Much has happened since my last blog post. Life has been full. My last post contained reflections about the death of my father. As a way of re-entering the blogosphere, reflecting on the past sixteen months without my father in the world may be a good way to do it.
I don’t grieve well. I shed few tears. Not because I’m too tough, but because I have never been able to shake the “big boys don’t cry” mantra that defined my growing up years. In ministry we are taught to maintain a professional distance when dealing with the needs of others. I do that well. However, it has not helped me move beyond the damaging nonsense of such a horrible male cultural expectation.
I’m normally pretty thick-skinned. I have always been a bit of a maverick in my ministry which lends itself to criticism from those threatened by the non-conventional approaches I take to things. I have always tried to receive the criticism in constructive ways. Looking for any truth that might be hiding in the words of my critics. My point being that criticism has never been a threat to me or to my work.
I am also a person who approaches my ministry with a lot of confidence. I work hard at discerning the path that God would have me walk and then I walk it with a certain sense of empowerment and confidence. My critics would use a different set of adjectives.
Last fall, for the first time in my adult life, I lost my swagger. I knew I was walking the right path, but I began to let my critics get to me. Self doubt came knocking. I noticed that I began to take it out on the people closest to me. I was on edge. I didn’t have any emotional buffers to deal with all that was coming my way. It was new territory for me and I couldn’t get a handle on just what was happening, why I was allowing doubt to cloud my judgment when I knew, truly knew, that the path upon which the Christian Church In Kentucky and I were walking, was right.
I began to withdraw from the world a bit. My energy level diminished. Each day was more of a “going through the motions” then aggressively walking the path God had put me on just the year before. In conversation with a few trusted friends and my spiritual director (especially my spiritual director) I came to see the real issue. I had not grieved my father’s death and his death was demanding its rightful due from me. In November of 2010, my siblings and I spent time together in Florida cleaning out my parents house, getting it ready for whatever was next. We laughed a lot. Reminisced a lot. Leaned on each emotionally has we began the hard task of dividing those things that had value to us from those that did not and got rid of those things we valued the least. Obviously, all the things had some value to our parents.
Through that experience I began to grieve in my own way. The blessed peace of God, God’s shalom, found its way back into my heart and mind and I began to feel like me again, but it was a different me. A better me. A me that had learned to deal with profound loss.There was a new intentionality, a new purpose, to my ministry. I didn’t regain my swagger. I was given something better. An internal confidence in who I am and whose I am. I know it’s a cliche but it is nonetheless true.
In a coming to Jesus moment with my spiritual director he asked me if I truly believed that God had set me on the path that I was on. I said, “yes, I do.” His response, “One would never know that by your actions.” Ouch! Like so many times before, God spoke to me through my dear friend and spiritual mentor, Father Noel. I have not been the same since, thanks be to God.
I’m still learning how to use this wonderful gift of grieving. But I am using it. Both my father and my mother bequeathed me many valuable, relational intangibles. They have been given new meaning and consequently new life. They made me open to God’s story intersecting with my story in new and profound ways. I am learning how to use this wonderful gift as well.
I am not only re-entering the blogosphere. I have made a re-entry into life with a capital “L.” A wonderful old hymn may sum it best for me, “This is my Father’s world.” That is true for me now in many ways, but both my heavenly Father and earthly father have made it clear to me, it is also my world, it is our world and I/we have a responsibility to it and to all who inhabit it. I pray you may know such blessed assurance, too.
