Falling asleep each night has been called “the little death.” In a way, we practice for the final death that will eventually beckon to us all. Night after night we give ourselves to God and relinquish the failures and successes, the frustrations and delights of each day into His hands. The childlike prayer many of us once prayed holds profound meaning despite its simplicity:

Each night before we fall asleep we should prepare our souls to meet God. We tuck away the cares and concerns of the day and, like Christ, we find ways to pray, “Father, into Your hands I commend my spirit.”

I have noticed that when I put my soul to bed each night (in contrast to watching videos, reading secular books in bed, or just flopping down exhausted) my rest is more tranquil. If I wake, I wake in prayer. Then I even slip into morning prayer more naturally. It is a 24-hour cycle I fight to establish and maintain.

Arthur Paul Boers writes in The Rhythm of God’s Grace, “Evening prayer is a small death; we surrender ourselves into God’s hands. The morning is a small rebirth and resurrection. We often give thanks for a new day and its opportunities. This dying and rising is relived in each daily cycle. Thus, as we observe the morning and evening rhythm, we also have opportunity to live deeply and enter into the most basic and important truths of our faith.”

A book of Daily Offices, or fixed-hour prayers, helps us establish this evening/morning rhythm. I love this nighttime prayer from the Book of Common Prayer. Perhaps it will be useful to you this evening.

“Watch, O Lord, with those who wake, or watch, or weep tonight, and give Your angels and saints charge over those who sleep. Tend Your sick ones, O Lord Christ. Rest Your weary ones. Bless Your dying ones. Soothe Your suffering ones. Shield Your joyous ones, and all for your love’s sake. Amen”

Rest well tonight, beloved ones. Learn the sleep cycle practice of putting your soul to bed with God.

Karen Mains
KM1-43

Other projects involving Karen Mains right now:

Karen Mains is currently involved in a mentor writing project involving teleconferencing. She has just finished a cycle with six “wannabe writers” and is brainstorming the effectiveness of her “Personal Memoir Writing” curriculum with that group. She and her husband, David, are hoping to lead a Christian trip to Kenya, Africa next March for the purpose of developing microenterprise projects.

Today is Tuesday. One crucial question we need to learn to ask is: How are we going to make Sunday the best day of the week? What do we need to do to make sure we are ready to observe it with a Sabbath heart? Establishing this rhythm of looking to Sunday in the middle of the week makes the whole cycle of the week richer. Here are a few quotes from the book Seven Days of Faith by R. Paul Stevens. Perhaps they will serve to frame your thinking.

“For many people, even the attempt to experience Sabbath can become work. The church unwittingly encourages the toxic mix of compulsive ministry and utilitarian spirituality. … Hardly ever is a person commended for refusing an office. Doing is considered more important than being. Sunday is often the most hectic and stressful day of the week, the least restful.”

“Sabbath and leisure have much in common: they are both personally restorative, enjoyable, non-utilitarian, and playful. But there are significant differences. Leisure is a matter of personal choice; Sabbath is a divine law (Exodus 20:8). Leisure is perceived as avocational; Sabbath is vocational—part of the response of our entire persons to the call of God. Leisure is directed mainly to self, while Sabbath is directed more to God. Therefore, leisure is more concerned with pleasure than meaning, while Sabbath is more concerned with meaning than pleasure. Both are aesthetic, but leisure tends toward hedonism while Sabbath invites contemplation. In sum, leisure is more often a diversion from Sabbath than a means of experiencing Sabbath, and this I think is reasonable to call it pseudo-Sabbath. It cannot give us a day of rest.”

“Sabbath seems to be a waste of time, but in reality it is the redemption of time.”

“In the deepest sense, we do not keep Sabbath; the Sabbath keeps us. Sabbath was intended to be the leisured but intentional experience of reflection on the source and goals of our life on earth. Therefore, it keeps us turned toward God and heaven bound. We make ourselves available to the gift of Sabbath precisely because we are not capable on our own of sustaining our orientation toward God and our heavenly direction. So we are left with a biblical irony: we must explore how to enter that rest. Some form of Sabbath is not an optional extra for the New Testament Christian. It is fundamental to spiritual health, and even to emotional health.”

