So, a year ago I wrote a blog about women in ministry that became my most widely read blog. I wrote it during my church's General Assembly, a [usually] multi-day meeting of the clergy of my church [movement] [denomination] that is for the purpose of conducting the church's business. It was a moment of stark realization that while the Church of God [Anderson, IN] has a grand history of women in ministry, the current landscape is less than ideal. In that blog I set out a few steps upon which I felt that the church needed to focus, among them rethinking the way we looked at pastors' spouses, changing the way we speak about ministers, and lifting up Christian Women Connection. Well, this year's GA just finished and I thought it might be interesting to walk again upon this topic and see what a year has brought us.
To begin with as I looked around the auditorium I was still rather disheartened with the lack of a strong female presence. We are still a group made up too largely of men, too many old men and too many white men at that [though that may be a different blog post altogether].
This is not to say that there weren't bright spots, such as that for the first time in our history GA was being chaired by a women, Dr. Rebecca New-Edson. Throughout the day people applauded the fact that she was in the position, but after awhile it seemed like she was becoming the token woman in a sea of male leadership. I by no means want to take anything away from Dr. New-Edson, but I long for a day when it is not a surprise that a woman might be in charge of a large group within our church.
The second thing that was made abundantly clear toward the end of the proceedings was that a certain number of people are still stuck in a 1950's mentality of what a woman should be doing. A resolution was brought to the GA in an attempt to define marriage [i.e. make sure we good upright Christians are never forced to marry gay people], and attached to its purpose was a ridiculous amount of language about the gender of God and what that meant as far as the world at large. This is by no means the first time that I have said or written it but, GOD NEITHER PEES STANDING UP NOR SITTING DOWN. God is not really male or female, because those descriptions are inadequate, and more to the point the Bible points out that male and female were created in God's image. We may talk about God as father, but that is by no means the only way to illustrate how God interacts with humanity, nor is it any more true than any other way that we look at God.
The group of people felt the need to harp on God's maleness to the point where they not only define marriage as being between a male and a woman but also defined marriage in a traditionally conservative view, in other words the man is the master and the woman is the servant [which may be a slight exaggeration, but unfortunately less slight than I would like]. Luckily more progressive heads prevailed and the resolution was sent back to committee [where it will hopefully at minimum dispense of its male female hierarchical language] until next year [when we can again debate whether or not it is a loving thing to decide in the first place].
So what?
Maybe we are making some progress, but we still have a long way to go, and some people have a longer way to go. We still need to redefine what it means to be married to a pastor. We still need to evaluate the language we use and make it more gender inclusive, especially when speaking about clergy. We still need to uplift the CWC and its many varied ministries. We also need to safe guard our church from those contingents that would take us backward instead of forward.
Until next years Isn't It Time blog.
Peace and Love,
Pastor K
Wednesday, June 26, 2013
Wednesday, June 12, 2013
The Roller Coaster of Pride and Self-Loathing
So, I used to be a loser, and then I developed a pride issue, but then I worked on getting rid of it, which has led to an occasional lack of pride issue.
Let us begin at the beginning. When I was a kid I used to be bullied, my bullying doesn't seem as bad as today's does, but it still sucked. I was called four-eyes because of my glasses. I was called dork and nerd because of my brain. People would call me a wimp because of my lanky frame. Occasionally some people would hit me and a handful of times I got beat up because I could be. From the time I started 5th grade at Washington Lands Elementary School through my junior year of high school at John Marshall there were plenty of times when I wouldn't walk certain streets in my hometown because of kids that lived there, there were days I would miss my bus just so I would get a ride to school, once in High School I walked the five miles or so home so I wouldn't be bothered on the bus.
[Like many kids who have been or are been bullied I lived my sentence in silence, so Mom, if you are reading this I am sorry that I never told you about most of these things, I thought it was best at the time.]
