Post #43: Resting in the Confusion

August has been crazy!  Between visits with family and camping, I think we managed to successfully never be home!  Our poor cats were going through withdrawal (Mortimer seriously won't leave my side when I am home on my own).  We have had so much fun getting to touch base with people.

We arrived home from visiting family in Minnesota late Sunday night (awesome visit, by the way... there was Play-Doh, painting, puzzles, manicures, and even some interpretive dance.  Because every child needs me to teach them "The Sprinkler").  Monday morning had me heading to the school for a week-long course/conference on Project-Based Learning (PBL).

Rather than tell you about it, I thought what I might do is post the reflection that I shared with my fellow staff and the admin team at the school today.  We had to reflect on our experience throughout the week and touch on the project that we designed.  The pictures below were ones that I had on a slide in the background while presenting.  Here it is:

The harsh beauty of the North

I'm the cute munchkin bending over on the snow drift.

Welcome to Rankin Inlet, Nunavut, land of tundra, -100 with wind chill weather, and whiteouts.  It was also my home when I was 4 and 5.  Now Rankin was tundra.  That means no trees and no wind blocks.  So in the middle of winter when it started to blow you had crazy cold mixed with brutal whiteouts.  It was not uncommon for someone who had grown up in the town to get lost in a whiteout, end up wandering out of the community, and freezing to death.  When I was sick my Dad had to take me to the nursing station.  He loaded me onto our sled and proceeded to pull my five year old body through blowing winds.  One moment this was going smoothly, and the next my Dad’s arm was up in the air with the sled while the wind was blowing me back down the road.  One of my strongest memories of living there is of walking to kindergarten with my Mom.  She had a special parka that had ties around her waist.  In these conditions my job was to hold onto those ties for all I was worth so that I didn’t blow away (which had happened to me before) and so that I didn’t get lost.  That was how I got through the storm.  That was how I muddled through the confusion.

On Day 1 of the Academy we were told to just live in the confusion.  If you get to know me you will discover that I don’t like that.  When I am confused I am driven to get through it as quickly as I can.  I cannot rest until I have done that.  In my mind, resting or living in confusion means you get lost.  And getting lost is the equivalent of dying on the frozen tundra.

I also came into the Academy with plans for creating a great overarching summative project for my Grade 10 Applied English course.  Watching everyone talk about the big projects they had completed made me feel like mine had to be big too.  And this overwhelmed me.  I felt like I was floundering.  Nothing was coming together and by the end of the day I had scrapped this idea of a big project and thought I would just look for a way to make poetry interesting to a group of 15 year old boys.

When I went home that night I was exhausted and my gut reaction was to sit down and drill out the question and details for my project.  But I kept hearing Harry saying “Live in the confusion.”

So for one of the first times ever I made the conscientious decision to live in it. I kept it in the back of my mind but allowed myself to just rest that night.

The next day I started talking to a few people and began to develop the idea of using slam poetry to have my students combat injustice.  The literature in this course deals a lot with issues of racism and discrimination, and I could see students picking an injustice they are passionate about, and being able to express their frustration and passion.  I saw us looking at the idea of righteous anger and addressing issues of social justice.  It was something I could see them getting passionate about.  We did protocols and with feedback I began to see my audience growing from peers, staff, and parents, to a competition at a school assembly and maybe even presentations of their poems at downtown coffee shops.  I started to get excited.  I began wondering if I could find a local poet to come in as my entry event.  I started contemplating what videos I could use to grab their interest.  It felt like everything was starting to come together.

Have you ever noticed that sometimes you feel you have learned a lesson God is trying to teach you, only to have Him teach it to you again and again in different contexts?  Welcome to the story of my life.

Part way through the week there was a dialogue regarding this specific English class, and as a result it was switched around and I was given a different class.

So there’s me, midway through the Academy week, working to develop a project for a course that I am no longer teaching. At first I was scared.  What should I do?  Should I scrap it and pick something completely different for a different course to go with?

I talked with some people and we decided that I should just keep going with the project.  Aaron was also very excited about this as he was the one now teaching that course!  And on my own time I have been using the skills I have learned this week to start working on a project for one of my other classes.

