November's End

The last day of November is nearly over. Tomorrow begins birthday month with four December birthdays to celebrate along with Christmas in our family.

Observations from my sporadic November posts....

Blogging seems to me a good discipline for writing, but it no longer fits the norm for electronic self expression. There are writers I love, whose books I read, whose podcasts I listen to, but I rarely read their blogs. I'm too used to cramming in short blurbs from Facebook and Instagram. Something longer takes a choice to slow down the scrolling and actually read paragraphs instead of captions.

Part of this is due to the changes in the digital world. I don't even have a Tiktok or Twitter account, and still, the number of times I check my phone for emails, messages, and Instagram posts or stories leads to a sense of possibly missing out. It drives an intensity, or maybe anxiety? 

The world slowing for down for covid has made a difference to me as well. Isolation has not been good for inspiration. 

The exception, not surprisingly, has been teaching High School Sunday School. 

Lesson prep is something I take pretty seriously. I remember a podcast with Nadia Bolz-Weber where she talked about sermon writing. She said that she has to sit with a passage until it breaks her own heart before she can preach about that passage. I don't know if I would word it the way she does, but there has to be a conviction that there is something in this lesson that is worthy, true, lovely, and illustrative of the goodness of God before I can teach it. If I haven't found that in the lesson, it is hard to believe I have something to offer that is worth the time of those who show up. Sometimes the worthy true beautiful thing is obvious the first time I read the lesson text and my task is to plan a lesson around it so the group can discover it as well. Sometimes I have to wrestle with it, even late into the night before I teach. Truthfully, sometimes even then I don't have a confident sense of the essence that should make up the lesson.

By now, having taught nearly all the ages of children's and youth Sunday School classes, I should relax a bit about this. But the most nervous time period of a teaching week is the period of time between entering the classroom and beginning the lesson.

I should know better, but I will have to relearn this again and again.

The most obvious illustration of what I should know is from when I was still teaching 2nd grade. The lesson in the teacher's manual was not at all something that would work with my teaching style or the children in my class. I couldn't find the 'aha' that would be the cornerstone of the lesson. I stayed up half the night working toward putting together something that was honest and engaging for a room full of seven and eight year olds, and I came up dry.

That morning was the morning I should have learned that it isn't about me. I began with the usual check-ins, asking about their week, engaging in greetings and conversations. And then I was honest. I told them I'd stayed up late in the night trying to understand the thing that was important for them to learn about God this week, and I still didn't know. I invited them to read the text with me, and maybe we could figure it out together. 

And we did. It was a holy moment, at least for me.

So last week, with the High School group, in our series on justice, we were ready for the concept of Jubilee. This idea from Leviticus 25 is that everyone has access to a means of caring for themselves through their access to land, and no one has the power to permanently take access away from any other person. If someone has hard things happen and they need to sell their land, or even become a servant for another, it is temporary. People cannot buy land. They can buy a limited number of harvests, after which the land returns to the original owner in the year of Jubilee.

In Sunday School, we talked about what it can mean in our world to make sure everyone has a way to provide for themselves. We talked about land ownership of stolen land, because we are in an agricultural state. We talked about taxes on groceries, and Food Banks, and changing motels to studio apartments for persons needing homes and fresh starts. I don't know if the youth came home with new or renewed insights, but I did.

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Now I've gone off on a tangent instead of writing about my observations from November blogging. The thing I'm coming to is this. Pandemic life has impacted the amount of time when I am stretched in ways that force me to learn. If I'm not learning, I have little worth sharing.

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One writing thing opportunity during the pandemic was writing for the current issue of Rejoice. I was assigned the first week of February, which is Black history month. Sammie Simmons consented to read my writing and offer suggestions and corrections to my writing, and his input, honesty, and kindness were invaluable. I am grateful.

The writing for this issue was stretching. It always is, but it felt more so this time, and I lost a lot of sleep while doing the study and research for the week. Having Sammie respond to my first devotional with clear and honest suggestions for changes gave me courage, rather than shame. He was not hesitant to tell me when I was on the wrong track, and I am so grateful.

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I've often quit blogging after November. Maybe this year I'll try to keep up some regular posting, even though blogging is on its way out.