Lisa Lewton

Advent Week 2 – Expectations

(This week’s devotion is a letter written to the not-my-favorite-person who first added candy to Advent calendars.)

Dear Sir or Ma’am:

Why? Why did you take a perfectly lovely German Lutheran tradition and transform it into a mild nightmare for moms? Whoever you are, I suspect you are not a parent. You might be one of those beloved and sneaky aunts who spoils the kids and runs away before bedtime.

Excuse my annoyance. This is not entirely your fault. It’s just that each year I hope to invite my kids into the mystery of this season, only to find myself yelling over the yelling when one of my three kids might get one more piece of candy than another. Really, you should have seen this coming! What did you expect? You have messed with the expectations. Now my kids expect the wait for Jesus’ arrival to be a road paved with chocolate. You changed the Advent Calendar to a sweet milk chocolate countdown and I have to tell you I’m 95% cacao bitter about it.

I’ve tried workarounds. Last year, I constructed a homemade Advent Calendar with a variety of surprises in individual paper bags. Each day, the kids opened a bag to discover a Bible verse they had to look up, with a small piece of candy (not always chocolate!) or instructions to do something kind for a sibling or a pair of socks or something silly. It was Pinterest-worthy and too much work to do a second time. It will live in my memory as that time I accomplished something Pinterest-worthy.

This year, I hunted for an Advent Calendar on Etsy…until I wondered what it meant that I might spent $50+ to help my kids get ready for the arrival of the Prince of Peace, when actually the calendar becomes a battleground?

Excuse me if I might be channeling too much Cindy Lou Who here, but oh my goodness it is a challenge to slow down the countdown to Christmas Eve! The sweet surprises in the Advent Calendar risk putting us in the fast lane when Advent is a slow lane kind of season. The slowness is necessary to absorb or breathe in the mystery of divine love packaged in a slippery infant body and delivered in an unseen corner of the world by an exceptionally young woman. The addition of chocolate, you see, sweetens the rugged and ragged mystery.

I expect chocolate makes everything better, including the Christmas story. But is it possible the daily dose of chocolate might forget this story is sweet enough without the candy? How sweet it is that God, so far away in the heavens, could not stand to be so far away from you. How sweet it is when God finally threw God’s arms up in the air when humanity kept messing it all up, and finally did what we could not: save ourselves. How sweet that we can expect radical hope every single day, beyond the rugged and ragged scene laid out before us in our everyday lives.

Sheepishly, I will admit to you, chocolate pusher, that in the end I stuffed some candy into 24 little bags and shoved them into a big Christmas cookie tin because it did not feel right to be missing an Advent Calendar! See what you’ve done? You have planted in my brain the expectation that candy must accompany all 24 days of Advent. <sigh>

I will choose to believe your intentions were good. You called attention to Advent using something ordinary and yummy. I will choose to believe you did not expect your idea would become so profitable. It can be tricky to know what to expect when something new is unleashed into the world. In the first century, no one expected a crying newborn to be God’s love unleashed into the world, but God does not adjust to any of our Advent expectations. God’s love for all the rugged and ragged among us does not fit in any of those tiny boxes or bags where sweet treats can be found for 24 days. Its sweetness outdoes all the chocolate in the world.

Signing off, slightly less bitter in North Dakota,

Lisa

PRAYER PRACTICE

Light a candle and make a list of expectations God might have for you this Advent season. God does not expect you to supply your children with daily surprises, or for you to locate the perfect present, or to make everyone else’s holiday a smooth ride. What God expects from you might invite you to be more gentle on yourself and stay in the slow lane.

Advent Week 1 – Promises

(Photo by Cathal Mac an Bheatha on Unsplash)

My daughter finds it funny to remind me of the time her principal called our home during the day to tell me she had fallen from the monkey bars and, we would later learn, fractured a bone in her arm. For whatever reason, Caller ID described the school’s number as “Private Caller,” ostensibly “Annoying Solicitation.” My choice to let the phone ring will be an everlasting tale for her to hold over my head. Forever and ever. “Whatever you do,” she instructs her brothers, “don’t call mom if you break your arm!”

In some way, I had broken an unspoken promise that whenever my six-year-old called or needed me, I would immediately answer the phone. Of course, it did turn out fine after the school called my husband who called me. She did not wait long for her mom to rush to her side! But it did seem the world shifted ever so slightly. She gained some awareness that our lives are not one life but two separate lives.

