Journeys 9-30-12 Homecoming

This week was Homecoming at Doniphan/Trumball and Giltner High Schools.  This next Saturday is the annual Fall Festival at Doniphan.  Homecoming/Fall Festival week is when a lot of former Doniphanites return to their roots to see old friends at high school class reunions and family reunions, or, to just have lunch with the entire town on Saturday of Fall Festival.

There are just a few homecoming times each year.  After this, we’ll have Thanksgiving, then Christmas, then Easter.  As one who has been away and come back, there is something to be said for checking in with your family/community of origin every once in a while.  

For years, when I lived elsewhere, we’d watch our kids in the Harvest of Harmony parade in Grand Island, then I’d bring Mom and Dad out to Doniphan for Lunch.  They’d work the room, thoroughly enjoying seeing friends from their 13 years here in ministry.  I’d stand next to my friend Mark Haskins and chat with him while he worked his shift at taking the trash out.  It was rare that harvest kept Mark from his annual contribution to the Fall Festival.  Little did I know that someday, I would be your pastor and be judging the Fall Festival parade along with the other pastors in town.

Homecoming implies giving thanks for where you came from and who you are as a result.  Coming home settles the traveling dust of your soul.  Our religious heritage is full of homecoming stories; coming home to who God made you to be.  Centering Prayer teaches the concept of finding your “True Self,” that deep inner-soul place where your spirit and God’s spirit co-exist.  

I like to think that our True Self is one that has found its way back to God and who God meant you to be.  So worship every Sunday can be a homecoming of sorts; coming home to God.

Grace & Peace,

Pastor's Page, Oct. Newsletter 2012

We all have the stuff that we do at about the same time every year. Then as the years roll around we can gage where we are.  So we ask ourselves, “Am I doing this earlier, or later than last year?  It is normal?  Or, is this year way different than before?”

This year harvest is a good two weeks earlier than last year.  You can tell that the farmers are both giddy about how much they’ve got done already, and, scared about what kind of winter we’re gonna get this year.

We’ve been living and driving in the corn alleys since mid-June.  Now, the corn walls are coming down.  And we’re having to get used to the wide open spaces once again. Our brains are having to readjust to this new view that stretches all the way to the horizon. 

Meanwhile farm families are zoned in on the multiple steps that it takes to get the crops tucked in at the elevator or grain bin.  All available resources and time are funneled toward this one month harvest effort.  The work of an entire year culminates now.  

Farm family or not, harvest effects us all.  You can feel the invisible urgency in the air.  And with the early harvest we’re all turning our attention to the pending winter earlier than ever.  

God be with us in this time of transition between seasons.  Will this year’s October be more like last year’s November?  Stay tuned!

Grace & Peace,

Journeys 9-23-12 Dust

Thursday was one of those rare days in Nebraska.  No wind. No breeze. Nothing.  Driving to and from a district pastor’s meeting in Geneva, I’d see these moving columns of dust that just went straight up into the clear blue sky.  I knew that somewhere in there was a green, red, yellow or slightly orange combine chewing up a field of soybeans.  Trucks or Semis were lined up at the end of the field. And harvest was rollin’!  In the morning that field was gray/brown and fuzzy.  By afternoon, it was shaved low to the ground and naked.

I don’t care how good the air-conditioning or how tight those seals are on those combine cabs.  Those drivers had to have felt like dust magnets.  No matter how fast you go, on days like that, you are the dust cloud maker.  Its a job that’s done from the inside-out.  You are at one with the dust; a living, walking “Pig Pen” from a Charlie Brown cartoon.  And you don’t want to hear anything more about how the bible says, “From dust you came, and to dust you will return.”

By nightfall that day, the dust from combines in bean fields and trucks on gravel roads had settled  and spread into low-lying areas as a moistureless fog.  The next day, that dust would be recycled and boosted with gusts of wind.  And a small percentage of Nebraska would now be Kansas.

