I've been embarrassed about our 'weed bed' since we moved to Hepburn. There are all sorts of pristine yards, avid gardeners, amazing home-makers living in our town.. We live on possibly the highest traffic corner of Hepburn, and we have this mess of a thing right in everyone's line of sight as they come into town. To make it worse, our shed doors are always open, revealing the mess of carp (that's the Hepburn version of 'crap') for all to see. It's such an intimidating mess, and I haven't had energy or brain-space to contemplate making it right. Brendan would say "huh? what mess?", so he's not much help either.
A few days ago, I was quite shocked to discover that my weedbed is not actually that bad ...
It's a sea of daisies. I had heard that it was once a wildflower garden, but we didn't live here to see the daisies last year. Hmmmm .....
I made the connection to something I've been dwelling on this week: uniformity. (Maybe conformity? not sure.) Jeff (our awesome pastor) talked last week about the kind of spirituality Christians sometimes practice. It's sort of this accessory to our life. I had used a similar description in a paper I wrote on marriage spirituality. Jeff described a spirituality that is 'picked up' in order to live out our faith. We take it along with us as we move through life. He illustrated this point with various shapes and sizes of suitcases, one marked with the word 'christian spirituality'. A hurried person walked along, observed the 'Christianity' case, liked it, and picked it up. But it jostled everything else he was carrying, and a couple of other things had to be left behind in order to manage it all. That sounds about right. I know that was my early understanding of faith lived out. The appeal is that the accessories are uniform ... Mine might be smaller or bigger than yours, yours might be browner or pinker than mine, but they're really quite similar. The analogy in practice is that our faith expressions are so similar to one another ... we go to church, we read the right books, we believe the right things, we accept and reject the same things, we use a consistent language to talk about our spirituality.
But is our with-god life really supposed to be something we carry around with us? Or is it already inside of us? If so, then it's not so uniform, maybe. Then it might look really different from you to me and still be okay. Then, maybe, just maybe, its not about what I do (practice disciplines, have devotions, pray right, believe right , ......) but who I am? or yikes... how I am?
Before I get back to how the garden of weeds reminded me of this, a reflection.
I struggled so hard at first when working in the inner city. I met these people, these families that were so broken. Kids had been apprehended from their parents. Men weren't around - lots of times they were in jail, or just inconsistently involved. Drugs being bought and sold, used, right under my nose. At first, I wanted to fix these families. I figured, we've got it figured out, us suburbanites. Clean houses and yards, decent paying jobs, complete families, SUCCESS... I just needed to help my new friends figure it out. I had no shortage of determination to do just that. After a while, though, they still weren't figuring it out.
I decided I needed to work harder, clearly, I was failing at this being a Christian Missionary thing. A funny thing happened, though. Spending time with these people I wanted to fix caused me to do something weird. I started to love them... and I saw their scars, I even felt their pain. And I realized that while everything wasn't right in their homes and families... everything wasn't wrong, either. There was beauty in their laughter, in their trust, in their generosity, in their acceptance of a funny little french girl who knocked on the door to chat every week. (okay, so I'm not so little, and I often didn't knock.) It took a while, but I realized a few things: wanting them to be like me was wrong. Thinking that I had the answers was wrong. Being blind to what I could learn from them was wrong. All these wrongs made me really judgemental. All those plans for them from the society they're part of is probably a big part of why things are the way they are. All those things were like accessories that I thought their lives should have. And because my faith was something that I carried with me (if I'd had my devotions that morning), I wanted to share that great accessory with them most of all. I wanted them to like it and pick it up and take it with them just like I had.
Eventually, I realized that they could love God like I do.. and still be so broken that they make some pretty bad life choices. After a while I realized that my bad life choices might look nicer (idolizing/coveting nice yards or homes, for example), but while I justified it in my heart and mind over and over again, I was committing the sin of not loving my neighbor by being judgemental . In God's eyes, I am not better. I'm going to type that again... In God's eyes, I'm not better ... than someone who is struggling with a drug addiction or a promiscuous lifestyle. It's basic, but I don't know why I need such frequent reminders of this profound truth.
that weed bed is a little sea of daisies for a couple of weeks in June. The rest of the time, its a mess. Today, I decided that I'm not going to use the round up I bought at Home Depot last week. I'm going to keep that messy weed bed around, and hopefully be reminded that having daisies for two weeks every year is enough. And being sometimes beautiful and sometimes not is all any of us has to offer.
