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Archives for August 2009

The Adamant Dancing-Master

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This year, many Christian men and women are saying what a hard taskmaster God can be. Adamant means “inflexible, or persistent in maintaining a position or opinion.” God can be loving, but He also can be adamant with me—maybe they are the same thing. During difficult times in my life, He insists I attend “dance” classes. The unrelenting stress of certain circumstances can force me to perfect my steps to His sacred rhythms.

This personal “dance” is a discipline that means that I must step for an hour in intercessory prayer to begin each day. Mondays are given to praying for David and for our adult children, grandchildren, then for extended family, particularly any who are not Christians. Tuesdays are given to prayers for Mainstay Ministries and our staff; Wednesdays are for Hungry Souls. On Thursdays I pray for those artists in the popular culture who are already positioned to do God’s work—that He will draw them to Himself—and I pray for my own writing as I begin to point it to markets outside of the religious ones. On Fridays, I intercede for our sorry world. On Saturdays, I turn my heart to Sabbath, but I pray for the church catholic, for the pastors on our lists, that God will pour out His Spirit.

This adamant Dancing Master is insisting that I pore over the Word daily and take notes and memorize. This is serious business, this dance class; no lollygagging around in the hallway at the candy machine. During times of intense stress, I reinstate prayer vigils. Once, when our ministry was under financial duress, we met every day around noon in the staff kitchen—office appointments and meetings and blocks of responsibilities had to be designed around this time, each day, without fail. Step/step. Practice/practice.

Some days I felt excessively burdened in this dancing lesson—as though David and I and our staff were in an unending rehearsal but didn’t know what the production was going to be or when a performance was scheduled. And despite all the forced practices, I still kept turning right in the chorus line when everyone else was turning left (complaining and grumbling about how our prayers weren’t being answered, falling to sleep at prayer, not meaning what I was saying). Like a teenager, all too often, I arrived for rehearsals out of breath, late, and having forgotten my dancing shoes.

The prayer work in this dancing class, morning and noontime and evening, is like labor that never ends in birth, or like a marriage that is not consummated, or like a musical that investors have financed but never reaches Broadway.

“How long, O LORD, will you forget us? How long will you look the other way? How long must I struggle with anguish in my soul, with sorrow in my heart every day? How long will my enemy have the upper hand?” Psalm 13.

And during days, weeks, seasons, years in the hard place, all I hear Him say is, “Practice. Practice. Keep dancing.”

Karen Mains

Other projects involving Karen right now:

Karen Mains has been a spiritual coach to many Christian women and men. These days, however, she is finding joy in working in teams with highly qualified adults who bring spiritual teachings into her life in fascinating ways. Maturity is a state where the teacher realizes she learns as much from her students, she receives as much from her companions as she teaches and she gives. Hungry Souls is a ministry that is a laboratory for those who seek to develop spiritual growth tools that work. Check out Karen and David’s Web site, www.hungrysouls.org.

Notice (Advent Retreat):

Registration is open for the upcoming (Advent) Silent Retreats. One of the Advent Retreats is for Christian women; the other is designed for both Christian women and men. See the Hungry Souls Web site for details.

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Still Points

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T. S. Eliot writes in Four Quartets, “Except for the point, the still point,/ There would be no dance,/ And there is only the dance.”

Due to frequent heavy travel schedules, I am sometimes not able to keep in the rhythm of deadlines for blog posts (this, my Christian blog), the free Soulish Food newsletter provided by my ministry, Hungry Souls (http://www.hungrysouls.org). I get bogged down in the comings and goings. Recovering from long trips where I have been away for more than two weeks sometimes takes me days to really get back into my daily swing. However, I am learning that there is a rhythm in presence and in absence. Each one works its own good. Much of the dance of our lives is poised in the pauses.

Henri Nouwen’s remarkable little book The Living Reminder: Service and Prayer in Memory of Jesus Christ, written for those who minister, makes the point that there is a ministry of absence as well as a ministry of presence. “Without this withdrawal,” he writes, “we are in danger of no longer being the way, but being in the way; of no longer speaking and acting in his name, but in ours; of no longer pointing to the Lord who sustains, but only to our own distracting personalities. … The more this creative withdrawal becomes a real part of our ministry the more we participate in the leaving of Christ, the good leaving that allows the sustaining Spirit to come.”

