The hand that fills the crock pot….holds the power to change the world.

I distinctly remember the crock pot full of cocktail weenies that Mrs. Wyatt made. We had fellowship once a month with the long tables covered in all the church-ladies-offerings. Her olive colored crock pot was always at the end. The kids would always be reminded that there were a lot of people behind us, and four was really quite enough. I am not so sure Mrs. Wyatt thought that four was enough. She would smile at us from atop her brightly colored high heels and bring a second crock pot next month. Sometimes love looks like two more tiny hotdogs in a delicious red-orange sauce just because they make you so happy.

I know what love looks like. I know because I was raised on it. I was raised on the smell of cupcakes in the oven for some sort of celebration. My mom was frosting cupcakes for the church picnic when she went into labor with my sister. One of my first memories is blowing out the candles on my train cake for my third birthday at the church’s annual fall festival. The whole sanctuary turned fellowship hall sang Happy Birthday to me. Loves sometimes looks like frosting and chocolate cake and everyone recognizing your accomplishment (even if it is, simply that you turned three.)

My summer memories are filled with elaborately decorated sanctuaries in the theme of that year’s Vacation Bible School curriculum. Rainforests, deserts, hot air balloon adventures, all created in my childhood house of worship. One year was The Wild West and someone made enough stick horses for the kids to get to ride them from place to place. One year was Outer Space and my mom spray-painted a refrigerator box into a rocket ship that the pre-k class got to play in. Our grass was silver for quite a long time, but I can promise you, it was worth it. In fifth grade I don’t remember what the theme was, but I do know that our teacher had us wear our name tags as ankle bracelets and we didn’t have to wear shoes the entire week. In church! The schoolboy with my name carefully painted on it that I won in kindergarten for naming the VBS mascot Hal. A. Looyah (my mother may have helped with that entry), I still won’t throw it out.

As an adult sometimes I have rolled my eyes at the time and expense put into those weeks where even the snack is carefully crafted to fit the theme. I scoff a little bit at the suburban church I grew up in and think the modest church plant I have chosen for my family does a much better job of allocating resources. But then, I remember how special those VBS weeks were, how excited I was every day to get to worship in the sanctuary turned underwater wonderland, and get my blue-jello snack with the gummy fish swimming through it. I remember that I felt special. I felt  cared for. I felt, loved.

The ladies who were in charge of the cupcakes, the fellowship hours, the Vacation Bible School planning. They were the first responders in times of crisis.

When my mom had a surprising interaction with an over the counter medication, not only did a woman from the church come over immediately to take my mom to the doctor, she stayed with her when they admitted my mom to the hospital, stayed until my dad got there, and then came home and made my  family dinner for the evening. She dropped it off around five. It was delicious.

When one of my dad’s clients needed to use our house as a safe haven from the streets because something happened to her that us girls should not yet be exposed to, my mom had to make exactly one phone call to find a place for me and my sisters to spend the night so that this woman could stay at our house. I believe this mom had us bring our dolls. She threw a spur of the moment tea party.

When my mom had a series of seizures and was no longer allowed to drive, she tacked a form for the week on the bulletin board on Sunday, and a mini-van with a person we recognized driving was always there when we were done with dance class, or needed to go to piano. This went on for months. I thought it was normal.

When my dad got into his car accident, it was a woman from the church who showed up at the hospital, pushed all the money she had in her purse into my mom’s hands so that my mom wouldn’t have to go to the bank for money for food and parking. It was this same woman who made sure I had a ride home from school and a way to get to the speech tournament the next morning. It was important to me, so it was important to her.

From the same women who taught me the wordless book and ten commandments, I learned the importance of bringing a casserole to a new mom, or family in crisis. I learned how to celebrate the good in each other’s lives. I learned to say yes, even when it was inconvenient because someone else really needed me to.

Sometimes when I hear a pastor explain that we are called to be “God’s love with skin on” I   nod in agreement. I know what that looks like. I was raised on that kind of practical love. Sometimes when I sit in meetings or read books that attempt to systematize missional living and loving our neighbor. I think about the web of women that taught me how to really be there for people, and long for them to show up in the darkest corners of our neighborhoods with a delicious meal and a quick fun craft for the kids.

I heard the women at my childhood church were throwing baby showers for women at the crisis pregnancy center and I was thrilled. I know these church ladies. They threw my showers. They bring the best food AND bring the best presents. They even make sure the wrapping is beautiful. They want you to feel loved. I found out the second year they did it,  more than double the pregnant women signed up to be showered. Word of the love had gotten around.

