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KARL - The Story…

Tuesday, October 24th, 2006

Tony Barker was the smartest sixth grader in the country and happened to be in my class at school. I remember when he brought War and Peace to class for his “free reading” selection. No teacher was qualified to teach him math, so he taught the class. At the age of twelve he aspired to become a neurosurgeon. He became one of the youngest tenured professors at the University of Colorado. But what I most vividly remember, the memory that is first in line for recall is…

In sixth grade Tony Barker wet his pants.

This past Sunday at The Refuge I shared a significant flaw in my character, a specific horrible moment that could have ruined multiple lives. It is probably not my worst moment, but it is certainly up there as something I would much rather forget. Now that I have said it out loud, publicly, it will now be a part of the mosaic that influences how I am known and remembered. Yes, how I am choosing to live now matters, but nothing will erase the memory of my bad choices. Hard to believe? What comes to mind with this name?

Monica Lewinski

A single act, whether stupid, evil, or silly influences our memory so dramatically it can overshadow all our other accomplishments. This is why it is always vital to remember the ellipsis.

The ellipsis (aka dot.dot.dot….) is the literary equivalent of Grace. We live in a world of periods. End of story. That is it, you are what you were, I have all the information I need. It is a life without grace. And I am fairly used to living that way. I forget that our lives are constantly being written, yes significant chapters have occurred and some of those chapters include some pretty ugly mistakes, but maybe the climax is yet to come?

The power of the gospel is that my story is constantly changing. It is my job to believe each person I meet, especially those who are part of the rag-tag community we call The Refuge, are not yet who they one day will be. Even more difficult is to believe it about me. I’m learning to believe my life is more like an ellipsis…the story isn’t finished. I must live this by not hiding, but trusting you will see me slowly become more of who I was made to be. I cannot end my loneliness if I am hiding in the shadows of someone’s distorted admiration.

I am …

Who knows where or how it will end?

Posted in healing, karl, spiritual formation, the refuge | 3 Comments »

PAUL - Masks

Wednesday, October 18th, 2006

About this time last year I was preparing a message on fear because I was the youth pastor of a church in Parker and we were going to have a special youth-led Halloween service… and we wonder why I’m not a youth pastor anymore. I promise we didn’t have enough goats for the ritual sacrifice (just kidding). Actually Halloween has an interesting past and relationship to the history of the church. Halloween began as a celebration to the Celtic new year Samhain, which is the end of the harvest and a time associated with death. Druids and pagans believed that wearing masks would prevent the evil spirits of the dead from entering you, because that way they couldn’t tell if you were human or not. So in a very odd way masks had a sort of spiritual power. Time passed and Rome conquered much of the Celtic lands and by the 800’s Pope Bonifice IV declared November 1st “All Saint’s Day”, a time to honor saints and martyrs. It is widely believed today that the pope was attempting to replace the Celtic festival of the dead with a related but church-sanctioned holiday. The night before it, became “All-Hallows Eve” which later shortened to “Halloween” and was celebrated by bonfires, costumes and most of all …masks.

Of course masks were around long before Halloween. Egyptians used masks in worship ceremonies and sacrifices. In ancient Greece, the first actors wore different masks to represent different people or emotions. The name Hypo-crities was developed to described these actors. It means “one who speaks from behind a mask.” The idea behind this was that a person’s true nature was hidden so you could not discern their real feelings… it was really hard to get the truth from a person in a mask. This is where we get our English word “hypocrite”. Hmmmm.

We all know that you don’t have to be an actor to wear a mask. We all wear masks…we’ve been wearing them so long sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between the mask and our own face. The truth be told, masks are rather comfortable and they make other people comfortable, too. Without our masks we are exposed, vulnerable, un-guarded, open to attack…and that’s frightening, terrifying.

Seeing someone else without their mask can be pretty disturbing, too. Because people without masks can appear horribly disfigured, ugly… you can see their scars… or open wounds… inside you wished they never shared that part of themselves. You know what I mean, it’s happened at The Refuge hasn’t it? One of those “whoa” moments when you think to yourself, “I just have to act like that was perfectly normal” and then make sure not to make eye contact because you have this panicky “is-my mask-still-on?” feeling.

The truth about masks is that they have always had a sort of spiritual power. The reason we put them on in the first place is out of fear, and fear has always been a matter of faith. Life without masks is scary, terrifying really. I like it better when mine is on. It feels much more protected, safe. But the truth is with my mask I always stay afraid. Afraid to be known. 1 John 4:18 tells us that God is love and that perfect love casts out all fear of condemnation. Someone once told me that fear was “faith in the wrong thing”. When I put on my mask I am afraid and my faith is in the wrong thing—it is in what people think of me, what I think of myself, the false things I believe God thinks about me, too. The perfect love of Jesus that casts out all fear of condemnation is nowhere to be found.