Parents make many promises to a child, perhaps each of them unspoken. There are basic promises to feed, clothe and show love. And there are social promises to equip a child to make friends and swim in the larger world of peers. There is a promise to be present for the conversation that needs to happen, to listen to a worry, to talk through a dilemma, to help navigate the tough spots, to keep the cookie jar from an empty state.

It could be that parents construct an entire foundation under kids with our promises. No parents keeps them all perfectly, so as we build the foundation with promises, we also build it with empathy and forgiveness. Promise-keeping happens to be the language of Holy Baptism. God promises to hold onto the baptized from this life into the next, and to love us even when we let God down. In turn, hearing God’s unconditional promise of love for us, we make promises, too. Our promises are designed for the well-being of our neighbor.

At weddings and baptisms, I take delight in disclosing to the people making promises (couples and parents/guardians) they are making promises that are impossible to keep. I assure them they will not keep every promise made in the rites of marriage or baptism. They giggle nervously, but I hope my disclosure relieves some pressure.

If we were meant to keep promises perfectly, God would have improved the prototype for humanity. But we are broken people who break the promises we make to one another, even though we know we should not. We act selfishly and out of resentment. We struggle with addiction or get tangled up in an abusive relationship. We get too busy and out of the routine to take our kids to church. Being human requires forgiveness and new starts, or to quote Ann Lamott, earth is forgiveness school. Which is why God’s promise of unconditional love will hang over your head like my daughter’s everlasting tale of the time I chose not answer the phone! This umbrella promise covers you and any mistake you make, including the small mistakes like neglecting to answer the phone, along with the bigger and heavier ones.

In this first week of Advent, we inch closer to a promise God had made long before Jesus was born. Throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, the promise of Jesus’ coming is whispered on each page. The patriarchs of the first book of the Bible tried to follow God and failed, just like the Israelites who entered the story later on, and the promise remained. Through creation and judges and prophets, through insignificant and unnamed people and rich and famous ones, the promise of a Savior is carried from page to page until finally, the promise is a child. On the page we discover an impoverished couple on an obligatory journey into Bethlehem because a king had promised to harm them if they didn’t.

God’s unending promise to love you can be, at times, difficult to hear. The whisper is too low, like a handful of lovely people in their seasoned years who have admitted to me after worship: “I can hear the man’s voice but not yours.” The Bible is like that, too. We can hear God’s promise loud and clear on some pages but not others. We hear it in Isaiah, but turn the pages back and the pitch is too low in the book of Judges (not bedtime reading, that book.) And yet the promise is on that dreadful page, too!

God’s promise cannot be erased or compromised, and I wonder if the is so gracious as to become hard to believe. Can you believe you cannot undo God’s promise of mercy? It is a wild and unwieldy promise, and it is yours to keep.

PRAYER PRACTICE

Light a candle and write a list of promises you are trying to keep. One by one, name them and remind yourself, beloved child of God, how God’s promise to love you is an unconditional promise of mercy. Let God’s forgiveness bring you to forgive yourself, too. With a marker, write “I Love You, I Promise. Love, God” over all of your words.

Thank You For Endings & Beginnings

It is with a touch of embarrassment that I admit to you the podcast episode I chose the other day. Among the bazillions of entertaining, educational, and inspiring episodes, I chose to listen to…the episode all about paper planners.

Because I am a nerd.

Allow me to demonstrate.

Every turn of the planner page to a new week or new month is delicious, like discovering a new blend of coffee or new trail to walk. Oh, the possibilities! New flavors, new sights and sounds to explore, blank pages on which to transcribe my day-to-day life as I expect it might unfold. Notice, a blank page can only be found when the previous page is finished. For a new thing to begin, another must end.

The end of December will be accompanied by another ending for myself and our congregation. We will say goodbye to my excellent pastoral partner and his excellent family. Together, St. John will bless them on the way to his next congregational call and to the place where God is calling their family to begin. The turn of the paper planner to 2022 will mark a significant ending and beginning for me as a pastor and for the church I serve.

I’ll admit with less embarrassment than my earlier admission that it wasn’t long ago I dreaded the idea of this particular ending. Pastors are human and we come and go and no goodbye comes as a complete surprise. Even so, transition and change you well know, can be tiring. Prior to my current pastoral partner, three pastors came and went in five years while I remained on staff. As trying as the changes were, those beginnings and endings, endings and beginnings, led to my current partner and a partnership that has been joyful and fun.