My experience in attempting to keep Sabbath in a basically Sabbath-less world has taught me that these observations are true. Keeping Sabbath keeps us, but because it is such a countercultural activity, we have to keep keeping at it. This holy rhythm all too easily slips out of our grasp. How frequently myself thinking, “Oh, we’re losing our Sabbath-practice again!” So some time on Wednesday/Thursday, I remind myself to plan the weekend—not what gardening I will get done, or what event we might attend, but first of all, how we will make Sunday the best day of the week. Then all the rest can follow.


Karen Mains
KM1-42

Other projects involving Karen Mains right now:

Karen Mains is currently involved in a mentor writing project involving teleconferencing. She has just finished a cycle with six “wannabe writers” and is brainstorming the effectiveness of her “Personal Memoir Writing” curriculum with that group. She and her husband, David, are hoping to lead a Christian trip to Kenya, Africa next March for the purpose of developing microenterprise projects.

I like the thought that Dorothy Bass introduces in her book Receiving the Day in which she states that, for Christian women and men, part of the rhythm of stepping well in life’s dance is learning to set established times aside each day for attention to God. Doing this, day after day, she maintains, not only helps us to see life more clearly but also to discover that we ourselves are being seen. “The idea of doing something with regularity arises from the concept of the regula, or rule,” she writes. “A monastery is governed by an official written rule that serves as the basis for the covenant among community members, making possible a certain way of life and expressing the convictions implicit in that way of life. Rules do their work amid the humblest details of daily life: they direct what time to get up, how to eat, what to do when a stranger comes to the door, and more.”

Since I have been concentrated in this blog on examining the sacred rhythms in my own life, I decided to count up some of the regular practices that have become rhythms in my day. I discovered these below:

1.  Putting a going-to-bed pattern into place so that I don’t just flop exhausted
onto the mattress, but instead, close the day in God’s presence.

2.  Meeting with my husband David on the mornings he is home to read the   Divine Office and also trying to observe this at noontime and late afternoon.

3.  Memorizing Scripture and repeating it to myself when I in the middle of the night.

4.  Attending better to the moments in the world that remind me of God’s creative genius—although I am still jerking myself to awareness. I’m trying to rush less and enjoy more!

5.  Attending Sunday worship service with regula—sometimes we minister during the week in meetings where worship is a central focus. Once, we counted that we had been in 8 worship services! It is easy not to go to church on Sundays when your week has not been at all like the average churchgoers.

6.  Working to re-establish a good Sabbath practice. I’m trying to end Saturday and begin Sabbath/Sunday by attending a Vespers service a nearby church holds at sundown on Saturday. To bed early, rest well, church on Sunday. My question to myself is: How can I make Sunday the best day of the week? My intent is to gather good worship music. We’ve built the classical-music library, but I need to find that church music that stirs the soul for background to the Sabbath experience.

7.  For 38 years I have kept a prayer journal; this is a rhythm that is so familiar, it is easy to overlook it.

I think you get the idea: Intentionally looking at the rhythms in our lives helps us to see where we are “in step” and where we are “out of step.” What are the regular rhythms you have in place or need to put in place so that you can pay attention to God? It is an amazing thing to not only see Him with the eyes of the soul, but to discover that you are, indeed, being seen by Him.

Karen Mains
KM1-41

Other projects involving Karen Mains right now:

Karen Mains is currently involved in a mentor writing project involving teleconferencing. She has just finished a cycle with six “wannabe writers” and is brainstorming the effectiveness of her “Personal Memoir Writing” curriculum with that group. She and her husband, David, are hoping to lead a Christian trip to Kenya, Africa next March for the purpose of developing microenterprise projects.