The still point in the dance is the moment when we balance on our toes before plunging into the next step. When I am unable to do what I want to do (like sending Soulish Food out on time), I must remind myself that the Lord is perfectly able to fill the pause with His Presence, and that sometimes this is not a failure on my behalf, but part of the rhythm that is in His mind. This gives me ease to know that the sacred melody to which we step is filled with pattern and emptiness, busyness and quiet, words and silence.

This is an extremely difficult year for people—and for many that is going to take some time to change—until the economy improves. All of us have friends and family who are without jobs. Despair threatens and the loss of material safety-nets is almost unbelievable. No matter how difficult, however, the circumstances of my life I am still choosing to learn the art of dancing. I have made it a point to pray for those who are facing hard choices; I pray that they will step in holy rhythm (not frantic anxiety), trusting that there is a divine pattern working in their behalf.

“If we are indifferent to the art of dancing, we have failed to understand, not merely the supreme manifestation of physical life, but also the supreme symbol of spiritual life.”
Havelock Ellis, The Dance of Life

Karen Mains

Other projects involving Karen right now:
Karen Mains is wading through research data gathered from participants in Listening Groups. These groups are small, including three to four people only, and are based on an architecture of silence, listening and questions as response. The growth curve of many participating in these groups seems exceptional, and so Karen and a team of volunteers are looking into why. Karen has been a spiritual coach to many through her years of ministry and is excited about the replication potential of Listening Groups.

She is also eager to get back into her own writing, but is examining the possibilities for online publishing that new technologies offer. Have any creative-writing tips you might offer regarding online publishing?

Advent Retreats of Silence:
Registration is open for the upcoming (Advent) Silent Retreats. One of the Advent Retreats is for Christian women; the other is designed for both Christian women and men. See the Hungry Souls Web site for details.

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The Year Is a Circle

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We are considering the modern dilemma of feeling “out of step” resulting in a need to “get back our rhythm.”

Two quotes from Dorothy Bass’s Receiving the Day: Christian Practices for Opening the Gift of Time give us a broadened idea of the rhythmicity that can be found in life.

“Happily, our home is a planet where the days begin to grow longer in the northern hemisphere just as Christmas arrives. Six months later, they start growing shorter again. Spring comes to every clime, however different it may appear in Norway, New Zealand, and Ecuador, and so does autumn. Human beings respond by elaborating on nature’s turnings: in every age and place, we develop seasonal rhythms of planting and reaping, of fasting and feasting, of letting go and starting afresh. These rhythms run through the days and the weeks, stitching them together until they come full circle over the course of a year.

“Within the rhythms that encircle a year lived in Christian faith, season also follows season. The natural tilts and turns of the northern hemisphere, where the Christian seasons of faith originated, set the stage: Easter follows the vernal equinox, Christmas the winter solstice. But the larger motions that govern these seasons belong to the story of God—a story in which nature is present but one that nature doesn’t write. Amazingly, even though this story began before time itself and reaches beyond the end of time, it is a story that has room in its narrative for each individual who encounters it in the present day. Within the Christian practice of living through the year, the gift of time becomes a means of entry into this story, a mysterious opening into participation in the life of God.

“Like the orbit whose span they measure, years are round. Each one begins at a certain point and arrives back at that pint before it can run its course once more. It forms a circle.”

For most of us, unreflectively rushing through the days of our lives, one season bumps into another. We have not developed a mechanism of living deeply, or living intentionally, in this most basic of life cycles, the yearly rhythm. “Is it spring already?” we ask. “It seems as though it was just Christmas a few days ago.” “Where has the time gone? We can’t be in another year already…? You mean summer’s almost over?” These are questions that become symptomatic of how out of rhythm, how detached from the moving circle of the year we have become.

Are you living each day as though they were beads strung aimlessly on an endless string, or do you see the returns and repetitions, the cycles and “circles” within the hours, the days, the weeks, the months and the years as a holy gift designed by God for some certain purpose, as rhythms that have sacred meaning?

How are you going to learn to live in the year as a circle in time? What must you do or change in your life so you will notice the days?