Living in the chaos and confusion.  It is not easy, and I don’t know if it ever is.  But what I noticed this week is that I am not alone.  No matter what stage of confusion I was in, whether it was the ideas, planning, or adjusting phase, there were people I could talk to.  I love collaboration, yet often try to do things on my own due to a mixture of reasons.  I can be insecure but I also hate bother others.  But we need each other.  Sometimes I get so muddled in the chaos that I need someone to run after me so that I don’t get blown away, like my Dad rescuing me from the wind.  And other times I just need people to walk alongside me, so that we can both help each other along, like with my Mom in the midst of the whiteout.  Sometimes it takes time for God to end a whiteout, and sometimes it takes time for confusion to become clear.  But I learned this week that I can rest in those times, because there are others who are going through it with me. And by the grace of God, we can support each other and get through that.

I guess the reason I wanted to share this with you, is because I know that most of us can understand that feeling of not knowing what is going on around us.  Of feeling like we are living in a constant state of confusion, asking God "When is this going to become clear?"  I wish I could tell you that your whiteout was only going to last a few hours, a day, or maybe the season of winter.  But I can't do that.  A whiteout could last only that long... or it could be years.  If we are being really honest, sometimes it can last a lifetime and we may not get the clarity we seek until Eternity.

But I don't want you take that as something depressing (as hard as I know that can be).  One thing that really struck me this week is the connection I felt with the staff at my school.  I saw myself forming not just working relationships, but also friendships with multiple people.  And that means I'm not alone.

You're not alone either.  Cling to those people that God has placed in your life.  Sometimes you might be rolling away into the storm and they will be the ones to grab by the fur of your parka (metaphorically speaking, that is), and yank you back to the present.  Or maybe they will be the ones that you hold to in the whiteout, taking baby steps forward as you make your way through together.  God created us to be community, and part of being in community means being there for each other.

Post #42: Striving for Balance... and Tipping the Scale

You know, I have been wanting to write a post all summer and yet have kept putting it off.  Even after I got a full-time job for next year at the school I love (huzzah!) I had a hard time making myself sit down to write.  The month of June was incredibly stressful as I waited to hear about the job and it definitely put a new spin on trusting God.

But still I didn't write.

I couldn't figure out my problem with writing.  I wanted to.  But I just couldn't bring myself to do it.

You know, in all the time I have kept a blog I don't think I have ever been convicted about not writing.  This afternoon I was getting ready to take my computer onto the front porch with something cold to drink, all set to do some planning for the fall.

And instead I was convicted.

On Monday night (technically Tuesday morning) hubby and I returned from a trip out west to see my family.  I had been gone for a week a half.  It was an incredible visit full of lots of cuddles from kids, walks, runs, and great visits.  

Throughout the visit my sister-in-law shared a book she was reading with some of the ladies from her church.  It's called Sacred Pathways by Gary Thomas.  She was talking about how the book delves into the idea that different people connect with God in different ways.  A good friend of mine read the book a few years ago and I remember her telling be about it too.

I found this intriguing and so picked the book up.  I know that in the past I have connected with God in different ways, and was curious what the book would have to say.

Before I get into that I want to share something else I have noticed lately that also came up in some of the conversations I had with family.

Several years ago I made the decision to leave the church that I had been a member of for years.  I had been heavily involved in this church and had called it home for a long time.  Then I hit a point where I left church angry over what I was hearing preached, where sermons could be summed up by "read your Bible and pray," where it felt like an experience was being sought after rather than God, and where I no longer felt like I belonged because of the path I was taking in life.  Within months of leaving the church, the leadership did something involving my family that it took me a very long time to forgive.

The reason I tell you this is because in response to what happened I more or less shunned everything that I felt had to do with this church and the Pentecostal denomination as a whole.  I attended a Mennonite church throughout the rest of university and during my first year of teaching.  After getting married I then became a member of the Christian Reformed Church.

Over the last two years, I have come to enjoy watching the reactions of the students I teach (as most of them are CRC kids) when I tell them I grew up in a Pentecostal Church.  This is usually followed by the question, "How Pentecostal?"  They tend to think it's pretty fascinating when I answer with "Hands raising, dancing with flags in the aisles, people falling down Pentecostal."

