Talk about “just-in-time” delivery!

“This is an example of what we call ‘just-in-time’ inventory.”

Maybe these are not the words you think of a new grandmother saying to her first newborn granddaughter, but if you know that both of my parents are CPAs and that there’s only so much a new mom can chit-chat, it makes more sense. I’d had my newborn home for just a couple of days, and I spent almost all time nursing and nursing that hungry baby, and was a sick combination of exhausted and restless, weeping daily by 6:30 pm an dgenerally no fun at all to be with. So an uncomprehending newborn baby was basically all Grandmamma had in terms of people to talk to. And my mom thinks about stuff like inventory strategies a lot more than theh grandmothers in books and movies do. And I have to admit, I laughed, so it was a good relief from the tension of sleeplessness and adjustment. And I also did not know what just-in-time inventory was*, so hey, it was informative. If you’re wondering, it means a way of managing such that you don’t have piles of materials sitting around but instead have the materials arriving just as you’re about to need them.

*The reason I did not know this term is because having two accountant parents and having a stronger-than-average drive to individuate, I refused to listen to any financial-related info ever if I could help it. And it was hard to help it: two and sometimes three televisions were on with different financial channels and shows on each one for what felt like 24-hour financial education opportunities. Opportunities I rejected, to my later disadvantage most likely, though feel free to look me up when I’m retired and see. So defensive I was of my creative spirit that when Mom suggested I take typing in high school, I adamantly replied, “Why? I’m not going to work Sitting in Some Office!” Apparently I thought all the creative jobs were done standing up and/or outdoors. And that computers, which at that point were original Mac and some early PC clones, were not really going to catch on. Annnnnd now I am a writer for a living, literally typing in an office NOW, and I’m ergonomically horrid.

I’ll never forget my mom speaking these words to my newborn daughter 15 years ago, watching me on the sofa, again, under a baby again, nursing again. I was always on the sofa it seemed and never fixing dinner even though I was so hungry, never cleaning up the mess someone had left just a few feet away, never getting any item from one room to another or getting that glass of water I needed or shower I needed or book I forgot in the other room or or or or or.

Then, your mileage may vary if you’re normal like other moms seemed to be (ok, seem to be, present tense, even now when said newborn is 15 with a ten year-old sibling), but for me it went on feeling just about the same for most of both my children’s early years. I felt behind, always failing in some area, be it cleaning or work or wife-ing or just general being. I was trapped under a baby, and later just trapped, trapped in a body in one place at a time and on one relentlessly advancing timeline in which I could never, ever do enough, catch up, do things right. Never have enough or know enough or be efficient enough or strong enough to do all these many important things. Never organized enough or disciplined enough, or relaxed enough or healthy enough. Never enough.

My head was pretty much always working through how I would get my act together. It went a little something like this:

ME: I feel like there's just not enough time for everything I'm supposed to do.
ALSO ME: Your colleague seems to make time. Why can't you?
M: It's not the same. Their kids are way older, and their spouse stays home with the kids anyway, and doing things like laundry and having dinner ready. 
AM: Well, the rest of the department won't know that. They'll just think it's you.
M: Shit. I'm getting up at 5 daily already! I can only do so much. I'll have to try again to divide up the work more fairly at home. Even if I had one more hour a couple times a week...
AM: He can barely do what you're asking of him now. Cut him some slack; some husbands do less! Manage your time better. You wasted a whole hour last night watching TV on the couch. 
M: I meant to be packing lunches then, but I was so tired...
AM: And then you conked out early, and you know you need to be having more sex or you're going to end up alone.
M: Being alone wouldn't...
AM: Shut up; you'd be a basket case. No way you can keep all this up on your own.
M: You're right. I know. I can't even keep it all up now. I'm fucked.