Karen Mains

Other projects involving Karen Mains right now:
Karen and David have spent a great deal of time launching the Global Bag Project, which seeks to provide sustainable income for bag-makers in developing countries by selling their reusable artisan shopping bags in developed nations. This is the aim of the project: Through micro-finance, women are helped to lift themselves and their families out of poverty. Every bag (and its bag-maker) has a story. The first such story is of Mary Nduta, a Christian woman from Nairobi, Kenya. If you would like to see Mary’s story, go to this YouTube link:www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcWFLbQ3u0M&NR=1

Other News:
Karen, through her ministry of Hungry Souls, has opened the registration for the Annual 24-hour Retreat of Silence. The Wednesday-Thursday 24-hour cycle will be for women only; the Friday-Saturday cycle will be for men and women.

Here are the details:

In 2009, the first retreat will run from Wednesday, beginning with dinner, December 2 through Thursday, ending by 4:00 p.m., December 3. The second retreat will run from Friday, beginning with dinner, December 4 through Saturday, ending by 4:00 in the afternoon, December 5.

This will make room for those who work during the days and don’t feel as though they can take time off during the week.

Our fees will be $120 for a single room with private bath. However, if you register early, by October 15, your fee will be $100. If you bring someone who has NEVER attended a Hungry Souls Advent Retreat of Silence, the welcome fee for any new attendees (and for you) will be $90. (The weekend retreat costs us $5 more. Add that amount to the fees – $125, $105 or $95.) The cutoff date for registrations is November 25. Since we must give a firm number to the Bishop Lane Retreat Center in Rockford, IL and pay for that number, we cannot return payments after the cutoff date.

Valerie Bell, Karen Mains and Sybil Towner will lead these two silent retreats again this year. This Hungry Souls Retreat of Silence is a guided retreat. We begin silence at 9:00 the first evening. If you are interested, contact our volunteer registrar Melodee Cook at Cook2210@aol.com.

If you are outside of the Chicagoland area and would like to fly in for any of our Silent Retreats, our staff or volunteers will be happy to meet you at the airport and facilitate any sleeping arrangements that might need to be made for our silent retreats.

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Another Rhythm: Walking Partner

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One answer to my prayer for discipline to get myself physically in shape for the years of aging ahead has been a delightful new walking partner. This woman, who lives in the housing development across the street, meets me each weekday morning, and we do either our “short” walk (30 minutes), “high” walk (on the nearby Prairie Path; ~40 minutes) or “long” walk (3.25 miles; today we did that walk in 69 minutes—a vast improvement over when we started!).

At a certain point on the way back, we stop chatting, and one of us moves unselfconsciously into a season of prayer, making the time exceedingly rich.

A couple weeks ago, my walking partner mentioned she had memorized some passages from Scripture as an antidote to anxiety. I said, “Oh, I’d love to hear that.” She quoted two whole chapters from Acts! Everyone should have a walking partner like this. In addition to holding each other accountable to physical exercise, I can foresee myself scrambling to match memorized Scriptures with her. (I quoted four verses from a Colossians passage; she quoted another chapter—this is going to keep me on my mnemonic toes for sure!)

At one point a few years ago, our Mainstay staff had gone four pay-periods without paychecks. It was a very tense time for us. So I was observing a partial fast—a small meal every two days—and holding a noontime prayer vigil daily in the kitchen. At times like these, we begin to ask, “Are You walking with us, Jesus?” One day, I sat in silence and asked, “What is it you have to say to me, Lord? Is there something I need to hear?”

I thought I heard the inner Word, “It is coming.” So I turned to Scripture for verification, flipping the pages to Psalm 70. “Come quickly, LORD, and help me,” the psalmist cries. “I am poor and needy; please hurry to my aid, O God. You are my helper and my savior; O LORD, do not delay.” (vv. 1b, 5, NLT)

I am old enough to know there is a rhythm to the seasons in our lives. Some seasons we prosper; some seasons we taste poverty and failure. The human assignment for us all, as far as I can tell, it to learn to “dance,” to step in time to the orchestra of abundance and to step as well—learning the hidden lessons—to abasement. People in all economic levels, at all stages of education, in all work professions seem to experience these life-cycles. Our walking if filled with hills and valleys.