It has also been interesting to talk with my friends who were raised in the CRC denomination.  Many of things that they find repetitive or maybe even lacking in meaning (such as liturgy), I find refreshing because it engages my mind in a way it hadn't been engaged before.

I have also been slowly coming to a point where I can say that I appreciate having attended the church that I did.  While I felt they focused too much on the emotional and experiential, and didn't focus enough on the intellectual, as a result I do know that God uses experiences.  That He created our emotions and speaks to us through them and not just through our minds.

And so I have worked to desperately balance the emotional/experiential and the intellectual aspects of my faith.  But in doing so I have definitely been leaning more to the intellectual side of things.

While attending the Pentecostal church I got heavily involved in the worship team.  This meant that I would often sit at the piano in my parents' home and play worship music.  I would sing along and that was my worship time.  I know I have mentioned before that when things get rough, that is where I would turn.

This summer has been good but it has also been hard.  I have been battling some pretty intense self-esteem issues (to the extent where hubby actually had to take my scale and hide it because how I felt about myself that day was wholly determined by what my scale told me).  The job situation was pretty stressful too, and there have just been other things going on that cause fear to rise up in me and I find myself again struggling to trust God.

Today was one of those days where things just felt hard.  I could barely run 3km this morning and felt like I had to do a 12km run/walk (more walking though as for the latter half of this excursion I was carrying potatoes and such) to make up for that.  I had had a rough sleep last night, battling some uncertainties that scare me a little, and found myself today still struggling with that and trying to distract myself.

When I came into the living room I saw the piano we are housing for my sister-in-law.  The music that stared back at me was for the song "Oceans" (I know I have shared before that this has become my go-to song in times of uncertainty).  Instantly the thought came to me that I should sit and play.  Instead I pushed it away and focused on my exercise, on getting some food ready for going to my parents' cottage this weekend, and on sitting and doing a puzzle while binge watching the show McLeod's Daughters.

At one point I started reading the book I had mentioned, Sacred Pathways.  In the intro Thomas gives a brief overview of what he refers to as the nine main pathways, or ways that people tend to connect with God.  And to be honest I was struggling with staying focused on this and ended up finishing this off with the sense that I had no idea where I fit.

As I neared the end of the intro, Thomas referenced a man, Dr. Wayne Grudem, who was working the English Standard Version translation of the Bible.  Grudem spent his days delving into Scripture and its meaning, but as a result he neglected his personal prayer time with God.  As a result, he began to feel spiritually sick, where he felt "pride, talking about myself a lot, inwardly hoping people would praise me, lack of love for friends, irritability, a general inward feeling of unease, self-reliance, no peace" (34).

The moment I read this I put the book down, sat at the piano, and started to play "Oceans."  By the time I made it to the second verse I could barely sing along because of weeping.

Almost everything on the list was something that I feel like I have felt for the last few months.  I would read my Bible, listen to podcasts, and read non-fiction books.  And I felt like I was learning a lot.

But in my effort to distance myself from the "Pentecostal" way of things, I think I also distanced myself from one the biggest ways that I connect with God.  I also don't think I realized that that was one way I connect with Him until today.

That way is music.

Over the last few months I have also been asked to play piano in church periodically.  And I have to be honest, those few times have probably been when it has been the easiest for me to connect with God during singing.  For whatever reason, sitting at a piano and singing/playing my heart out, not caring who hears me, is how my soul connects with my Heavenly Father.

It's also how I find rest.

But music is not the only way that I connect with God.  Writing is another way.  And in the last few months (well... the last year, really), I have been neglecting doing that.

I have wanted balance so badly in my spiritual life that, without realizing it, I was ignoring some of the main ways that God speaks to me.  And for that He convicted me today.

This doesn't mean that I ignore all other ways of connecting with God--I still read my Bible and challenge myself to learn.  But I also need to remember that for me, the experience of worshiping through music and through writing is how best I connect with Him.  And when I don't make the time to do those things as well, I will feel spiritually sick.

So there are my thoughts and convictions from the last little while.