time heals all...

My church has not had a choir for about 10-15 years. And this large brown filing cabinet with boxes overflowing next to it in the church office is full of sheet music and photocopies (oops) and sample scores.  For 10 years, we have not used a single piece of music... and in fact, when we brought together a special choir last spring, most of the music was too difficult and too many parts for us to use. 

A faithful member walked into my office the other day.  She has been working on passing on some of the music to the local community choir, but they are more interested in music with accompaniment CD's rather than the sheet music with piano scores we have.  So she volunteered to pay the postage to send the music to someone who really could use it.  With so many tragedies and natural disasters this year in Alabama, Missouri, and even here in Iowa, certainly there were churches who had lost their collections of music.

So I put out a general announcement via facebook searching for a home for this music.

A church less than 30 miles away responded.  Salem United Methodist Church, three years ago this month, was underwater when the Cedar River flooded.  Three years ago, three temporary worship spaces ago, they had a choir room full of music they had collected through the years. And it all washed away down the Cedar. It was all left covered with muck.

Three years have passed and they now find themselves in a new home.  And settled, though busting at the seams in their new gathering space, they were eager and excited about the possibility of having filing cabinets full of music once more.

While my mind immediately went to those places that have recently been hurting, when I first got the word about Salem UMC needing music, my heart sank.  The churches in Tuscaloosa and Joplin and Varina are not ready for choir music.  They are probably still sorting through rubble.  They are probably still trying to figure out what to do next.  They are still grieving, and they have a long journey ahead of them to recovery.

The thing about healing and rebuilding is that it cannot happen over night.

Whether it is rehabilitation after an injury to your body, or repairing a damaged relationship, or restoring a structure that sustained damage... it takes time.

Just ask the residents of New Orleans... Just ask the people who lived in Czech Village or Time Check in Cedar Rapids... Just ask that neighbor who had a heart attack a few years ago, or your family member who broke a rib... just ask the couple across town whose marriage was strained by adultery or the siblings who didn't talk for seven years after a falling out.

There are a few places in this world where miraculous healing occurs in an instant... but I know of very few of them.  And even when the healing does come - like in the scriptural stories of the leper or the hemmoraging woman or the demoniac - it is going to take a while to figure out what to do next... how to live your life without the disease or the illness or the demons that plagued you. Relationships might never be the same as they were before.  You will have discovered something about your self or others that changes who you are and what you value. You may not want to get back to your old "normal" at all.

My church has been through its own ups and downs throughout the years.  We have had our good times and our bad.  As we are being re-energized by God, we pray that we simply won't be what we were in the past. And part of that is letting go of past ideas of "success." 

And so, this morning, seven boxes of sheet music found a new home.  And a flooded out church choir finds itself, three years later, further down the road to recovery.

Down to the River to Pray

The last few days have been simply overwhelming in my life. The first reason is that there is just a lot to do.  My weekend was jam packed full of good church related things like a Holy Spirit filled training with leaders from my church and a beautiful celebration of marriage and excitement about renovations being made at the church.  But there is also a lot of heaviness of heart that comes from my cousin being sick and searching for answers and my husband's great-grandmother facing the end of her life and seeing pictures and hearing stories of my last hometown Nashville under water.

I opened up my worship planning book this afternoon trying to figure out what to preach on.  For the past few weeks I have been following our churchwide bible study (although most days, I'm not sure people get the connection between the two) and this week the topic is the Household of God - the creation of God's people who are sent to be witness to God's love.  It fits in okay with the whole Mother's Day thing happening, but for some reason in the midst of all of my exhaustion and anxiety, it feels a little too schmaltzy.

Want further proof of my "unsettledness" - just listen to my dream last night.  I was in an elevator with these two twenty something women who were gossipping and saying horrible stuff about other people and the elevator started to tip and we heard a snap and then went plummeting downwards - the elevator falling faster and faster and faster down the shaft with screams and shouts until I woke up.

So, when I opened up the book of Acts today, I found it kind of funny that Paul was dreaming too. A man stood pleading in his dream - COME HELP US! And in that plea, Paul felt the urgency of God's calling and immediately the band of evangelists packed up their bags and made a long journey to Phillippi.

And they wandered around in the city for a few days, settling in, seeing what would arise, and finally on the Sabbath they went down to the river... "where we supposed there was a place of prayer." 

I read that phrase and my heart skipped a beat.  Because there is a lot of praying happening by the river these days.  I don't know anything about Ancient Roman culture or why they guessed that people would be praying at the river, but I know today that praying happens at the river.  I'm not sure what Paul and Luke and the others thought they might find there - but I know that if I were able to head over to the Cedar River here in Iowa or down to the Cumberland River in Tennessee, or even to the Mississippi River Delta and the coastlines of the Gulf of Mexico there would be a lot of praying going on.

COME HELP US! the vision came in Paul's dream.  And they got up and left and went down to the river to pray.



We could talk about the church gathered at the river and have the visions from Revelation in our minds... the faithful gathered at the river with their beautiful robes, but instead my mind is going to pictures of the church gathered at the river with sandbags and stories of hope and songs of peace and offerings of money for recovery.  My mind is going to images of churches full of people who have just come from the river and are now stopping for a free meal and rest for their tired arms and legs. My mind is going to images of churches that have traveled hundreds of miles to come to the river and help rebuild. 

And as we head down to the river to pray and help and listen and cry and share... as we are the family of God down by the riverside... maybe others will hear our stories of hope, like Lydia did.  Maybe they will be moved by the good news and they will put down what they are doing and open their hearts to us and join us in this journey. 

