 The other morning I woke up a bit later than usual, which meant that I ended up walking my dog, Hank, a little later than usual. Instead of it being dark and quiet like it usually is when we walk, the sun was up and the streets were alive with people driving to work, garbage trucks running their routes and, of course, school buses shuttling children to school.
On part of our regular morning walk route there is a school bus stop with a rather large number of children who get on the bus there. As Hank and I approached this bus stop along a busier thoroughfare in town, I noticed a mother who had just gotten out of her vehicle. She was parked along the street on the opposite side of the road from the bus stop, and had gone around the back side of her SUV to open the rear passenger door. Out slid her daughter–or who I presumed to be her daughter. The little girl was tugging on her backpack that appeared to have fallen between the seats. Just as her mother was bending down to help free the pack, the little girl gave it one final tug on her own and the bag was freed. She promptly flung it onto her back and slid her arms in the straps, then appeared to look up at her mother’s face. In one motion, the girl’s mother closed the door of her vehicle and dropped her hand. Her daughter’s hand easily found hers, and mother began guiding daughter around the vehicle to the street’s edge. In tandem, the two looked both ways–up and down the street–with almost exaggerated motions of their heads. It appeared to me that the little girl was still learning to be aware of her surroundings, so everything her mother did was a bit more pronounced in an effort to get the point across. Then, with one last look both ways, the little girl’s mother guided her across the busy street. They didn’t run. They didn’t even look hurried. The little girl never seemed to hesitate or quicken her steps. They simply moved–together–until they safely reached the other side. As Hank and I continued to walk I found myself wondering why the scene had caught my attention. I mean, presumably, it was just a parent and a child, doing fairly routine parent and child stuff, right? But maybe that is what was so attention-grabbing about it for me. Could our lives together really be as simple as that? I suppose they can be, I just don’t know that they always are. If I’m being honest, I don’t know the last time I was content to simply get to the other side of whatever I was facing. I’ve been in a hurry to achieve success (whatever that is). I’ve been in a hurry to reach the day when I finally have everything figured out (I’m still waiting on that day). I’ve been in a hurry to reach my goal weight, to stop missing the people I love who have died, to be more secure in my relationships, my job, and my finances. I’ve twisted, I’ve contorted, I’ve broken a sweat–literally and metaphorically–all to reach some magical day or feeling or number that I think will finally make me happy or content or…something. And I can’t help but wonder if you have too. I don’t know about you, but with all of that hurrying and twisting and contorting, I’m fairly certain I’ve missed a lot of outstretched hands along the way–hands that were desperate to find another hand to hold during a difficult time–hands that sought to be a comfort to me as I have struggled. In the traditional language of the Lord’s Prayer, we say the words, “Thy kingdom come.” Richard Rohr points out, “to pray and actually mean ‘Thy kingdom come,’ we must also be able to say, ‘my kingdoms go.’” And I can’t help but wonder if what was striking about the mother and her child crossing the street that day was that they offered me a glimpse of what it looks like when God’s kingdom comes and our kingdoms go. Maybe God’s kingdom comes every time we drop our personal agendas long enough to care about another–ensuring that we both safely reach the other side of whatever road we’re walking. Maybe God’s kingdom comes through a steady rhythm of hands offered and hands taken. Maybe God’s kingdom comes in the blessed reassurance our presence offers another–that we can do what frightens us, that we can become what we are not yet, that we can make it through what we think will certainly kill us. Maybe it’s as hard as all that…but maybe it’s as simple as all that too? So this week, may our prayer each day be, “Thy kingdom come, and my kingdoms go,” and may that prayer free us to see more clearly the hands reaching out toward us–waiting to entangle their fingers with ours–as we all learn to simply move toward the other side together–whatever the “other side” is for each of us. Learning to let my kingdoms go with you, Pr. Melissa  While visiting my dad a few weeks ago while he was in the hospital up in Waterloo, I noticed this pole plastered with Visitor and Patient name tags. The pole is located at the road crossing from the hospital building to the parking lot. The name tags are a mandatory part of visiting this hospital. When patients arrive, a “Patient” name tag is given to them in order to clearly identify them before they are officially checked in and receive their hospital bracelet. The “Visitor” name tags are provided to each visitor every time a visit is made to a particular patient, and oftentimes have the patient’s room number written on them just under the word “Visitor.”
