Afraid of saying (or writing) something stupid

In my new position, I am in charge of giving the opening welcome and announcements. God help me, I'm afraid of saying something stupid when I do that.

Then again, it's already happened. Last Sunday, the senior pastor and I had worked out which announcement I would give and which one he would announce. Well, once I got up to the lectern at the first service (8 a.m.), I gave his announcement and then turned to him for the other one. Whoops. He let me do both announcements for the remaining two services.

In my previous appointment, I was less afraid because it was in my second language; mistakes were inevitable. I was going to say (and did say) something estúpido on a pretty regular basis. My congregation either laughed at it, because they had never heard something phrased that way before (they loved it when I used the word chismes, or gossip), or if it was really bad, they gently corrected me and taught me the correct way to say something. When speaking in your second language, you're going to say something stupid. This slows lots of folks down from speaking in the language that they're learning, which is unfortunate, because speaking it is part of how you learn it and making mistakes is part of how you learn in general.

Even when speaking in your native tongue, you'll also inevitably say something stupid. When I told my husband about this blog entry's topic, he said, "Being afraid of sounding stupid doesn't slow me down any. I do it all the time!" (And he said I could quote him.) When I write this blog, I want for what I write to not sound stupid. That's part of why I don't post any more than I do - what I do post, I've thought about for a few days to make sure it's post-worthy and not stupid. I know sometimes it'll be stupid anyway. That certainly happened a few times in my monthly newsletters I sent out when I served in Nicaragua.

And I suppose a stupid greeting is going to happen from time to time in church as well. They can't all be winners, right? It may just be a problem of practice - the more I give the greeting and the welcome, the more comfortable I'll be doing it and I'll find a "standard" way of doing it that suits me and doesn't sound stupid.

Pastora Incognito

When I arrived at Unidos por Cristo, it was very obvious that I was the new pastor. They'd heard their new pastor was not Hispanic and I was the only unfamiliar un-Hispanic face in the building.

After two weeks at Orange, I am still meeting folks who don't realize that I am the new associate pastor. They've been out of town on the weekends and so haven't seen me in services; during the week, they assume I'm part of the preschool or one of the other events happening daily at the church. In a congregation of 500 that's predominantly white, it's easy to assume that an unfamiliar white face is just someone else you don't know.

Last week I volunteered with the church at the Interfaith Council Homeless Shelter. Only I didn't tell anyone I was coming. I arrived in the kitchen and said, "Hi, how can I help?" I was put to work before one of the other volunteers whispered to her husband, "psst, that's the new associate!" I wasn't trying to be secretive, I'm just more comfortable saying, "Hi, what's your name?" than "Hi, I'm the new associate pastor." Later on, I was talking with another church volunteer (who was smart enough to ask back, "what's your name?"!) and another church volunteer joined us just as we were talking about my predecessor. The two talked about how they missed the previous associate and the second one said, "but I hear our new associate has her own gifts and talents." I didn't interrupt her, just introduced myself to her when she was done. Good thing she had only heard positive things about me!

Transition Time - Everything Changes

(My last Sunday at Unidos por Cristo)

I have had my last meeting at Unidos por Cristo UMC. I have turned in my keys, the church laptop, and the church cell phone. I have said my good-byes and been thrown a despedida (good-bye party). I wish the bugs on US-264 a long life now that I will no longer be regularly driving that route at night.

In one week, I start at Orange UMC.

At first, I thought I'd make a list of all the changes. Then, I realized the number of differences is almost overwhelming and maybe instead I should focus on what will be the same. That list is not very long:

Still serving the same one triune God
Still serving with The United Methodist Church
Still in North Carolina
Still will be doing pastoral care, worship leadership, and leading bible study
Still part-time
Still will have to get up at 6 a.m. on Sunday

So many things are going to be different: setting, language, multiple services, a staff, church age, church size, etc. It reminded me of the last time almost everything in my life changed with not much staying the same.

Five years ago this summer I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. In order to manage it and because of it, almost everything in my life changed. Not all at once, but within about a year. Hair, clothing, shoes, residence, occupation, car, athletic ability, tote bag, contact lens case, diet, patience, and even, after one more year, marital status. That's right, because of my RA, I re-met and started dating my husband when I did (because it was a main reason why I moved from Nicaragua back to North Carolina). By the end, even my name had changed. (Honestly, I felt a lot like Jacob with all the wrestling with God I did because of that disease.)

I do not expect this change in churches to be quite so drastic. It will be more of an external change than one with myself. I will still be seeking the kingdom of God and his righteousness before all else. I will still be working toward glimpses of that kingdom here on earth. I will still be working to meet physical and spiritual needs. Just the local setting will be different.

