Tribal Stories: Groundswell

Her fingers nimbly secured the knot around the vine and the stake. She had done so many of those knots now that it had become second nature to her. Noticing the row of crops in particular with droopy leaves, she looked up at him. Their eyes met for a brief second before he picked up the watering jug and walked in her direction.

Her heart danced as the ground beneath them began soaking up the water. Much time had passed since her arrival in the southern lands, and this had become the new normal -- their new normal. Daylight hours were spent in the vegetable patch, tilling and sowing, watering and staking, and occasionally, harvesting. Their days were busy and their lives were full, and for a moment, she wondered in awe at the way that life was now.

The southern lands were not at all as she had expected. The first days were hard as she struggled to find her place. The desert people had a way of life they were committed to, and she struggled to even learn their pigeon dialect. It was a far cry from the routines of the city where everything was polished and refined. Desert life was rugged, and everyone dug deep, and it wasn't long before she discovered joy in painstaking labour and returning home with dirt under her nails.

"You're thinking again, aren't you?"

His voice interrupted her thoughts. She looked up at him as she whispered a word of thanks to the forces that brought them together. The early days at the vegetable patch felt foreign and strange, but he came along and helped her understand their work. Their pulse had been in sync right from the beginning, and it didn't take long for them to begin creating a life together.

"Just... life since the city walls... It's been a while, that's all."

He nodded and continued moving the big planters around, without saying a word. She watched from a distance as he exchanged a laugh with the farmer from the next block. Smiling, she picked up another stake and drove it into the ground. The desert chiefs had a particular way they liked the stakes to be in the ground. It frustrated her to no end that it was a long and tedious method that felt like a waste of resources, and she and he had had long conversations about better ways to work the land. The long days in the vegetable patch often ended with resignation that as long as the ways of the land remained unchanged, their hands were tied.

She thought back to her tribespeople and the last news that had came from the north. A new governance was about to descend, and there was much fear about what this could do to their way of life. Her heart ached for her tribespeople who had long held out for peace and the well-being of the people, and the possibility that the dawning of the new governance could be the undoing of everything they had worked towards. Driving the stake further and further into the ground, she thought of the numerous occasions where both she and he had similarly been witness or casualty to the decisions of a few in their times in the city walls. All the pain and hurt from the years of holding peace resurged within her.

"Any harder and that stake is going to snap."

The farmer's voice snapped her out of her thoughts. With one hand shading her eyes from the sunlight, she finally noticed that daylight was ending. Dusting off her hands, she mopped the sweat off her brows and headed for the water vessel where he and the farmer were washing up for the day.

"Don't interrupt; she's probably come up with another new way to irrigate the vegetable patch and will probably launch another monologue about the chiefs and how obstinate they are about the way things are done."

She narrowed her eyes as she flicked a few drops of water at him. He was jesting, she knew, but she was struggling to find humour in the present agony.

They washed in silence for a while, aware of the heaviness of the news from the north.

"Groundswell."

She and he exchanged a brief look before turning to the farmer. Like she and he, the farmer had his own story with chiefs and governors.

"Groundswell," the farmer said again. "The decisions of a few can very well change the way of life as the impact trickles down. But we, the ones who work the ground, we have it in us to undo the impact of those decisions. One stake at a time. One knot at a time. One seed at a time. We create our everyday for our people. That is something chiefs and governors cannot take away from us."

She and he nodded in silence. If the years since the exile had taught her anything, it was that no exile, chief or governance can take away the way of life that had been passed down from her mother and mothers, her grandmother and grandmothers, the sages and her tribespeople.

Her hands found their way to the rocks. He had put holes in them so she could put them on a rope to hang around her neck.

"Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind."
"You shall love your neighbour as yourself."
"Do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God"

As the last rays of sunlight faded for the day, she whispered words of blessing for her tribespeople in the north, and gave thanks for the wisdom from the generations. Most importantly, she gave thanks that the forces held them together.

Aotearoa Diaries: Job Hunting (Or Discerning Vocation)

I was talking to a friend the other day and we came to the realisation that this new season of my life isn't just a turning to a new page, but a whole new book altogether.

Even though I tried not to think about it in those exact terms, I had spent my first four years in Aotearoa as a missionary because my funding came from overseas (I know the term "missionary" means a lot more than that, but globalisation and all that--ask me about it another time). But this year marked a huge transition. It wasn't just a year of discerning what's next with The Bridge, it was also the year I'm transitioning out of "missionary" status--and not just because I got married to a Kiwi bloke. No, it's also the year I'm transitioning into doing things the way local ministers would.

