What Are We Imagining We Will Find When We Seek the Will of God?

Any professor knows that when students are doing their job, they press us to articulate things that we have not said clearly before.  If we have not said them clearly, it probably also means we have not understood them clearly.  Moreover, what these classroom discussions will often do is require us to pull together things we have said on various discrete topics in order to discern new insights and construct new frames for reflection.  This week in class, my students and I have been talking about how we discern the will of God for our lives.

I have thought of this past year, the year since Everly's death, as my year of discernment.  Although I am fifty-six years old with grown children, I have had to reboot my future.  I've written about this before.  Having lost access to the future with Everly that I was expecting, all the roads ahead seemed strange and uncharted.  I'm struggling for the right word here.  My dean talks about "renorming" of his life, having lost the "normal" he knew when his wife passed away.  That get's at a big part of it.

It's not exactly like going back to the beginning, not a Da Capo al Fine.  I don't have to repeat all the misdirections, achievements, and learning of youth.  In that way it's more like continuing with a great absence and all the confusion and uncertainty that brings (which, realistically, is actually a different set of confusions and uncertainties than the ones that Everly and I shared).  It's continuing, but things don't feel the same, don't taste the same, don't smell the same.  It's like walking on a path on a hillside, with everything tilted, with challenges for the footholds.

My having recently moved to a different house, one that has been gutted, rebuilt, and remodeled, puts me into a kind of spacial, structural model for what is happening.  It is a kind of rebuilding after a storm.  Parts of the structure are missing.  As things get into place, I have to figure out how to reorganize.  What used to take my time does not any more, but new things beg for my attention that I could previously ignore.  I'm not doing a very good job of maintaining a single metaphor here, so I guess I'm back to my earlier point of struggling for the right word.

So in the year of discernment, I was asking a question that in common church-speak could be called "seeking the will of God."  Now that things have changed, what should I be doing?  Now that I'm not Everly's cheerleading director, where should my energy go?  I talked with people I see often.  I mulled things over with family.  I made efforts to visit with people I see less often.  I pulled everyone who gave me some time into my conversation about what kind of life I should have.

Part of it, the part that swam in a deep pool of grief, was about recovering.  I'm not saying grief is something you get over.   I'm saying that making a life required time and reflection and learning and growth that acknowledges that for me everything is changed.  It means trying to remember those strengths that made Everly my chief admirer, an honest and plainspoken admirer, but an admirer no less.  It means trying to resurface from the deep pool breathing big gulps of a life that I have always believed God is offering to me as a gift.  It means believing again in the reasons I have been driven to be somebody and make a difference in my world.

As it has turned out so far, I continue to teach in the same esteemed seminary where I have taught for two decades.  It made sense to relocate back to that vicinity.  I had to grapple with my learning about John Perkins and his teaching about "relocation" to live among people with whom one ministers.  Puzzling about where that relocation should be, I looked at several different neighborhoods where I have relationships with church people who care about their communities.  I had to overlay those neighborhoods with the available housing, to find a place I could live and be healthy, provide space for my scattered family, and, of course, that I could afford.  Affordability and livability do not always align.  So I have ended up living near the church where I have served as a minister for the past seventeen years, Mt. Level Missionary Baptist Church.

What will come of all this discernment and seeking?  That is something to wait and see.  Saturday I led devotional for people who had come to Mt. Level for Community Day.  We had health personnel for blood pressure checks, information about chronic conditions, community programs for children's safety, and even flu shots available.  There was a cookout fired up in the parking lot.  People who needed it got food to take home and help make ends meet.  Throughout the day, our ministers led short devotional services for the people who were there.