If nothing else was taught to me all those years in that suburban church, I was certainly taught this: The hand that fills the crock pot….has the power to change the world.

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This post is linked with all kinds of posts that celebrate women today! Go see the rest at Sarah Bessey’s place. Cheers!

I ran into my friend’s house yesterday. Not like I was driving around and I saw my friend’s house and people were home so I popped in.  I took a corner too close and scraped our van all the way down the passenger side, wheel well to wheel well on the side of my friend’s house. I managed to take a piece of white trim off the side of the house too. It fell out of the crack between doors and onto my driveway when I went to get the Peanut out of the van.

To make matters worse, (because hitting your friend’s house with your car is not bad enough) when her husband came out to check on everything, because you know I HIT THEIR HOUSE, he was totally awesome and assured me that if I had to hit their house, I certainly took it at a good angle, and I proceeded to act like an idiot and tell him to “just let me know how much it was” like he was a stranger and I was used to throwing money at my problems and I hit houses all the time. Then I peeled out  of the driveway because, apparently, even though I am almost thirty, I would still rather act like an ass than cry in front of a middle school gym teacher.

I wish I could tell you that this is the first time I have run into something that does not move. I have a long and storied history of poor spacial awareness. I regularly have bruises on my legs because I cannot gauge how far away from the student desks my body is as I wander about the classroom. My dad had to pray over me repeatedly as I learned to drive. I had a lot of trouble figuring out where the gas and the break were in relationship to my foot and used to hit the wrong one. Until I had children I was responsible for schlepping into the store, I just played it safe and parked in the back away from everyone.

When I emotionally vomited about this on twitter and pleaded for someone to make me feel better, my high school friend came through. 

@accidentaldevo This won’t get the paint off of your car, but it always makes me laugh: youtube.com/watch?v=3qqE_W… #betterthannothing?

— Laura (@darthsnuggles) March 5, 2013

and I laughed. How can you not? Mostly though, it made me feel better because it reminded me that I am not alone. It reminded me that when I was getting my license and crying in the back of the band room because “I would never get my license. It was just too hard, and it made me feel so, so stupid.” I remember this girl, who was so smart no one else even bothered trying to be valedictorian in her class, I remember her saying, “Me too. Abby, I struggle with that too. And it makes me feel stupid too.” Maybe I wasn’t sure that I was not an idiot but I was sure this girl wasn’t and that “me too” left me a little less alone.

Lately, I have been confronted with all the ways I am screwing it up. But mostly, I have been confronted with all the ways I do not pour those screw ups on the altar of my God, and trust that He loves me enough to want those too. That He is big enough to redeem even my inability gauge how close I am to the things around me.

Here is a secret about me in my classroom. I get the learning disabled kids. I understand them. I know what it feels like to stare at the words in front of a page and have no idea what they are saying as everyone around you interprets them flawlessly. I know this, not because words have ever been a challenge for me, but because the exact same thing happens to me when you put a map in front of my face. I know what it feels like to have someone talk to you like you are stupid just because your brain cannot interpret certain symbols in certain ways. I know how hard your brain has to churn for a work around, and when my students find one, I am so glad. I am so proud. I celebrate with them and for them because I know what it took. I know what it means, because really, me too.

So you feel like you aren’t good enough, me too. You are unable to ever put the laundry away and wade through the pile in the laundry room and decide that your two-year-old’s socks don’t need to match anyway, me too. Twitter makes you feel like the awkward girl in the cafeteria who occasionally gets a seat at the cool table, but only if someone is absent that day, me too. You are sure that God cannot use all of you because all of you occasionally take turns too close and run into structures that never move, me too.

That last one is a lie, friend. He wants to use all of you. He wants to use all of me too.

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A few weeks ago something terrible happened in my classroom. My student who has some physical disabilities sat in a desk that is not rock solid. When he pushed on the front of the desk to get himself upright so that he could walk to his wheel chair, the desk flipped over on top of him. In front of everyone. (If you have ever been fifteen, you know the implications of that last sentence.) Then, he had to tell me that he was physically unable to right himself. In front of everyone. I was grateful we were watching a movie and the lights were out. I could hear the embarrassment in his voice and was sure it was written, blazed across his face.