When leaving the hospital, there is a receptacle for used name tags to be properly disposed of, however, if a person isn’t thinking about it, it is very easy to leave the hospital wearing your name tag–not realizing it’s still on until that receptacle is far off in the distance. I imagine this is how this pole began to serve as a “second chance” receptacle for the name tags. Of course, like with most things, once one or two people have done something, it becomes easier for others to follow suit. The pole–once bare metal–has become a kind of monument to the lives lost, saved, and forever-altered by all that has taken place within the hospital walls. It is a testimony to the love that surrounds us–particularly palpable in times of dis-ease and distress–as well as to the sheer number of hurting people–either physically, mentally, emotionally, or spiritually–that have walked this same road–either separately or together. The pole might look like graffiti to the untrained eye, but to me it is evidence of people wishing to leave their mark–even in some small, perhaps annoying way–and let others know “we were here.” My friend Joe Scallon’s visitation was Saturday, and I spent the day driving to and from Iowa Falls to take part. That afternoon, plus the funeral service the next day, were all focused on the mark Joe left on this world, his community, his church, his family, and the countless numbers of people who were lucky enough to call him a friend. The mark Joe left was one of humble service to others, hard work, and a deep and abiding love for God, family, and community. But the weekend was also laced with an undeniable message: Joe has left his mark–now make sure to leave yours. I have mulled over those words in my heart and mind since then, and have pondered what that means in my own life. What mark am I leaving on the world? How do I know? As a person of faith, like my friend Joe was, I think the best way to tell if we are leaving a mark and what kind of mark we are leaving, is by looking at the condition of those around us. Jesus seemed to agree. Throughout his ministry, Jesus challenged “good, religious people” to move beyond their insistence on upholding the letter of the Law in favor of moving toward living the spirit of the Law. Jesus understood the Law to be interpreted by love, and not the other way around. In Matthew 25, Jesus shares the parable of the sheep and the goats, and in that teaching says, “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’ “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’” The report card of our lives, it seems, comes from those around us and, in particular, from those who are worse off or struggling more than we are. People who can’t “pay us back” for whatever good we do, but rather, those who can only pay it forward in the aftermath of our kindness to them. In this way, the lives of those around us that we have impacted become a living testimony to the love and nurture we have shown them. Their lives reflect the mark we have left on their hearts and on their lives–a monument to the lives impacted by us–understanding that our lives were first impacted by not only someone else–or a whole chorus of someone else’s–but by Christ. We love because Christ loved us, and that love has shown up through people making food and dropping it off after a death, through rides that have been given to us when we needed one, through hugs and knowing smiles, through phone calls and prayers and shopping trips. It is, after all, the simplest things that leave a mark on a soul. And those are marks that do not die with us, but continue long after our earthly bodies have died. So, my challenge to y’all this week is to look at the world around you. Are your fingerprints on it? Is there dirt under your fingernails from working to make it better for someone else? Are you living in such a way that your life is an unmistakable monument to someone else’s love? I know I’m sure working on it in my own life–a life that is a living testimony–a monument to all the love that has been shown to me thus far from many people–including a guy named Joe. Leaving a mark of love with you, Pr. Melissa  Cool Hand Luke. There’s a lot wrong with this 1967 film, but there’s something so right: The famous, often misquoted line, “What we have here is failure to communicate.” The line is spoken by the character Captain, right after hitting Paul Newman’s character and pushing him down a small ravine. In the movie, the line comes on the heels of Luke’s (Newman) smart alec reply to Captain, after Captain tells Luke that the chains he is wearing (Luke is a prisoner on a chain gang) are for his own good. Luke’s comment? “I wish you’d stop being so good to me, Captain.”