I talked about the times we are motivated to seek out God's guidance as seasons in our lives change.  From the seasons of the year, to seasons of school and work, to seasonal change from major life events, people may be motivated to inquire after God concerning their futures.   In those short comments, I tried out a couple of analogies.  First, we sometimes go asking for the wrong kind of guidance.  We are looking for the GPS god.  We want an exact destination, every road and turn preselected, a voice telling us what's about to come next, and no more having to think about it.  Anyone who got bad directions from a GPS device knows that's not even a good way to think about using one of those things.  But I am convinced that it also misunderstands the way that a life unfolds in relation to God.

Maybe that imagined map of God's will holds on from an age when Christians more widely believed in theological determinism and predestination.  In popular Christian talk and thinking, it remains a commonly expressed idea that God's control of the world means that every step our our lives is planned and coming to fruition moment by moment.  Most would not spin from their comments about specific events a full-blown theory of predestination, but would instead offer assertions in defense of human free will or even radical freedom and autonomy.  So in that way, it does seem more like a holdover, a convention in religious speech passed on through generations, even as worldviews and theological constructions have changed in ways that would contradict it.  The continuing presence of this kind of thinking is a partial explanation of why people would go to God looking for a GPS answer.

Before mentioning the alternative that I offered in the Saturday devotional, let me interrupt with the conversations I had with my students over the past week.  A big part of the Introduction to Theology course at Shaw Divinity School pertains to theological hermeneutics.  Along with the hermeneutical study that students get in Bible classes and in preaching classes, we spend some time on theological aspects of hermeneutics to help students understand that there are critical theological judgments and ecclesiological practices that shape faithful reading of the scriptures.  As I conclude this part of the course, I spend a large part of a class meeting in theological autobiography.  I tell the story of my upbringing as a white Southern Baptist, a Texan, a minister-in-training, a theologian, a church leader, a white person learning to make black friends, and a member of a black Baptist church.

Having told this story, with illustrations about Bible interpretation at relevant points, and especially to discuss my journey into reading the Bible with people whose lives have not been the same as mine and whose faith sensibilities have been shaped in a very different social and cultural context, students had more questions.  Learning to read the Bible in a black church and teaching black ministers has burst open dividing walls, pushed away opaque glass to allow me to see what my isolation in white privilege did not let me see.  I try to tell this story truthfully without letting it be a form of heroic tale of the honorable white man bearing his burden.  Telling it over and over, with the conversations that ensue, keeps helping me to understand my own pilgrimage better.

This time, a student asked me how I understood what had happened to me in relation to the will of God.  Since the most recent chapter of my life includes the death of my wife, that was the first thing that came to my mind.  I explained that I do not believe it is God's will that people die of cancer, and that there was much more good that Everly could have done in this world had she not been taken from us by this disease.  Thus, I don't think it is God's will that she and I had only thirty-three years of marriage, or that my children will progress through their adult lives without having their mother to encourage and direct them.  Some people may feel the need to believe that "it was her time."  I would say this time or another could have been her time.  Such things are not set in stone nor predetermined.  But whatever time her death came, whether she lived or died, she lived or died unto the Lord.

Everly's dying was a great loss to our family and to many other people in this world.  But I also told my students that I don't think that her untimely death means an end to all good possibilities for us.  It's not a failure of God's love and providence, but a tragic circumstance in which God's love and providence remain and surround our lives.  By implication, I am saying that I don't imagine a divine being flipping switches, waving a scepter, or pushing buttons to make every event around me happen.  God is active and present, but not necessarily in those kinds of ways.

The great challenge for me, mentioned above, has been rethinking what kind of life God has for me even though for almost four decades it was and would be a life lived with Everly.  The year of discernment was partly a year of looking at who I have been with and without Everly.  It was remembering what has mattered to me about living with her and wondering what that looks like if she is not by my side.  I wondered if, after this devastating loss, I would be able to invigorate, even resuscitate, some of my passion for making a difference in the world.  As our pastor, Dr. William C. Turner, Jr, said in her eulogy, she has finished her part of the race and has handed me the baton to keep on running.  In her view of me and my own self-understanding, God has not cast me aside and is not finished with me yet.

