement wasn't something I had to do. I needed Wesley Sanders to pray for me. This time, he was there to offer hope, redemption and grace to me. 

In that moment, being prayed over by a man that under other circumstances may not even have been my friend I knew God's goodness in an all new way. The give and TAKE of a relationship made me realize that I am receiving as much as I am giving in all of this. 

Wesley Sanders is praying for me. God is good all the time, all the time God is good.

My friend Ed

It's been a couple weeks since I've blogged. Needless to say, it's not for lack of content, but time that I've not been as quick to tell you of things going on at ENCM. Thankfully though, Ryan was able to give you all an update on our friend Wesley. One of the most amazing things about any relationship is to watch how people grow and change. It's no different at ENCM. To see our friends, and ourselves, change and grow has an eternal effect.

It's in that same vein that I give you a report on my friend Ed Clark. I met Ed at our Emmaus Fellowship service on Sunday mornings. He's one of the sweetest guys I know and and he's one of the most consistent members of our little rag-tag congregation. A few weeks ago, Ed agreed to sing in one of our Sunday morning services. I had no idea what to expect. Ed picked up a borrowed guitar, pulled out a sheet of lyrics he'd been working on and proceeded to sing a song he wrote about getting High on the Holy Ghost. The words seemed all too personal and spoke of addiction and a marginalized life. Then, right in the middle of the song the bridge opened up and Ed began singing the names of God. He knows more of the names of God than I do and he sang them out with the same confidence of a small child calling out for the safety and affirmation of a parent. It was one of the most beautiful things. I just couldn't get over how good he was. And the rest of the congregants were cheering him on and clapping. The song was about redemption. And about praising the God who can save you from the most desperate of situations, and then about recognizing Him when he does.

A few days later I saw Ed in our Wednesday evening college and young adult service at NFCN where I attend church. He started coming pretty regularly on Wednesday evenings. This particular Wednesday he pulled me aside and told me that he had something to show me. He proceeded to pull out a certificate of completion for a career counseling program he went to at the Salvation Army. He told me it's a program that will help him with job training, and essentially teach him how to keep a job and hopefully, eventually, help him find a job that suites his new and improved resume. He was so proud of himself. And I was proud of him.

I remembered that one Wednesday morning over coffee, Ed had told me that he struggled with alcoholism and that he had tried and failed a number of times in different rehab facilities. He also told me that he hadn't been drinking lately because he'd been in God's word. And now, here's a certificate of completion. Completion... He started and finished the program. He saw it through until the end without alcohol getting in the way. 

So, a certificate from the Salvation Army isn't the most quantifiable of ways to show the effects that ENCM is having on the community, but it means a lot to Ed and it means a lot to me to be able to see the process of redemption in him. And in it all, God is changing me too. I come thinking I have some measure of help to offer Ed, and I do, but I leave realizing that he has so much to offer me as well, that God uses him in my life to teach me about love and redemption as much as he uses me in Ed's life to cheer him on and offer a consistent friendship with someone who believes in his worth.

Grace & peace, 

Melissa