We now have 300 African-made kanga-cloth bags in the Global Bag Project office. Carla Boelkens and I will gladly hold home-based bag parties in the Chicagoland area. Just sign up at info@globalbagproject.org and we will get in touch with you. Carla and Doug Timberlake fly to Nairobi September 4. David Mains is using frequent flyer mileage and will have to transit alone via Turkish Airlines through Istanbul, then down to Nairobi. Pray for him; he is 73. They will be organizing personnel and systems to purchase fabric, train bag-makers, ship bags overseas, and filming, hopefully, three more bag-maker stories (every bag has a story). To see the first such story, of Mary Nduta, watch it on YouTube.

For contributions of $30 (+$6.95 shipping/handling), we can provide you with a kanga-cloth, artisan reusable shopping bag. Shipping and handling are extra. Jim Whitmer and his wife, Mary, photographers par excellence, have put together a YouTube “Dancing Bag” clip. That link is HERE and will show just a sample of the kanga-cloth patterns that are available. The bags are cotton; the fabric is made in East Africa. The bags’ bottoms have a firm lining, and the straps are reinforced. Proceeds go directly to the Global Bag Project and are helping to sustain the living of Christian sisters and their families. Some of the HIV/AIDS widows we work with are struggling with health issues. There are 30 or more children involved with these mothers. Pray for renewed health for our African friends. Make out a check for $36.95 to The Global Bag Project, and send to P.O. Box 30, Wheaton, IL 60187.

Please pray for safety and strength for David, Doug and Carla. We also need financial donations to underwrite some of the expenses. David and Karen are taking out a home equity loan to provide liquidity when needed, but in this economy and at the end of a summer without many gifts, your contributions toward the project will be greatly appreciated.

The Global Bag Project is our way of helping Microfinance Women in Africa who have real needs for basic income to provide for their needy families. 

Your Christian Blogger Karen Mains

What do weddings have to do with Sunday/Sabbath practices? Two weddings in my family—a cousin’s and our youngest son’s (age 31)— several years back caused me to think about how good marriages on Earth are a sign of the covenant agreement God makes with His children.

The New Testament teaching is that Christ, the Lamb of God, will marry His Bride, the Church, at His Second Coming. And our relationship to Him now is similar to that of betrothal. In the Middle East, a marriage began (sometimes years before the actual ceremony) with formal betrothal, in which a man in the eyes of the community was as good as married to his betrothed. This arrangement, though unconsummated, could only be dissolved by divorce such as when Joseph realized that Mary was with child without any intimacies with him and he “resolved to divorce her quietly” (Matthew 1:9). Betrothal was considered complete except for the privilege of sexual intimacy.

But when finally the time for betrothal was ended, and the wedding ceremony was near, the bridegroom would leave his house which was the center of the festivities, and with all his friends—musicians and celebrants and dancers—he would make his way to the bride’s house, where a simple marriage ritual took place. Then, taking her by the hand, he would bring her back to his house for the wedding feast, which would sometimes last for days.

All earthly weddings foreshadow the eschatological reality that one day our Heavenly Bridegroom will come and gather His Bride into His household.

Consequently, practicing the Sabbath principle is like the engagement ring a woman puts on her finger to remind herself and the watching world that she is taken. In a sense, we Christians wear the Sabbath ring (and polish it each week) to remind ourselves of the consummation in which our Lord will come for His bride-to-be, the Church.

Sunday, celebrated with delight, captures a taste of the distant future: Indeed, it is a prophetic practice of what eternity spent in Christ’s presence will be like. We are betrothed to Christ and as married to Him as though we had taken wedding vows. How dare we pull dour faces and downcast eyes. According to the Levitical law, no fasting was allowed on Sabbath. The one psalm specifically assigned in intertestamental times to Sabbath worship, Psalm 92, is a song of thanksgiving, sung in festive mood with musical instruments, “…to the music of the lute and the harp, to the melody of the lyre.”

