A Lesson in Humility

by Rev. Laura Barclay

A few days ago, during a respite from one of the many polar vortexes that have blown through Louisville, I took my dog for a walk. My neighbor called me over.

“Hey there! I saw you fall the other day.”

“Oh, yeah. I slipped on the ice.” I laughed nervously and stared at my dog.

“Yeah, you fell. Then you laid there a while. You looked like you were hurt, and I thought you might have moaned a little. I was about to come over and check on you, but you stirred a bit, fell back down, pulled yourself up, and then limped slowly inside your house. I thought it was best not to disturb you, since you were probably icing your wound.”

Thanks, neighbor. He keeps an eye out for those around him and not a lot makes it past him, but I could’ve done without the painstaking retelling of one of my most recent examples of clumsiness. The only thing that makes this story even more embarrassing is that I was running back inside the house to change my shoes when I fell. I had realized I was about to take my sick dog to the vet in my house shoes instead of my snow boots.

We’ve all been there—tripping on the street and moving quickly along like we just decided to change our pace, as if anyone besides children would suddenly decide to start skipping instead of walking. Or maybe we spill a drink on our shirt and then decide to wear our coat to cover it for the rest of the evening. “Oh no, I’m not uncomfortable. I love sweating.”

But here’s the thing: life is too short to pretend we are perfect. As a recovering perfectionist, I should know. This means that where I would normally get very anxious about completing a project or meeting a new group of people, I now just try to do the best I can. If I fail or people don’t like me, so what? Neither of those so-called potential failures should be the measure of success to Christians, who are commanded to love their God and their neighbors as themselves. That’s easier said than done, and I can still get very anxious about the smallest things. But having a mantra of “so what?” has been helpful during those moments when I screw up or my neighbor slowly regales me with tales of my face plant or I just can’t seem to get it together.

Paul advises a church in Romans 12:3, “For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.” Paul’s point is that we are all part of the body of Christ, and each one of us has gifts and a role to play. We don’t have to be perfect or have it all together. We are meant to work in community to help one another and embody the love of Christ. We can fall down, mess up, be awkward and fail. Each one of us is beautiful despite (and even because of) our shortcomings.

You are a member of the body of Christ. You are gifted and special. Let’s work together to share this message with all God’s children.

This article also appears on Next Sunday Resources.

Who Is My Neighbor?

Sikh Temple in Fremont, CA. Photo courtesy of Elizabeth Edwards

By Rev. Elizabeth Edwards

I had just arrived at the Y on Sunday when I saw the news scroll across the screen: MASS SHOOTING AT SIKH TEMPLE. Two weeks before, I would have responded the way many of us have who are dreadfully accustomed to hearing about such shootings: a feeling of sadness and shock, a prayer uttered for the victims, and a return to my routine. But Sunday was different. I stood holding my breath. Eleven days earlier, the Lakeside pilgrims had visited the Sikh Temple in Fremont, CA. I won’t say it lessened the horror of the event when I saw Oak Creek, WI, appear on the screen, but I did feel a sense of relief that the people who had welcomed us so warmly were safe: people who had brought their children to the Temple for a program akin to our VBS, people whose faith obligates them to defend anyone who is being attacked even to the point of risking their own lives, people who expressed to us concern over being mistaken for terrorists because of their dark skin and head coverings, people gathered for fellowship and prayer.

Youth & adults from Lakeside Baptist at the Sikh Temple in
Fremont, CA. Participants visited many communities of faith
to learn about different worship, beliefs & devotional practices.
Photo courtesy of Elizabeth Edwards.

On Monday, I received an e-mail from Rick Sample, the CBF missionary in Fremont who had made the visit with us. He and his wife Lita had taken food to the Temple and had expressed their prayers and support on behalf of CBF and their Christian neighbors. Rick was surprised to learn that they were the only Americans who had reached out to their Sikh neighbors.