I believe Jesus is extending an invitation to all of us to take off our masks even when everything thing in us screams “Condemnation!” “Exposure!” “Judgement!” Lately I keep hearing Him tell me, “Paul, masks are a waste of time. Take it off. Let me, let others, see your real face.”

Posted in community, healing, paul, spiritual formation, the refuge | 1 Comment »

KATHY - My Love-Hate Thing with Community

Tuesday, August 8th, 2006

We’ve been spending the past few weeks talking about community at The Refuge. Everyone who knows me knows I love community. I love relationships. I love people connecting with God and each other. I love to see someone who thinks they are unlovable start to feel loved because I remember how much that meant to me a long time ago. But it’s not just a love thing. Please do not think I have some crazy idealistic view of community, thinking it’s a piece of cake to pull off. Real community is brutally hard, maybe one of the hardest things we can do as human beings.

Every church values community, this is nothing new. Look on every church website and you will see a list of small groups and ways for community to “happen” at a church. Why are so many strategies necessary to pull off “community”? Why is it not just our natural bent to want to be together, love each other, share our lives with each other, and reach out to others and love them, too?

Because we are all messed up. Most of us have a love-hate thing with community. I know I do. I want it. I want people in my life, to know how I’m really doing, to care about me, to pray for me, to carry my burdens when they are too heavy for me. And I also don’t want it. Why? Because it’s hard. It’s easier to go solo. Having people in my life exposes me. They see things I don’t really want them to see. They force me to think about things I don’t want to. It means I will have to sacrifice time, myself. It means I will have to trust, risk, and I’m a scaredy-cat at heart.

Like most of us, I’m sort of in this double bind. I love community. I want it. And at the same time, I hate community.

Here’s why I hate community:
1. It’s time consuming. I’ll have to be inconvenienced.
2. I am sure to get hurt.
3. It forces me to think about things differently. Everyone won’t agree with me (what’s wrong with them?) and that stinks.
4. It messes with my self-centeredness.
5. I’m asking to be annoyed, irritated, frustrated, angered, disappointed.
6. I’ll let others down, fail them, disappoint them; I’m a tried and true people-pleaser, so this is asking for trouble.
7. I’ll actually have to ask for help.
8. I won’t be able to fake it.
9. It won’t be neat and tidy (what I’m always longing for). In fact, it’ll be messy, crazy, hard and unpredictable.

Okay, so with all of these negatives, is it really worth it? I think so. For me, the loves are definitely starting to outweigh the hates.

Why I love community:
1. It’s worth the time. Jesus was about people, bottom line. Relationships are what matter. At the end of the day I won’t remember my job, my house, my stuff. I’ll remember the people I loved and that loved me.
2. It’s a place to practice becoming a better lover—of God, of people. I definitely need a place to practice. How can we live out the 2 greatest commandments Jesus gave us…“love Him, love others” without at least trying for close, intimate relationship with each other?
3. It inspires me to keep going. The courage you have—to keep fighting, living, trying—makes me want to, too.
4. The laughter. Without it, I don’t know where I’d be. It is sustaining. Life is too hard without it.
5. I can talk grace and forgiveness until I’m blue in the face, but unless I have to give it, receive it, it means nothing. I want it to mean something.
6. It keeps pointing me toward God. The more I hang around other people and listen, I am forced to think more, ask more questions, seek, wonder, question, wrestle.
7. It is glorious to be up close and personal with Jesus moving in a life, changing a person, healing, bringing hope. Nothing is more beautiful.
8. You seem to keep loving me no matter what, and for that I am very grateful.

So what do you hate about it? Love about it?

Posted in community, kathy, the refuge | 3 Comments »

KATHY - War Wounds

Friday, July 28th, 2006

I have skin cancer. Don’t worry. It’s not serious, but I had to have this thing on my chest removed a few weeks ago. 8 stitches. It’s ugly and I’m stuck with it forever. The worst part is that it was kind of my fault because a weird combination of fear, denial & busyness led me to postpone taking care of it for over 2 years. I know, you are shaking your head. You see, I am really good at taking care of other people and stink at taking care of myself. The whole thing was fairly inevitable because years ago I was one of those people who slathered with baby oil and layed out on tinfoil. A few months ago, my husband Jose and a few good friends applied some pressure and forced me to go. When it was getting cut out I bravely told the doctor “well, no big deal, it’ll just be one of my war wounds.”