Needless to say that I greatly looked forward to graduation and getting out of that town and hoping to never go back. [To this day whenever I go back there I get a pain in my stomach about 2 hours out] Like many people I saw college as a chance to start over, to let go of the past and create a new me, so that is exactly what I did. I created this persona of someone who had it all together, who could speak into any situation, who always had an answer or a joke or a solution. And by and large it worked, I won't say that I was the upper-crust of the college hierarchy, but I was definitely no where near the bottom either. I had friends of all groups and social statuses. I was who I wanted to be for the first time in my life, and I was doing just fine.
The one negative aspect that did bubble to the top though was that I began to overcompensate on my self-esteem, I no longer thought of myself in those negative ways that I used and instead began to think of myself in uber-positive ways. I now thought of myself as better than most people, smarter than most people, more capable than most people. I began to become an internal snob, and all too often it would flow over into being an external snob. Now I found myself being the one who occasionally bullied people, not with my fists but with my words. I could tear people down with the best of them, too often [once would have been too often] bringing people to tears.
So, I had gone from being the kid that walked out of my way to not get beat up to being the guy that would go out of my way to beat someone up. Needless to say I began to become as disappointed with my current situation as my past one. And so, as my faith began to grow and change I decided that my attitude and actions had to begin to do the same thing.
For over a decade now I have been on this journey of becoming a genuine nice guy as opposed to the false one that I claimed to be. By and large I feel that I have done a good job, I'm not prefect or even nice all the time, to be honest occasionally the dragon of pride will rear his head and strike out, but it is fewer and farther between. The biggest negative is that sometimes I let my pride go too much and go from the point of over prideful to overly low self-esteem. The goal, of course, is to find a happy medium, where I do not consider people either lower or higher than myself, but to get to the point where I consider us all equal.
I can talk that game of equality well, but living it 100% and believing it 100% still takes time. I want neither to be the bullied nor the bully. I want to believe that I am good enough at things, not the greatest and not the least. I do not want to live a life where I put people down, thinking that people are losers or somehow beneath me; but I also do not want to live a life where I put myself down, thinking that I am a crappy pastor and a crappy friend and a crappy husband and a crappy father and so forth and so on.
I write this so that you would know me a little better, so that when I am a jerk you might be able to forgive me and when I am down you might be able to lift me up, and I hope that I could do the same for you.
Peace and Love,
Pastor K
Let us begin at the beginning. When I was a kid I used to be bullied, my bullying doesn't seem as bad as today's does, but it still sucked. I was called four-eyes because of my glasses. I was called dork and nerd because of my brain. People would call me a wimp because of my lanky frame. Occasionally some people would hit me and a handful of times I got beat up because I could be. From the time I started 5th grade at Washington Lands Elementary School through my junior year of high school at John Marshall there were plenty of times when I wouldn't walk certain streets in my hometown because of kids that lived there, there were days I would miss my bus just so I would get a ride to school, once in High School I walked the five miles or so home so I wouldn't be bothered on the bus.
[Like many kids who have been or are been bullied I lived my sentence in silence, so Mom, if you are reading this I am sorry that I never told you about most of these things, I thought it was best at the time.]
Needless to say that I greatly looked forward to graduation and getting out of that town and hoping to never go back. [To this day whenever I go back there I get a pain in my stomach about 2 hours out] Like many people I saw college as a chance to start over, to let go of the past and create a new me, so that is exactly what I did. I created this persona of someone who had it all together, who could speak into any situation, who always had an answer or a joke or a solution. And by and large it worked, I won't say that I was the upper-crust of the college hierarchy, but I was definitely no where near the bottom either. I had friends of all groups and social statuses. I was who I wanted to be for the first time in my life, and I was doing just fine.
The one negative aspect that did bubble to the top though was that I began to overcompensate on my self-esteem, I no longer thought of myself in those negative ways that I used and instead began to think of myself in uber-positive ways. I now thought of myself as better than most people, smarter than most people, more capable than most people. I began to become an internal snob, and all too often it would flow over into being an external snob. Now I found myself being the one who occasionally bullied people, not with my fists but with my words. I could tear people down with the best of them, too often [once would have been too often] bringing people to tears.
