A Few Words From Pastor Bryan
If you want to see what's in a sponge... SQUEEZE it!
I heard someone share those words about squeezing a sponge in a sermon many years ago, and I've obviously never forgotten it. The preacher was making the point that when life somehow puts pressure on us, we tend to find out who are truly are on the inside. We get squeezed and whatever's "in there" is, well, revealed. Exposed. Sometimes it's a strange blessing in a hard time to watch ourselves respond and even react in ways that surprise us in a positive sense--show how much we've grown and evolved.
But plenty of times, and I'm certainly no exception, the squeeze reveals that we're nowhere near as grounded or evolved as we might have hoped. You've heard me quote from Ram Dass, one of my favorite spiritual teachers, many times. He often used to say, "if you think you're enlightened, just go home and spend a weekend with your family." He would joke that his family "knew exactly how to push his buttons, because they installed them!" And when he suffered a severe stroke later in life, he confessed that when he was going through that experience, he felt nothing but fear and "didn't have a spiritual bone in his body." For all of his teaching and practicing about God's presence and grace and facing illness and death with serenity, when he himself was "stroked," he felt nothing but terror. He said that he did not have one single thought of God in the midst of it. As he quipped during his recovery in retrospect, "when push came to shove for me, I failed the test."
Well I don't think that God was testing Ram Dass through his stroke (that's "another sermon" as I often say), but we understand what Ram Dass meant. Once he was well enough to reflect on this experience out loud, he said, "It showed me that I still had lots of work to do." And then he devoted the rest of his life (another 15 years or so) to learning how to live with severe physical limitations, face a very slow and painful physical decline, and eventually die with "fierce grace." He wound up teaching the world so much about how to both live and die with dignity and deep spiritual presence even while he was in pain and facing some incredibly difficult circumstances. I just love Ram Dass.
But the reason I'm sharing all of this with you today is because this afternoon I received a text from a member of our church who is actually being squeezed on a number of fronts herself at this point in her life. I'll let her remain anonymous. But in the midst of her own discomfort and pressure, she texted me a couple of pages from Kate Bowler's latest book, "The Lives We Actually Have." I was touched both by the way in which she is trying to work deeply with her own very full sponge these days, and also that in the midst of her own turmoil she thought to share this with me and to minister out of her own difficult situation. What is coming out of her is a desire to let even her own pain somehow be a gift that God can use to bless someone else.
Ram Dass might playfully say that she's doing much better with her test than he did. I'll just say that what's being revealed as the sponge of her being is being squeezed, is quite beautiful. Thank you my friend. You know who you are.
The blessing from Kate Bowler that was shared is below.
See you all soon I hope,
Pastor Bryan
For when this pain doesn’t make sense
By Kate Bowler
God, I’m fumbling around for answers, reasons, meaning.
I can’t find any purpose in this pain.
Why me?
Why them?
Why now?
I don’t know when this is going to get better.
Or if I will ever feel relief.
God, make this pain matter…at least to you.
See me in my fragility.
Give me a reminder of your presence.
Reach for me,
for I am too weary to reach for you.
Blessed are we who need to be reminded
that there are some things we can fix
…and some things we can’t.
Blessed are we who can say:
My life isn’t always getting better.
Right in the midst of the pain and fear and uncertainty, may we hunt for beauty and meaning and truth…together.
Not to erase the pain or solve the pain
(though surely that would be nice),
but to remind us that beauty and sorrow coexist.
And that doesn’t mean we’re broken or have been forgotten.
God is here, and we are never—were never and will never be—alone. In our hope. In our disappointment. In our joy. In our pain.
God, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Spirit, have mercy. Amen.
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