Frankly, I don’t know if I heard a sure inner Word on that day when I looked at these Scriptures. Nor do I know, if I did, what “it” is—“it” could be anything! “It” could be success, or “it” could be failure—both extremes hold perils. But I do know that many saints of God have trod the way of desperation before me and give testimony to the fact that they have experienced the Presence of the Unseen Who has been walking in step with them during their trying times. I really have two walking partners. One is the human woman who meets me in the mornings. The other is divine, and He meets me at points all along the day—low walks, short walks, “high paths,” and the long three-milers.

Of course, He is walking with me. If I notice it and think about it, no matter the condition of the path, we are in step.

Karen Mains

Other projects involving Karen right now are: Working with teams of Christian women to design training material that will teach retreat leaders how to conduct retreats of silence. In addition, she is designing a Webinar that will mentor writing wanabees. The topic of that Webinar will be Personal Memoir Writing. Details are on the Karen Burton Mains Web site, www.karenburtonmains.com.

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The Elephant Dance

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Years ago, it was the season of life when I found myself sitting in the audience of the annual spring Kindergarten Circus for the morning class. My granddaughter, Joscelyn, was part of the Elephant Dance—the last act after the Tightrope Walkers, the Seals, the Strong People, etc.

Now I had been informed of this event, but when my answering machine yielded a charming invitation from Josie the night before, I decided that no matter how busy the schedule, I simply had to be part of the audience. Of course, it was a delightful morning, filled with performing children and adoring parents and exhausted teachers.

I was a little concerned, however. Josie was part of the last act and dressed in what looked to be a very warm elephant outfit. She and her two partners had to sit in the front row under hot lights and wait for a whole hour for their turn.

“Weren’t you hot, Josie?” I asked after I had praised her for her remarkable two-stepping little dance with the other Elephant kindergartners. Pushing up her floppy elephant trunk, she shook her head up and down. “Well, maybe,” I whispered, “you could take your elephant costume off now.” She did so did immediately, with smiles and a sigh of relief.

“I’m so sorry Papa couldn’t come, but I’ll tell him all about it.”

“Oh, that’s okay,” she replied, taking refreshments from her mother’s hand. “You were here and that’s what makes it so very special to me.” Then it was my turn to melt.

Coming home, I began to build an analogy in my mind (I am a writer, after all). Isn’t much of life like the Kindergarten Circus? Everyone else comes first, doing their tumbling and fake weightlifting and rigged magic acts, and we’re sitting in some front row somewhere in a hot, uncomfortable costume, waiting for our turn to do our little two-step. It begins to seem inappropriate, or silly, or long. Then we realize that Someone is in the audience—Someone who has come just to watch us do whatever it is we do. We scootch around in our uncomfortable costume (whatever role life has assigned us), move the wrong way, correct ourselves, get back in step with the other dancing elephants.

But it’s all okay. God has come to be with us, to cheer and applaud, to wave from the audience, to say to our hearts, “I’m so very proud of you.” None of the inconveniences really matter. Nor does the fact that other people have been watching their children and don’t care that we’re hot and long-waiting. God is here. That is what makes everything so very special. “The LORD himself watches over you!” Psalm 121:5a, NLT.

Now that is a truth worth dancing about (even when life’s a little hot).

Karen Mains

Other projects involving Karen right now are: Working with teams of Christian women to design Retreats of Silence, in both 24-hours and three-days formats, through the aegis of Hungry Souls. Developing hospitality initiatives that train Christian men and women how to use their own homes in caring outreaches through the Open Heart, Open Home ministries. Launching the Global Bag Project, a worldwide effort that markets sustainable cloth shopping bags to provide sustainable incomes for bag-makers in developing nations. Researching the impact of listening groups while overseeing some 240 small groups over the last three years. Experimenting with teleconference mentoring for Wannabe (Better) Writers. Designing the Tales of the Kingdom Web site.

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Missteps: Forgetting Appointments

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This is a terror to me: Sometimes I become so preoccupied that I forget certain appointments that are on my calendar—particularly the phone appointments that require no physical space and are only a notation on my Day Runner, my desk calendar and my kitchen calendar. (It’s not as though I don’t try to remind myself. I keep hearing my husband asking in disbelief when I confess that, once again, I’ve something on my schedule. “Do you write this down in your calendar?” he asks. Well, writing it down isn’t the problem; checking it with serious regularity is.)