The past few days have convinced me more than ever that making an effort to know and understand our neighbors of all colors and languages and faiths is not only important for fostering respect and cooperation but also vital to the health of our communities and a response that our faith in Christ necessitates. Our pilgrimage experiences were a significant first step in opening our hearts and minds to others. Perhaps because of the encounters we had in California, some of our youth will be inspired to devote their lives to reach across lines of religion and race and economic status to work for peace. Or perhaps one of us will have an opportunity to speak up when we hear hate-filled or misinformed speech. But we shouldn’t have to board an airplane to realize our responsibility.

It is not acceptable that we have come to tolerate or even expect violence, whether in Colorado or in a Sikh Temple or in the streets of Rocky Mount. It is not okay that I don’t make the same effort to know and understand my neighbors across town when I have traveled across the country to do so. Each of us is called to do our part to wage peace in the face of such violence and hatred. The example of Christ, and that of our Sikh neighbors, demands it.

Elizabeth Edwards is the Associate Minister at Lakeside Baptist Church in Rocky Mount, NC. This article originally appeared in their church newsletter, The Link.

Running Lessons

by Dr. Guy Sayles

It has been odd but good: over the last month or so, when I have been jogging through town, people have spontaneously decided to join me. I’m still not sure why. Maybe it’s because I was moving so slowly, they liked the idea of winning an easy race. Or maybe I looked so winded and in pain, they thought I might need them to call 911. I don’t know why they joined me, but I am glad they did.

I was running on Hilliard, just past the Orange Peel, and a young man carrying a backpack jogged with me for about five minutes. I couldn’t understand very well what he was saying to me as we went up and down the Hilliard hills, but he said something about being in training for the army and something about not being in very good shape. When he decided to drop back to walking, he thanked me for the company.

I was running up Market Street, near the Thomas Wolfe House, and an older man I know from the streets called-out, “Hey, Rev, let me run with you.” I said, “Come on.” He had on heavy shoes, and he seemed to have had a liquid breakfast and lunch, but he ran with me for a couple of blocks. We talked briefly about how getting older, with all its aches and pains, is better only than the alternative. We mostly laughed at ourselves.

Then, this past Thursday evening, as I was coming down College Street, I passed a young man and a little boy, father and son, who were walking. The boy was 4 or 5 years old. He was wearing blue jeans, a t-shirt, a leather-like jacket, and tennis shoes that lit-up with each step he took. As I passed them, the boy started running, too. It stunned his dad, who started jogging along behind us, and it surprised me. His dad said, “He’s just so excited to run; I hope you don’t mind.” I told him I thought it was one of the best things that had happened to me that day. I matched my pace to the little boy’s who would run like crazy for a while and then slow down almost to a walk. I told him how fast he was and how cool his shoes were. As with my older friend on Market Street, more than anything else, we just laughed. I’m not even exactly sure what we laughed about what, other than how weird but wonderful it was, that three people who didn’t know each other at all managed to play for a few minutes.

I’ve been surprised how much those runners have been on my mind. That young man with difficult speech, reporting to the army: What will happen to him? Will he make it through basic training? If he does, what kind of role will the army give him? I’m guessing, from the quick impressions I got, that there won’t be a lot of options for him. Will he, before long, be doing grunt work of some kind in harm’s way in Afghanistan? Did he enlist because he wanted to or because it was his last chance, a kind of forced choice? Do his parents know he’s enlisted? What are they feeling?

And, my friend from the streets is someone I have been seeing around town for some years now. I don’t know a lot about him, but I know he’s a Vietnam vet who saw bitter action in Cambodia, and that he was never the same after he came back home. I don’t think much is going to change for him; I am not even sure how much he believes things can or should change. I know that he sometimes drinks too much to forget for a while his days in the killing fields and to numb the shock he still feels over how those days changed him.

When the air turns cold and the wind howls through downtown, I will be worried about him and the other homeless men and women who will scramble to stay warm. I wonder what it feels like to spend most of everyday trying to figure out how to get enough of whatever it is they think they need.

And, what about that little boy and his young father? What will their futures be like? I don’t know, but I hope and pray that, whatever happens, whatever success they enjoy and failure they endure, they will always feel free to break into a run and to laugh for no reason at all with a complete stranger. The pioneering environmentalist Rachel Carson said that the one gift all children should have is “a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.” I hope that little boy will keep his sense of wonder. I know he won’t always wear light-up shoes, but I hope he will always know that he shines and the world is radiant. Such wonder belongs, though we lose track of it, to all God’s children—all of us.