Holy Communion

(This picture is from Easter Sunday.)

One of the things I have been commended for by my church is the hospitality I show on behalf of the church when we celebrate the Lord's Supper. The current "motto" (for lack of a better word) of The United Methodist Church is "Open hearts, open minds, open doors." One of the ways that plays out is that we celebrate an "open table," which means anyone and everyone is welcome to participate in communion. Some churches require that you be a member to partake; others that you be baptized. In The United Methodist Church we say that everyone is welcome. Nothing more matters than that you have a desire to come and "taste and see that the Lord is good" (Psalm 34:8). Every time we celebrate Holy Communion at Unidos por Cristo (about once a month) I make it a point to say that. We have folks from various church and non-church backgrounds - Baptist, Pentecostal, Catholic, lapsed Catholic, etc. I want to make sure that each person present knows that they are welcome at the Lord's table, that it is not my table or the church's table, but it is God's table. And God welcomes everyone who comes to him.

Of course, still not everyone present participates. There are still those who think they are unworthy. Those who think they are not hungry. Those who are still holding on to the tenet of a previous church. Not everyone comes, but everyone is welcome.

Maybe about a month ago I visited with a Señora who was one of those few who stayed in her seat during communion. She shared with me why. Years ago, her family went to the Baptist church up the road. At that church they taught that if you were sinning, then you could not receive communion. She is not married to the man she has lived with for 20 years and the father of her teenage boys. Technically, he never divorced his wife in Mexico. By common-law standards, this Señor and Señora are married. But they've never actually had a wedding in a church. And so she did not participate in the Lord's Supper because she was taught that she was unworthy.

My heart went out to her, while two responses were forming in my head. One, "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23). No one is worthy. We are all sinners in need of a Redeemer. Two, I was reminded of a song the praise band loves to lead us in: "Amor Sin Condicion" (Unconditional Love). Communion is one sign of God's unconditional love for us, one means of grace. God loves us no matter what. God puts no conditions on his love for us; we put no conditions on who can participate at his table. The Señora said she had heard me say that each time we celebrate communion, but she had not yet been able to come forward. I asked about maybe the next time. She said she would pray; I said I would, too.

This past Sunday we celebrated the Lord's Supper. The Señora participated. Gloria a Dios!

Long-Winded? Who? Me?

I remember in 6th grade when I joined my church's youth group. One of the youth leaders commented that if the whole youth group were made up of Heather Willet's (my maiden name), it would be very quiet because no one would ever speak.

One year in college, some girls on my floor got together and wrote poems about everyone on the floor, likening them to an animal. My animal was mouse and the first line says, "Shy, quiet."

Now, I am less shy than I used to be. I used to be painfully shy; I remember crying once in 4th grade because I was so shy. By no means am I an extrovert, I haven't come out of my shell that much, but I am more out-going than I was as a kid. (We moved after 8th grade and I remember going back to the church we went to when I was in middle school and people commenting on how much more talkative I was - it was because I knew them! They weren't strangers!)

However, I've only become a "chatty Cathy" around my husband. It seems best, at least for now, to tell him everything that goes through my brain rather than risk filtering out something I should tell him. And he doesn't seem to mind occasionally hearing TMI because it means I'm not skipping something that may be important to tell him.

So, pastoring a church, folks have had a hard time figuring out if I'm just reserved or downright unapproachable, because I'm still pretty quiet. I prefer silence to the risk of saying the wrong thing. Plus, sometimes just sitting with someone speaks louder than words. I don't use five words when two will do. And I occasionally had trouble writing academic papers because I don't like repeating myself, so I was tired of saying the same thing by the time I got to the conclusion. Same goes for sermons. When I started, I wrote out manuscripts which were usually six pages (14 point font, Times New Roman, 1.5 spaced, 1" margins) and took 10-12 minutes to preach. I'd repeat once or twice the key idea or verse. Now, with no manuscript and just an outline, apparently I've become wordier. My husband timed me on Sunday and it was a full 30 minutes!!! Granted, I'm not convinced my sermons are better. Length does not a good sermon make. My sermons don't always feel very organized, either, especially when I don't refer to my outline. I know I repeat myself a lot. Yet, my preaching does now better fit the Hispanic culture in which I serve for one more month, where half-hour sermons are normal and expected. Either I'm becoming all things to all people, as Paul writes, or else I've just decided it's okay to be wordy when it comes to preaching the Gospel!