So, I am, consequently, often having to make apologies to friends and acquaintances. “I’m sorry, I forgot” always seems so lame. And despite all the working years I’ve accumulated in a lifetime, and despite the fact I pride myself on being a conscientious Christian woman who doesn’t disappoint, neglect or inconvenience others, I’ve never really had a personal secretary to sit on this flaw in my personality. How I envy those movie moments when some important CEO is reminded that he or she has a conference call at 10:00, a luncheon appointment at 12:30. Briefing sheets, research reports—there they all are—at hand, no wonder he/she is an apogee of efficient living.

One week, having more than its weight of sorrow, I missed a spiritual telementoring call—embarrassment again (I am the spiritual telementor). This poem by Elizabeth Rooney had been sitting on my desk all week, but it seemed an appropriate message to include with my abject apology. I include it in this blog. It is a reminder that missteps are part of the dance of life—they are often the way we learn establish a rhythm, looking humiliatingly awkward as we do so. For me, missteps are a way of developing the rhythm of humility.

Opening

Now is the shining fabric of our day
Torn open, flung apart,
Rent wide by Love.
Never again
The tight, enclosing sky,
The blue bowl,
Or the star-illumined tent.
We are laid open to infinity,
For Easter Love
Has burst His tomb and ours.
Now nothing shelters us
From God’s desire—
Not flesh, not sky,
Not stars, not even sin.
Now Glory waits
So He can enter in.
Now does the dance begin.
—Elizabeth Rooney

Each day that we practice being in step with God is preparation here on Earth for the day when the dance will never end. Pray for me. I always spend a little time praying for whomever reads these little messages. (Pray that I will remember to keep my appointments so I will be practiced at keeping the Final Appointment!)

Karen Mains

Other projects involving Karen right now are: Working with teams of Christian women to design Retreats of Silence, in both 24-hours and three-days formats, through the aegis of Hungry Souls. Developing hospitality initiatives that train Christian men and women how to use their own homes in caring outreaches through the Open Heart, Open Home ministries. Launching the Global Bag Project, a worldwide effort that markets sustainable cloth shopping bags to provide sustainable incomes for bag-makers in developing nations. Researching the impact of listening groups while overseeing some 240 small groups over the last three years. Experimenting with teleconference mentoring for Wannabe (Better) Writers. Designing the Tales of the Kingdom Web site.

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God at Every Turn

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Three blogs ago, I remarked that when we learn to look for God and find Him in the circumstances of the everyday, we can become breathless with how frequently He extends His hands to us, pulling us close, and twirling us in the dance that is stepping with Him.

Four categories help us to find God in the everyday. These are:

  1. Any obvious answer to prayer.
  2. Any help to do God’s work in the world.
  3. Any unexpected evidence of His care.
  4. Any unusual linkage or timing.

What is the God Hunt? The God Hunt is anytime God intervenes in our everyday lives, and we recognize it to be Him.

For instance, when I was clearing out the Annex building across the street from our office on Main Place in preparation to sell it, I discovered that a vacant building shows all its flaws. I was dreading taking on the responsibility of hiring repairmen, painters and contacting a realtor—all time-consuming responsibilities I suspected might fall on my shoulders.

Driving from home toward our main office, I kept seeing a huge commercial “For Rent” sign posted on the street of one of the neighboring office buildings. How will anyone even see our little “For Sale” sign when we put it up? I thought.

Two days later, David received a phone call from someone interested in buying the Annex, which despite its need for repairs was a lovely Colonial-style brick building. “We haven’t even contacted a realtor!” I exclaimed. “The inside still needs cleaning! The outside has to be scrapped and painted! How did they find out it would be for sale?”

It seems the woman who called David had pulled into the parking lot of our neighbors with the HUGE “For Rent” sign. She thought that sign was posted on our property. She called the phone number, realized her mistake, but that neighbor told her he thought our building would be for sale and gave her our phone number. We showed it with all its flaws on a Monday afternoon, without a realtor and without an appraisal.

