How did I EVER get myself into all of this?
I looked at my calendar at the beginning of May and wanted to throw up my hands or cry.
What was I thinking when I committed to preaching three sermons in one month – sermons of far different types: A wedding (of friends), a funeral (of a longtime colleague at The Blake School), a Mother’s Day sermon at St. John’s, and all in a month that is one of the busiest ever in Minnesota (yard! garden! deck! window washing – okay I hired that…and some of the gardening).
I was honored to be asked to do the wedding and the funeral and I did say no to one thing: a political candidate who asked me to “come out of retirement” and do some speech writing for him just one more time. No. No! No longer a kind of writing I can do with integrity…
What bothered me the most is that I wanted to do a really good job on all of it. For me, this takes time, and more importantly, the integrity thing. I am unable to go into a wedding, for example, and not be aware of my own unsuccessful experience with the institution, and say something that is not, well, real. As for the funeral, I easily thought of the opening part: “Until someone dies, very few of us ask the big questions.” Yes, good. Like it. Now to identify the questions and why we don’t ask them! With Mother’s Day, I was already worried about, well, the usual things: what to say that’s new, how to say it. Of course, the responsibility and privilege of stepping into a pulpit is always in the forefront, regardless of the occasion.
Whether any of us confront our too-full (or too-empty) calendars, a week of nothing but obligations and duties, a persistent loneliness, or a burning desire to please those we care about along with doubts about our abilities to do so, it is challenging to say the least. We can be caught in the perils of not enough: time, talent, focus, happiness, knowledge, persistence, experience, luck.
As I was contemplating what the month of May was going to demand of me, I ran across a prayer in my files:
“Accept what we have to offer, gracious God: our good intentions, our mixed motives, our hopes and uncertainties about life, our small grasp of truth, and give us the will to use them with love.”
As Jesus gathered up the fragments of the loaves and fishes after the feeding of the five thousand – and there was still enough left to feed many– so we have fragments of knowledge, experiences, talent, and even wounds and scars that can serve our purposes. We have resources, and God promises that, if we ask, he will transform them into enough. We don’t have to do it all on our own. That’s part of what it means to be a person of faith.
I had more resources than I knew, going into this demanding month. Mark Twain himself helped me enliven the wedding sermon; references to some of my favorite movies did some of the heavy lifting in the funeral sermon; and my previous work at Blake helped shed light on the Gospel reading for Mother’s Day.
I had resources, fragments, and offered up freely, they were enough. Yours will be, too.
See you in church.
Barbara
