My Lenten Journey (or lack thereof)

I feel like I’m not really observing Lent.

I apologize if this sounds irreverent to anyone reading, but I think for at least half the Lenten season I’ve forgotten it’s Lent, but I was soon reminded of it when I literally got a rude awakening last Saturday morning when two Jehovah’s Witnesses knocked on my door handing me a flyer. I actually thought they were Christians at first, but then I looked at the flyer which read something like this: “Jesus- The Greatest Man that Ever Lived. Join us as we discuss questions such as Who is this Jesus?, What did he do for us?...” Then at the bottom I notice that the meeting is at Kingdom Hall in Costa Mesa…. I throw it away and crawl back into bed.

I don’t have any profound epiphanies to share during this Lenten Journey so far. In fact, I hardly feel like I’m really on a ‘Lenten Journey’ at all. I’ve been disobedient, indulgent, self-focused and I still feel like I’m on this journey of darkness in my life. As much as I hoped and thought that I was being led out of it, I feel like I keep getting sucked into the darkness. Just when I thought things could not be any worse, what do you know? I honestly did not know whether to laugh or cry. I asked God, “Are you kidding me? How much more of this can I take?”

I think I resonate with Becky’s sentiments in her last post in secretly finding joy in recounting how much pain I’ve been through. It's so much easier to whine and wallow in the pain instead of letting God bring you out of it. Maybe in some ways I am the one holding myself back from being at a better place.

Someone prayed for me once when I was really low. She said that she saw an image of me drowning in quicksand. At the time, I interpreted that quicksand to be external forces such as other people and other things out of my control. But I realized later that it was my own pain that I was drowning in, and I did have control of how far I wanted to sink into it. It’s not easy to get out (I’ve never actually been in quicksand but I imagine it isn’t an easy thing to pull yourself out of)… but not impossible either.

I think through the bad and the ugly though, God has shown me something good. I think as God brings up the difficult situations, I have learned how to respond. It is through this process that God is able to show me that He has brought me much further from where I was before, that in the face of some of life’s ridiculous moments, I can see them for just that and not as an excuse to jump back into that quicksand of pain.

The Stinky Side of Suffering (Today's Lent Reading)

I'd like to believe that I use to have quite a high threshold for pain and suffering. I would hold out and refuse medication for as long as I could if I had a migraine headache, fever, or sore throat. It was my way of proving that I could overcome suffering and pain and limit it to a battle of the will. The same sentiment was applied when I was faced with pain that dealt with feelings and emotions of the heart. In fact, I would secretly find joy in the fact that I could count the number I cried in college on one hand or how I was the kleenex-passer in movies that everyone else was sobbing in.

As I've gotten older, that mysterious threshold somehow disappeared. I pop every type of medication I can when I start feeling achey and find myself getting misty-eyed when something stirs my heart.

I cannot explain why suffering happens. In fact, it's has been the greatest mystery to me recently. I find myself despising with a passion when I hear others or the voice inside my head say it's "the will of God". For if God is for us....why is he still against us? (yes, I'm sure there's some long textbook theological answer someone can give me...but I'm not really asking)

Nouwen writes, "Therefore, instead of declaring anything and everything to be the will of God, we must be willing to ask ourselves where in the midst of our pains and sufferings we can discern the moving presence of God....We are poor listeners because we are afraid that there is something other than the love of God...We doubt what presents itself to us as love and are always on guard, prepared for disappointments."

I think that hit me between the eyes. That means we cannot "experience love without jealousy, resentment, revenge, or even hatred", which also means we will not experience suffering without these feelings too. When I experience vertigo, GERD, stiff lower back pain, heartache (boy, I sound like I'm 107 years old!), my initial feelings of resentment surface. I forget that in the midst of the physical or emotional suffering, I still remain in God's loving presence.

For me, that's the harder place to be. Yes, I'd rather monku (japanese slang for complain) so loud about the cards I've been dealt and allow my heart and mind to be filled with noise.

Yet, God calls me to commit to listening and to soak in His love without fear. It's a scary thing.

Update on Lent Group Meeting

Hi Everyone,

As I looked over the original dates, I realized that we planned to meet this upcoming Sunday, March 25 and not Palm Sunday. Let's plan on doing so...that way we won't run into the issue of meeting thrice the following week.

As for Good Friday, I recently learned that some of the House churches are planning to observe Good Friday together. If you are part of a Friday House Church, please do participate in that community, though I also realize that not all the House churches meet on Friday.

For those of you who are available and interested in meeting together on Friday, April 6 to observe Good Friday, Paul and I are open to your ideas of how to observe this day together. We are also open hosting a Seder Meal and having a time to share our reflections on this past Lent season. We can also worship as we have in the past Sundays through liturgy & Scripture reading. Please have a think about it and we can make a decision together at the end of our Lent meeting this upcoming Sunday.

I hope you are well and look forward to seeing you Sunday.

