What Pastors Do on Summer Vacations- Part 2

I’ve never attended a funeral in my swimsuit before.

We have a timeshare, one of the old-fashioned types, where you stay in the exact same place the exact same weeks each year. There are 32 units at our place, and we have gotten to know people over the past dozen+ years simply by virtue of proximity. (For instance, we know to dread the noise from the party-hearty types that show up each year for week 30.) Over the years, we’ve shared some significant life events together.  Some life events happen at the beach itself, such as the year our daughter was rushed to the ICU with undiagnosed and life-threatening juvenile diabetes. Most events happen during the other 51 weeks of the year, and we share them with each other annually in beach conversations or in passing.

This year, there had been a loss to death. I knew the man only from watching him kitesurf in front of our beach, marveling at how high he could fly into the air. A brain aneurysm claimed him over Memorial Day weekend.  Although he was my age, it fell to his mother to plan his funeral. His surfing buddies suggested a “paddle out” as an appropriate way to memorialize him.  Word spread. I offered my services as a pastor, but another pastor who stayed there had offered already.  (Imagine that- 2 pastors at the same place!) 

And so we gathered on the beach on a Wednesday afternoon. His 5 siblings spoke of the man and their love for him. There were funny memories and laughter, the way that there usually is, and talk of his excellence in his profession as a partner at a major accounting firm. The outer ring of us stood in tribute to a man whom we knew only for his soaring above the sea, tethered to a kite and a surfboard. It was beautiful and perfect, and the pastor said exactly the right things. When the talking was done, the nieces and nephews got on surfboards and paddled out past the sandbar.  There, ashes and flowers were showered into the sea. And the salt of tears mixed with the salt of the ocean, even for those of us in the outer circle.

That night, we were in our condo when Andy called us out to the porch. The family had one more act of tribute, lighting floating lanterns that sailed into the night sky towards the full moon.  The beauty of those lights floating off gave us goosebumps, as we heard the echoes of voices calling out his name one last time into the sea air.

Families come in all sorts of different ways, shapes, and sizes. Until this year, though, I never realized that family can come a week at a time.

What Pastors Do on Summer Vacations, Part 1

Nothing. I did nothing, and a whole lot of it.  I lost track of what day it was.  I played Canasta into the late night (for me) hours with my family. I read novels because they sounded good and I thought I would enjoy reading them. I read the Book of Romans for the same reason. I attended a funeral on the beach (see Part 2). I stood my ground (see Part 3). We ate out a bunch, and we made easy meals when we ate in, and we ate a lot of shrimp and key lime pie both in and out.

The water was icky due to habitat-destroying releases of water from Lake Okechobee and full of jellyfish, stingrays, sawfish, and something that created yesterday’s headline:  “Sea creature bites teen fishing on Sanibel shore.”  (The television news described flesh hanging off of both legs and feet, but the newspaper interviewed the sheriff who observed laconically, “It couldn’t have been too big because of the size of the bites.”  I consider the whole affair to be Nature’s revenge for the Okechobee releases.) Yet, even my well-founded concern about habitat destruction and less-well-founded concerns about hungry apocalyptic sea creatures roaming the shore didn’t dampen my utter enjoyment of agenda-less days on a tropical island.  Snakes and lizards slithered by me while I read, and a 5-foot alligator lurked along the bike path as I pedaled by, and I loved every minute of it.

As hard as it was to pack up and leave paradise this morning, it feels great to be home!  My to-do list contains both mundane things and significant challenges. Settling back into the regular routine feels comfortable and right, and I’ve got the energy to deal with some of the more “interesting” things ahead. 

On one of the morning news shows a few days ago (I actually had time to watch the morning news shows!), there was a story on “Hail Mary-Cations.” In essence, married couples whose marriages are in danger go on a vacation as a last-ditch effort to save their marriage. Some couples report finding renewed love while experiencing an African safari together. The news story told also of couples who went straight from the airport to separate apartments, with the vacation not having fixed the problem. While listening to that story, I realized how blessed I am to have time away each year with my husband and children, to renew these most important relationships.  No need for a Hail Mary when the game is going well all along.

Life is good, and I am blessed, and I am blessed to have had some time away to remember how very, very blessed I am.

On Being Tacky

Today, the Supreme Court issued an important ruling about the Voting Rights Act. This Act was hugely important in the days of the civil rights era, insuring equal access to the polls for a population that had been denied it for too long.  With the Supreme Court’s action, we are left to hope that things have changed enough that those protections are no longer necessary.  Surely, we think, we as a nation have moved beyond those days.

And yet . . . in another courthouse in another state, a racially-charged criminal case is going on as I type.  Was Trayvon Martin shot purely because he was a young black man in the wrong neighborhood, or was he shot by someone acting in self-defense? 

And yet . . . shooting targets that bleed and look suspiciously like our President were being displayed at a convention just last month.  Are the strong feelings that many bear towards Obama born out of racial hatred, or are they simply the dislike that any president bears?

And yet . . . a popular food celebrity who makes food the way that I think it ought to taste acknowledges having spoken disrespectfully of people of other races.  Paula Deen’s recent publicity demonstrates one version of growing up Southern.  She grew up in a climate in which it was somehow normal to use vulgar words for persons of a different race, or to tell jokes where the punchline lay in the ethnicity of a character.  When she acknowledged these things in open court, she lost a job and at least one sponsor. Her defenders have said, among other things, “Well, she can’t help it, it was where she was raised.”

I was raised in Georgia, too.  Although I may have been raised in the same state as Deen, I was raised in a different universe. I was taught at an early age that it was “tacky” to use the n-word, along with the d-word and the s-word. (Of course, I didn’t even know the f-word existed.) For a Southerner of my universe, there was nothing worse than being tacky. Ethnic jokes, although a little fuzzier, also fit along the spectrum of tackiness. I often forget to thank my parents for their wisdom in raising me they way that they did, and I am grateful for an upbringing that didn’t really seem that momentous at the time.

“Tacky,” of course, contains its own level of judgmentalism, even without racial connotations. Face it, none of us have perfected the art of looking at the world without filters of familiarity.  Those who are different from us are going to be judged by us differently, more harshly.

Have we evolved beyond the need for the Voting Rights Act?  I’d like to hope that the Supreme Court’s optimism about human nature is well placed.  However, if they are wrong, well then, their decision would just be . . . tacky.

Groundhogs and Grace

Yes, groundhogs can be pests.  On our 25+ acres at church, groundhog burrows have tripped up the tractor.  A few years ago, one persistent groundhog kept breaking into the church office and setting off the alarm.  Once, I stepped onto the back porch behind the office, inadvertently getting between a groundhog and its nest.  We both scared each other, and we each dashed to safety.

This morning, a baby groundhog was alone by the church.  One of our members grabbed a shovel and hoe, ready to dispatch it to the great groundhog burrow up above.  And then I came along.  There was something about that little groundhog, quivering in the shade of the church building that touched my heart.  “Not today,” I thought to myself.  I pretty much threw myself between the groundhog and the well-intentioned person as I started singing “All God’s critters got a place in the choir.” The baby groundhog skittered off to safety (probably driven by my singing voice), and I imagine that he's right now learning from his parents how to make more holes in our field and dig into our basement.

I’m not this sentimental about nuisance creatures all the time. If it had been a cockroach or a rat, my response would have been different. And there are some sparrows that are terrorizing our martin house at home that need to wing their way to heaven by whatever means possible.  Today, though, the sun was shining, and the little groundhog looked so scared as it cowered against the church building. And so a little groundhog grace was extended.

After all, none of us knows when we’ll find grace from an unexpected place.