Goodbye might be no one’s favorite word, yet at the same time, it might be a word that turns the page to something new. To be clear, new is not always better or easier or more fun. New might fit like the wrong size of tights!

When someone retires, it often takes time for it to feel right. The new is confusing, like finding your way in a new school, or when the grocery store does this terrible thing and shuffles food around and all you want is your favorite box of crackers. Or when someone you love dies and the new page of that planner is missing entirely because you don’t even know how another day could begin.

What occurred to me as I listened to the paper planner people is the silly comfort I find in having words on the page of my planner. It brings such comfort when my daily plans and wider dreams are words on the page of a lovely Rifle Paper Co. spiral bound, for example. As though writing down plans and dreams will assure that they happen, as though the loveliness of the paper will protect me from the endings.

Life, of course, is more than plans and dreams. It is endings and beginnings, pages and pages of the planned and mostly unplanned. It pains me to admit that the unplanned may be the most valuable of all. Probably not in the thick of it, but looking in the rearview mirror, you can see growth and maturity and deeper faith is written where you expected ordinary, stable plans.

Which is why the type of paper planner you buy isn’t as important as using a pencil. At least the pencil might remind you that plans are subject to change, and beginnings follow endings.

Thank You, Friends

There are a handful of decisions that change everything. Looking in the rearview mirror of your life, you can spot a choice you made that led to this, while chances are a different choice would have led to a significantly different that. Where you live, how you spend your time, whether to work outside your home, whom you married or didn’t, whether to have kids, whether you go to church. Just as Annie Dillard sagely said, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” the choices we make accumulate into a life.

Once upon a time, we moved to this town and settled into a house. After many months, Marcus and I made a decision to invite a few couples for a wine and cheese party. I vaguely remember handwriting invitations asking people to bring a favorite bottle of wine and dropping the invitations in the mail. I also vaguely remember a long Google search to learn how to pair wine and cheeses, due to the fact I knew nothing about either.

Roughly 14 years later, these friendships are like roots that keep us planted. Whenever my husband and I imagine life in a different town, we cannot imagine life without these friends. They have helped us move to a new house, they have cared for our kids, brought us homemade food in busy and stressful seasons, held us in prayer, vacationed with us, and have frankly made us better humans. It is a profound privilege to be welcomed into someone’s life, and a generous gift to discover mutual encouragement and grace.

We seem to be getting older, this group of friends. One by one, our kids graduate and move away and through each change, we are steadied by our friendship roots. Last night, we celebrated Friendsgiving. I saved time and stamps by texting them an invitation. I asked them to bring both food and a story. Using Priya Parker’s 15 Toasts, I nervously asked if they would come with an origin story from their own life, and suggested bonus points if it was a story their spouse hadn’t heard.

We drew back the curtain on our lives and raised our glasses to our moms, to healing, to choices that led to something good. And we raised our glasses to decisions that led to a moment of friends gathered around a table. I use the word decision, and yet I am not certain that word fits.

Another look in the rearview mirror suggests God has a way of surrounding you with the people you need at just the right time. Although we did make a decision to invite people to our home so long ago, a decision that fills me with gratitude, God had already brought these particular people to this town, just like us.

Trusted friends are worth more than anything money could ever buy, even though it is a risk to open the door and let them see your life for real. What you may discover in doing so is that life requires good company. And toasts.

Thank You, Saints

(Photo by Cosmic Timetraveler on Unsplash)

Fran shared a treasured recipe for Oatmeal Carmelita Bars. Morris taught me how not to drive a motorized wheelchair down a hallway. Jan upholstered a rocking chair before my first child was born. Dorothy gently suggested I needed a different sweater to go with my clergy shirt. Glen invited me to decorate wooden Christmas ornaments with him at a nursing home. Marilyn gave me voice lessons. And Jackie taught me never to guess a woman’s age based on her hair color.

After my seminary coursework was completed and I moved through internship and my first call, the lessons I learned were taught by the saints. Saints, as we remember them yearly in the church the first week of November, are not perfect people but human people. Saints are the broken and lovely sinners whom Christ redeems. And saints can be excellent teachers. If you close your eyes sometime and recall the saints who have shaped your life for the better, the reel might surprise you. One by one, you will recall moments when God provided comfort, levity, wisdom, or strength through someone who showed up in your life. The Spirit stirred up a conversation or set you in a particular place at a particular time, and there you were: the recipient of a holy moment.