So, I had gone from being the kid that walked out of my way to not get beat up to being the guy that would go out of my way to beat someone up. Needless to say I began to become as disappointed with my current situation as my past one. And so, as my faith began to grow and change I decided that my attitude and actions had to begin to do the same thing.
For over a decade now I have been on this journey of becoming a genuine nice guy as opposed to the false one that I claimed to be. By and large I feel that I have done a good job, I'm not prefect or even nice all the time, to be honest occasionally the dragon of pride will rear his head and strike out, but it is fewer and farther between. The biggest negative is that sometimes I let my pride go too much and go from the point of over prideful to overly low self-esteem. The goal, of course, is to find a happy medium, where I do not consider people either lower or higher than myself, but to get to the point where I consider us all equal.
I can talk that game of equality well, but living it 100% and believing it 100% still takes time. I want neither to be the bullied nor the bully. I want to believe that I am good enough at things, not the greatest and not the least. I do not want to live a life where I put people down, thinking that people are losers or somehow beneath me; but I also do not want to live a life where I put myself down, thinking that I am a crappy pastor and a crappy friend and a crappy husband and a crappy father and so forth and so on.
I write this so that you would know me a little better, so that when I am a jerk you might be able to forgive me and when I am down you might be able to lift me up, and I hope that I could do the same for you.
Peace and Love,
Pastor K
Saturday, June 8, 2013
Walking Through the Mud
So, for the past few weeks Henry and I have been taking a couple walks a week in the state park not too far from our house. It is a pretty nice park, not too big and not too small, our walks are somewhere between 2 and 2 and a half miles depending on the day. Usually we take the big trail all the way around the park until we take a spur and climb about 80 steps back to the parking lot. We use it in three ways, first as a nice little walk in the woods, second as a time killer on days we don't have anything else to do, and third as a way for this dad to lose a little bit of the weight that he has gained in the past few months.
We have yet to take a walk during any rain, but there are days when we take a walk the day after it has rained, and though our path has quite a bit of tree cover occasionally we do come across a section of mud and even less occasionally we come across a puddle that can be tiny or stretch completely across the path. When we are walking I talk to Henry from time to time, explaining things about nature, showing him how the water is flowing through the river, streams, or little trickles that appear randomly, and also just about random things that pop into my head.
But on those times when we encounter the mud and water I always discuss our options with Henry. Sometimes I ask him rhetorically about what he thinks we should do, and sometimes I use him as a sounding board. Many times we can skirt around the water and/or mud, but there are other times when we have no other option but to go straight through. In those times I always tell Henry that 'sometimes you just have to go through the mud in life buddy.' Those times the surrounding brush is too dense to walk through, or the mud looks a little more slippery around the edges, but for whatever the reason sometimes its just simpler to go right through it.
The same is often true about life, though we never like to admit. Sometimes in our paths of life we often only have options of not good and bad and worse, in those moments we hopefully choose the best of the bad, because sometimes getting a little dirty is better than getting completely lost.
I recently had the task of writing a short essay about hope, and I wrote that often there is an aspect of irrationality that goes along with hope, after all hope is often found when we have no other option. Growth is often the same way, as they say you learn a lot more from failure than success.
In my case Henry's case I hope that I can walk with him when he has to walk through the mud, giving him an ear or a shoulder or someone to carry him through. Because when we walk through the mud currently I am the only one who gets dirty, my shoes get a little heavier and mud splatters on my legs some, but Henry is none the wiser because his journey doesn't change. There's a lesson about how God sometimes carries us in there somewhere, but it sounds like a slightly overused poem about footprints, so I'll leave for you to think about.
Peace and Love,
Pastor K
We have yet to take a walk during any rain, but there are days when we take a walk the day after it has rained, and though our path has quite a bit of tree cover occasionally we do come across a section of mud and even less occasionally we come across a puddle that can be tiny or stretch completely across the path. When we are walking I talk to Henry from time to time, explaining things about nature, showing him how the water is flowing through the river, streams, or little trickles that appear randomly, and also just about random things that pop into my head.
