It's Raining in Baltimore....

Life is full of bitter sweet moments and through all of those moments, especially in my life through all those moments music has had a defining place in what is going on. 

I tend to relate to music better than other ways to deal with whatever emotion I am feeling.  I also tend to gravitate toward a certain type of band, Counting Crows is one of my favorite bands.  They are not one of the more popular bands of the day but I love their sound and 98% of their lyrics. 

SO right now as I sit at 3 Bean for what will likely be one of the last times, I am listening to August and Everything After, great album.  The song in the video is on that album, and funny enough it's been raining in Baltimore a lot lately. 

If I had to be honest the last two years in the Newell house have been full of a lot of rain, a lot of storms.  In some ways we are still dealing with storm clean up, the battles with cancer, my tendency to internalizing and taking everything personally, walking away from the church that I was supposed to save, being angry at everyone involved in that process including myself, mostly at myself. 

The song talks about things that fall apart and about the need for a phone call, a raincoat some kind of connection with anyone and that's where I have been for a long time.  When we first left the church I was in a bad place, people reached out to me and I just sort of read their posts, words of encouragement all that and either ignored them or unfriended them.   I made excuses to not go to church, made sure I had to work as often as possible on the food truck, attempted to start writing again and in doing so posted a couple of angst filled rants.  Then something happened, well a couple of things happened. 

I have this amazing woman that I can say with complete honesty I don't deserve.  The amount of mess she has put up with in the last 23 years qualifies her for sainthood.  My best friend was having a birthday party, in Oklahoma and while we couldn't go she asked if I wanted to talk to him.  Now to be fair, he was one of the guys that reached out to me when everything fell apart and I just didn't respond.  Turns out the party was in Youngstown, also turns out we were going to be in Youngstown at the same time he was.  We couldn't go to the party but that didn't really matter, Joyce asked if I wanted to see him and I said sure why not.  Keep in mind I hadn't spoken to my friend in 7 years.  Long story short after along walk in the snow with my dog we had reconnected and when we got back to the house he mentioned that his nephew had preached the Christmas Eve service at NCA. 

Which brings us to where we are now.  We found out that NCA needed a pastor, I submitted a resume and this past Sunday the church voted us in.  Long journey actually,  full of prayer, conversation, prayer, conversation, evaluation, phone calls, prayer, travel to Ohio more than once, sermons and questions and all of it.  God did some pretty amazing things to bring us to the place we are at now.
He brought us to a great church in Baltimore that reminded me about how much God cares, he opened the hearts of the people in Niles, He opened my heart to realize that HE wasn't done with me by a long shot and that there was a place for us. 

The thing is all of this excitement comes with a bit of sadness.  We have friends here in Baltimore, people who we have grown to love.  People who have stuck with us, people that have been there.  We will miss them.

I will miss them.  Perhaps one of the ones I will miss most of all, is Jim.  I can say with a hundred percent surety that without Jim I would not be heading back into ministry at all.  Without his encouragement, friendship, and prayers I would just be sitting in my room with the lights off listening to Bathsalts (really dark angsty song) over and over again.  He and I came to Locust Point at the same time.  He left before I did and then I left and we have maintained a friendship that transcends ministry and shared vocations. 

God has done some pretty amazing things in the last six months.  I can't wait for all that he is going to do in the coming weeks, months, and years.

So there it is.  It's raining in Baltimore, but there is a light on the other side and well I can't wait to see what's next.




 

Plot points and Plans

Years ago...and at this point I do mean years, I was in the Science Olympics in my school...Don't get too excited, lots of people were in the science Olympics one of the ways to get in was to make a hot box that was supposed to keep water hot for a certain amount of time, build a contraption that kept an egg from breaking and some other strange stuff.  I happened to build a hot box that did a fairly decent job and in doing so landed a spot on the team.  The good thing was that it was a day out of school, if i remember correctly the bus ride for that particular science Olympics led to my first high school Girl Friend, at least I think it did, anyway the point is that you couldn't just do one thing at the Science Olympics back in the day Mrs. Viars wanted to optimize bus space.  So in addition to my hot box project I had to choose another event to be in.  There were options to do a weather event and a few others an then there was the option to do a compass course. I'm sure there is a more scientific name to whatever that was, but that's the best I can do given the circumstances.  I chose the compass course and my buddy Jeff did the weather thing.  I then spent an entire Saturday with a the commander of my Royal Ranger outpost (think boy scouts but attached to the church I grew up in) following direction a set of directions he had plotted out for me to find.  North South East West.. North East, South East etc.  I successfully navigated the courses he set up for me to navigate, filling in the paper with what I needed to and all was good.  I went to the competition confident that I had learned all that I needed to learn to make it through the course.