For most local ministers, being bi-vocational is the only way for ministry to be healthily sustainable unless, of course, we are with one of the bigger denominations. (But this isn't a conversation about denominational affiliations--feel free to ask me about this in a different conversation). And while I had known this since starting up The Bridge back in 2014, it wasn't until June this year that I finally had a work visa that would allow me to work outside of the religious organisation that sponsored my Religious Worker visa.

Nearly three months after I received that work visa and at least 30 job applications later, I'm still unemployed. At the advise of a friend, I went to a recruitment agency and managed to get this close to securing a job, only to receive a phone-call last Friday to say the organisation had decided to hire someone else. Never mind that the recruitment agency had been impressed with my typing speed and data-entry accuracy, I didn't even get a second interview.

So of course, last weekend was spent with a lot of crying and frustration, and my poor husband got the raw end of it when I raged at him for not going to work because he had a tummy bug (he was feeling miserable, and I was jealous that he had a job to go to while all I could do was sit at home and play Suzy-Homemaker. Seriously, job envy is the dumbest). I got angry with the world because it felt like all I had to offer to the world had no monetary value attached to it. And then I got angry with the Christian voices in my head that I could hear saying, "But think about the eternal value..." and wanted to rage at them and ask if that meant they were offering to pay our bills. And then I got angry with myself that all my training and work experience had been within Christian circles and blamed that for my lack of success in the secular world. And then I got angry with all the nay-sayers who tried to convince me to work in the secular world before going into ministry (believe me, I tried--it just didn't work out that way) and how it seemed they had just been proven right.

When all the raging subsided, I heard my friend Brett's words of wisdom in my head. Something along the lines of... "'Rejection letters' sound so harsh. Why don't you think of it more like, 'vocation discernment communications'?" And then I thought about all the job offers I had received before I got my work visa. It offered a bit of comfort to know that I wasn't being unrealistic with my job search--the jobs requiring my skill sets were out there; the timing just hadn't been right. And then I thought, "Ok God, you win this one. But then when is the timing ever going to be right, and how the hell are we supposed to pay our bills in the meantime?"

And then I thought about all the company we had over the weekend. And the anger and laughter and exhaustion and Truth-seeking and Life Together we had done. And suddenly I didn't feel like as much of a loser for only doing things that had eternal value even though we still have no idea how we are going to pay the rest of our bills.

Some concerned friends had asked a little while ago if I would still be willing to give as much to Church and ministry, and whether I would still want to be a pastor if we couldn't even financially support ourselves. I gave a half-hearted yes because I knew it didn't sound rational, and even though in my heart of hearts, I knew it was a resounding yes, I was fatigued. But having gone the round-about way and actually doing a bit of hard questioning, my answer is still yes. Because pastoring and ministering is more than what I do--it's who I am (Shut up about giving me crap about acknowledging I'm a minister.)

And now back to the drawing board with job applications all over again. Hopefully the timing will be right sooner rather than later, but until then, just keep swimming. Because... What Would Dory Do?

Aotearoa Diaries: Re-imagining Sunday

Growing up in church, one of the markers of being a good Christian was if my friends knew to never invite me to do stuff on Sunday mornings because they would know I would be at church.

That was never a problem for me because I didn't have friends. (I wish I was kidding, but it's true. I didn't really learn social skills until I was in uni and living in a foreign land, and it was sink or swim to find social skills. But that's beside the point.)

After moving to Auckland and working in a church full time, I wrestled long and hard with how "Sunday = church" wasn't a norm for so many who considered themselves Christians. It wasn't necessarily that I had a personal issue with those who didn't show up at church faithfully every Sunday--no, for the most part, I understood where they were coming from.

It was more, how am I supposed to do my job and sustain our programme if we didn't have a faithful attendance?

In the first year after I left my full-time job in a traditional congregation, I convinced myself to take a break from the Sunday routine to allow room for healing. And the struggle was real. I missed having a weekly community, but more importantly, I missed the music and the congregational singing. I plugged myself into a congregation a friend pastored, and tried to find fringe ways to get involved so I could feel like I was still being a good Christian.

Then I began to realise the main reason I was doing that was so that if anyone was to ever doubt if I was being a faithful Christian/pastor, I could have an easy answer: "Hey, I AM going to church. Don't ask further questions about my relationship with God or my ministry life or any of that."

But I was drowning in my own inauthenticity. It wasn't that being in a traditional congregation wasn't fulfilling my spiritual need, or whatever the new-age/millenialist term for that is. It was that I knew in my heart of hearts I was created to imagine a different kind of church for the other misfits like me. But I was too busy covering up my insecurities about looking unChristian to venture into this unknown of Church of the Misfits.