In short time, we reached an as-is agreement and sold a broom-cleaned, vacuumed empty building in need of repairs to Union Local XX. I had been mourning the loss of my office in the Annex, the downsizing of our staff, the closing of our radio studio, the loss of our living-room-like planning space. I was allowing all these impossible improbabilities (not to mention the weeks I had been sorting and clearing) to overwhelm me.

Without even a little, innocuous “For Sale” sign, the building had been sold. Through this odd set of circumstances, God said to me (in that inwardly persuasive sort of way He has), “You know, Karen, I can take care of this stuff you’ve been wasting your energy worrying about.”

Obvious answer to prayer; unusual linkage and timing; unexpected evidence of His care—it’s all there. “I spy!” “I spy God!” It is easy for us, humans with myopic vision, folks who would all too often rather drag their feet during trying circumstances than to lift them to life’s rhythms (all life’s rhythms—dirges as well as festival hymns) to miss even these big God-events, let alone the diminutive occasions.

Remember, if you seek for Him in the everyday, you may become breathless with how frequently He twirls you around.

“Seek me and you will find me if you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you.” Jeremiah 29:13.

Karen Mains

Other projects involving Karen right now are: Working with teams of Christian women to design Retreats of Silence, in both 24-hours and three-days formats, through the aegis of Hungry Souls. Developing hospitality initiatives that train Christian men and women how to use their own homes in caring outreaches through the Open Heart, Open Home ministries. Launching the Global Bag Project, a worldwide effort that markets sustainable cloth shopping bags to provide sustainable incomes for bag-makers in developing nations. Researching the impact of listening groups while overseeing some 240 small groups over the last three years. Experimenting with teleconference mentoring for Wannabe (Better) Writers. Designing the Tales of the Kingdom Web site.

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Misstepping Again

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One Saturday morning, about 6:37, I popped into Panera Bread in St. Charles to pick up 54 individually packaged salads for the women’s retreat that Hungry Souls, the little ministry I head, sponsored. It was called “Summer Slowing for the Soul.” I could tell by the face of the woman behind the counter that she had no clue as to the whereabouts of 54 salads. Nor, after hunting around, did she have an order for them.

“Look,” I said to her, imagining what a shocking beginning this might be to her workday. “We’re not going to sweat this. Fortunately, I’m early. So I’ll just have a cup of coffee, read the paper, and if I get out of here around 8 o’clock, we’ll still be OK. I don’t want you to be upset. I too have been known to be prone to human error.”

That was an understatement.

By the time I left Panera Bread around 8:10, I’d been plied with free coffee, a huge imprinted sack with sourdough rolls, and to make up for their error, three gift certificates worth $18. I thought I had conducted myself in a kind Christian manner. Several people in the long line waiting for morning coffee particularly complimented me on my calm approach.

I did not question myself one moment, until later in the afternoon, after 52 women had successfully slowed their soul in the spring sunshine at the Catholic Retreat Center nearby, and I had hauled all the “props” back home. It was then my husband, ever the pragmatist, asked, “Are you sure you went to the right Panera Bread?”

Pure panic set in. Sure enough, there was a message on my answering machine: “Uh, Mrs. Mains, this is Mitch from Panera Bread. We’ve had your order for 54 individual salads ready since 7:00. It is now 9:00. Will you please call me?”

I certainly AM prone to human error. I had ordered from the wrong store, and I didn’t have a clue which of the 12 in my area had been stuck with 54 individual salads that were not paid for. Thank God I’d had the charity to be kind to the shocked woman who rallied her staff to fill my order.

Now I had a choice. The deed was done. I hated to think of paying an unnecessary $143 from my retreat earnings of $525. But I had obviously misstepped; what did the dance with God require of me now?

If you’re dancing with God, you have to keep dancing even when you misstep. I spent Monday morning calling Panera Breads until one manager (in Geneva) said, “Yep. That’s us. Fifty-four salads—20 Asiago cheese; 16 Fandango; 16 Chef’s Salad with chicken.”

“Well, I want to make this right. How much do I owe you?”

“Oh no, lady,” he replied. “We just mixed them in with the lunch-crowd orders. The problem isn’t with you (I knew it WAS with me); the problem is with the other management team. We’re trained to call the other stores if something like this happens; they didn’t do that.”

I couldn’t believe it! How had this reprieve come my way? I was free to go misstepping another day. (Hopefully, I would remember when making another phone order, to inquire as to location.)

