Prayer is the Work

So, I'm now a regular (every 2 weeks) contributor on Bible.org's Tapestry blog and for my first post, I talked about Looking for God in America and our motto, "Prayer is the work". Go check it out! =)

Our Tribe

Last night we met more of Our Tribe. This happens occasionally on the road--we unexpectedly run into someone who relates to, communicates with, experiences God the same way we do. Someone like Charlie, someone like Ruth.

Ruth and Charlie live in a converted hotel overlooking a found art collective, just down the block from the Woolworth's lunch counter that started a culture upheaval in 1960.

We shared a meal, and God stories. They are quirky and relaxed and favor four-letter words over Christianese. They are artists, too--theater people--and that's part of it, but not completely. Those things make us comfortable with one another, makes it easy. What makes it eternal, kindred, is the grace. Look tribe members in the eyes and you see that they know big grace. Like us, they have required mountains of grace, not just to get out of trouble, but to get out of bed.

So we sit in this house that regularly rotates eclectic art and eclectic people, talking community and church. We talk about prodigal times, and coming home. We swap stories about little graces, common grace and big giant life-support grace. Chalk up two more for the tribe.

The Buckle

Looking for God in the Bible Belt hardly resembles looking for Him elsewhere. Other trips have been filled with variety, sarcasm, surprise. Here, there's less shock with our project and more unity in the answers.

This falls nicely with the history and statistics--cliches become so for a reason. If we'd started here, all would be as we'd expected. But over the last four years, we've asked people over 31 states where we can find God. Over those four years, we've come to expect certain answers. "Not here." "God is a force, not a being." "She's in nature." "God doesn't exist."

Unorthodoxy had become so common that I almost overlooked orthodoxy this time. I thought the first couple of people we talked to were just warm-ups before we got to the "real" conversations with the interesting folks. We knew what the Christians would say--we'd previously recorded a few canned answers from isolated outposts of faith. So at first, I only half-listened. But interviewees and waiters and former strangers, one after another, are telling us where find their God. Yes, some canned answers, but something else, too...

The light-writer and the songbird

Monday found us in Sebring FL with a redheaded photographer and her singer-songwriter friend. Erin, the photographer, had lived with Angela in Montana for several months. Kirsten came to Sebring for a Bible Institute and a passion.

Twenty-four hours in a borrowed home, enough time to breathe, enough time for stories and longings and chai. Snapshots of community—-the smell of grilled chicken pasta, laughing as raindrops fell onto our plates and chased us inside; looking at the Light through Erin’s lens; art and God tangled in all our lives.

Late that night, Kirsten folded herself onto the couch and grabbed her guitar. Soon Erin unfolded herself from the distance and grabbed her camera. Renee captured in scene, Angela asked her questions. Beauty and calling, music and light.

Rusty

OK, so by now you probably know that my right arm's been in a sling for about a week. This morning, I woke up sore--not sore in my dislocated shoulder, but in my perfectly healthy elbow. It's getting stiff from being frozen in the same awkward position night & day. So this morning I woke up at 5am stiff & sore & thinking of the tin man (pre-Dorothy.)

It has been almost two years since we've hit the road. It doesn't seem that long in my head, but we're rusty, stiff. It's taking a little longer to pack the car, remember the routine, hit our stride. And of course, it's taking a whole lot longer to blog with one left hand.

It's 10a now, and my arm's feeling better after working it a bit. The girls have had their coffee & we're going to spend some time in prayer. I could end this on some analogy about the tin man's oil, but it'd be cheesy & awkward, because I'm rusty.

Continental Divides

We turned east yesterday, and south. None of us spoke directly about it, but there was a shift in our demeanor. We've turned towards home. We passed the Continental Divide without warning. Just a little sign by the side of the road--I didn't even have time for a picture. We're heading south. There's a heaviness to that.

I'm always conflicted when it happens. Home--"home" is calling. There are loved ones there, and things to do, and routines to re-establish. But part of me always feels more at home doing this. I think it's especially hard on us this time, as all of us resonate with the Rockies and the West. A double mourning--leaving the mountains and leaving the project at the same time. I wonder if maybe we should have started west, and ended through the east. But it doesn't really matter.

We'll get up now, and pack the car. We'll head south to Wyoming, then Nebraska, then Colorado. And something will happen to us. As we get closer to home, Texas' gravitational pull will grab hold of the car, and of us. Our minds will start making lists of things we need to do when we get home. We'll start making phone calls to the people there, and plans for when we get back. I'll get more homesick, and eager to return. Conversations will be about goals and jobs and our next trip. And that's okay. It needs to happen. But for now, I grasp for this trip, hold on to the magic of this for a little bit longer. My heart aches in two directions. My Continental Divide.

Perkins #2432

I am sitting at a Perkins, a now-familiar restaurant chain kind of like Denny's; this one in Helena, Montana.

Behind me I hear a couple talking. "I woke up in a hospital bed, and I wasn't supposed to be there. It was supposed to be a day surgery. I woke up and didn't know what had happened." I want to turn around, to talk to this woman, to say that I know & I understand & put my arms around her and grieve what we have lost and gained.

"Why are you frowning?" Renee breaks my concentration. I tell her what the woman has said.

"You know, sometimes it just..."
"--sometimes it just gets to you." She understands, because she almost died once, too.
"Does it still get to you?" I hope she says no, that in a couple of years this will stop bothering me. She's 13 years out, more than enough time to get over it.
"Yes, sometimes it still does." My eyes well up. This was not what I wanted to hear. She goes on about life, and death, and how near-death changes your life. I watch the people over her shoulder. A middle aged man and woman sit across from the woman's parents: small wrinkled man on oxygen and frail woman with a placid, slightly confused look of dementia.
"But I never wanted the plaque at the end of my career. I wanted more. And less," Donna Renee is saying.

A skinny, hunched teenager sits in the corner with his cute round girlfriend.

The waitress comes to take our order. She clears and delivers and writes and repeats mechanically, like she is doing this job for someone else's sake. Her face is tanned and carved and maybe a little bit angry, like she did not choose this life for herself. I wonder if she's a single mother, or if she too has elderly parents at home, or maybe she's just having a bad day.

Four bikers walk in, with chaps and Harley shirts and vests and bandanas on their heads. They are two couples--one in their 40's, the other maybe in their late 50's or 60's. The old oxygen man glares openly at them, full of expired prejudices about rowdy Hell's Angels, I suppose. The couples sit down to the left of us, under a shelf of teapots and dusty fake flowers laced with ribbons and pearls, and a doiley-crocheted doll's hat. The bikers talk quietly and gently. One of the men puts on his reading glasses to skim the menu. Oxygen-man still glares. His daughter ties a bandana over his wife's hair and tries to coax her to the edge of the bench to make her stand.

The teens have not stopped touching each other since they sat down--fingers entwined, or hair brushed gently or playful taps and grins. She looks alternately concerned and reassured. I can't hear what they're saying, but he leans over the table for a peck. She seems pleased.

"And I asked for my doctor, and they said he'd gone home. I told them I needed someone to talk to, someone to explain what had gone wrong--"
"No plaque to gather dust. Makes you want to buy a motorcycle and just ride away--"
"Come on mom, scoot over, so we can go. Mom, MOM, you have to scoot over. Scoot over--"

The waitress lays down the check.
"Thank you so much for lunch," we say.
"Yep," she says and is gone.