In 18th-century American, Jonathan Edwards preached that the Sabbath, “a pleasurable and joyful day, was an image of the future heavenly rest of the church.” So let us become accustomed to resting in the arms of the Beloved. Let us frame our Sunday/Sabbath practice in such a way we will be ready for that eternal rest of which Hebrews 4:9 promises: “So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God.”

In truth, when the Bride is finally is brought into the household of the Bridegroom, every day will be Sabbath. Eternity will be a Sabbath without end. As we place this wedding ring of Sabbath upon our finger now, it is a sign that we are betrothed to Him, awaiting the consummation of a final marriage act; we are remembering God’s act of creation, His bold impregnation of souls with spiritual nativity; we are looking forward to a final re-creation, a perfect world in a perfect time, a utopia that can no longer be spoiled by infidelity.

In truth, this marriage celebration will be the ultimate wedding in the family.

This marriage metaphor makes sense to me; it resonates deeply within and makes me look forward with anticipation. Remembering the divine prototype and its earthly parallel, I am more than eager to “observe the Sabbath and keep it holy.”

Karen Mains
KM1-40

Other projects involving Karen Mains right now:
Continuing to promote Hungry Souls, a ministry that is a laboratory for those who seek to develop spiritual growth tools that work. Designing a Webinar that will mentor writing wanabees. Wading through research data gathered from participants in Listening Groups. (Karen has been a spiritual coach to many through her years of ministry and is excited about the replication potential of Listening Groups.)

Also, Karen is preparing for the upcoming (Advent) Silent Retreat, which is still open for registration (see the Hungry Souls Web site for more information).


Making Sunday Special by Karen Mains
(inside-flap copy, hardcover edition)

Whatever happened to the spirit of Sabbath-keeping? Many Christians in this secular age have reacted so strongly against secular rules for Sunday that they retain no sense of its spiritual, sacred opportunity. This lively yet practical book by noted Christian leader Karen Mains calls us to restore the sacred meaning of the Lord’s Day—a choice that will make for a richer, fuller life.

Making Sunday Special is available for purchase through Sunday Solutions, the Webstore of Mainstay Ministries.

How can I make Sunday the best day of the week? One of the ways to do so is to consider the weekly rhythm of Sabbath-keeping.

In order to get into the rhythm of God’s sacred Sabbath time, this is a question we need to learn to ask in the middle of each week: “How can I make Sunday the best day of the week?” And the best way I have learned to answer the that question is with another: “How can I fashion this day so that it is a day for making love?”

The concept behind the Sabbath is that God has given us the gift of time; 24 hours that are not to be crowded with the cares of the workweek; 24 hours for rest and recreation that are not to be intruded upon with the worries of ordinary time (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday).

There are many theological explanations for keeping the Sabbath “dance.” In fact, the more I practice, the more I learn, the more I agree with Karl Barth’s exclamation of “a certain awe. The radical importance, the almost monstrance range of the Sabbath commandment.” The more one studies Sabbath, the more there is to study and learn about it. Yet no theology stimulates me motivationally more than the love analogy.

I am learning to observe Sunday with a Sabbath heart, with the heart of a young woman who polishes her engagement ring; who holds it to the light so the diamond can catch the shining; who remembers that the setting apart of this day is meaningful to the One she loves; whose heart floods with joy at the thought that He (the Lord of the Sabbath) is coming in a special weekly visit, that the day will be spent in His company without the distractions of the workweek.
 
I look inward and make sure there are no idol suitors vying for my attention. For instance, have I watched too much television/video on the weekend, and are my thoughts filled with everything but my desire to know Him better. Is my heart chaste? Are my desires for my Loved One and for Him alone? Is there anything in my life that will cause Him grief or sadness when we come together?

And I am learning that Sabbath/Sunday is a love day, a day to adore. As I strive to celebrate Sunday with a Sabbath heart, I have learned that when the Loved One is near, I don’t work. I don’t need to spend an afternoon shopping or to spend Sunday catching up on the tasks I didn’t get done during the week. This is a day set apart for love. It is a day for dancing with God.

