Answering the Hard "Ask"

A student-pastor in children and family ministries recently asked me for an interview via email. It was part of a class assignment. She said she chose me because people "say wonderful things" about me and considering her vocational goals, I seemed to be "a good fit."
Blah, blah, blah...I wonder if she still feels that way.
The first couple of questions were easy -- why do you do what you do, what is the purpose? But then she asked how I, in the role of Pastoral Counselor, could interface with her, in the role of Christian Ed Coordinator at a church.
I just couldn't sugarcoat my answer and it is my fervent prayer that years from now she will look back and find the good in it.
Here's what I wrote:

Here's the naked truth.
Each of my classes at seminary got a folder in which I would keep my notes. Yellow folders were the best…they denoted happy class! Black folders were not happy. My Christian Ed class folder was black.
The reason for that is that I have long felt that Christian Ed in the church has been reduced to a cutesy babysitting service developed so that adults can attend worship uninterrupted, a substitute for parental guidance (ie “we came back to church so our children could learn morals"), or a Christian club for the easy, cool, pliable kids that works to stay on top of the newest, coolest movement/curriculum/camp/conference/song -- where numbers in attendance is the marker for success.
You’re asking yourself: could she be more rude?
In that climate, how do we work together?
Be around to pick up the pieces.
Those of the kid who didn’t fit in, whose parents don’t understand why church didn’t “do the trick,” who took alcohol or grass to church camp and got sent home; or the adult who grew up believing in a fairy-tale Jesus who should have rescued him or her but didn’t; or the outcast who still isn’t invited to family events because he married a person of a different race, religion, or gender; or someone who decided one day to claim her inheritance and go to a foreign land but now just wants to come home.
I feel Christian Ed needs to be overhauled entirely to include full families worshiping and serving together. I feel it should include working in the neighborhoods where we live, getting to know our neighbors so we can love them, going to the most marginalized in our communities (10 blocks away --not across the globe) to serve them on days other than Christmas and Thanksgiving. It should include getting dirty, exposed, and real.
Our children and adults need to be challenged with the true Jesus who wasn’t the nicest, most regular kind of guy. He was a revolutionary who challenged the culture of his day -- the religious people of his day and he got killed for doing it. Those are the footsteps in which we are called to follow. We need to help our people climb out of the box of passive recipient and into the adventure of critical thinker.
Instead, we grow them up to be pew potatoes and ecclesiastical bureaucrats, rather than wild-eyed, honey-eating, goatskin wearing Johns and Janes crying in the wilderness of planet earth.
So how do we work together?
We set one big goal: to make my job be obsolete.
More probably, you send me referrals and teach a class here and there on things like grief recovery, parenting, and communication.

Passing Up Peace

Sunday was stunning. The wind didn’t blow, the thermometer registered an ideal 80 degrees and the sky, absent of clouds, was that pristine color of blue that is seen only in the Southwest. We had the kayaks loaded and were destined for the Rio Grande. The gates at Elephant Butte dam are open and the water is flowing high.
Conditions were perfect, in ways I could not know.
For the river that would be traveled this day was the Styx, not the Rio Grande.
I was outside when the phone rang. So often I ignore the phone.
Just because it rings doesn’t mean I have to answer, right?
But some spirit thing urged me toward the house and going that way I could hear snippets of the answering machine broadcast, “Need you, Pastor..... Mom....heart attack.... doctors.... ....hours to live....call....please.”
I called.
And I changed into preacher-lady clothes and headed for the hospital.
The mom of the message belonged to my former next-door neighbors, a family who has moved twice since living next to us but we still call neighbors. They are good people…horse people.
Horse people are connected to the earth by a different rein.
Horse people possess more the wisdom of beast than that of man. They understand connectedness with other as a result of years in the saddle, responding to nuance—the flinch of a muscle, the twitch of an ear. Horsemen can spot the slightest change in the disposition, the health, the state of being of their regular mount.
Yet completely miss a similar shift in a human with whom their days are shared.
We sat together, this family and I, around the bed of their dying mother.
She had come to the border area eighty years hence.
Her husband of sixty years rests beneath its rocky desert crust.
She was ready to search for him in worlds beyond this one.
The nurse turned off the machines.
And we waited.
So much is learned about a family in moments such as these. The smooth exterior of self, maintained for the world at-large, erodes and the reality is laid bare for all to see. Raw family truths are out there and at such times, age-old pains and unforgivenesses stored in the gut, nurtured in the cauldron of memory have an opportunity to be released…to simply go the way of the dead.
A tear, a touch, the caress of a hand, a word spoken in love. The offering is made but must be accepted.
I watched the players dance the dance of possibility.
I felt the brush of the olive branch, tenderly offered.
I realized the tragedy of its refusal.
The tensing of body, the back turned in reply, the head bent in sorrow.
The moment was past.
The waters were stirred and healing was so nearly there.
One had but to breathe it in.