Taking a Leap of Faith

My family just moved into a new house. It is a faculty house belonging to my seminary where I teach and I am delighted to get to live there. The move went well - for about a day. Then I got sick and ended up in the hospital having two surgical procedures in two days.

Luckily, we had family coming to help with the move and they did more than could possibly be expected of family members during a move. They helped us clean, unpack boxes, and hang pictures. They helped us shop for new items for the house, carried out trash by the barrel, and helped us get organized. I am so grateful they were all here to help us out while I was sick and recovering from my surgery.

Today we were listing moves we made as a family. Since my birth I have lived in 21 different homes. That is 21 different moves. Some were just across town. Some were across country. Some were when I was too young to help. Some were with my own son who barely remembers the move. Some were painful and some were joyous.

Moving is never easy. Packing up and moving means saying goodbye to one reality and hello to a new one. Saying it 21 times means saying a lot of goodbyes to realities.

When I was a kid there were moves that made me angry. As an adult several of my moves were to grand new adventures - to college, to my first job, to attend seminary, to serve my first church, to grad school to get my PhD, to my first teaching job, and to Philly to teach at Lutheran. These were amazing new adventures.

But each and every one of them required a leap of faith. The moves required a sense of trust in the possibilities ahead. That trust is sometimes hard to come by. But trust must be lived out in the midst of change.

My prayer for this move and for the ways your life is changing is that trust comes to you. It takes small leaps of faith - trusting that God is present in the midst of the change, trusting that things will work themselves out, and trusting that you are not alone in the journey.

I'm leaping here, people. Wanna jump with me?  

Me and My Stuff

I heard a comedy routine some years ago by George Carlin about STUFF. I still remember it:

“That's all I want, that's all you need in life, is a little place for your stuff, ya know? I can see it on your table, everybody's got a little place for their stuff. This is my stuff, that's your stuff, that'll be his stuff over there. That's all you need in life, a little place for your stuff. That's all your house is: a place to keep your stuff. If you didn't have so much stuff, you wouldn't need a house. You could just walk around all the time.”

The routine continues to talk about getting so much stuff you need a bigger house for your stuff, you go on vacation and need to take just a bit of your stuff, and after trips you bring home more stuff, etc.  It is raw and rough in spots but I love the bit, because it is so dang true. The acquisition of “stuff” is part of the American reality for most.

We are moving this month and going through all of our stuff – decisions about keeping stuff, giving away stuff and moving stuff is a big part of our lives right now.  We have bags of stuff to give to Goodwill or some other charitable organization. We have bags of stuff that is going out in the trash.  And other stuff is getting packed up to load on a truck and take all the way to our new house – a mere 15 blocks away. But we have to pack up as if we are moving cross country almost.

And the stuff is amazing. Going through your stuff is a kind of archeological dig of sorts. We have talked about items in my son’s room that he wanted to hear the story about. We have talked about priorities in regards to what stuff we have and how we use it – or don’t use it. We have talked about how to decorate the new place with our stuff. And we have talked about the need to acquire less stuff in our lives.

We discovered that we have stuff we have not used in the two years since we moved here – so it is getting tossed or given away unless it is a keepsake. We have stuff that is important so we cannot pack it up until closer to the truck coming to load. We have stuff that has to go with us and stuff that we’re still debating about keeping.

Stuff can weigh us down. Stuff can make us possessive and oppressed. Stuff can separate us from ourselves, from others, and from our God. Stuff is not what God wants for us – God wants faithful living, nurturing relationships, spiritual formation, living missionally, and building family, among others.

Truth is … me and my stuff need a reality check.  What is important in my life is not going to fit in the back of the moving truck. I need to remember that fact.

(And I'm not even gonna get into the "unpacking" of my stuff ... that's for another blog)