Everything is not alright today.  And maybe my dream was just an indication of the helplessness that I feel as things fall apart.  But if we go down to the river to pray with our brothers and our sisters and our mothers and our fathers we might just find the strength we need to keep going and the hope that we need to survive.

gone

h

I found out yesterday that the house I grew up in burned to the ground.

It was a beautifully constructed old farmhouse. The woodwork was beautiful throughout the entire house, with built-in cabinetry throughout the house - stuff that you just don't see made any more. Some of the walls had been painted years and years ago and were practically frescos. When I was born, there still wasn't running water in the house (according to my baby book) and the entire time we lived there, there was no electricity in the upstairs bathroom. It had a beautiful cast iron clawfoot tub and I grew up taking baths in candlelight. We had a woodburning furnace in the house and as kids we would help dad chop wood and toss it into the basement through one of the windows.

My family still owns the property, although no one has lived in the house for eight years. We decided to build a new house and as we moved on with our lives, that house remained as a part of our past. There were no plans to sell the house and so we gradually moved out stuff into our new house - and what we didn't move, was just left.

We moved right after my senior year of high school, and the new house didn't quite feel like home yet, so as I prepared to go to college, many of the things that I just didn't have room to take with me, things from my childhood remained. Books that I had read as a child and then a teenager, scraps of memorobelia, clothes that I had grown out of, but didn't take the time to sort through and donate.

A few years ago, as I moved into my first apartment in divinity school I went back and got a table and chairs and an old writing desk to take with me. I keep trying to remember if there were other things in the house that were left behind and are now gone.

I always have had so many dreams for that house. While it was beautiful and had so much history, it was a sort of embarassment to me growing up... it always was in the need of repair and more love than we had the time or energy to give it... but I had dreams of someday restoring that house to its original beauty and either living there or turning it into a bed and breakfast or something. It would probably cost a half a million dollars to do so... but still, it was a dream.

I had so many plans this summer, now that we are back in the state, to head over there and sort through things. Throw out what we never intended to keep, find those treasures all over again and give things away. I even had a dream right after we had the tornados north of us that this same house had been completely wiped out by a tornado - and I woke up with the same regret and emptiness that I have today. I think I might have done something about that feeling, but with all of the flooding that hit a week later, there just wasn't time. I needed to be in other places, with other people.

All of that is now gone. My husband and I stopped by to see what remains. The charred ruins smouldered still. All that was recognizeable was the stone foundation and the porch that was right below my window. I sometimes used to sit on the roof of the porch - careful to avoid the weak spots. But not anymore.

Friday Five

So, i've been hanging out a lot at RevGalBlogPals.blogspot.com when I work on my sermons and prepare for worship and what not. and they have this thing called friday five where there are five things to blog about... so i'm going to start doing it.

This week: Free word association with the following words

1. rooftop

for some reason, I am thinking of my kindergarten christmas music program and doing a little song and dance to "up on the rooftop, reindeer paws, out jumps good old santa claus"

2. gritty

there is sand everywhere. gritty gritty sand. and much of it is because of the flooding we have been experiencing. i helped fill sandbags twice and it was good, hard, fun work. so that part was good. but then, having to see all the awful, stinky, sopping wet mucky sandbags left behind after the flood waters on wednesday - didn't seem so fun anymore.

3. hot town (yeah, I know, it's two words)

thinking again of children's songs - and climbing volcanos! my family has made several trips to hawaii - oahu more specifically - and always make a trek up Diamond Head. there is a great trail leading up the inside of the crater and into the military bunker. we always take the kids and sometimes they need a little bit extra push to make it all the way up. so we sing camp songs the whole way. one of which is about the great chicago fire "it's gonna be a hot time in the old town tonight.. FIRE FIRE FIRE"

4. night

I just read "the curious incident of the dog in the night-time" it was such a great book! it is written from the perspective of a young boy with autism and it was just so engaging... it really had the ability to get me out of my own state of mind and point of view and into his world - i felt very connected to what he was going through, what he was afraid of, and when i finished, really wanted to know more about autism and programs to help children find their voice. it really felt like i walked a mile in his shoes... i highly recommend it!

5. dance

wow - i haven't been dancing for a long time. Probably since my brother's wedding last September, and then my own in August. Either I need a girls night out, or i'm just going to have to hold out until the next slew of weddings comes along this August. I have three weddings back to back! eep!

water...

right now, our state is experiencing the worst floods EVER recorded here.

The town that I am serving is so far semi-okay... the levee is holding, but the water is only .7' below the levee - and all day long, storms have been springing up. Last night, the river was only at 20.1 and now it is at 21.35 - levee at 22'

Because of flash flooding, and because all of my family was in Cedar Rapids (about 30 miles away) I headed up to be with them. My husband was helping his family out there.

Cedar Falls and Waterloo yesterday and now Cedar Rapids today are experiencing horrific and unimaginable flooding. Coralville and Iowa City are next. We have already had water past the bounds of the 500-year flood plain.

I just sit here and am absolutely amazed. at this point, there is nothing we can really do in this area. it's just coming.

Some of the most awe-some images I have seen have been of the National Czech and Slovak Musuem which is surrounded by floodwaters - at least 4 feet deep. And so many houses are underwater. The water keeps rising in downtown and we have no idea when a crest will be expected. The water is supposed to raise at least another foot and a half in CR.

Please keep us all in your thoughts and prayers. My family is all safe and sound - and right now that's all that I can even begin to think about.