Once a friend said, “Grace is God giving us enough time to get it right.” If that isn’t melody for the soul that is out of step, I don’t know what is.

For me, my daily life dance lessons seem to go on and on. Listen to this, another melody:

“But everyone knows you are obedient to the Lord.
This makes me very happy.
I want you to see clearly what is right
and to stay innocent of any wrong.
The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet.
May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you.” Romans 16:19-20.

Keep dancing.

Karen Mains

Other projects involving Karen right now are: Working with teams of Christian women to design Retreats of Silence, in both 24-hours and three-days formats, through the aegis of Hungry Souls. Developing hospitality initiatives that train Christian men and women how to use their own homes in caring outreaches through the Open Heart, Open Home ministries. Launching the Global Bag Project, a worldwide effort that markets sustainable cloth shopping bags to provide sustainable incomes for bag-makers in developing nations. Researching the impact of listening groups while overseeing some 240 small groups over the last three years. Experimenting with teleconference mentoring for Wannabe (Better) Writers. Designing the Tales of the Kingdom Web site.

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Locked Out

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One day some years ago, I got locked out of the house—for the whole day! The day was warm—a truly rare spring moment. By 5:30 a.m. I was in the yard, raking leaves and fallen twigs off the garden beds. For a dedicated gardener, after a long winter, this can create a state of total absorption (dare I say bliss?).

I had originally doled out to myself two or three hours of labor before I went to work on the writing project assigned for the day, but at 9:00, when I went to wash my hands and clean up, I discovered that one of my housemates, the last one out the door (adult son or husband) had left for work, tightly locked up, and with no thought for the fact that I was tucked blissfully into the back garden. I was abandoned in the world with no keys, no cell phone, my hair wild, my jeans smeared with mud and clogs clotted with clods of earth.

The neighbor next door was gone, same for the one in back. I decided to walk to my son and daughter-in-law’s house about one mile away. It was a great day for walking, although my garden clogs were not designed for trekking, and when I arrived at their house, I discovered they were not a home. The whole world in West Chicago, Illinois appeared to have been seduced outside by the wondrous (70-something degree) weather. So, I waited a little—just in case they showed up—then turned around and walked back to my own yard.

Suddenly, it struck me: Maybe the very best way I could step in harmony with God, who is, after all, the Master Gardener, would be to submit to reality and just spend the whole day outside, putting as much in order as my energy would allow and my muscles could stand.

Consequently, I enjoyed an absolutely wondrous gardening day and got a huge head start on spring chores. Nine beds were raked, hoed, weeded, cultivated and trenched; garbage pails of leaves were dumped in the woods for compost. And as far as my own comforts—I had taken two Aleve tablets before stepping outside, and there were bottles of water in the garage, as well as the woods nearby for any emergency physical contingencies. I simply needed to devote myself wholly to this unexpected set of circumstances.

Sometimes (have you discovered this?) God does for us what we will not do for ourselves. One of the daily ways I note his intervention is to find Him through any unexpected evidences of his care for me. Can you picture this scenario? The God of the Universe says, “Oh, it’s going to be a remarkable gardening day in the Chicagoland area! Let’s lock all the gardeners outside (including Karen) so they can have a perfectly happy day without feeling guilty.” Then I can hear all this chuckling and laughter in Heaven. What a divine joke! God gave me, at least, the very thing I wanted most and would not have given to myself. He locked me out.

Sometimes we are so earnest, so locked into schedules and events and appointments and responsibilities, we don’t take time to dance. We can’t find moments to waltz. God is planning this little improvisational moment in our lives, but He can’t get our attention. Is He locking you out of anything? Does He have something else in mind for your day, your season of life, your years ahead? Do you think?

Karen Mains

Other projects involving Karen right now are: Working with teams of Christian women to design Retreats of Silence, in both 24-hours and three-days formats, through the aegis of Hungry Souls. Developing hospitality initiatives that train Christian men and women how to use their own homes in caring outreaches through the Open Heart, Open Home ministries. Launching the Global Bag Project, a worldwide effort that markets sustainable cloth shopping bags to provide sustainable incomes for bag-makers in developing nations. Researching the impact of listening groups while overseeing some 240 small groups over the last three years. Experimenting with teleconference mentoring for Wannabe (Better) Writers. Designing the Tales of the Kingdom Web site.