That line was on my mind as I walked my dogs this morning in the early, autumn-like air. They were on the scent of only God knows what, and were zigging and zagging in random fashion all over the sidewalk and the easement. At one point, Hank decided to zig and June decided to zag, and somehow their retractable leashes (yeah, I know, their short leashes would likely be better for morning walks, but here we are) got wrapped around my body. In an instant I paused my True Crime podcast on my headphones, did a kind of twirl and jig to get untwisted, and started to chuckle as the quote flashed like a lighted sign in my mind, “What we have here is failure to communicate.” As I’ve reflected some more about communication and communication failures, I found myself wondering about all of the ways and for all of the reasons communication tends to break down. There are communication breakdowns that happen in an email, a text, or on social media because tone and facial expressions are absent tools that are helpful in interpreting what’s being said and how it’s being said. Communication breakdowns happen with our spouses when we make assumptions that the other person will take care of something else. Sometimes we think we told a co-worker or a partner about a meeting we have at a particular time, but it turns out that message never made it from our “To-Do” lists into an actual conversation. We fail to communicate effectively with our kids, sometimes forgetting that listening–truly and deeply–is as much a part of communication as speaking is. And we even have communication failures that happen inside of us without any other person involved. That last one, I think, is somewhat trickier to identify, and yet it carries a weight that is so profound that it impacts nearly everything else in our lives. It is a communication failure between our heads and our hearts. You would think that with all of the body’s sophistication, failures to communicate would be few and far between, and yet they are nearly as common as breathing. We get an illness that might slow us down a little, and our brains try to reason a way out of it so that our hearts won’t have to be resigned to acceptance and taking the necessary rest. Our hearts will remind us that someone we love is dying, but our brains will try anything to force by sheer will some different outcome. Our schedule will look impossible for the day, and our brains will tell us that we’ll still be able to get it all done and be able to make our child’s sporting event, or be able to keep dinner plans with our friends or our spouse, but our hearts hold the deeper, disappointing, truth that we won’t be making anything of the sort. Our brains tell us that we can multitask in order to make it all happen–that we can be bigger, stronger, faster, and maybe even still look smokin’ hot doing it, while our hearts hold the wisdom of our true capacity. Even in grief, denial is usually our first step–our brain’s feeble attempt to protect our tender hearts from feeling the shock of a loss. It’s like we get it through our heads, but we just can’t bear to break it to our hearts. In Matthew chapter 3, John the Baptist calls us to change our hearts and lives, or to repent. While this word has gotten a bad rep from some who have misused it as an action that reminds us how terrible we are, I can’t help but think that it might have a very useful application to help with communication failures. Maybe our failure to communicate–whether with others, with God, and within ourselves–is crying out to us from the wilderness of our own lives the way John called out from the wilderness in our sacred stories? Could it be that a communication failure between our heads and our hearts is asking us to change how we’re living or how fast we’re living? Could it be that a communication failure with our children is our invitation to make a change from listening in order to respond to listening in an effort to understand? What if we practiced letting our heart work as intended, and not calling it “broken” during times of loss and grief? What if communication breakdowns aren’t the end of the story we are writing as people, as partners, as parents, and as professionals, but instead are the beginning of a transformative story? OUR transformative story–the beginning of our very own repentance–a complete change of OUR hearts and OUR lives? Well, I don’t know the answers there–at least not for you. But what I do know is that when communication failures happen, what we have is more than just the failure itself. What we also have is an opportunity–to turn back to God, to turn back to one another, and to turn back to the image of God we were created to be. For it is in the turning and re-turning–in the repentance–where transformation and change are born. Learning to turn someplace new with you, Pr. Melissa  This year, on a whim, we grew watermelons. Actually, we are still growing watermelons. Allow me to explain. This past spring, my spouse and I went to a local farm store to look at replacing some garden plants that had failed to thrive. While perusing what else was available, I came across some Georgia Rattlesnake watermelon. I eagerly showed my spouse my find, and they agreed that we had one spot in our perennial bed where it might fit.