But on those times when we encounter the mud and water I always discuss our options with Henry. Sometimes I ask him rhetorically about what he thinks we should do, and sometimes I use him as a sounding board. Many times we can skirt around the water and/or mud, but there are other times when we have no other option but to go straight through. In those times I always tell Henry that 'sometimes you just have to go through the mud in life buddy.' Those times the surrounding brush is too dense to walk through, or the mud looks a little more slippery around the edges, but for whatever the reason sometimes its just simpler to go right through it.
The same is often true about life, though we never like to admit. Sometimes in our paths of life we often only have options of not good and bad and worse, in those moments we hopefully choose the best of the bad, because sometimes getting a little dirty is better than getting completely lost.
I recently had the task of writing a short essay about hope, and I wrote that often there is an aspect of irrationality that goes along with hope, after all hope is often found when we have no other option. Growth is often the same way, as they say you learn a lot more from failure than success.
In my case Henry's case I hope that I can walk with him when he has to walk through the mud, giving him an ear or a shoulder or someone to carry him through. Because when we walk through the mud currently I am the only one who gets dirty, my shoes get a little heavier and mud splatters on my legs some, but Henry is none the wiser because his journey doesn't change. There's a lesson about how God sometimes carries us in there somewhere, but it sounds like a slightly overused poem about footprints, so I'll leave for you to think about.
Peace and Love,
Pastor K
Sunday, June 2, 2013
one mans journey for something to eat
So, we have spent a lot of time in the car over the past two days, something like 9 hours since yesterday morning at 10. We had a round-trip from Anderson to Paulding, OH so that Henry and I could join my father-in-law, brother-in-law and nephew at a Father Son dinner that they have at the church Mary's home church. Then we had the usual Sunday round-trip from Anderson to Linton for church. It felt like even longer in the car since last night we got home to go to sleep to get up to leave. Because of that by the time we got home from church there was no way I was willing to get back in the car until tomorrow. This meant that we would be eating dinner at home.
It was a simple problem for Mary, she decided that she would have cereal for dinner. That didn't seem like a bad idea to me either until I realized that I had finished my cereal on Friday. What I didn't realize was that after I came to this realization I had unknowingly began a perilous journey to find something for dinner. The first issue that sent complications into my world was that I didn't want to eat anything at home, I wanted pizza or Taco Bell or donuts or freshly caught game or some other thing that existed outside the confines of our fridge and pantry. But as I already said I was completely unwilling to leave the homestead to venture out for any reason, and though Mary offered to go for me, I decided that I would indeed find something to eat that we already had.
The next thing I became hungry for was a roast beef sandwich, but alas, much like the cereal I had finished our last bit of that on Friday as well. Friday was obviously a day of endings in the Stephens' household, as least as far as food was concerned. So I began the task of looking through the fridge, freezer, and pantry to find something of sustenance. To be honest we have plenty of food in those three places, but trying to find a combination of items that would both work in conceptualization and be appealing to me was next to impossible. For instance, spaghetti sounded pretty good, but the Italian sausage was frozen, and the idea of defrosting it in the microwave was unappealing. We also had frozen ground beef that would have worked perfectly in hamburger form, but once again the prospect of thawing it was not appealing.
I crossed off the possibility of tuna fish and black beans and rice and noddles with butter pretty quickly. Other things, such as Creamy Chicken Ramen Noodles stayed on the radar a little longer. I finally decided to make some frozen fish that I had purchased several months ago when Mary was going to be out of town, because she is not a fan of frozen fish that is a step or two away from the fish sticks that so often graced the junior high lunch counter. We also had some frozen steak fries that I thought would compliment the fish fillets, that I planned on making a fish sandwich out of. I would make some homemade tartar sauce and everything would be great.
If only it could have been that simple. My first hurdle was the moment I read the instructions of the two frozen items and the needed to be cooked at different temps for different times. This would have become a larger issue if I hadn't opened the french fry bag and realized that about half of the fries that remained were freezer burnt, the quantity remaining was neither enough to satisfy me nor worthy of being picked through to get out in the first place, hence the fries got to meet the garbage can instead of the oven, and the time and temp dilemma was solved before it really became an issue.
