 After worship on Sunday, I showed one of our young people how to lock and unlock the door just outside my office. I told him how it worked, then I handed him the key, as his family and I stood there and watched.
It's a heavy lock that takes some coordination–pushing the key in and turning it at the same time. He struggled at first as he tried to figure out how he was going to do what he knew the door could do. As he stayed laser-focused on the lock, I watched him–noting how the key looked larger in his hands, how a small furrow of concentration had formed on his face, and the way he adjusted his grip on the key and tried again. At some point I started to reach out to help him, but just as I did, the lock snapped into place. He looked up, delighted with himself. Then he did it again–unlocked the door, then locking it again–as if to ensure that he had truly mastered the lock. I've been thinking about that moment all week. About my hand starting to move toward his. About what would have happened if I had gotten there BEFORE that lock snapped. Spiritual director and writer Caroline Oakes has a book called Practice the Pause, in which she draws on both contemplative Christian tradition and brain science to make a case for the transformative power of the intentional pause. Her argument, in part, is that our fight-or-flight wiring makes us reactive–and that we can literally rewire our brains, over time, by practicing the habit of stopping before we respond. What she's describing isn't passivity. It's the discipline of creating just enough space between stimulus and action for something other than instinct to operate. I almost took that moment from this young person. Not out of cruelty, but out of instinct. My hand moved before my brain did, which is precisely the response Oakes is talking about–that deeply grooved impulse to fix, to smooth, to resolve. And sometimes that impulse is exactly right. But other times, what looks like helping is really just our own discomfort with watching someone struggle, and our need to relieve the tension. Sometimes the most faithful thing we can do is leave the tension alone and see what it becomes. Barbara Brown Taylor suggests that it might become like salvation. She describes salvation as something that not only happens at the end of a life, but as something that happens every time someone with a key uses it to open a door they could lock instead. In other words, salvation–wholeness–is the act of choosing to make a way where you could have just as easily made a wall. Stepping back and letting someone else learn they have what it takes to turn the key themselves makes such a way. That young person didn't need me to unlock the door. He needed me to hand him the key and then let him work, let him grow, let him become…more whole. Which makes me wonder if practicing the pause in other areas of life might be an invitation worth accepting. So this week, I invite you to consider the various places in your life–your relationships, your work, your church community–and ponder whether you have been reaching out to help when what's really needed is a pause. And consider if perhaps you, too, might instinctually be interrupting something beautiful trying to unfold. We are people who carry keys. The question is always what we do with them. On the journey with you, Pr. Melissa  From the Iowa Department of Transportation By the time you read this, the high temperature for the day will be 54 degrees. But I’m writing it on Monday, and on Monday–right now as I write–it’s 9 degrees with a windchill that makes it feel like -12. And Monday Melissa–along with the Monday versions of you all–are living in the aftermath of a blizzard.
Part of that aftermath, of course, is snow removal. Like many of you, I remove my own snow from the sidewalks and the driveway. So, like many of you, I imagine, I was outside this morning running the blower and using a shovel to clean up the rest. All while the wind continued to howl, and Mother Nature routinely slapped me in the face with any light, fluffy flakes that weren’t thrown in the right direction. I normally find blowing and shoveling snow somewhat meditative…in December and January and maybe even February. But not in March. Not when I’ve already tasted the sweet victory of wearing shorts outside in a non-tragic way. Not when I’ve already taken the long way home from work with my sunroof open and the window down to let the freshness of a warm afternoon fill up my senses. Not when I’ve seen the first green plants pushing up from the earth in their bold, yearly march toward heaven. Blowing and shoveling snow in March is deflating, and I found myself lacking a certain motivation to get the job done and done well. A lack of motivation isn’t just a problem we face when the snow falls in March, it finds us in our lives of faith too. There are seasons in faith that feel like March blizzards–not because they're the hardest seasons we've ever faced, but because we've already seen what warmth looks like. We've already tasted something real. We've prayed prayers and sung songs that felt alive, and have experienced a community that met us with a deep sense of love and belonging in ways that were new to us. We've seen grace break through, leaving our hearts strangely warmed. But then…the cold returns. And we find ourselves going through the motions, clearing the same ground we thought we'd already cleared, wondering why it all feels so much heavier, so much more meaningless than it used to. Theologians have a word for this: acedia. It's often translated as sloth, but that doesn't quite capture its essence completely. Acedia isn't laziness. It's more like a spiritual windchill–a numbing that sets in not at the beginning of the journey, but somewhere in the middle, when the novelty has worn off and the finish line isn't yet in sight. The desert fathers and mothers knew it well. They called it the noonday demon, the one that whispers: What's the point? Nothing is changing. You've done this before and here you are again. There’s not a simple fix for this, so I won’t pretend that there is. Motivation in the life of faith isn't something we can manufacture through grit and determination or by simply harnessing enough willpower. In fact, I’ve found that the answer rarely starts with trying harder. It starts with simply being honest and naming that the ground feels frozen again. And it asks us to resist the temptation to perform enthusiasm we don't feel. Author and speaker Steve Maraboli once wrote, "Life doesn't get easier or more forgiving, we get stronger and more resilient." Honestly, the first time I read that, it didn't feel like good news. It felt like someone telling me the winters don't actually get shorter, I just get better at standing in them. Which, if you're me on a Monday morning at -12 windchill, is not exactly the comfort you're looking for. But the more I sit with it, the more I think Maraboli is onto something our faith tradition has always known–and also something it pushes back on. Because yes, we do get stronger. We do become more resilient. And the winters don't actually get shorter. But we are not left to simply toughen up and endure. We are promised bread for the journey. Light for the way. We are promised that all we thirst for will be quenched–that we will run and not grow weary, walk and not grow faint. We are not promised that the cold won't return. We’re promised that we won't be left standing in it empty-handed. So if you're just not “feeling it” in your faith life right now–if prayer feels like talking to a wall, if showing up feels more like obligation than belonging, if the songs aren't landing and the words feel hollow, and the homilies feel like they’re written for somebody else–that doesn't mean something is wrong with you. And it doesn't necessarily mean something is wrong with your faith either. It might just mean you're in March. It means the journey is long and you are human. It means you've been at this long enough to know what warmth feels like, which is exactly why the cold is so hard to bear. And it means acedia has found you, the way it has found every serious person of faith who came before you, so you are in good company…you don’t have to panic. March might feel like it lasts forever–but to date, it never actually has. So keep showing up. Slower than usual, maybe. With less grace than you'd like, perhaps. Do the thing–the prayer, the practice, the getting-yourself-there–not because it feels meaningful right now, but because you trust that meaning isn't always available to your feelings in the moment. And when you do, you won't be standing alone. You'll be met there. That's not a promise I'm making. It's one that's already been made by the One who made us…and the stinkin’ March blizzards. On the journey with you, Pr. Melissa  I recently finished a beautiful little book of desert wisdom. In the book was a saying from Abba Anthony–one of the great teachers of the early Church. The saying reads: "The time is coming when people will be insane, and when they see someone who is not insane, they will attack that person saying: You are insane because you are not like us."
