My church has this tradition called “guess who’s coming for lunch”, where a Sunday is set aside, speaking to those who want to participate, for the community to sign up to either host or be hosted for lunch following the service. Names are collected and paired by the church staff, thus who you are gathering with and where constitutes the guessing part, up until we receieve our emails in the week leading up to the event.
It’s a tradition I have always appreciated. It inevitably results in gathering with people you don’t really know all that well, which has the affect of opening us up to being surprised. Being willfully positioned within this intimate setting condusive to uninhibited and honest conversation and connection allows for great and unexpected stories to emerge, often ones that reveal these persons to be completely other than my perceptions or expectations might have assessed them to be from a distance.
And perhaps more importantly, while these momentary connections might not always be reflective of shared perspectives or life long friendships, they do inevitably bridge the gap between what was otherwise a name, or sometimes a role (I know that person as a greeter, for example), and what becomes an embodied story.
We held this event a few weeks back. We were hosted. The couple who hosted us was slightly younger than my wife and I. We shared space as well with a couple that was slightly older. What became immediately clear, aside from the fact that the host and myself shared a celiac diagnosis, was that the inroad into our shared stories, each being expressed from our unique vantage point in life, was our travels.
More specifically, we had one couple experiencing the momentary thrills of being in the present moment of their late thirties with energy and ambition and potential, one couple on the other side of 50 having been shaped by stories of crisis and struggle, and us, both fast approaching 50 and feeling the weight of looming crisis and anxiety that this transition tends to bring with it.
One couple not yet asking the questions that could and would inevitably come with age, another having wrestled with those questions and formulated a sense of renewal on the other side.
And us feeling stuck right in the middle, feeling plagued by the questions of the present.
All of us subsequently shaping these things around significant, perspective shaping trips.
The younger couple revelled in a recently embarked upon bucket list trip to Japan, with all the necessary energy needed to make the most of it in their prime, the trip setting the stage for the opportunities for home, life and work that filled their time and energy. The older couple reflected on the ways 50 inspired them to start aknew following, among other things, divorce and upheavel, with a trip to England and Spain. For the former, the trip was inspired by their present passions and a sense of building their life in real time. Life is still an endless future. For the latter, these trips were a way of recovering who they were over and against the reality that life was an endless past, their present story being something that had gotten lost in the shuffle of that precarious decade between 40 and 50.
In the weeks following, questions that have been popping up with increased frequency in our home- how do we know what our story is supposed to be? How do we know we are living the story God desires for us? Do we write our stories and fit God into it? Do we live into the story God desires for us? Why is it that approaching 50 brings with it this sense of anxiety, this fear that the whole idea of our story has been lost entirely? As though the crashing inevitabilies of the prior decade coming to an end act more as a stark reminder of the fleeting failures of those once ambitions and promises enabled by our 30’s and 40’s, to produce and lead somwhere, anywhere, with realized clarity. If this is true of the prior 20 years, how much truer will it be of the next 20, which, given the assumption that we are lucky enough to play out an average life span, will place us near the end of our lives and subsequently the end of such questions?
Being stuck in the middle, we found these polarizing feelings. Cynicism, jealousy and skepticism of that familiar optimism undergirding the younger couple in the prime of their lives on one hand, and the hopeful possibility of this older couple story, whom found their way to the other side of their common crisis with some recognizble portion of grace, revelation and growth. Caught in the middle, we found ourselves grappling with certain temptations- solve our present crisis by using the jealousy to motivate us towards replicating the experience of the seasoned sourjourners. The immediate result of this temptation? Suddenly our home computers have flights to England logged in our search engines. Since relocation and renovations were also part of their story, we found ourselves at the bank talking about refinancing. Since the revitalization of their art and ambitions was on the table, everthing from job changes to scattered pipe dreams seemed to dominate our supper conversations.
At which point I found myself throwing up my hands this week and saying, hold up. I think we need to pump the breaks for a moment. I don’t have answers to our questions. I know the anxieties and fears intimately. Feeling lost is far worse than feeling the fleeting nature of time, although those things go hand in hand. Yet, I do know that attempts to wrestle with the questions, with those anxieties, with that feeling of lostness, will not be satisfied by replicating someone else’s story. It will not be solved by chasing after someone else’s story. By comparing our life, our story, to another.
If nothing else, seeking clarity in those questions above requires locating how God is speaking and what God is speaking into the present shape and moment of our own lives. Our story must always be in conversation with where we find ourselves, not acting in opposition to it. Not finding our answers in the present space of another. If we are to imagine one day that being us sitting at someones table over lunch representing the couple who is the seasoned sojourner, where we are in the future moment will only be able to make sense to anyone, let alone oursleves, if it is in dialogue with our present. If we are feeling lost right now, to find our story is to continue living the plot. An act of faith? If the older couple is a testament, then yes, definitely. An act of faith without precedence? Without hope? Absolutely not. If that older couple’s story teaches us anything, it is that growing into the next decade is as much about remembering as it is about continuing to shape a future.
Interestingly, for Lent this year I’ve decided to spend time in Elizabeth F. Caldwell’s new book Pause: Spending Lent with the Psalms. The first words of her introduction read the following:
Consider these words: running to the next thing. to do list. pause. interruption. wait for it. slow down. keep going. stop. Which of these defines the pace of your daily life…. (either descsribing the present, or what you need)
I immediately harkened back to the frenzy of feelings and emotions that followed this lunch, and my own cry to STOP. To apply the breaks. To pause. If these words apply to the daily pace of life, I think they also apply to this kind of human processing. Pause is a word that invites interruption. Interruption is what brings clarity.
As she says about the Psalms,
It may be helpful to imagine these words being written by someone just like yourself, who is experiencing both the challenges of life and the hope in God’s abiding presence….
Both a precedent and an invitation to forge a story anew.
And then perhaps most timely for my ponderings above, I come to this reflection for the first week of Lent
Sometimes the way forward is very clear. And sometimes you can barely see the path…. One of the yearnings we all share is to see clearly, to know what’s ahead, to find our own way through life. But we also know that paths through life change. Sometimes the path feels blocked or uncertain. Sometimes the only constant is change itself. And following a path or paths requires adaptability and the ability to deal with change. Lent gives us a chance to pause in the midst of all this change and listen to the rhythm and music of our lives It offers us time to reflect on our journeys, where we’ve been, and where we might be headed.
Make me to know your ways, O Lord, says the Psalmist in Psalm 25. Teach me your paths.
For YOU are the God of my salvation.
For YOU I wait all day long.
As the Psalm finishes with the plea to “gaurd my life and deliver me”, it becomes a vivid reminder, especially given the context of the Psalm relating to the story of Israel, that my story, our story/stories, belongs to something bigger and broader than our own specific place within it. This is what binds those three perspectives sitting around the table together. We do not write our stories from the present without precedence and without hope. We write it with the promise that salvation – the thing every story hinges on- is its defining point. It is the thing that frees us to live from the present into the questioned tomorrows.
The Stories of my Life 