Dream Geography

Growing up, my family moved six times before I graduated from high school (among four different states and regions of the U.S. as well as another country). It is an average of every three years. The first four moves happened almost in a blur: I was ages 2, 4, 5, and 6. Then, we stayed put for seven years, which is still my record for living consecutively in one place. Move #5 happened the summer between finishing middle school and starting high school. It was also the move that involved the most culture shock for me: from urban/suburban/metropolitan/diverse Montgomery Co., MD, right outside of Washington, D.C. to a small North Carolina mill town. We lived there two years and during that time, all my dreams took place back in MD. Then, in the fall of my junior year of high school, we moved again and the setting of my dreams changed from MD to that mill town. Following the mobility of my childhood, I kept moving as a young adult: college in St. Louis, semester abroad in Spain, grad school in Philly, back to NC, then serving in Nicaragua, before back to NC again where I have now stayed put. Perhaps needless to say, the locations in my dreams have been all over the place, sometimes even back in MD.

Recently, however, they've become current. Often in my dreams these days are the kids of Unidos por Cristo. When I left teaching in 2006, I also subconsciously stopped investing myself in kids. I had a hard time learning the names of kids I didn't know. I subbed for an elementary Sunday school class and had trouble involving myself in it. I didn't realize til 2009 what I had done: I was afraid of investing myself in kids and then leaving them again like I did in Philly and in NC and in Nicaragua. Either my heart needed a break, or my head just decided it was safer not to get involved in kids' lives. Things have improved since I made that discovery and I have wholeheartedly enjoyed getting to know and playing with the kids at Unidos por Cristo. They are great kids and I love them and can name every single one of them and something about what's going on in each one's life.

I announced yesterday at church that I would not be appointed to return to Unidos por Cristo for another year but rather will begin serving at another church come July 3. My plan, to my husband's dismay, is to have a gift for each child on my last Sunday. I will miss them.

Los Despreciados, Los Humildes, y Los Perdidos (the least, the last, and the lost)

I don't know how many of you are familiar with the Disciple Bible Study originally written years ago by a United Methodist Bishop and his wife. They discovered a lack of Bible literacy among the congregations they served and created a curriculum to remedy that problem. Disciple I covers the entire Bible in one year's time. Then, they expanded on it and created subsequent studies. Lately, the trend is for short-term Disciple studies, only three months long because folks don't want to commit to a whole year. I myself have taken and/or taught and/or co-taught Disciple I, II, III as well as the short-term study on the Psalms. I've also been to the training on how to facilitate these studies (a much more accurate word than "teach" when it comes to Disciple). Part of how the long-term studies work are that each week there is a theme word, a theme verse, a human condition, and then at the end, a mark of discipleship, all of which relate to the reading one does during the week.

Last summer, when I started at Unidos por Cristo, I presented the Bible study group with a few choices as to how we could go about Bible study. They chose Discipulado (or, Disciple I, the only long-term Disciple study in Spanish). Things have more or less gone pretty well, especially lately as we've slowed down the study to adjust it to our framework. Between work and bedtime for those who work super early in the morning, we only have 1 1/2 hrs to meet. Disciple is designed for 2 1/2 hours. So, we now take two sessions to go over one week's worth of material. This group would rather go more in depth instead of being exposed to more material. At the end of each unit, we read together "our human condition," and I ask if they agree with it and we talk about it. Then we move to "marks of discipleship" and read that together and discuss it.

Last night, they didn't agree with "our human condition." We were on week 21, which covers the Gospel of Luke. The theme word is "least" (despreciado). The theme verses are Luke 4:18-19,

"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release of captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."

We began by talking about those verses, what they mean, and the context in which Jesus said them. Folks said that "good news to the poor" was bringing the message of salvation to the poor in spirit. The captives are those who are captive to sin and death and we now tell them, in Jesus' name, you are free! (This kinda related to my Maundy Thursday message, which I share in an older post.) "Our human condition" for this week reads below, in English:

"I don't really like the poor. They're not always clean. I stay away from sick people. They smell bad. I don't understand people whose customs, culture, and ways of thinking are different from mine. They make me uncomfortable. I don't want to go to church with them or socialize with them. People with handicaps also make me feel awkward. Actually, I enjoy being with people who are just like me."

This human condition, which many of us would think is universal, is not. There are folks who don't mind the poor, who don't avoid the sick, who don't feel awkward around those with handicaps. There are churches who welcome those with different customs and languages. There are people who enjoy being with people from other cultures. Gloria a Dios! because that's what the kingdom of God looks like.

The "marks of discipleship" for this section no one had any problems with: "Disciples throw their weight with God's mission to the least, the last, and the lost." Gloria a Dios! that this is not a hard lesson for everyone to learn.