Thank you, saints, for the holy moments.

I could not have been prepared for the level of trust people granted me in my mid- to late-20’s as I practiced being their pastor, but I can only assume such relationships are built when trust is mutual. I needed them as much as they may have needed me. I needed them to teach me the church is broken and lovely saints, and perhaps I could be one of them, too. I was made better by their food and wisdom, their forgiveness and invitations. In return, I offered the assurance that all we need has already been given to us in the unbreakable promise of Christ’s mercy.

It is helpful for me to reminisce back to these early saints and holy moments. In the 17 short years I’ve been a pastor, the church has dramatically changed. Even if these early saints are still around (a couple of them may be) they, too, would be part of a Christian church disrupted by a pandemic, in which mutual trust between leaders and parishioners has been tested. We (churches) have not made it this far into a pandemic unscathed, I think. We are still a wobbly bunch, forming our opinions and trying to discern what lines are being drawn.

We are still broken and lovely sinners, we who are church. We draw lines Christ has already erased. We confuse political opinions with religious ones. We share memes instead of recipes for Oatmeal Carmelita Bars. We too easily ignore how deeply we might influence one another’s lives for the better. Alas, one cannot be a saint without also being a sinner. And so, we wobble together, steadied only by that unbreakable and eternal promise of Christ’s mercy.

I Just Texted My Kid During School

Not so long ago, I could not fathom why a parent would send a text message to their own kid knowing that kid is at school. Can’t it wait until after school? I haughtily inner-commented. I mean really, they’re in school!

I remembered those haughty inner-comments this morning when I texted my kid a question related to Thanksgiving break…while he was at school. Thanksgiving is several weeks away, deeming this question non-urgent. And yet, texting often leads to quicker answers which leads to quicker knowing and isn’t that normal?!

Immediacy is the new normal. Would I wait eight hours to ask my son a quick question? If it meant avoiding disruptions in school, absolutely yes. The truth is, however, any number of people outside of the school building also have access to him via his phone. My not sending a quick text does not mean he won’t be disrupted.

Like so many phone-related shifts in our lives, this one happened fast. Suddenly, a student could be anywhere in the world and in a classroom at the same time. With peers inside and outside of the building all at once. Which sounds like most workplaces. We can simultaneously be in a work meeting with colleagues and in a family vacation text string. Digital life often allows/requires us to be in two places at once.

Perhaps texting my kid while he is at school is prepping him for the 21st century work world. Ours is a world unlike any worker or workplace has ever seen before. It requires the ability to maintain eye contact in a conversation happening in the room, and to know how to navigate the other perhaps dozens of conversations unfolding more slowly on your phone. You are constantly triaging which conversation requires your attention.

Exhausting!

But here we are. We live in this time with particular people doing particular work using a particular kind of technology. It isn’t perfect, but neither were telegrams, or the party line system, or any other kind of technology humans have invented. As always, kids adapt quicker than adults. My kids can probably help me learn how to better find my way, after he answers the non-urgent Thanksgiving question.

Why Do I Do That?

Every Saturday begins with me believing I can get so much done and ends with me wondering why I didn’t get all those things done. It’s called planning fallacy. In 1979, I was a busy one-year old when Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky put a name to underestimating how long it takes to complete something. Although I’m aware that I underestimate how long things will take me (including this blogpost), I keep doing it every single Saturday.

So why do I do that!?!

For one thing, Wayfair.com, where an amazing deal might be a click away! I also love clearing out my email inbox, among other ridiculous and unnecessary tasks. But most of all, there is something about the liberty of moving from one thing to the next at a leisurely pace. You don’t need to know my husband well to know he manages to overcome the planning fallacy. He is efficient and determined and lets nothing get in his way, such as Wayfair.com.

I, on the other hand, slow down on Saturdays. Read a chapter of a book, take an extra walk with the dog, notice the leaves peeling off the trees, enjoy an episode of Schitt’s Creek while cleaning the kitchen, dream of a different color on the wall, bother my kids with questions.

And at the end of the day when few of my plans actually happened, wonder where the time went.

Do I Really Know My Kids?

Occasionally I wonder which conversations with me my kids will remember. Will they remember our conversation related to their grades or their friends? Will they remember telling me the story of what happened one day at school? Will our talk after they failed at something stick with them?