A few weeks ago something wonderful happened in my classroom. One of my other fifteen-year-old students quickly and quietly helped his classmate up, and dusted him off. “You okay, man?” With that sentence they were just two fifteen-year-old boys. Dignity restored. Then the student switched the desks so that he was sitting in the rickety and uncomfortable desk. He now checks to make sure the desks don’t accidentally get switched. It isn’t a big deal; it took me a while to notice. He just does it because he cares, because he has chosen to take responsibility for the welfare of his classmate.

February 22 D.L Mayfield wrote a column about bullying that I have been mulling over ever since. Her words have been going round and round in my mind. She ends the column by saying that is does get better, but not because of age or maturity, it gets better because of Jesus.

As these thoughts were slowly circling the interactions I have, every day with my students, they collided with this thought, retweeted from Luke Harms, but originally from Jonalyn Fincher: Parents expectations for youth group graduates: Sober Virgins #aimhigher.

I have written about it once before, about the day the Holy Spirit got a hold of me in the Jr. High cafeteria. About the day giving a kid someone to sit with at lunch gave him a reason to show up the next week. I said much of what I want to say then, but these two things collided in my brain, and there seems to be an aftermath of this explosion.

We, as a church are selling out our teenagers. In most high schools in America you will find a christian organization, in almost all churches you will find an organization for teens. Christian teenagers are everywhere. Yet, where is Jesus in the cafeteria? In the hallways when someone is getting their head bashed in? Maybe you won’t find a Christian teen doing the bashing, but you will likely see one watching silently near by.

It is okay for us, as adults to preach the wild ways of the cross, to even let some crazies (Jen Hatmaker, Shane Claiborne) encourage us in living more like Jesus, but we will not preach that message to our teens. We are afraid. We are afraid our teens will face opposition, will lose friends, will not be invited to prom. We know that the teen years can be fraught with pain, and we want to do everything we can to keep them from hurting. We are afraid that if we challenge our teens with a faith that will cost them, they will reject that faith entirely.

We are afraid of the implications of teens who have agreed to deny themselves and follow Jesus, about the mirror it may hold up to the holey gospel we have been giving and receiving, and so we preach abstinence, of many things, and define Jesus lover in “we don’t do that.” 

They are listening, our teens are listening and have learned that following Jesus is what you are doing if you are not doing certain things. If you don’t smoke, and drink, if you don’t get into the backseat of a car at night, then God is happy with you. If you are not the one slamming head into lockers, or writing insults on Facebook pages, then you are following Jesus. Bonus points for wearing a t-shirt with a Bible verse.

Our teens are better than this. They are better than this shell of a gospel and they deserve more. They deserve to be fed the whole gospel. They deserve to be challenged with the sacrifice of Christ and the wild love for people no one else likes.  If we fed our teens the whole gospel, their insatiable need for love and acceptance would be filled, even over-filled and out of that abundance they could feed their peers.

Can I tell you our teens are hungry for justice? Can I tell you freshmen are capable of having deep and heart wrenching discussions about privilege and popularity?  The teenagers we are sheltering from the gospel are bursting to talk about it. When we give them the chance to do better, so often they do.

So many of our teens are tired of an easy gospel, hungry for a more sustaining word. They long to believe that their life makes a difference, they are hungry to be a part of the “Thy Kingdom Come” everyone keeps reciting before football games.

The answer to school bullying is already in the schools, sitting in the desks with mission trip t-shirts on. The answer to childhood cruelty is unleashing the love of Jesus Christ through the bodies of the peers of the victims and bullies alike. The answer to the hate that we are trying so desperately to shield our teens from, is the promise that the sacrificial love that Jesus requires is worth it. The love of Jesus can turn the teenage popularity kingdom upside down too.

But we don’t tell them it is worth it. We don’t tell them it is worth it, because we are not sure it is.

Maybe you are headed to work like you always are, listening to your favorite radio program, maybe it is the weekend, you are headed nowhere in particular but hope to land some place special. Maybe you are driving around and around your block because the baby in the back seat refuses to sleep any other way.

It doesn’t really matter where you are driving, what you are doing.

You hear the siren somewhere in the distance–and you wonder if it is coming for you.

There are days when I am on my way to work, and the siren of anxiety can be heard in the distance.
It sounds like a faint police car wail that I am pretty sure I can ignore. Weee-oooo-no-good-you-are-fail-ing. On the good days it remains in the back of my head. A faint sound that can be drowned out by the daily activity that is my life.

Other days are not so good.

The anxiety siren comes closer.

I am grateful to have the opportunity to post at Renee Fisher’s place today. Would you join me there?