In fact, think of it like this: Sabbath/Sunday is a day on Earth that comes each week so that we can practice the steps of eternity where Sabbath never ends. We are practicing here in this time how to be good and loving Sabbath-keepers there, when we move beyond and out of time’s constraints.

So, how can I make Sunday the best day of the week? How can I set it apart so that it is a day ideal for making holy love?

Karen Mains
KM1-39

Other projects involving Karen Mains right now:

Karen continues to write for her new Christian blog, with topics relevant to Christian women and men in today’s contemporary world. Also, 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.

Making Sunday Special by Karen Mains
(back-cover copy, paperback edition)

Do you rush around on Sunday morning complaining and shouting instructions to a household in mass confusion? … “Why didn’t you tell me earlier the button was off your shirt?” “Stop teasing your sister.” “Don’t hog the bathroom.” “Hurry, we’re going to be late.” “Has anyone seen the car keys?”

Has Sunday-morning worship become an intellectual exercise without meaning? Do you rarely experience the presence of the Lord, even in His own house?

Then let Karen Mains show you how to make Sunday the best day of the week. For years Karen and her husband, David, have searched for ways to make worship more meaningful. Here Karen tells what they discovered in an examination of the Sabbath-keeping principles that not only restore to Sunday a sense of the holy but even give work and leisure renewed meaning.

Making Sunday Special is available for purchase through Sunday Solutions, the Webstore of Mainstay Ministries.

In Jr. High I was not allowed to take part in the social-dancing classes offered by the Physical Education department. Between the position of our church, my father’s work as a faculty member in the music department at Moody Bible Institute (considered the “West Point of Fundamentalism”), and my mother’s involvement as executive secretary to the director of a conservative mission-sending organization, everything weighted me with the preordained conclusion that good Christians don’t dance. I sat out the unit while my peers learned to do-si-do and allemande left. As classmates hastened to the gym in happy herds, I sat alone in study hall.

Several years back, I had good reason to “sit this dance out.” A backache sent me home early from the office on a Friday afternoon, and in the middle of the night, I woke with one thought original and unbidden: I bet this is shingles. Sure enough, the mirror revealed a few patches blooming on my hip, and the charming Convenient Care Center doctor confirmed that, indeed, the herpes virus had been chomping its way along a neural path on the right side of my body and was popping to the surface. She started me on antiviral medication immediately.

“Oh, we’re sorry you have shingles,” commiserated many former sufferers. “They are so painful.”

But due to early treatment (and my inexplicable early inner self-diagnostic), the patches that bloomed on my skin after the first all began to fade. (Those that popped out before medication all blistered and scabbed over and itched and sent off alarums of pain when touched.) Consequently, I tucked down into the guest-room bed, hunkered beneath a feather comforter, and drugged myself into happy slumber with regular doses of Tylenol 3. Being a good Christian woman with a life full of godly projects, endless hospitality events, mentor-writing projects and endless trips on the road, speaking and teaching, this was the best sleep I’d had in decades, and my dreams were not crowded out by a mind so busy it organizes even when I’m resting. I considered this enforced interval one of God’s good gifts to me.

Sitting on the sidelines while the dance swirls around us can be a good gift. We hear things the music often drowns out; we pay attention to thoughts that active rhythms often prohibit. We sleep; we dream. Bobbing in and out of sleep; taking Claritin, ibuprofen, the antiviral, and codeine; and dosing my skin with calamine, I heard this word: “Write. Write out into the culture.” And as if to verify this, articles began forming themselves in my mind, all slanted to a secular readership.

A friend, who has been out of work for nine months, called to commiserate with me that I had been laid low with shingles. I found myself saying, “Oh, please. I needed this rest. Maybe you should look at this period of your unemployment as a gift from God. Do in it the things you don’t ordinarily have enough time to do.”

