Efficiency

This week, in some devotional reading, I came across a sentence that I have been rolling over in my mind for several days: "I realized that, when it comes to faith, I spend most of my energy trying to make God fit into my life, rather than making room in my life for God to take root and grow." (Jeremy Langford in Seeds of Faith)

AS IF!!! As if I could somehow shape and mold God into something that would fit into my helter-skelter-never-stopping-to-smell-the roses-life!Talk about wasted energy. God can morph into any shape God wishes but I have no power to control that whatsoever. Yet this is what we all try to do - we want to domesticate God . We want to reduce God to an item on our to-do list: “OK, said my prayers at bedtime and wrote a check to the church. I'm good to go and nice of you to stop by, Lord!”

This approach to God is akin to the "Quality Time" parenting myths that were so pervasive when my children were small. The theory was that if you made the time you spent with your child meaningful, a little bit would go a long way. The problem (well, ONE of the problems) was, children weren't always in the mood for meaningful activities when you had them in your Daytimer. The fact that a parent had scheduled a 4-hour block to take a child to the zoo didn't mean the child was going to be in the mood ,or feeling well, or that the weather would cooperate. Parenting by the calendar - the most efficient way raise your child. Are you laughing? I know you are - nothing is less efficient than hanging out with a child, except maybe hanging out with God. . .

God doesn't want your quality time either. Like your child, God wants all of you: the good, the bad, the inefficient. Efficiency is a human priority. God created plants that would be pollinated at the whim of bees and butterflies. Plants proliferated everywhere: vines climbing up the trees, birds pecking at the fruit, flowers and weeds indistinguishable. Humans created fields with straight rows of corn or cotton, carefully weeded and watered when the rain doesn't come.

God comes in like a child and fills up your life. You can try to limit the space you give to God, but if you share your space, you will find that faith and love expand and take root.  Faith and love will last through all the bumps along the way; all the joys and sorrows of being a parent, a child, a person. . . I'm sure you had ideas of how you would fit a child into your life, or another child into your family. I am equally sure it didn't work quite the way you had planned. Along the way you let go of a lot of things to make space for your children – and I'll bet most of them seemed like small sacrifices, in retrospect. Look around for the not-so-important thing that is occupying space that God could use; as God grows in your life, you won't miss it!

Clean Hands

Late again - blame it on Daily Bread Cooking Camp. Twice each summer I lead a week-long cooking camp at my church for children of various ages. This week I had the littlest campers - 6, 7 and 8-year-olds. What a week we've had! Grand adventures in the kitchen, Bible studies that added new spice to old, familiar stories, and lots of laughter around the tables as we ate what we cooked.

There are a number of water connections I could make - today we boiled water, used ice to make ice cream and watered the little garden we're tending for the Sunday School. Yesterday we visited Boggy Creek Farm and saw many drip irrigation lines which prompted the comment "only the roots get thirsty - like your mouth" from a knowledgeable 7 year old. Oh, I could tell a dozen stories but the thing that has me thinking this week is hand-washing.

On Monday morning, after we pray, the very first thing we do is learn an important safety tip that helps us to keep everyone safe in the kitchen: always cook with clean hands. We line up and wash with soap for as long as it takes to sing "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" at normal speed and then rinse, dry and go to our cooking stations. If a camper touches anyone else, or his or her own face, hair or ears, the camper is sent back to wash hands again. It's a little bit like Chutes and Ladders - back to the beginning with almost no notice. The kids police each other and somehow, my youth helpers managed to make everyone feel like it was okay to go back to the sink again and again. One budding cook came to me to report another camper's hair-touching-violation and enthusiastically demonstrated the scope of said violation by running her fingers through her own hair. When I pointed out that now she had to go wash her hands again she almost collapsed from laughing at herself. This is grace - to know that forgiveness is coming even as we commit the sin.

I think I'm going to try to live like my little camper and rid myself of "germs". I'm going to figuratively wash my hands in the baptismal font every time I catch myself in violation of the cardinal rule of loving God and loving neighbor. Instead of beating myself up, spending endless hours trying to figure out how to undo some thoughtless moment of insensitivity or neglect, or making deals with God to mitigate my guilt, I am going to go and wash my hands. I am going to make right what I can fix, tell God about my germs and then wash my hands in the waters of baptism and make a soapy sign of the cross on my forehead to remind myself that I am forgiven.

And I believe I'll sing as I row my boat gently down the stream of God's unlimited forgiveness:

Jesus loves me! He who died, Heaven's gates to open wide.
He will wash away my sin, let each little child come in!
Yes! Jesus Loves ME!