In my every-day life—hurrying in and out of stores and restaurants, hustling from one meeting to the next, rushing from one event to another, and scrambling to get tasks crossed-off my to-do list—I run past people. I miss their stories, their hurts and hopes, their disappointments and dreams. I miss chances to cry and to laugh, to listen and to talk, to know and be known, to help and be helped, to love and be loved. I’m busy and preoccupied, so I miss a lot. I especially miss opportunities to experience Jesus, to offer and receive him, in encounters with the people I run by.

How much of my hurrying—how much of yours?—is driven by confusion about the purpose of life and by a distorted understanding of what it means to be successful?

Guy Sayles is the pastor of First Baptist Church of Asheville, NC. This article was originally posted on his blog, From the Intersection.

Dig Some Wells for Others Along the Way

By Dr. Mark T. White

A Winston-Salem columnist reminded his readers that self-focused living now surrounds us, and we cannot deny the escalation of “meism” in our society today. Delayed gratification is basically non-existent. Replenishing what we have taken is rarely a priority. Oblivious to the biblical principal that future generations suffer from the myopia of their ancestors, people continue to take, take, and take.

Roger Pearman illustrates from his own experience how we can reverse this and find hope. When he was five years old he was spending a long, hot summer at his great-grandparents farmhouse 50 miles past Spivey’s Corner in Sampson County, N.C. Play was hard due to the heat. Every few minutes he had to find a cool spot to rest.

On one particular day, he dipped the bucket into the well and pulled the water up. Once he had the bucket of cool water he poured it over his head and felt a wave of coolness sweep him.

As the cool water calmed his little body, his grandfather walked in and said in his typical terse, clipped way, “Remember boy, we all drink from wells we did not dig.” We share in the bounty of those before us, and it is our responsibility to dig wells for those who follow.

Roger says the importance of this moment did not come to him until years later when he was asked if he was a “self-made man,” to which he replied, “No, I have drunk from so many wells dug by so many people that the question makes no sense to me.”

We have all quenched our spiritual and emotional thirsts from the wells dug by those who have gone before us. I wonder…as you and I glance behind us at the next traveler coming down our same road, do we see them with bucket and dipper in hand drinking from a new well dug by us?

Mark T. White is the pastor of First Baptist Church of Clayton, NC. This article first appeared in their church newsletter, The Outlook.

When the Last Laugh Is Not Yours

by Dr. Greg Rogers

Editor’s Note: Oakmont Baptist Church voted to purchase a neighboring apartment complex in order to be on mission in the community. Since then, they have been engaged in and continually discerning how best to use this property for the good of the community and Kingdom of God.

Since we purchased Oakmont Square Apartments in August 2007, I have heard countless people make the same statement and then ask the same question, almost in the same breath: “I know we didn’t buy those apartments to be in the ‘apartment business,' but I really do think God wanted us to have them for some purpose. So what’s the purpose for our owning them?"

If you had been a fly on the wall during our first Oakmont Square Apartment (OSA) Vision Team meeting on February 6, you might have reached the same conclusion that this team is reaching: perhaps God’s ultimate purpose for our owning them is already being seen in how we are using them now.

This Vision Team idea was birthed during our last coaching session on January 9 with CBFNC Church and Clergy Coach Eddie Hammett as a way of continuing the conversation on future next steps for our church to build more “go to” structures into our community. It is composed of 11 lay persons and three ministers, who either volunteered or were suggested by other people to serve on this team following our January 23 church-wide prayer meeting.