It is impossible to live life without dust.  Part of me would love for everything to be clean and neat all the time.  But that’s just not possible.  If you’re going to harvest beans, dust happens.  You can’t have one without the other.  The dust is a well known marker that harvest has begun.

Thank you God for the harvest and all that goes with it.  May our equipment operators be safe as they bring the crops in.  And thank you God, even for the dust.

Grace & Peace,

Journeys 9-16-12 "Remembering the rain."

I found myself just standing in the rain on Wednesday afternoon, ‘cause it felt so good.  It had been so long since I’d felt good hard driving rain that it took my brain a little while to process the signals my skin was sending. Not only was it wet.  It was cold too!

After what seemed like an entire summer without rain.  I’d forgotten what it felt like.  The other day, I pointed to the sky and joked with my farmer friend Mark, “Look, . . .  those are clouds.  Remember clouds?  Water doesn’t just come from the ground, it can come from the sky too!”  He was not amused.

It is easy to forget the good things of life sometimes.  Rain doesn’t show up for 30 days and I’ve already forgotten what it looks like.  Your teenager pouts around for a week and you forget how when they are happy, their laughter takes over their whole body.  Your family member goes into the hospital and is pale and all hooked up to IVs and you can’t remember the last time you saw them standing up and smiling.

The bad of life has a habit of wiping out the memories of the good.  But I believe that the good memories are not gone.  They’re still there.  They’ve just been hidden by the dark clutter that causes fear; drought, illness, tragedy, car wrecks, cancer, fire, floods, strokes, tornados etc.

In the past, when I’ve been surrounded by darkness and fear, I’ve found myself asking God to help me remember just one blessing in my life.  And that one good memory can sometimes help me realize that I am not totally surrounded by darkness.  That one small glimmer of light can start a turnaround in my thinking that brings me back to a whole memory bank of blessings I thought I’d lost.

Remembering the rain is only the beginning.

Grace & Peace,

Rev. Kelly

Journeys 9-9-12 Blue Hill Bus Crash

Cindy and I were co-pastors at Seward when their buses carrying their high school band crashed on the way home from a competition in Omaha, killing four.  So when the fifteen passenger van filled with Broken Bow high school basketball players and coaches crashed this past year, my brother Todd, pastor of the United Methodist Church there called me to ask me about that Seward bus crash experience.

I shared with him our experience of community grief at four community-wide funerals.  And how that grief affected everything; the band, the school and churches for a very long time.  We also talked about how when children die tragically like that, it messes with we adults’ sense of the order of things.  We do not expect our children to die before us.  That’s not the way its supposed to happen.  

I told my brother Todd that my experience as pastor both at Seward and in Charleston, SC after hurricane Hugo was that if there were people on the edge, emotionally, before these tragedies, this sent them tumbling over that edge.  

Today we join churches all over this state in praying for the folks of the Blue Hill area.  Four people, (two adults & two children) were killed in a tragic bus crash on Wednesday.  We pray for the families who lost a loved one.  We pray for their churches and school and community.  We do what we know how to do to offer comfort and support to their overwhelming grief and shock.

When our child died in the midst of being born in 1994, folks gave us tons of books and pamphlets to help us.  For us, the best book turned out to be one called, “The Worst Loss,”  by Barbara D. Rosof.  We’ve given that book to families who’ve lost a child ever since.  At Seward, the folks from “The Compassionate Friends” in Omaha who specialize in grief and ministering to parents who’ve experienced the death of a child sent us boxes and boxes of materials to pass out to the community.  We’ve shared that web-site ever since.

These materials help folks when they start to come out of the fog of grief and are searching for a way to make sense of the brokenness of their lives.  The community of Blue Hill and all of us surrounding communities will be doing everything in our power to support and hold up those who have experienced this tragic loss; to keep them from drowning in their loss, until they can once again swim on their own.  So please include these folks in your daily prayers for these next several months.  I know from experience that they feel these prayers.  Thanks.

Grace & Peace,