Fast forward to this past weekend. We had seven (SEVEN!) HUGE watermelons on a vine that usually only produces 2, maybe 3, watermelons. Having never grown watermelons before, I had no idea how to tell when they are ripe. I see people at the grocery store all of the time thumping melons, but honestly, when I thump them, they never really speak to me. So, I turned to the great prophet of the ether, St. Google, to help me better understand how to tell if these melons were ready to harvest. Like many prophets, the instructions and anecdotes found on Google seemed to muddy the waters more than clear them up. Some said to look at the color of the ground spot on the underside of the melon. Some said to wait for the stem attached to the melon to dry up. Others said to trace the stem back from the melon to find the first two tendrils and see if they were dried up. So, I decided to take a little bit from each piece of advice in order to determine if the melon was ripe. I decided I would examine the LARGEST of the melons. I gently rolled the fruit over and saw that the ground spot was yellowish in color. Okay, good sign. The vine was dried up in other places, just not going into the melon. And one, not both, of the tendrils was dried up. That, coupled with the size of the melon (it weighed in at a whopping 26.2 pounds!!), led me to believe that it was ready to pick. With watermelons, you really only get one shot. It’s not like a tomato where if you pull it too soon it will finish ripening on a window sill. As I cut into this giant melon, however, I knew almost immediately that this one shot was over. The resistance of the knife against the rind was present on the outside of the melon where I expected it to be…and then it was present as I cut deeper into it. I had harvested this melon far too soon and, while some of the fruit was still salvageable, it was not nearly as sweet and delicious as it would have been had it been allowed to fully mature. This past week I have given lots of thought to the parts of life that come too soon–many because we rush into them. We enter a new relationship too soon after a previous one has ended only to find that the new relationship is not exactly what we thought it would be. We pull a bandaid off a wound too soon only to find a scar has not yet formed and healing has not yet happened. We say “I love you” too soon and find that we don’t really mean it. We enter a social situation too soon after an anxiety attack. We make a joke too soon about something that we know will likely be a source of laughter in the future, but isn’t quite funny yet. We rush our children to “get over it” when they are hurting, we rush our spouse to forgive us after an argument that caused them pain, or we rush our friends to move on following the loss of someone they love–all of it perhaps not soon enough for us, but far too soon for them. I have come to believe that when we rush into things it is often because we are uncomfortable in liminal spaces. There is great discomfort and dis-ease when life brings us to times when we are in between the “now” and the “not yet.” Rather than sit in that discomfort for too long, we do the very best we can to make it stop as soon as possible. So we rush to make decisions and rush to form new relationships and even rush those around us to grieve on our time tables all so that the discomfort we are feeling in the moment will end. After all, even bad decisions are decisions, so we can stop the uncertainty and the discomfort that leads up to making a decision in the first place. The wrong relationship is still a relationship that will stop the loneliness and the heartache with the ending of the last one. The thing about doing things too soon or forcing other people to do them too soon is that it doesn’t end our dis-ease or our discomfort. It just gives birth to a new discomfort or a new source of our dis-ease. In our effort to avoid the pain of uncertainty, we are causing a new kind of pain to rise up in us, when we would have been better off letting ourselves be uncomfortable for just a minute, and letting those around us grieve as they need to grieve. This is one of the reasons I love the liturgical seasons in the church. Just when we think we cannot possibly count one more Sunday after Pentecost in the LOOOOOOONG season of ordinary time, Advent happens. Advent forces our mad dash to Christmas to slow a bit, asking us to mark time differently. Lent slows our roll into Easter and the resurrection, and demands that we sit in the shadow of the cross. There is something beautiful and holy and sacred about waiting, not rushing, pausing, and letting things unfold in the time they need to unfold. Tom Petty was right all those years ago, I think, “the waiting IS the hardest part,” but our faith teaches us that it is also the most fruitful part. Learning to wait allows us to learn from each part of our journeys, no matter where they lead. It allows us to get real about what’s going on and what life might be trying to teach us. It is, in a very real way, an act of love–for ourselves and others around us. So, I’m asking you to join me in refraining from doing things too soon this week. I’m asking that you join me in pondering the tough internal questions like, “Why am I rushing this?” or “Why am I afraid of being uncomfortable?” or “Why do I view the grief of those around me as so threatening to me?”. I’m asking that you join me in waiting and seeing what God does in our discomfort and our dis-ease…it could just be larger and more delicious than we could even ask or imagine. 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
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