Summer meditation

 

Yesterday, you leapt into your DeLorean of a life to rewind, review, and remember the places, spaces, and people that first left fingerprints on your life.  I especially encouraged you to think about the messages and meaning that you made and still carry in the luggage of your soul today.   We are shaped by the past no matter how many candles are on your birthday cake.  I am curious about the most difficult part of your childhood as well as the best part.

 

The most difficult moment I can remember is my dad losing his job when I was in elementary school.  This set him on a course of changing careers and our family needing to move when I was in middle school.  There was a tension within me that while society preached, “Just work hard and you’ll get ahead,” this wasn’t the lived reality in my life.  Instead, I was taught and told about forces that made life difficult, bosses that demanded and demeaned people, and that sometimes despite your best effort the pink slip still comes.  Such uncertainty shaped me and continues to stir within me.  The best part of growing up were friends who I played basketball with in their driveways and listened to music that I am sure my parents would not have approved of if they only knew.  This was the era of government saying that music was corrupting youth ~ which only made the melodies sweeter to our ears.  I remember concerts my friends and I would attend, the State Fair each year and the smell of grease that lingered in the air and navigating adolescence together. 

 

Our Sacred Conversations on Race group is reading Sho Baraka’s book, He saw That It Was Good.   In the book, Baraka writes, “As part of our growth, we all must begin question the stories we were given about ourselves, about the world, about God.  We must compare what we’ve inherited with the stories Jesus told about a humanity being redeemed.  What does your tribe say about the poor?  What does it say about sex and relationships?  Whether you come from a conservative village or a progressive metropolis, odds are that you have assumptions about your narrative.  How might those assumptions be shaping your creative life right now?  How might they be imprisoning you?  And most importantly – how do they compare with God’s image in you.  Many of us are blind to the storytelling we do as we travel through our personal narrative arc.  The decisions we make communicate our beliefs about the world, but do we see the story?  What is the story I am telling with my life and work?”

 

When did your life reflect the great Dickens’ line, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” growing up?  Again, I would love to hear these stories!!  May God who holds all that was, is, and will be in your life be found as you flip back through the photo albums of life ~ seeing the black and white moments as well as the grainy first colored Polaroid pictures too.  Amen.