Abba Anthony said this in the fourth century. You'd be forgiven for thinking he wrote it last Tuesday. If you aren’t familiar with the desert fathers and mothers, I offer you a brief primer. In the third and fourth centuries, something unusual happened at the edges of the Roman Empire. Men and women–many of them disillusioned by a Christianity that had become comfortable, institutionalized, and entangled with imperial power–walked out into the Egyptian, Syrian, and Palestinian deserts to seek God in simplicity and silence. These weren't folks who were fleeing the world so much as they were refusing to be consumed by it. These ammas (mothers) and abbas (fathers) became teachers. Seekers traveled to sit with them, to ask questions, to receive "a word"–a short, piercing piece of wisdom meant to be carried and pondered. These sayings were eventually collected into what is known as the Sayings of the Desert Fathers (or Apophthegmata Patrum–say that three times fast), and they remain among the most startlingly fresh spiritual texts in all of Christian history. Among the most revered of these teachers was Anthony the Great, who left his inheritance at age twenty and lived most of his life in the desert. He is considered by many to be the father of Christian monasticism. And yet he was no recluse–he was deeply engaged with the world's problems, and he knew something about what it costs to hold a different kind of center. This particular saying from Abba Anthony might feel a bit like clever social commentary to us today. But it is far more than that–offering us both a pastoral warning and a spiritual gift. Anthony seemed to understand that there is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from living in a community–or a culture–where the dominant reality has quietly become the only acceptable reality. Where compassion gets called naïve. Where truth-telling gets called divisive. Where slowing down gets called laziness. Where simply not participating in the frenzy gets you labeled as the problem. In the shadow of such communal living, Abba Anthony names what so many of us feel but struggle to articulate: Sometimes what gets called insanity is just the refusal to go along. You know, I spend a great deal of time thinking about and reflecting on our congregation–a community scattered across five counties, often feeling like a minority voice in this area. I think about the people who come through our doors carrying the weight of being different in ways our culture punishes. I think about those who have been told by churches, or family, or the ambient pressure of their communities, that something is fundamentally wrong with them. And I can’t help but think that maybe the reason so many of us feel so different at this time in this place is because we ARE different. And maybe that’s not a problem to be fixed so much as it is a description to be claimed. In so many ways, we are the ones refusing to just go along with what is happening around us. Which, as many of us know all too well, comes at a cost–both communally and individually. And yet, not paying that cost has never really been an option for any of us. Because we know what Abba Anthony knew–that in a climate like ours, in an area like ours, when people call us the problem, it is not necessarily evidence that we are wrong. It is evidence that we are paying attention. Sometimes I need that reminder–and maybe you do too. That we are not crazy. We are awake…woke even. And that is not quite the 4-letter word people are making it out to be. In fact, it puts us in good company. Alongside people like Jesus, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., Harvey Milk, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the suffragists, the abolitionists, and a fourth-century Egyptian monk named Anthony who walked into the desert and saw the whole thing coming. We are a part of a tradition that has always lived in the tension between what is and what ought to be. And learning to live in that tension without being crushed by it, is some of our most important work. So this week, maybe we can let the desert elders remind us again that the crowd has never been a reliable guide for knowing which way we need to go. We already know the way…we just need to walk it. On the journey with you, Pr. Melissa |
Pastor Melissa enjoying time on her hammock.
Rev. Melissa Sternhagen
Rev. Melissa Sternhagen was called as the pastor of St. Paul Congregational UCC in June of 2020. Prior to her call to St. Paul, Pr. Melissa worked as a hospice chaplain in the Ames, IA area, following pastorates at rural churches in Central Iowa and Southern Illinois. Pr. Melissa is a second-career pastor with a background in agribusiness and production & supply operations. She received her M.Div. from Eden Theological Seminary in St. Louis, MO, and holds a MA Ed. in Adult Education and Training, and a BA in Organizational Communications. Archives
April 2026
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