No problem, I declared I will just make a small salad of spring mix greens, seedless cucumber and tomato, that is until I realized that our tomatoes had all gotten over-ripe and started to wrinkle. But still I would have a small salad or spring mix greens and seedless cucumber to accompany my fish fillet sandwich. That is until I opened the box of fish fillets to find out that I had bought a box of fish tenders instead of fillets. So, instead of cooking two fillets and saving the rest I baked the entire box of tenders, which were just a tad bigger than fish sticks. It was at this point that I realized that a fish sandwich consisting of these tiny tenders would have been difficult to hold together after that first bite, so instead I decided to eat them with out the bread.
In the end my dinner was still satisfying and I had a little adventure to share with all of you, so I guess it was all worth it. But, I could still go for a couple tacos and a pintos and cheese.
Peace and Love,
Pastor K
It was a simple problem for Mary, she decided that she would have cereal for dinner. That didn't seem like a bad idea to me either until I realized that I had finished my cereal on Friday. What I didn't realize was that after I came to this realization I had unknowingly began a perilous journey to find something for dinner. The first issue that sent complications into my world was that I didn't want to eat anything at home, I wanted pizza or Taco Bell or donuts or freshly caught game or some other thing that existed outside the confines of our fridge and pantry. But as I already said I was completely unwilling to leave the homestead to venture out for any reason, and though Mary offered to go for me, I decided that I would indeed find something to eat that we already had.
The next thing I became hungry for was a roast beef sandwich, but alas, much like the cereal I had finished our last bit of that on Friday as well. Friday was obviously a day of endings in the Stephens' household, as least as far as food was concerned. So I began the task of looking through the fridge, freezer, and pantry to find something of sustenance. To be honest we have plenty of food in those three places, but trying to find a combination of items that would both work in conceptualization and be appealing to me was next to impossible. For instance, spaghetti sounded pretty good, but the Italian sausage was frozen, and the idea of defrosting it in the microwave was unappealing. We also had frozen ground beef that would have worked perfectly in hamburger form, but once again the prospect of thawing it was not appealing.
I crossed off the possibility of tuna fish and black beans and rice and noddles with butter pretty quickly. Other things, such as Creamy Chicken Ramen Noodles stayed on the radar a little longer. I finally decided to make some frozen fish that I had purchased several months ago when Mary was going to be out of town, because she is not a fan of frozen fish that is a step or two away from the fish sticks that so often graced the junior high lunch counter. We also had some frozen steak fries that I thought would compliment the fish fillets, that I planned on making a fish sandwich out of. I would make some homemade tartar sauce and everything would be great.
If only it could have been that simple. My first hurdle was the moment I read the instructions of the two frozen items and the needed to be cooked at different temps for different times. This would have become a larger issue if I hadn't opened the french fry bag and realized that about half of the fries that remained were freezer burnt, the quantity remaining was neither enough to satisfy me nor worthy of being picked through to get out in the first place, hence the fries got to meet the garbage can instead of the oven, and the time and temp dilemma was solved before it really became an issue.
No problem, I declared I will just make a small salad of spring mix greens, seedless cucumber and tomato, that is until I realized that our tomatoes had all gotten over-ripe and started to wrinkle. But still I would have a small salad or spring mix greens and seedless cucumber to accompany my fish fillet sandwich. That is until I opened the box of fish fillets to find out that I had bought a box of fish tenders instead of fillets. So, instead of cooking two fillets and saving the rest I baked the entire box of tenders, which were just a tad bigger than fish sticks. It was at this point that I realized that a fish sandwich consisting of these tiny tenders would have been difficult to hold together after that first bite, so instead I decided to eat them with out the bread.
In the end my dinner was still satisfying and I had a little adventure to share with all of you, so I guess it was all worth it. But, I could still go for a couple tacos and a pintos and cheese.
Peace and Love,
Pastor K
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)