The interludes in the dance that is our life—when the music changes, or the silence intrudes—can be life-altering. They can be inconvenient, embarrassing, annoying or painful, but after we’ve lived awhile, we begin to understand that they are never outside of God’s intents. Sometimes, we need to stop dancing.

Karen Mains
KM1-38

Other projects involving Karen Mains right now:
Continuing to write for her new Christian blog, with topics relevant to Christian women and men in today's contemporary world. Planning upcoming mentor-writing sessions. Preparing for the upcoming Silent Retreat (see the Hungry Souls Web site for details).

Making Sunday Special by Karen Mains
(back-cover copy)
Author Karen Mains challenges readers to celebrate Sunday with a SABBATH HEART—to make the Lord's Day so special that there are three days of anticipation ... and so meaningful that it continues to nurture for three days afterward.

MAKING SUNDAY SPECIAL is brimful of creative celebrations that take the hassles out of the Day of Rest and restore "the rhythm of the sacred"—practical exercises that will help you fall in love anew with the rest day and with Christ, the Lord of the Sabbath.

Making Sunday Special is available for purchase through Sunday Solutions, the Webstore of Mainstay Ministries.

On the last night of our pilgrimage to Spain in 2003, before flying out of Madrid early the next morning, a group of us took the Metro to attend a tablao, a flamenco show, the highly structured folk art from Andalusia. We listened as song, dance and the music of the guitar were blended together in the passionate rhythms of southern Spain. By nature oriental, flamenco dance differs fundamentally from other well-established European dance forms. Complex rhythmic patterns are created by a sophisticated footwork technique (with the rest of the troupe providing clicking or clapping accents), and the dancers wear special shoes or boots with dozens of nails driven into the soles and heels.

Flamenco dancing, even when a man and women dance together, is highly individualistic. One young man, dressed in black, sat on stage through two-thirds of the performance, and when he finally took his place at center stage, commanding our attention with a remarkable interpretation of anguish, and defiance, and anger, we in the audience were somewhat relieved that he had a place in the troupe.

In contrast, the Sabbath dance, one of the weekly rhythms of observance built into Christian practice, is not individualistic. It is a communal expression that includes infants and children, the newly married and the recently divorced, grandparents and teens, the disgruntled and the enthusiast, new believers and wise saints.

We enter into the rhythm of Sabbath for the sake of the whole Body (not to satisfy our individual preferences—what a surprise!), and when one of us sits out “the performance” like the young man waiting to take part in the flamenco, the whole is diminished. During this weekly holy event, enacted 52 times a year, earth is connected with heaven in some way that is different than the rest of the days. That connection can only be accomplished through this communal dance. Tragically, it is estimated that some 12 million believing Christians in the States are sitting out “the performance.”

Although observing Sabbath is more than going to church, it includes the obedient
practice of showing up for “dance classes,” week after week, year after year. “Let us not give up the habit of meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another…” Hebrews 10:25.

One summer, in between churches, David and I (well, mostly I) sat out the Sabbath dance. Sorrow and fatigue had slowed me; I was hesitant about the missteps of disappointment, but in my heart I wanted to be passionately engaged in a local church, my shoes driven with nails so that I could pound out the melody of redemption in time with fellow believers, all of us flawed, failing, sinful, striving and neglectful, but despite our human ineptness, helping each other become formed in the image of Christ, making a whole that is more, much more than the sum of its parts, touching together—in barely explainable ways—the realities of heaven. I long deeply to be part of the communal pattern once again.

One Saturday night, I put together a Lord’s Day Eve meal; we lit the Sabbath candles, read the Vespers service together, then went to a new church on Sunday, as husband and wife, taking our small part in the “work of the people.” Hopefully, the grand Sabbath waltz, for me, was beginning again.