So as the will of God unfolds for me, I don't think of it as a single road to a single destination.  That brings me to Christian Ethics class a few days before that hermeneutics discussion.  We examined the Christian understandings of love and marriage and the contrast between those theologically shaped ideas and the popular thinking that permeates our culture.  One of the popular ideas is a fatalism of romantic love.  It is widespread popular thought that there is a single perfect mate for each person.  These two people of shared destiny must find one another and make their fate come into fruition.  It's a highly problematic way of thinking that has little room for grace, for redemption, and for growth.

To "fall" in love implies a complete lack of control.  But that is to conflate a biologically driven instinct toward pairing and mating with a virtue of love.  Attraction and infatuation are not the same as love.  Love is an orientation toward the good of the other, not a giddy feeling in the stomach and a fog in the brain.  Rather than the fatalistic falling in love, a Christian understanding of love and marriage should be about "growing in love."  The contemporary moment in which we live, a blip on the longer history of human flourishing, is all about self-chosen mates based on love as fate based on a self-perceived and self-reported giddiness.

I'm not arguing against people making their own judgments about whom they will marry, but I am arguing for a different kind of discernment process based on a sober evaluation of how deep a friendship is possible with the other person and whether we are pursuing goals that will take us in the same direction, or in Christian language, whether we are sharing a calling we can live out together.  For that reason, as a young man I came to imagine different ways of describing the will of God as comparable to maps of two different states of the U.S.

Having spent a summer in Washington, mainly around Wenatchee and Spokane, I had learned that the prominent geographical feature of the Cascade Mountains makes getting from one side of the state to the other a bigger challenge than I had experienced growing up in Texas.  There are very few roads that cross the Cascades because of the difficulty of traversing such high peaks and their steep slopes.  A few mountain passes allow hikers, skiers, or drivers to safely travel.  In winter, the choices for driving become more limited.  So if I am in Wenatchee and want to get to Seattle, I can either go this way, or that way, and there are not many other options.

The fatalistic view of finding a mate, when imported into Christian thinking, is operating in an imagined world not unlike the road map of the State of Washington.  To break it down, if I am in Wenatchee and if God's will is for me to get to Seattle, then I have to get the exact road right, or I have no hope of fulfilling God's plan for my life.  If I have only one perfect mate out there in the world, and I can't keep myself on the path toward God's perfect will, I will forever miss God's plan for my marriage.  When I put this in such stark terms, I wonder how such thinking would ever pass careful theological muster.  Yet the anxiety of believing in only one path and the risk of missing a turn because of a mistake, a sinful choice, or ignorance, makes out God to be a kind of heartless dictator of sorts.

Once when I was about to drive from one small town in Texas to another, I got out a road map of Texas.  Because of legislation in the 1940s to support secondary roads in farming and ranching areas, there are thousands of roads that crisscross every county in Texas.  A road map of Texas is a jumble of roads forming triangles and quadrilaterals of varied sizes and turned all directions.  Getting from point A to point B in Texas often has dozens of possible routes.  There are longer and shorter routes.  There are straight, curved, and zigzagged routes.  There are scenic routes and efficient routes.  When I ask a computer map system how to get somewhere in Texas, if it suggests three routes, it usually tells me they will all take about the same amount of time.  Getting around in Texas leaves lots of room for missing a turn or for changing your mind.

It struck me that seeking the will of God was more like this map.  (I confess my birth and upbringing in Texas does make me biased toward believing it could be God's country, but I think that is irrelevant to this analogy.)  If God has a direction for me to go, it is not necessarily dependent on an exact route.  If God has a destination at which I should arrive, there may be many possibilities and ways by which I could get there.  God is not so much trying to harness me onto a single set of ruts on a road that runs through the only mountain pass as God is calling me to be a certain sort of person whose impact in the world is a certain sort of impact.  There are all kinds of flexibility about how that will play out.  I don't have to be in a panic about accidentally missing a road sign or misunderstanding an instruction.  God is making the journey with me, and we will work it out as we go.