A little thing about compass navigation, especially when it is in competition form...yeah we didn't do north south east and west... we were each handed a compass that was set in the middle of a clear plastic ruler for lack of a better word, with markings on it the compass I had was a small circle with a flip top lid...the compass we used looked like this...

BIG DIFFERENCE...Now to be fair to Commander Cliff (no I'm not making that up that was his name, dude was TALL to)  this is the kind of compass he trained me to use, however he trained me N, S, E, W.  He did not train me 360 degrees bla bla bla.   To say I was lost would be an understatement.  I will admit to hoping we would all get to start around the same time and I could sort of fudge my way through.  Nope.  Start times were staggered, and while we all ended up bunching up there was a problem in that I really had no idea what I was doing.  I had the tools I needed but I had no idea how to use them.

Which brings me to the real reason for this blog post.  I have been out of ministry for 8 months now.  Back when I left I will admit to being pretty angry and that anger had several places to stop.  God, the church, the conference, and of course myself, because lets face it I had failed.  I made some pretty hard and fast statements as well.  It's funny how when we are in a place of pain, feeling like we have failed ourselves, God, our family and the group of people we are supposed to be helping we lash out.  I would love to tell you that I will never lash out again.  I would love to say that suddenly everything is sunshine and roses but if I am honest that's not how it is.  If we are all willing to be honest we will admit that there are days that we get it and days that we don't.  What matters is what we do on the days in-between.  See the days that we get it and that everything is right in our world and it's all working, we lean into the good stuff, we tell everyone how blessed we are, our social media posts are sickening to the vast majority of our friends, and we can't wait to get to whatever place of worship that we go to, so that everyone can see how great life is.  The days when everything is bad when things fall apart when we are lost and don't know what's next, we get angry, we are no longer blessed God is not real, or not interested, we find the most depressing music we can, and everyone tends to know how bad life is and how much we hate it and how much we are not being treated the way we should be.  We avoid getting together with other people to worship because we don't really want to or see a need too.

Full disclosure I was there for a long time.  I would make excuses to skip church  and when I did go to church it was usually just because that's what the family wanted.  Eye contact was at a minimum, angry rants abounded.  It's a small blessing that I stopped blogging, because while writing is my way of processing and I love doing it, what would have come out of my fingers to the screen would have been ugly and hurtful and would not have been even close to the way Jesus would respond.  Slowly things started to change, we found a church that we fit into, and we began to get involved.  I went back to Facebook and started to actually look at what people posted while I was going through the dark time and found so many people that I thought were gone from my life reaching out and praying and saying to call them.

I have had, for a while now, a hard time holding onto the whole road map of life that God drew for me individually.  I believe that God is interested in me, I believe God cares, I believe God has a plan and a purpose for humanity and even for me.  I believe that plan is to be a pastor, however I also believe that there are entire aspects of that calling and the fulfillment of that calling that sit squarely in my lap.  I'm not much for signs and all that.  People will point to Gideon and the whole fleece thing as if it's a good thing. I tend to see that whole thing not as a guidebook to be sure of what God wants and more of a this is not the way it should be done.   God did what he had to do for Gideon because Gideon didn't want to listen didn't want to step up didn't want to do the task that was before him, he set out impossible tasks not to test God but to get out of his job, the job that God had decided Gideon was supposed to do.  It makes me laugh was I read the entire account of Gideon, mainly because part of me thinks that God engages in similar behavior with the whole whittling down of Gideon's army.  I know that we have this great picture of Gideon having a come to Yahweh moment but I really don't think he was cool with losing vast chunks of his army, especially when it was that whole pick them on the way they drink thing.   God wanted to be sure there was no mistaking who was doing the saving sure, but Gideon still had to do his part, he still had to be the leader, he still had to follow the path that God laid out.

Looking back on the last eight months and even further back at the last five years I can see the shape of a path emerging, and while there are places that a road sign popped up to help steer the journey there are huge chunks of the journey that are me making choices after talking to my family and friends and yes God.  

As we stand on the edge of something new, I am beginning to see the pattern of how God has to deal with me to get me where I am supposed to be.  I plot the points but God makes the plan, and there are many times that I'm right back on that compass course with all the tools I need and not a clue how to chart the course, and then God steps in and hands me a revised plan with N S E and W instead of Degrees and Coordinates, smiles pats me on the head and says.  Now try it.   That's what is happening now and I can't wait to share the end results.