Our coaching sessions with Eddie led us to identify three target groups – at risk families, college students, and senior adults – for whom we might seek to address their educational, vocational, medical, and spiritual needs. The Vision Team dreamed about what is already happening and what could happen when we viewed the apartments as a “hub” of missions and ministry into our local community. Here are just a few of the possibilities the Vision Team considered:

• medical clinics staffed by Oakmonters skilled in the healing of the body.
• creating an Intentional College Community where a college intern (divinity school student) would work with college students, and develop them into leaders focused on spiritual growth and missional service to the community and world.
• after-school tutoring for children, a ministry that is already occurring at the apartments under the capable leadership of a gifted team of Oakmont members.
• providing affordable housing for at-risk families and/or senior adults.
• a host of programs to grow a person spiritually as a follower of Jesus.

An interesting thought occurred to us all as we envisioned the possibilities: being in the “apartment business” may accomplish some or all of the above possibilities, placing us exactly where God wants us after all. If that’s the case just slightly, then God has a funny sense of humor and may have the last laugh on us before it’s all over.

Greg Rogers is the pastor of Oakmont Baptist Church in Greenville, NC. This article originally appeared in their church newsletter, “Connections.”

Answering the Door

by Rev. Laura Barclay

A couple of months ago, I wrote an article entitled “The Power of Persistence,” which I cut from a sermon I delivered recently. The whole point of the entry was for Christians to encourage themselves to live out an active prayer, answering the door when our neighbors knocked and were in need. Somehow, I’ve always found that my sermons have a way of challenging me either when I’m writing them or in the weeks after, but I’ve never faced a more direct challenge that I did a few weeks ago.

It was a late Saturday night, and my husband and I were exasperated with some home projects that including putting up a very complicated ceiling fan and light fixture. It was now 11:45pm, and we’d been at it for a few hours. Parts of all shapes and sizes were strewn about our dining room table with confusing directions to piece it all together. All of a sudden, the doorbell rang. We hesitated for a second, wondering if we should answer the door. It was late, the streets were deserted, and we were tired. After a few more seconds, Ryan and I went down the steps and opened the door to a man who looked both tired and upset. “Do you have a problem with black people?” he asked. My husband, a community organizer, answered no and said, “What do you need?” He continued by talking about his experiences with some local non-profits that had treated him very poorly and refused him services. Before long, he was sitting on our step, pouring his heart out about how badly people treat him on a daily basis. He had asked for a little bus money somewhere in the conversation, which we gave him (we don’t usually do this—we’d rather direct people to services or give food), but he still stayed, telling his story.

Pastoral listening ensued and my tiredness and fear of answering the door at night abated. As children, we are taught to fear strangers and not answer the door, which is healthy and appropriate to some degree. For some reason, that fearing of the stranger seems to be hard to let go in our adult life, and can keep us from embracing fellow brothers and sisters in Christ.

After about a half hour of discussion, we encouraged him to visit a local church that had a good homeless ministry. He nodded approvingly, and said he wanted to be around people that would treat him as an equal and not look down upon him because of racial or economic prejudice. He walked off toward the bus station, but his impact stayed with me. I turned to Ryan and said, “We both wondered whether or not to answer the door, and I just preached on this a few Sundays ago!” Ryan responded that my sermon was the first thing he had thought of when the door rang, and that’s why he’d answered it.

I don’t say this to pat myself on the back. On the contrary, I am humbled and alarmed at how close any of us are to turning our backs on others simply because we are tired. At any point in our lives, we can find ourselves playing the various roles portrayed in Jesus’ parables. Though we might try to be that Good Samaritan, we might find ourselves playing the role of the priest passing by the wounded man on the road. This was a helpful lesson in humility to me to practice what I preach!

The Power of Persistence

by Rev. Laura Barclay

Most people think ministers have a solid prayer life. When I envisioned my call to divinity school, I couldn’t help but picture cloistered little monkish students squirreled away in their rooms or libraries juggling thick books on the history of the church, stopping their study every so often because they are overwhelmed with the urge to pray. Divinity school, as many of you know, is nothing like that. The image of monkish little cloisters was destroyed by the reality of theological arguments and all night study sessions fueled by copious amounts of coffee and cookies with the fear of failure hanging thick overhead. Many of my former classmates are now ministers, and I know we are just like most people--busy, running about, answering emails, talking on our smart phones, trying to figure out how to squeeze in a pastoral visit when we are also supposed to attend a committee meeting. Trying, like all of us, not to let anything slip through the cracks.