Lotto and Lent

I'd never purchased a lottery ticket in my life until recently when I purchased seventeen. Wait, actually, sixteen (Paul bought one of them) and this all started just before Lent season. Blame it on Lunar New Year's Eve when I was feeling rather auspicious and bought my first Lotto ticket, ever. Paul and I were at 99 Ranch Market, strolling around after lunch when the ticket machine outside the market caught my eye. I asked Paul whether he wanted to purchase a "Lucky Lunar New Year Lotto ticket" and he said, "sure." We pulled out our money and inserted it into the machine that quickly sucked in our delicious dollar bills.

Out printed our tickets. 6 random numbers on each. We made a mental note of whose was whose and I tucked our tickets away in my purse. Initially, we had no idea how to find out what the winning numbers were, so I looked up the California Lottery website and discovered that the numbers would air on TV in a few nights. We waited, then watched the drawing only to discover that we were two dollars poorer than we were the weekend before.

That was just the beginning.

With no jackpot winner, the Mega Millions jackpot continued to climb into the hundreds of millions and there I was, already late to work the following week, but pulling over to a local coffee shop to purchase five more tickets. A rush came over me as I thought about all the things I could do with the money. Things that I thought would certainly make me a good and worthy steward of those millions: give some away to charities, tithe (ahem, of course), invest in socially responsible companies, build safe-houses for survivors of human trafficking with job-training programs throughout S & SE Asia…yadda, yadda, yadda.

Needless to say, no jackpot for the Lucky Rabbit. Nope, not even for the Lucky Rabbit with ‘honorable’ intentions. If you do the math, you’ll figure between the second purchase and last week, there were 10 more tickets purchased before this burgeoning gambling addiction came to a halt. You might be thinking that I’m sharing this story in hopes for virtual absolution…and that could possibly be true. But what really hit home was thinking about my Lotto experience in light of Nouwen’s thoughts yesterday in Show Me the Way.

“There was nothing spectacular about Jesus’ life. Far form it! Even when you look at Jesus’ miracles, you find that he did not heal or revive people in order to get publicity. He frequently forbade them even to talk about it. His resurrection too was a hidden event. Only his disciples and a few of the women and men who had known him intimately before his death saw him as the risen Lord. Now that Christianity has become one of the major world religions and millions of people utter the name of Jesus every day, it’s hard for us to believe that Jesus revealed God in hiddenness. But neither Jesus’ life nor his death nor his resurrection were intended to astound us with the great power of God. God became a lowly, hidden, almost invisible God…”

The idea that Jesus reveals God to us in hiddenness challenges me. What I forget is that Jesus wasn’t looking for power or publicity in His ministry. That’s not how God revealed Godself in and through Jesus. That’s probably not how God wants to reveal Godself to and through me. Yet in our culture where “great notoriety means big money, and big money often means a large degree of power, and power easily creates the illusion of importance” I feel ashamed to admit that my hope of winning the jackpot betrayed my subconscious hope of gaining a large degree of power. Whether it’s power to make a good deal of positive change doesn’t seem to matter. What matters is that during this Lent season God’s presence isn’t going to be found in power as the world understands, but in weakness. God, help me accept and enter the paradox of Your hidden way in order to be set on the road of the spiritual life.

Usefulness ≠ Worth

Yesterday's reading about measuring our worth made me reflect upon how God truly values us. God doesn’t equate worth with pure usefulness. The meek will inherit the earth, Jesus said, right? Yet in this season as a first-year teacher--and this season of lent--I often identify my self-worth with what I can offer to someone else.

Am I only useful if I am a good husband? Does my value rest in my accomplishments as a teacher?

I grappled with this tension between worth and usefulness this week. Tuesday in a class discussion about modern-day slavery, one student said, “I wouldn’t help people enslaved in Africa. I don’t think they would rescue me if I were enslaved.” It was an honest comment that I appreciated, although it reminded me of some cold, harsh attitudes that exist.

After reading through Nouwen’s observations about worth, I returned to class Thursday to challenge my students. Is that what a human life is worth to you? Is that how you want to be valued? Are we only worth what “services/talents” we can offer somebody?

Many students answered with resignation. “That’s how our marketplace is set up,” one student said. “In our jobs, we only get paid for what we can do.” A few students disagreed. “If any of us have a heart, we’d do something to help that person who’s enslaved.” I shuddered at the dim display of compassion in my classroom. I hope and pray that God will touch more of those hearts.

He touched mine this week. I am thankful for the reminder that my value in Christ does not depend upon my teaching evaluations. I’m grateful God doesn’t equate my worth to my usefulness. As a newbie teacher, I feel inadequate at times, especially as papers pile high, stress rises and my patience grows short.

But God’s love for me is a pure gift. I did nothing to earn His favor. Sure, I have this crazy workload, but it is His abundant blessing. How many first-year college teachers get this amount of experience? How many people have a 10-minute commute to work? I have encouraging friends and family, and the most loving and supportive wife that anyone could hope for. He has deemed me worthy. God calls all of us worthy.