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Misstepping

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One week, several years back, I spent a great deal of time on my knees. I wasn’t at prayer; I was cleaning the kitchen in the Mainstay Ministries office building. Because of an economic downturn, we were consolidating our office space, moving from the Annex building across the street, which had a kitchen of its own. But before I could combine that kitchen with our existing kitchen in the main office, I needed to empty and clean one kitchen, and rearrange the sadly neglected space in the other. That entailed moving the Coke machine and the refrigerator, cleaning under them, dumping and sorting the clutter that gathers in communal spaces, reposition the eating tables, storage cupboards, ditching junk and scrubbing every inch. Hardly what I would call dancing moments (I have been looking at dance as a metaphor for living in God’s sacred rhythms).

Now all this effort was complicated by the fact that somewhere in all this, while leaving my daughter’s house I took a misstep, twisted my ankle and fell to the ground. Since it was closer for me to crawl to my car by the curb and much less humiliating than scooting back up the walk to her front door, I drove off not knowing whether I had broken anything. At least I could drive.

Amazingly, after icing my foot and elevating my ankle, I was able to meet grandchildren that night at the movies (using my father-in-law’s cane, which I kept, fortuitously, when we cleared through the remains of his estate). By Sunday I was walking without it; by Wednesday I was back to mopping floors at the office on my hands and knees. This, however, was accompanied by moans and groans since during my misstep, I had also scraped my left knee like a little kid falling off a bike, and in order to get up I had to maneuver the right ankle (which had the funniest bruise—large and dark, clothing the whole joint like a 19th-century gentleman’s spat) just so. I’m sure our staff thought I was trying to gain their sympathy and attention. (Of course I wasn’t, though it does seem to me that some of them might have given me a hand, crippled as I was and as unpleasant the task.)

All the while, pressing onward in my private war against aesthetic criminality—I don’t mind living without much money, but I hate disorder and ugliness, which often happens in office places where there is no police-warden type to keep the material things in
shape—this little phrase kept nudging my thoughts: “Do you understand what I have done to you?” These words are spoken by Christ from the Gospel account where He washes His disciples’ feet. “If I then, the Lord and Master have washed your feet, you must wash each other’s feet.” John 13:1-15.

So I wasn’t dancing. I certainly wasn’t praying, but I spent a week at 370 South Main Place in Wheaton, Illinois in a kind of foot-washing season. Next on the list was clearing out and cleaning the women’s bathroom (we were condensing five bathrooms from the two buildings into two bathrooms in the remaining building). And just to make sure that I didn’t lose my battle against aesthetic crime, I stopped and clipped magnolia blossoms from the yard of the Annex we had sold. I arranged them in two glass vases for the office kitchen tables. Beauty is persistent; it will make its way up through the ashes—the debris of economic collapses, the rubble of neglect and negligence, but perhaps that is because it is also nurtured at the cost of someone’s willingness to serve.

“Do you understand what I have done to you?” No, none of us will ever understand, but spending time on our knees scrubbing up everyone else’s mess isn’t a bad place to start. This knee-work is akin to the stretching exercises ballet dancers perform at the studio barre—bending and stretching, bending and stretching. There are no pirouettes, no pas de deux of any merit until the dancers have done the secret labor of knee-work, exercises that make the muscles flexible, the body lithe and the limbs graceful.

Missteps, uncomfortable as they are, dangerous as they might be, can bring us down. And from time to time, that isn’t always a bad place for us to be.

Karen Mains

Other projects involving Karen right now are: Working with teams of Christian women to design Retreats of Silence, in both 24-hours and three-days formats, through the aegis of Hungry Souls. Developing hospitality initiatives that train Christian men and women how to use their own homes in caring outreaches through the Open Heart, Open Home ministries. Launching the Global Bag Project, a worldwide effort that markets sustainable cloth shopping bags to provide sustainable incomes for bag-makers in developing nations. Researching the impact of listening groups while overseeing some 240 small groups over the last three years. Experimenting with teleconference mentoring for Wannabe (Better) Writers. Designing the Tales of the Kingdom Web site.

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