Karen Mains
KM1-37

Other projects involving Karen Mains right now:

Getting the ordering procedures set on Web sites so readers can once again enjoy the books of Karen Burton Mains. Making Sunday Special is one that has been out of print for a decade. In it she looks at the restoration of the Old Testament pattern of Sabbath-keeping and explores joyful ways of incorporating that practice into our contemporary busy world.

Karen is also continuing to develop and expand this, her Christian blog. Additionally, she is designing a Webinar that will mentor writing wanabees. The topic of that Webinar will be Personal Memoir Writing. See www.KarenMains.com for more details.

About Making Sunday Special
In this insightful, encouraging and delightful book, bestselling author Karen Mains challenges Christians to celebrate Sunday with a Sabbath heart—to make the Lord’s Day so special that its impact launches a weekly cycle of reflection and growing anticipation. Making Sunday Special will help you and your people restore the biblical “rhythm of the sacred” and then fall in love again and again with Jesus Christ, the Lord of the Sabbath.

Making Sunday Special is available for purchase through Sunday Solutions, the Webstore of Mainstay Ministries.

The epigraph in the rough cut of Mel Gibson’s film The Passion is from Isaiah 53:5, “Surely he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace was upon him and with his stripes we are healed.”

Before this film was introduced, David and I, along with 100-or-so others, sat in a darkened theatre, with Mel Gibson and his producer in the row behind us, watching a rough-cut showing of this film about the last twelve hours in the life of Christ. This was part of the marketing plan, engaging the support of pastors, church leaders, and directors of religious not-for-profits. As we now know, it worked brilliantly, pushing the box-office take of a decidedly religious film into the multimillion-dollar bracket.

The Legionnaires of Jesus Christ, a conservative Roman Catholic order of priests—all young, friendly and manly—shared our row, passing a box of Milk Duds from the Catholic side to the Protestant side as we waited for the rough-cut version to start—sort of a pre-movie, non-sacramental breaking of the bread! Gibson said a few words, explained what a rough cut was, we signed confidentiality agreements, then sat in stunned silence as the film progressed, thinking eventually, I cannot bear to watch any more, then thinking, If Christ endured this, I can stay in a theatre for two hours and keep vigil over His sufferings.

After the movie, Gibson was asked, “Why this film? Why make this one?” His answer was a clear testimony of “having been a self-centered pig” and of having, over the period of twelve years, gone deeper and deeper into the meaning of the Cross. In the following years, Gibson has had a series of well-publicized disasters—an arrest for drunk driving and a drunken slur against Jews that Hollywood pundits delighted publicizing (take that and that for making a box-office hit about the passion of Christ!). Then there was the multimillion divorce from his wife of decades who had fathered his many children and probably was long-suffering about his self-centered pig antics. Now, he is romancing another entertainer who is pregnant with his child. I do not know what is happening in Mel Gibson’s life, but I do know with certainty that God is not done working in his heart and soul. So I leave all that in God’s capable hands.
 
I do have this bedrock conviction that for all of us in the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago—folks from Christianity Today magazine and Moody radio, the Legionnaires as well as Cardinal George of Chicago, David and myself, as well as the Hollywood star, would gladly give our lives for the truth of The Passion, Christ’s sacrificial atonement for our sins.

I remember that for weeks after that showing, I was God-struck. I couldn’t go to prayer without these images flooding my mind—I was at the foot of the Cross. Tearful repentance and incredible devotion poured forth in me for the Lord who died for me.

Ken Gire quotes an ancient Chinese proverb, “One may judge of a king by the state of dancing during his reign.” However, I’m not sure it is the King’s fault that my devotional dance has been so haphazard, so without passion. I think my view of the Cross has been blurred by a sterilized, antiseptic, Protestantized understanding. C. S. Lewis once remarked, “Isn’t it interesting that the cross began to be used as jewelry only after there were no people alive with any memories of crucifixions?” Gibson’s goal as director of this film was to show the reality of crucifixion to a generation who no longer understands what it means.