Parenting is basically hugs and a series of conversations, both of which become trickier as kids get bigger. At the same time hugs and conversations grow trickier, kids’ worlds rapidly widen. Their friends become more worldly and so do they. There are dangerous rabbit holes on their screens and in all of the places their freedom leads them into. In teenage-dom, there may be a direct proportion between how much kids need to talk and how little they actually do.

This is why I loved the latest podcast by Laura Tremaine called “10 Questions To Ask Your Kids”! Her kids are slightly younger than mine, but her 10 questions still fit. I wrote each down on an index card to park at our kitchen table. Will my kids be excited to discover these questions I will try to ask them? I am sure at least 1/3 of them will! Really, all that we ever do as parents is try things. We try to be present, try to be patient, try to serve vegetables, try to understand. And so, I can try to ask questions that I hope might help me better know these humans whom I see and usually eat with on a daily basis.

While her 10 questions are a tool to hear from kids, they are also a way for kids to get to know their parents (or grandparents). If you were to tell them who your best friends are these days, what might you say? As Tremaine points out, will your kids (or grandkids) know the answer? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe you stay connected with someone whom they do not know or haven’t met. You have a story to tell to explain the people with whom you are choosing to share your time.

You have plenty of stories to tell, and so do the younger people in your life. What an amazing moment for them to know you really want to hear their stories! I hope Tremaine’s questions inspire you, too.

Kelly Corrigan’s Lovely Oh Wells

You know those moments when the words find you. When you read a passage in a book that names exactly how you feel. Or a phrase from a song touches you. It happens to preachers, when someone listening thanks you for words they needed that you may or may not have said.

This 6-minute episode of a podcast found me at the right moment. I’m a fan of Kelly Corrigan, author, podcaster, and person who wonders out loud. She also wrote a lovely children’s book called “Hello World!”, calling young humans into the wonder of the world and its inhabitants.

Back to her podcast episode, where she gracefully names some of the disappointments we experience and concludes with the refrain: “Oh well.” These two words are like Teflon for the moments we simply must let go. They resemble the life-giving reminder to be gentle on yourself. And they sound like Jesus’ promise of peace, unlike anything the world gives (John 14).

There are some reminders that never completely sink in, or maybe they do, and they’ve sunk so deep we hardly notice them. As your life changes, however that may be, and the story isn’t the one you had in mind, “Oh well.” The earth spins and we start over. We can cling to regrets and grudges, or we can let them go. “Oh well.”

No circumstance changes who you already are, beloved human of God. “Oh well” keeps us from shooting for perfection. You are you with your flaws and your everything. “Oh well.” You are loved just as you are, and that is well enough.

Renaming Mondays

If you could rename today because you believe “Monday” is a worn out word, what might it be? What would you call this day if you could call it anything you choose? Let’s pretend that next week on this day, you could invent a completely new name, and every week after. (I realize this would be confusing for Amazon deliveries, and would eventually get annoying. But for now, shed your practicality. We’re pretending!)

I might call today “Bake and Breathe Day”, which puts the word “Monday” to shame. Today might be your back-to-work/school day, but for me it is a day off. I would choose this clever name due to the way feeding teenage boys seems easier if I do some baking on my day off. And, I try to spend some of this day taking a deep breath and writing (like right now).

Even though you cannot rewrite the calendar, you can rename this day for yourself. You can look around your life and note what it is that you need today. If today is tough, could it be “Please More Coffee or Water Day”? “A Walk Might Help Day”? “Be Extra Gentle on Myself Day”?

Maybe you love Mondays because you return to the action of the week. “Bring It On Day” might work. Or just, “Ready Enough Day”.

Last Friday, what I needed most was a long walk by myself. That day could have been called “Long Lonely Walk Day”, except that sounds way too somber! Also it might already be the name of a Western. I can’t be sure.

This might be a chemo or radiation or dialysis day for you. “Healing Day” fits. It might be a day you have to face something you happily avoided all weekend. “Reckoning Day” is nicely dramatic. My Tuesdays often become “No More Freaking Cookies Day” after I’ve done all that baking (and sampling) the day before.

A day has a tendency to get away from you. But this is the only one like it you’ll ever get. You have a particular need today, you beautiful human, that you get to name. What might you rename this day? I hope you will think of one, and I’ll give you a few others. Today and every day (even Mondays) are your “God Is With Me” days. Or, “Covered In Mercy Day”. Or, “I Don’t Care To Name A Day, But I Do Care That God Names Me Beloved.” Hmmm, kind of long. Good luck.

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