And then I met Stephen, who was at basically the same place where I was with regards to our relationship with the traditional Sunday congregation. And it became slightly easier--and slightly not. Being raised in church meant that we had been brainwashed learnt to believe if we were to take our relationship with each other seriously, we needed to do better about our relationship with Church.

So for a while, we tried Sunday evening church. We found somewhere we liked enough, but the question kept coming back: Is this really where we should be, or are we just feeling guilty about not being at church on Sunday?

There was one particular Sunday evening that became a turning point for me. Some friends whom we hadn't seen in a while were popping in for an afternoon coffee. It got closer and closer to the time we were supposed to leave for church, and Stephen and I started getting a little antsy about how to tell them we had to leave shortly. But something prompted us to wait, so we did. The conversation turned a corner and we found ourselves learning about our friends' thoughts on church and why they were no longer a part of a traditional congregation.

When we eventually pulled into the church parking downtown, we both had the same thought. We may be walking in to the church building ten minutes after the service had started, but it was a no-brainer. That last little bit of conversation over coffee was more Church than either of us had experienced in a while.

I don't know for sure if that was when it started, but it wasn't long before we gave ourselves freedom on the weekends for encounters like that. For a while, we still tried to make sure we made it to Sunday evening service, but more often than not, we would have had friends popping in and out all weekend long. Our kitchen would be a complete mess after brunch and pizzas and chips and hot chocolates and dumplings and nachos and rugby that trying to head out the door for Sunday church just became too hard. And I began to understand at a deeper level why I struggled so much with the Sunday programming when I was full-time at a traditional congregation.

So what is the Church of the Misfits going to look like? We're slowly experimenting with a few ideas. But it probably wouldn't all take place on a Sunday.

Dusting Off The Pages

It's been over a year since my last post here.

It isn't that I haven't wanted or tried to write, but the words that would appear on this screen made me angry with myself whenever I tried. And so I would walk away, make myself a cup of tea, try to start again and just get frustrated.

So a year went by.

In the year that passed, I re-found affirmation and lost faith in myself and my vocation again just as quickly.
I re-found faith in the institution that housed my childhood idealisms and watched that institution shatter all over again.
I re-found hope in community and slowly stepped away as what was real about community slowly shook off my idealisms again

And I sat in silence.
I wanted to speak, but the words would not come.

So a year went by.

In the year that passed, I watched as bombs fell on the just and the unjust.
I read headlines as the issue of homelessness in our city gained increasing awareness.
I watched as voices on both sides of the spectrum of everything that has to do with "equality" or sexism or racism or some other -ism argued their perspectives on what was good for humanity.

And I sat in silence.
I wanted to say Yes, and Amen, but my fear of backlash made me too uneasy.

And so I sat in silence.
And I sat in silence.

So a year went by.

Compassion fatigue had reached a new low.
I had become afraid that even if I were to speak out about something I believed in, someone was going to pick up on that article or that personality or that cause, and point out all its flaws and inadequacies.

And so I sat in silence.
And I sat in silence.

So a year went by.

And I sat in silence for so long that I became ashamed.
Whatever happened to the zeal and passion to change the world that was once burning a holy flame?
When did it die, and how did I not notice it?

And so I sat in silence.
And I hung my head in shame.
And I sat in silence.

So a year went by.

And then I stumbled upon a box of matches the other day.
I put it away in the drawers because it was cluttering up the room.
But I kept going back to the drawer and picking it up.

The problem was, I liked playing with fire way too much to keep the box in the drawer.
And so I picked it up and struck one of the matches.

And I realised my desire to set the world on fire to make change had died
But the spark
The spark would never go away.

And I went and put on another pot of hot chocolate
One cup of hot chocolate at a time.

It isn't that I no longer believe in the power of words.
But it isn't my ikigai to set the world aflame through words alone.

One cup of hot chocolate at a time.
And if that cup of hot chocolate is to mean friendship, then I celebrate.

One cup of hot chocolate at a time.
And if that cup of hot chocolate is to mean solidarity, then I celebrate.

One cup of hot chocolate at a time.
And if that cup of hot chocolate is to mean believing in another's ability to change the world, then I celebrate.

One cup of hot chocolate at a time.
And if that cup of hot chocolate is to mean sitting in silence without it being disconcerting, then I celebrate.

One cup of hot chocolate at a time.

This isn't just the turn of a page, but a whole new book.

One cup of hot chocolate at a time.