A week later, in Christian Ethics class again a student followed up on our conversation about the will of God.  That gave me opportunity to elaborate further on the idea that our calling is first of all to a relation to God and one another.  Jesus called the disciples to "Follow me."  He sent them out to go to every village and town, stay a while, accomplish some things, then go on to another place.  What mattered was the people they met and what they did as they carried out their mission.  The calling of God, following Jesus, and living in the Spirit has its roots in the life of the Trinity and the pouring out of the divine love and goodness in creation.  The divine life of mutual love, submission, and sharing is the pattern sewn into the fabric of creation.  Humanity's destiny is to love one another, seek the good of one another, and share the bounty of creation with one another.

The will of God for all humanity is a life lived in justice, kindness, and humility.  This is what the Prophet Micah proclaimed about the essentials of the divine will.  Do justice.  Love kindness.  Walk humbly with God.  To generalize, the will of God for humanity, for me, for us, is a life of virtue.  Living in the Spirit means loving, being joyful, making peace, being patient, showing kindness, living gently, doing good, remaining faithful, and having self-control.  Following Jesus entails poverty of spirit, meekness, mourning, mercy, peacemaking, purity of heart, hunger for justice, and endurance even in hardship.

So I explained to the students that while they should seek God's guidance on major life events and choices, such as whether to become the pastor of a specific church, those moments which seem so critical have to be seen within the bigger picture of God's calling.  Being at this church or that church will certainly have an impact on the pastor's life, the pastor's family's lives, and the lives of the people in the church.  Yet if a pastor is at church A or church B or church C may not be the most important aspect of knowing the will of God.  Is this pastor living in the beatitude that comes with being a follower of Jesus?  Do this pastor's life and this church's life bear the fruit of the Spirit?  Where there is injustice, are this pastor and church seeking justice?  Where people struggle, do the pastor and the church and bring kindness in word and deed?  Are this pastor and church walking with God and in humility?  The calling is first of all to be a certain kind of people, a peculiar people, a people whose living bears in it the image of Christ.

Finally, I can get to the second part of what I shared at the devotional.  Rather than a GPS version of the will of God, I suggested that it is a Jazz Band God whom we serve.  I will claim no originality for making this claim.  Writers such as Cornel West and Barry Harvey have preceded me in using musical metaphors to help describe the shape and possibilities of human living in this world where God is calling us together.  What I said in this case was that a jazz band does not have every note and beat predetermined.  It is not without any sort of plan or purpose, but it always remains open for improvisation.  It may start in one direction, then regroup and change its direction.  The key is that they listen and make the musical journey together.  Our God made us to walk this journey with one another, and even with God.  Walk humbly.  Walk faithfully.  Jesus said to take my yoke.  Let Jesus share the burden and be a partner in the tasks.  The Spirit will guide us into all truth.

God may have specific destinations and specific stretches of road for any of us along the way.  We can trust that if God has such specific plans for us, God will make them known if we are walking in the Spirit as we ought, if we are living a life of virtue, if we are following our Lord.  But there is no need for constant anxiety about whether in each step we are getting it right.  There is so much from scripture that is clear about what sort of persons God has called us to be.  If we keep that in the forefront of our living together as God's people, we will always be on the path to do the will of God.  For that will is that all creation live in love, doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly with God.  What else does the Lord require?

Having been pulled into these conversations by students who themselves are pursuing God's purpose for their lives with great enthusiasm, I was able to lay out in close proximity several decades of my reflections on what it means to pursue God's will in life.  It has been a fruitful time of reflection for me.  I hope some of it can help others make a little sense as well.  At least it may be an opportunity for me to gain insight from you and clarify some matters about which I need to learn more.

