Olive Crest United Methodist Church
7180 North 60th Street
Omaha, Nebraska 68152

Our Pastor

Rev. Debra Tompsett-Welch

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The Spiritual Life

January-February 2004

Digging Out from Snow or Expectations?

By Rev. Michael Lee Burgess

Well last time I wrote to you all I was using Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol to illustrate how one can get ready for Christmas, or in other words, get ready for Christ to be part of your life. I got through the Spirits of Christmas past and present. But I never got to the Spirit of future. Remember he was the one that looked like the "Grim Reaper" with bony hands and his face hidden behind the cowl of his robe? Well it is a most foreboding image and helped scare Scrooge straight and gave him the energy to let go of his addiction to greed and reliance on money for his self worth, opening his life to joy and the love of those around him.

Well you may have noticed that this newsletter is not a January or February one. It is Winter 2004 and what a winter it has been. I feel kind of like a bony hand is resting on my shoulder. But great good can be done out of the wreckage of bad things. That doesn't make them any less bad, but God is a God of redemption and never wants to leave a mess or a broken thing the way it is. God is always trying to renew and recreate all that is into the beauty and wholeness God intended. But I am having trouble seeing how God is going to make something beautiful out of this winter. Could you walk with me through it and see if we can find out?

You see to put out a newsletter takes Gabrielle and I almost a full week of our part time office time after people get their articles to us and then we have to have the Bible Study group, the Three "S's" to collate and staple with us for at least a couple of hours or so on Thursday, so this is a pretty big group effort. Well we have had blizzard snow days that wiped out weeks for almost a month. Gabrielle's husband Jeff came down with a horrible case of Shingles, even on his face, and from that the kids caught Chicken Pox the next week. The plumbers finally came to their house to fix the bathroom that's been broken for six months and they had to be there for part of it, and an endless list of delays.

I also seem to find days that were mostly taken up with blowing and shoveling snow and the sudden cold and gray seemed to sap energy too. Then our church office flooded from the ice dams on the roof and filled the office with toxic smells so we couldn't work in there since Gabbie's eyes were burning and I was having trouble even with my big filter mask. In fact we are putting this out on my personal computer in my home office as we disinfect and dry out the office. I also spent lots of time doing hospital visits and helping out with some funerals I was not doing. Of course I also had to get the year-end reports into the Conference. Then we had the Dinner Theater Plays to raise money for the Day Care and our Mission Giving Apportionments, (see another article) that was fantastic but took lots of time so the newsletter just kept getting knocked off stride and pushed back. We even had this fantastic learning opportunity called Fire Seeds (watch for more reports coming soon) but that took time too. So finally I get sick Sunday afternoon from working in the office before I got the bright idea to wear my funny looking filter mask and so that wrecked a couple of days. Sigh, more time lost.

But I have noticed something in this tale of disasters. Except for not thinking of wearing a mask for hours (and I got yelled at for that by a bunch of people so it done already) all the other things didn't happen in a vacuum. All of the opportunities for adventures happened in community. None of us faced these events alone and in reality I had a lot of support and help, even if it wasn't visible at the moment. I remember Trace asking me if I did the entire blocks sidewalks when I was blowing snow because I got so into it I was cleaning up some sidewalk edges at the church and walking down our neighbors sidewalk and having a real deep sense of pleasure doing something good. The feeling you get when you do a good thing just because it is good and you know God is smiling. It was hospitality, neighborliness and all those things, which help people be glad you live next to them. Jim Kofoed was helping my mom work on the house and he said it was really nice that our neighbors snow removal people did our sidewalk too. (He didn't recognize me under all that coat, scarves and snow). And that was fun too. Remember when Jesus said that doing good things in secret made sure that God would reward you for it?

Thinking about these disasters like this is making me see them a bit differently. Getting to help out with funerals I was not leading was also fun. I really prefer leading them, but if I relax I can contribute and it really doesn't make any difference who does the work for God, as long as the job gets done well. And our funeral for Rev. Billy was very well done indeed. The play was an all around great thing, even if it did take eight months of weekly and more practices to get it all just right. (I still know my lines.) So if all this stuff was good and in its own way helping to build God's kingdom, why when I look at this Newsletter to get the same feeling I got when I woke up to over 2 feet of new snow or the Sunday when a few brave souls gathered to be in the presence of God and it was soul warming but a record for low offering? The feeling of being buried so deep it is hard to walk. I think that feeling comes from what I am looking at. Our feelings are not reality, they are a response to the choices we make in response to what happens in our world. So what then is making this feeling of being buried that robs the world of joy and makes it seem winter gray and gloomy instead of bright and sparkling with snow diamonds on a field of white? It is the same scene I am looking at, only how I'm looking.

I think the biggest contributor to my feelings not being more upbeat is my expectations. I have an expectation that our newsletter should go out like a magazine subscription and when it gets pushed back by things that are either unavoidable or more important (funerals and Fire Seeds were both more important) I forget to adjust my expectation. That expectation is the one that is creating my mood or emotional attitude. And the attitude is what either fills my life with wonder, delight and energy to get things done, or robs it of joy and sucks the energy away so it is hard to get even the ordinary things done, much less something more. I had a dear parishioner in Archer Zion UMC who had cards printed up that said, "My attitude IS my Life."

So I think the Good Thing God is trying to turn our disasters of delayed publication dates into is teaching me to examine my expectations so that my attitude can help me do more work and live in more joy.

When we do our New Years resolutions and think about our year to come, we often think only of the end result. But our lives got where they are for reasons, and to change the results we need to change some of the ways we got here. In fact one of the definitions of insanity is to do the same thing and expect different results. So I need to look at my mostly unconscious expectations if I am going to do different things, have different attitudes and find my joy in my life. And never underestimate the power of joy to make impossible things happen. It is an enormously powerful force, even stronger than anger or fear over the long run for changing a life and habits.

If I look at it this way, and work at letting this lesson renew my life and joy in ministry, I think I can even be grateful for our 31 inches of snow this last month.

Thank you for helping me see what good God could make out of little disasters. May God also bring renewal and help you dig out from under your snow and expectations.

Your brother-in-Christ,
Reverend Michael Lee Burgess

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