He certainly did that for one woman who spent some months dancing the dance of the God-struck. Perhaps, despite the many failings of its human creator, I need to look at it again.

Karen Mains
KM1-36

Other projects involving Karen Mains right now:

Figuring out the science behind blogging, particularly Christian blogging (is there such a thing?). Keywords and search-engine-ranking reports. Link-building using multiple social networks. Internet branding. What a new world this all is!—but rather exciting. The democratization of the writer’s voice, unfiltered unfortunately for many who are near-idiotic in expressing their unconsidered opinions, but also an outlet for those many who yearn to connect, to communicate, to develop their own thinking using the medium of words and technology.

Karen's Web Sites
www.KarenMains.com
www.HungrySouls.org

Worth Reading
Open Heart, Open Home by Karen Mains
In Open Heart, Open Home (more than 500,000 copies in print) award-winning Karen Mains steps far beyond how-to-entertain you hints to explore the deeper concepts of Christian hospitality the biblical way to use your home and an open heart to care for others like God wants us to. Countless pastors have recommended this classic resource as the meaningful example of how the Holy Spirit ministers to and through us to make other people feel truly welcome and deeply wanted.

Open Heart, Open Home is available for purchase through Sunday Solutions, the Webstore of Mainstay Ministries.

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
KM1-35

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.

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
KM1-34

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.

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
KM1-33

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 microfinance, 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.

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
KM1-32

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.

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
KM1-31

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.

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
KM1-30

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.

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
KM1-29

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.

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
KM1-28

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.

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
KM1-27

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.

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
KM1-26

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.

Dennis Sherbeck was a temporary employee; he worked as our audio engineer and sound editor for our daily radio show, The Chapel of the Air, which broadcasted daily over 500 outlets nationally. Usually, the Sherbecks served as missionaries to Pakistan, and Dennis worked with us when home on furlough.

After I sat in my husband’s office one morning, I felt I had been neglectful in not getting better acquainted. He and his wife, Diane, recounted the Sunday morning when they had been leading worship in a church that was bombed by extremist followers of Islam. Six were killed that morning and many others injured. “Normally,” they explained, “we sit on the side where most of those who died sat, but this Sunday morning, since we were in charge of the service, we were sitting up front.”

Though even the recounting of this memory brought back intense feelings, which the whole family was still dealing with, the Sherbecks nevertheless added, “We had many remarkable God Hunt sightings.” The God Hunt is a spiritual game we taught to our own four children, then to thousands of radio listeners, and finally included in several of our 50-Day Spiritual Adventures, a church-wide spiritual growth event.

They told of the attack on the grade school their 11-year-old son attended, how the terrorists were delayed in their plans and arrived 15 minutes after the children had all been called back into class from recess on the playground. They told of the Pakistani Christian worker who hurried to escape but couldn’t climb over the high fence behind the school building. Suddenly, two men wearing long white robes came and said, “Let us help you.” One kneeled so the fleeing worker could stand on his back; the other boosted him over the barrier. When he turned to thank them, they were gone.

It occurred to me, as David and I listened to these remarkable stories, that in this world where death seems to be rising at the hands of lawlessness and increasing militarism, that we need to know (and teach our children, our grandchildren and others) how to find God in the everyday.

The God Hunt is a simple practice that yields profound results. “Seek me and you will find me if you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you,” proclaims the prophet Jeremiah on behalf of the Lord. Jeremiah 29:13-14a.

Let’s concentrate in the next few blogs on learning to go on the God Hunt—a kind of spiritual quick-stepping (in light of the dancing metaphor I have been employing to open our thinking about stepping into God’s sacred rhythms) that makes us aware of God’s daily activity in our lives. When we learn to intentionally seek for God every day, we can become breathless with how frequently He extends His hand to us, pulls us close and twirls us around.

The first question we must ask is: Am I looking for God in my everyday world?

The second question we must consider is: Am I finding Him?

Karen Mains
KM1-25

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.