Visioning Board

"Is not this the fast that I choose:

to loose the bonds of injustice,

to undo the thongs of the yoke,

to let the oppressed go free,

and to break every yoke?

Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,

and bring the homeless poor into your house;

when you see the naked, to cover them,

and not to hide yourself from your own kin?

Then your light shall break forth like the dawn,

and your healing shall spring up quickly;

your vindicator* shall go before you,

the glory of the Lord shall be your rearguard.

Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer;

you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am.

If you remove the yoke from among you,

the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil,

if you offer your food to the hungry

and satisfy the needs of the afflicted,

then your light shall rise in the darkness

and your gloom be like the noonday.

The Lord will guide you continually,

and satisfy your needs in parched places,

and make your bones strong;

and you shall be like a watered garden,

like a spring of water,

whose waters never fail.

Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt;

you shall raise up the foundations of many generations;

you shall be called the repairer of the breach,

the restorer of streets to live in. "  Isaiah 58:6-12

My bishop told me that over the course of my formation process my bridge ministry might change and as I began the education part of my formation process I could feel it changing.  But I didn't know how.  If you are not a first time reader of my blog - you have read about and felt this uknowing change building.  It has become turbulent in my soul as we go on.  I am deeply involved in my bridge ministry of serving the homeless.  The two places in my life where I feel the most at home are on the altar serving with my priest(s) and at the shelters serving my homeless friends. The third place I feel most alive is in spiritual formation small groups; exploring God's word and the movement of the Holy Spirit in peoples lives.  So what is this change?   What is this unrest?

This weekend was amazing, an adventure of emotion and worship.  Saturday was the first ordination of deacons in my diocese - in I don't even know how long or if there has been one before.  The first class of 5 deacons were ordained and I was there.  It was affirming and wonderful and overwhelming and exciting and sobering and humbling and uplifting.  Before this moment the formation process did not have a conclusion of ordination.  Now it is a real possibility. I am still a postulant, there are still 2 years of formation, committees to sit before, ember day letters to write, classes to take, lessons to learn.  But now there is also hope, not cautious hope afraid to really believe.  Rather a wild, passionate grace-filled hope that what God has called me to my church will ordain me to.  God has called me to be a deacon of this I have no doubt.  It is in my dna, my blood, my thought, my word and my deed.  Once I claimed my call there is no stepping back from it.  The question for me was (and is) will the church affirm my call and allow me to serve in the church as I feel called to serve?  Will I be able to articulate to my church, my brothers and sisters what God has set before me?  As of today the answer is yes and I will continue to pray for the words to speak, the quiet to hear and the wisdom to serve my bishop effectively while serving the homeless in their deepest needs.  It was a good day!

The next day as I was driving to church I felt the Spirit welling up in me, filling me to brimming.  The mantra "I am Alive"  "I am Alive" "I am Alive" kept coursing through me.  This fullness lasted all through worship.  I found this an interesting prayer response for the whole night I had been praying for my classmate and sister in Christ, deacon in formation friend, Anne.  She had died and I was leaving worship to drive a few hours to her funeral.  I couldn't sleep that night knowing that in only one more year she would have knelt at the altar and been ordained by our Bishop.  At the funeral we learned that one of her friends at her deathbed had stated "Jesus will place her stole on her."  How true, how true.  Anne was a deacon years and years before the church even decided to reinstate the sacred order.  Her call came from God and she served unceasingly as she was called to do.  Her ordination would have been an affirmation of who she already was.  Anne's funeral was an amazing tribute to her life.

What do you do in the formation process?  It is such a roller coaster of Who Am I?  Who do you call me to be?  Where do you want me?  How do I serve?  How do I share who I am?  The process breaks you down and lifts you up - it stretches you out of your comfort zone and demands you embrace your gifts, your call, your voice.  The process demands you claim your call!  It demands you continue to listen and to vision God's dream for you.

That leaves me to my visioning board.  I made one about 2-3 years ago.  It was a family visioning board.  We had certain goals we wanted to meet and we made a board outlining those goals and putting up pictures and scripture to help us.  I had a morning of silence last week (blessed silence!).  I sat in the silence and jut let thoughts come to me.  Some began to come more rapidly and I sat down and began to write them down on post-it notes.  I took down portions of our visioning board and replaced the empty spaces with my new thoughts, my new revelations, my new visions coming at me as quickly as a heartbeat.

I have a homework assignment to take a current social issue from any news source and work it through theologically and through our baptism covenant, to work up a plan of how to bring it to my congregation and create action around it and minister to it.  In december I read an article about a homeless high school teen in the next county over that I can't stop thinking about.  As I spent the last 3 weeks trying to figure out what social issue I would explore and do my homework on I continued to think about this teen and then it seemed on a daily basis I would get 5 more stories of other teens in the same circumstance for different reasons.  And then I met a woman in the shelter with 6 kids - she has been on her own since 14 - she is 26 with 6 kids, no high school degree, currently unemployed and homeless and shelter hopping to try and keep her kids warm and fed.  Of course my social issue is the rising epedemic of children and youth homelessness!

Sometimes God really has to smack me on the forehead.  I can envision the Holy Spirit swirling around me saying "Hello?"  "Do you hear me??"  "Don't you see, feel, smell and taste what I am showing you?"  You could say God began planting this seed 15 years ago when my husband and I began talking about being foster parents, exploring how we wanted youth to always feel welcome in our home, a place where they felt heard and seen, our kids friends love to hang out here;  our kids know their friends are welcome here and at the dinner hour we don't turn anyone away, just be ready to pray and share your highs and lows of the day.  About 10 years ago we began talking about purchasing land to have a "safe house" for homeless mothers and their kids - maybe a summer camp for homeless youth - a place where family dinners were normal, game night was a constant, reading before bed and hanging out watching movies and telling jokes was okay.  A place where you had warm shelter and said your prayers before bed.  A place where the mothers' could switch out of survival mode and began to just mother and kids switched off the stress button of adapting to survival environments and felt home and safe and comfort.  A place where cycles could be broken.  Cycles of addiction, abuse, fear, neglect, homelessness and hopelessness all broken and replaced with redemption of our Lord, hope in the living God, and a cycle of the pursuits of happiness, liberty and justice and a future!

Something tells me I am going to have many sleepless nights as I begin researching my county's foster care programs, homeless teen rates and options.  I don't have the money to buy land and build my safe house but I do have the resources to do research, work in current systems set up, educating myself and meeting these kids who need me now, need to know that God loves them NOW!  God could not reveal His vision to me until I was ready.  Visioning sometimes is just one step in front of the other without being able to see through the mist.  Sometimes it is just a random heartbeat of thought that won't stop and has to be written down and placed on a board so that you can stare at it until you can really SEE it and become it!

My visioning board has this scripture:

"Is not this the fast that I choose:  to loose the bonds of injustice,

to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?

Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house;"

What is God's vision for you?