It’s hard to get all the chatter out of our heads when we pray. We are busy people, with spouses and children, work and deadlines, school and soccer practice, and all sorts of crazy and new-fangled types of social media like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, LinkedIn, and so on, with countless requests to join one more thing that will take up our time.

This past Lent, I tried to take 15 minutes a day and listen to a guided prayer meditation produced by Benedictine monks in England, but I kept missing days. Once I missed because of a CHANGE meeting where we discussed the creation of disaster response teams from churches, negotiating with banks to put foreclosed properties on the market, and pushing forward on education reform. Another day I missed because I was helping organize racial reconciliation and social justice workshops at the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of North Carolina General Assembly. One night I missed because I fell asleep early. I had dinner with friends visiting from out of town another time. Once, I went on a long walk and just forgot. I’m not very good at being still when I’m supposed to.

Jesus tells us in Luke 11:5-8, part of the lectionary text for this week, that we must be persistent in our prayer. He gives an example of someone who has unexpected company and goes next door to ask for food, but his neighbor won’t answer the door. Jesus encourages him in verse 8 to keep knocking, for, “even though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, at least because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs.” This persistence passage tells me that prayer isn’t always a passive activity, but an active response to make something happen. Like the anecdote about the praying man who was drowning and passed up two ships and a helicopter because he thought God would save him and still died, we know we should use what God gives us to make change. The real blessing occurs when we do this not only for ourselves, but for the good of others. We know from many of Jesus’ parables that “other,” “neighbor” and “friend” stretch our mindset for our day-to-day frame of reference for church relationships (think of The Good Samaritan story in Luke 10, where Jesus gives a parable about a total stranger in need as an example of “neighbor”).

Everyone has talents and gifts through which he or she can persevere in a life lived as prayer. What gift, talent, or resource do you have to offer your community? I encourage you to pray about it, and then act on it persistently.

Let us challenge ourselves to always answer that knocking door, knowing that in doing so we are living into our calling as children of God, disciples of Christ, and agents of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Getting To Know Your Neighbor

by Rev. Laura Barclay

Last night, I attended the Metro Council of Churches meeting for C.H.A.N.G.E. (Communities Helping All Neighbors Gain Empowerment), an intentionally multi-racial, multi-faith, non-partisan organization that brings churches, non-profits, and neighborhood associations together to solve identified community problems through collaborative research. We then meet with corporate leaders and government officials to challenge them to work with us toward a solution. Delegates representing each of our churches met last night, and one of our activities was to find a person you don’t know and ask them the following questions:

1) Why are you here?
2) What makes you angry/get up in the morning/lose sleep at night?

We had 25 minutes to make a new friend. I paired up with the Liberian-American gentleman sitting to my right representing an African-American Missionary Baptist church. I learned what worried and angered him, why he cared about making a difference in Winston-Salem, and what he’d like to see changed. We had similar values and concerns. Perhaps the most profound thing he said was, “I see this as God’s work. We can say it in church and not live it. Here, we are living Jesus’ example and caring about each other.” He also said that getting to know one another makes it harder to make generalizations about a person based on skin color. Once you get to know one another and trust that you both want to work side by side to make positive change, you realize how much you have in common. Suddenly, the fractures in the body of Christ don’t seem so deep.

The point of the exercise was to connect the members of C.H.A.N.G.E. on a deeper level and to cause you to care about your neighbors even more than the issues you might organize around. You stick with social justice work because you know and love your neighbor, and want to continue to work by their side. I think churches could learn a lot from this model for two main reasons. First, a healthy church should be missional and engaged in the work of the community. Staying enclosed behind the walls of the church in a self-contained community is not what Jesus asked of us. Second, I think church members should have relational meetings with each other and non-church members in their community. In this way, stories become intertwined in the larger narrative of God’s people working through history to be a light to the world. So, go have coffee with someone you don’t know very well. Have lunch with that person you always wanted to know better. You might find out that you aren’t so different after all, and that you can work together “to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God [Micah 6:8].”