And then because minds can be real assholes, as in even worse than it was already being alI day long in conversations like that one, I also felt (feel!) bad that I felt bad about this. Now, I’m a grown-ass woman with a Ph.D.! And I know for a FACT that this isn’t just me. I have read articles! Peer reviewed articles! I actually offended myself as a feminist for feeling like I was supposed to breadwin AND do all the mom stuff AND clean AND oh yeah put out more… but none of that stopped me from feeling it. And then judging the feeling as a dumb feeling to have. Like, I could just feel like I was failing, and that would be bad, but my head prefers the layered, deeply grooved bad of reflexive-looping self-judgment bad. It’s a bit like having that same exact argument with someone you love for the millionth time, and knowing that nothing will change AND you may actually be doing damage…but to yourself.

So a newborn gets just-in-time inventory from a boob, but my mind goes either for excess or extreme scarcity. Excess: My mind appears to have excess stock of poison. Scarcity: I know I am supposed to know that it’s not me, and that I have enough and am enough, and that a lot of my feelings of inadequacy are really just what it feels like to like and work in America in 2022. Yet often my heart rejects the knowledge, seeing just empty shelves where intentionality and self-compassion and acceptance should be. (I think they’re somewhere near the empty shelves for grading, baking, getting grants, raking, and putting away laundry.)

And then, just in time, this text floated near me!

Somehow, I was able to pick it from the air and feel myself set right– or at least right enough to keep going. Nadia Bolz-Weber’s take on the parable of the mustard seed is that it’s not that the mustard seed WILL grow to be enough, it’s more like just a seed IS enough. Now. (Seriously, she even uses Greek grammar to do this, so you know my nerdy heart was extra open to her point.) The disciples ask Jesus to increase their faith, and in answering that, she writes:

Jesus isn’t actually scolding them for not having even the tiniest amount of faith – instead when they ask him to increase their faith he’s basically rejecting the premise of their request.

In essence, he seems to imply that what they need isn’t more faith,

What they need to realize is that the thing they already have IS faith.

It’s like Jesus is saying how much faith do you have? and I’m like I don’t know Jesus, it’s not very much it’s like barely any and Jesus is saying “perfect!”

That’s a different message entirely isn’t it?

I think this message is for the humanist lacking faith in one’s own sufficiency to circumstances as much as the Christian’s. I don’t have enough, I can’t do enough, my faith is not enough– these are the earworm-y jingles that fear plays on the pianos of our heads. And we let those fill our ears, let them distract us from what we know deep down to be true, and end up seeing ourselves as empty cupboards, tiny seeds, when the truth is: here we are, human and all, already having just what it takes to be human. Not great reassuring piles of what we need, and not all stocked in ahead of time so that we feel ready. But already, always, we are who we need to be to live the moments we live through. Just in time.

Saved from What?

Driving on the highways of Texas and New Mexico, the neon crosses and stark billboards would loom in the distance for miles before you could read them: “Jesus Saves.”

Or in the street, at a park, or at a public event, a stranger with a handful of tracts might ask, “Are you saved?”

For most of my life, and especially in my years away from the church, my internal reply has been “saved from WHAT?” From burning in hell, which is what the people asking seemed to be asking about? I was pretty sure I didn’t believe in hell, or at least in a hell that was a place, with fire, and maybe a devil in a red suit. Those seemed like bogeyman stories to me. They seemed like things TV preachers warned about, or (on the more cultured end of the spectrum) things Dante wrote about. I’ve never been scared of hell. Concerns about the afterlife are not why I’m a Christian.

So as an adult, even as I have grown to love Jesus and know him more and more, the idea that he was saving me has always seemed a bit abstract. I have problems, yes, but am I in danger that he must rescue me? I sin, no doubt, but somehow I’ve never been afraid of ending up in hell; I believed it when Jesus said that he loved me and redeemed me.

But in truth, there are many, daily times I need saving, times I long for rescue from something. I long for rescue from my own bad moods. From my pessimism. From my incessant judgment of myself and, consequently, of others. From racing thoughts. From persistent, needling worry. From that “stuck” feeling I get– stuck in a situation, or with a person, or with a problem. Stuck with my same old self doing the same old patterns. Times when it seems nothing I do will make a difference. Overwhelmed, I long for rescue.