Jeremiah 29:11-14 

¹¹For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope. ¹²Then when you call upon me and come and pray to me, I will hear you. ¹³When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart, ¹⁴I will let you find me, says the Lord.

Everly's Blessing

 Originally posted on CaringBridge.org

Today our pastor, Dr. William C. Turner, Jr., took his text from Isaiah 44:2-3.  It is a promise of water in the desert, of the Spirit of God upon the people.  He pointed out a significant distinction that many of us may miss.  When God blesses us, the blessing is not for us.  God blesses us that we will bless others.  This particular text says that the blessing will be for the offspring and descendants of those who first receive it.

The sermon sent me to thinking about the blessing of Everly.  A little more than thirty-six years ago, in the fall of 1976, Everly arrived in Waco, Texas, to start her higher education at Baylor University.  Within a few days we met one another as part of a leadership group recruited and sponsored by the Baptist Student Union.  Everly had been recognized by her peers and teachers at the very large J. Frank Dobie High School as perhaps the strongest leader in her graduating class.  She was expected by them to go far and accomplish great things.  I was a small-town boy with an over-estimation of my importance in the world.

It was a couple of months before Everly and I began to get to know one another.  She endured what women in our culture often endure--listening to men talk excessively about themselves (in this case, I was the blabbermouth).  Even with that, she detected something in me worth sticking around to discover.  I was especially drawn to the joyfulness she brought when we were together.

As we grew to be a couple, we had lots of long talks.  One of the early memorable conversations had to do with Everly's calling to teach.  She did not begin her university studies with plans to be a teacher, and some important people had steered her away from it because they thought she could aim for something "better" or "higher."  However, her first year of studies was leaving her with a feeling of something missing.  She was becoming sure that she should be an educator.  Everly did not see a need to separate high achievement from a vocation that would allow her to serve the community and use the gifts to teach that had already appeared.

Most of us who have lived long enough know that the actual path our lives take is far more complicated than we might have imagined at the outset of adulthood.  Everly finished Baylor with little inclination to ever go back to school again.  She immediately became a teacher, and in the course of a few years taught math at most levels from middle school to high school seniors.  It only took about a year of teaching--a year of wondering how it is that some children learn a concept and others don't, puzzling why some strategies work with one child and not another, reflecting on the processes children develop on their own to figure things out--before Everly started recognizing her drive toward further study.  A masters degree in math education from the University of Texas followed.

Then more years of teaching took Everly through Irving, Texas, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and Durham, North Carolina.  As a lead teacher, a department chair, a Presidential Award Winner, and a visiting professor at the University of North Carolina, Everly's vision of better classroom teaching expanded and began to make its mark.  Eventually she moved to district-level curriculum leadership in Durham Public Schools, gaining national recognition for her work, including the Outstanding Young Alumni Award from Baylor University.  And during those years she began work on her doctoral degree from the University of North Carolina.

From Durham she advanced to state leadership as the Director of Mathematics for the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction.  Having made a lasting mark on that state, she most recently moved to lead mathematics curriculum for the Texas Education Agency.

This is a story that many of you already know.  But for me it is a way of showing how Everly has understood deeply from a very young age that the blessings she has received are for others.  She had dedicated herself to understanding young minds, developing strategies for instruction, and uplifting all students to realize success in mathematics.  Her bountiful intelligence, enthusiasm, organizational insight, and compassion are blessings she received to share with others.

Another way of saying this is that Everly is our blessing.  We have received her into our lives as she has poured herself out, doing good.  She has done good to teachers by recognizing their centrality and power in education.  She has done good to students by never giving up on their capacity for higher math.  She has done good to bureaucrats and politicians by helping them direct their ambition and power toward better curriculum and schools.  She has done good to her colleagues by finding their best qualities and helping them to grow in those ways.

I guess I got the best of the blessing.  I got to live with Everly and share my life with her all of these years.  She is my supreme blessing.  From the time of her first years of teaching, the two of us have had an unending conversation about math teaching.  She has hammered out her ideas, her experiments, her theories, and her resolve in long talks as we drove to work, did the laundry, picked up the kids' toys, sat down in the evening, and just about any time or any place. 