That’s how Jesus saves me. He swoops in to be with me when I’m really not fit to be with. He lifts me out of my own head. He lets me glimpse here and there how God sees things, restoring some perspective. He accompanies me through the bad moments until I’m unstuck.

I have no doubt that Jesus also saves me in the afterlife. Through Jesus we will have eternal life. But we also have life NOW through Jesus as he saves us NOW from the hells we make for ourselves. It is as Psalm 23 says: “He restores my soul.” And it is also as that same Psalm says: he restores it “all the days of my life”, not just after it has ended.

Photo credit:

By David Shankbone (Own work) [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Fairest, Beautiful

The first hymn I ever loved was “Fairest Lord Jesus,” in our hymnal as “Beautiful Savior” (ELW 838).

Having not been raised in the church, then coming home from summer camp wanting to find out everything I could about God, I listened to the Christian radio station in Houston. Mixed in there with a lot of very bad theology and political discourse was a lot of great 1980s “Contemporary Christian” music—some of it terrific, some truly awful—covering the whole range of 80s sounds from synthesizers, to fake rock and roll, to the truly grandiose. One day, cutting through all that noise like a laser, I heard this simple hymn. It was performed a capella, without instruments, starting with a single voice and then layering on part after part in a way that made my ears tingle. It was like musical glitter, sparkling and lovely.

I knew about Jesus the baby, Jesus the mighty, Jesus the mysterious, Jesus the dead-then-alive. To that point, my attraction to Jesus had been to the idea of Jesus. It was about his teachings, his importance, the necessity of Jesus.

But THIS was a different Jesus. Jesus the beautiful. Jesus in the meadows and woodlands; Jesus in a shining sky. Beautiful Jesus. The Fairest. The song, and the Jesus in the song, cut right through my brain, through all that thinking and reasoning I had been doing, and got into my musical heart. Thinking about Jesus was good, but through this song I started to feel Jesus.

Beautiful Savior, delight us with your starlight and moonlight. Shine on the meadows and woodlands, and on us. Drizzle your beauty all over us like musical glitter. Let your love enter our brains, our ears and our hearts. Amen.

Photo by NASA/ESA/JHU/R.Sankrit & W.Blair [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Narratives of discernment

Because I’m a writing scholar, I see everywhere the writing of narratives. Of course I mean the literal writing of narratives, as when I tell a story here, in words. But I also see everywhere how we write and revise the narratives of our lives, of identities, of our memberships and intentions.

This idea isn’t mine, nor is it new. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. And these days, I’m seeing how it’s especially true when it comes to discernment. Discernment is a storytelling activity. Everywhere people are discerning God’s call to them, those people are writing a narrative. It’s a narrative of what will happen going forward, and a narrative of what was meant to happen, looking backward. I’m especially interested in the backward part– a story made entirely by revising.

As any writer can tell you, revising takes bravery. What if my story hasn’t meant what I thought it did? What if my steps weren’t leading where I thought they would? And what, then, if I am not who I thought I was? To make a new story out of one’s life is not only to make a new story, it is also to let an old one go.

Jesus– the Jesus who, having been not only fully God but also fully human, knows what things are like for us– must have known this too. What stories did he have to revise along his way? What did he have to let go of?

These are my discerning thoughts at the beginning of an especially discerning Lent. And this old-but-good post from Amy Butler reads the temptation of Jesus as a discernment narrative (wrapping it in one of her own). She writes:

“Vocational discernment totally unmoors us. It turns us around, sets us off course, rattles our comfortable cages. Thinking about what we’re called to do and who we’re called to be in the large picture of God’s work in the world does have the potential to call us to greatness…and it has the potential to destroy us.”

Like I said, revising takes bravery.