As I said earlier, I probably started out with an over-inflated sense of my own importance.  We intellectual and academic types are prone to such delusions.  I have had a very satisfying and enriching career as a professor, so I'm not belittling that. 

But I also have come to understand that God blessed me with Everly not to have her only for myself, but so that I could play a part in giving her the strength to bless the world.  Reading so many of the comments on CaringBridge has further confirmed this is true.  Everly's influence is deep and wide, and the people she is touching, working with, and serving are blessed beyond measure.  Wherever she has gone, people and institutions have changed for the better.  I'm thankful that I am sharing in such a powerful life of blessing in this world.

For I will pour water on the thirsty land,
and streams on the dry ground;
I will pour my spirit upon your descendants,
and my blessing on your offspring.

I am a witness.  This is what God has done and continues doing through Everly.  All praise and glory be to the Holy One of Israel!  Amen.

Follow-up on a Day with Dad

After Dad and I made our tour of central Texas, where we saw not only hoards of goats and a few buffalo, but also a trio of elk behind a very tall fence, I traveled to NC for a few days.  Upon my return, I had about a week in Texas to get a few things done and prepare for a long stay in Durham to teach summer school at Shaw.  Yes, we did manage to get the university reopened for summer school, and I have two full classes.  We anticipate having the dormitories and dining hall reopened by the end of July in order to welcome back undergraduate students for the Fall 2011-12 semester.

Dad asked around and found a friend from church who was willing for us to get our rolling cart/shelf units using his pickup.  Moreover, having known my dad for some time through Sunday School class and other church activities, he decided to drive us himself.  He told me he couldn't think of much better than getting to spend a few hours with W. D. and hear him tell stories.

The drive was uneventful, and our friend was not disappointed.  All along the way, Dad would tell about a pastor whom he had known who served a church in the small town we were passing through, or about the time he preached a revival at a church on the side of the highway, or a funny story about a preacher or church in this or that town.  In fact, we worked Dad so hard that he started getting hoarse by the time we reached Huckabay, our destination for the furniture acquisition.  We took a slightly different route, and along the way we saw winter wheat and hay ready for harvest.

As I had judged earlier, the people at the Huckabay I. S. D. were very nice people.  If they got a laugh out of our last visit, no one let on.  Instead, the business manager apologized to me, as if her description of the units had not told me enough to save me from that first unsuccessful trip.  I reminded her that the auction listing did include the exact measurements, which I had failed to think through adequately.  It took only a couple of minutes to load both items into the truck and tie them down.  Then we were back on our way. 

We stopped again in Hico for lunch.  Dad and I had the blue plate special--meat loaf--which was excellent.  The dessert for the lunch special was "coconut pudding," basically a coconut merengue pie without any crust.  That's two pies I've tasted there--about fifteen or more to go. 

We got the furniture back home, letting Dad nap a bit while we told some of our own stories in the front seat.  I rolled them into the garage and piled them high with boxes, making a way to more easily move stuff around in the crowded garage.  That night, I moved another pile of boxes to get them out of my mom's way so that she would not have to deal with them while I was gone for a half the summer.  We also spent a couple of days getting her pantry and cabinets cleaned out and reorganized.  It was a busy and rewarding week.

The shelf units cost me a total of $16 at auction.  I suspect that equivalent units would cost $500 each, give or take a hundred dollars.  Even building them from scratch would take a long time and cost $100 or more in supplies.  They should be sturdy enough to do what we need.  Dad bought our friend lunch, and Mom cooked him dinner.  I bought him a tank of gas for about $80, making the total price of each unit $48 for me (I'm not counting the Day with Dad trip since we went to see Aunt Joyce.)  Considering the good times had by all, I would say we all came out very well.