That was when I hadn’t seen it yet.

The next day, when I took off the initial bandage, I was a little stunned. It was a lot bigger than I thought and right smack in the middle of my chest. I started to cry. The war wound idea didn’t feel too glamorous anymore. I just wanted to go back to how it was before. Yes, it’ll fade. Everyone tells me that (It’s not the most helpful thing to hear in the moment. “I’m sorry, what a drag” just helps so much more). Bottom line is no matter how much it fades, I’ll always have the scar.

And I don’t want to be scarred. I think that all of the time. I don’t want the ugliness of life. I don’t want pain. I don’t want loss. I don’t want struggle. I don’t want anything bad.

I just want the good. I want Utopia. I want Mayberry. I want a steady paycheck (is that too much to ask?). I want everyone to like me and never be mad at me. I want everything to stay the way it is when I’m having a good day. I want to forget about the past. I want the scar to magically heal. I guess what I really want is heaven on earth.

But that’s not real life. Jesus made that pretty clear. He was painfully honest with us, that life on earth was sure to be hard. But that somehow it could also be good, that peace was still possible. Maybe peace would come if we’d just be willing to accept the bad better?

That’s what I want to do with my pain, accept it better. Embrace the loss of dreams. Maybe God can give me new ones? Embrace my insecurities. As much as I hate them, they always force me to go back to God because I don’t know where else to go. Embrace the confusion, that I have no idea what I’m doing but I guess this is where I’m supposed to be. Embrace that others hurt me. That’s part of risking our hearts with each other. Embrace change. It’s brutal in the moment but always moves me to new, better places somehow. Embrace that God never promised this was going to be easy. My big beef these days is why does it seem like every Christian book out there makes it seem so darn easy? “8 ways you can make your scars disappear.”

Okay so my bottom line is this. At The Refuge I don’t have to hide my scar. I showed up on a Sunday night tank top and all. It’s just part of me now. And like all of my other war wounds, I guess it what makes me, me. And at The Refuge I can be me. I looked around last Sunday and I was like “wow, there are a lot of scars in this place, lots of war wounds.” We really are battle-weary soliders on the front lines. And we’re all here for some wild reason. We’re all laughing. We’re all crying. We’re in this crazy hard battle together.

And somehow it’s beautiful. Can scars really be beautiful? Maybe so. I think yours are. They remind me that God heals. Gives hope. Makes something beautiful out of ashes. I need to believe the same thing about my scars, too. It is so hard for me to do. But I know I must try. Please, let’s keep trying together.

Posted in community, healing, kathy, the refuge | 7 Comments »

KATHY - "I Believe in You"

Sunday, July 23rd, 2006

Last week, my best friend Elaine sent me a donation to help fund my role at The Refuge. Jotted at the bottom of the sheet she only wrote four words: “We believe in you.” I immediately started to cry. I’ve been crying a lot lately; the past 8 months have been some of my hardest. I have been so vulnerable, scared, straining to listen to God but struggling with the din of the Enemy’s voice that always tells me that I really don’t have what it takes to be a pastor, that I’m all washed up and should just go try to find a real job.

“We believe in you.”

In the same group of mail was a donation from an outside friend of The Refuge. He wrote us a letter and said “Kathy and Karl, we just want you to know we believe in you and what you are doing at the Refuge.”

“We believe in you.”

A few days later I had coffee with my friend Brenda and she gave me a belated birthday present. The card said “I believe in you” across the top with some beautiful thoughts about God’s heart for me. I was a little surprised. I’m not a big believer in “signs”, but I know there was something here I wasn’t supposed to miss.

“I believe in you.”

It’s not hard at all for me to believe in YOU, my dear and faithful friends at The Refuge. That’s not a stretch at all. I can see God all over the place, at work in your life. I can see the hard work you are doing to try to find Him, God’s healing happening, changes being made, that He has a great plan for your life and wants to give you a hope and a future. I see all of your gifts and talents, all the things that could be. The beauty despite your pain. Believing in you is a piece of cake.

Believing in me isn’t so easy. I have great faith for you and little faith for me. I am realizing this more and more lately, how difficult it is for me to really believe God is going to take good care of me. Wouldn’t I live a little different if I really believed that? I would trust more. Risk more. Doubt less. Fear less. I am tired of feeling afraid. Aren’t good Christians supposed to be confident? Aren’t we supposed to have prayed our way toward perfect peace? Isn’t God’s will supposed to be more clear?

But then I think about most every character in the Bible and quickly arrive at a helpful reality–they were all afraid, too. Maybe even more afraid than me?????? They didn’t believe they could take the next step, go any further. They were often paralyzed, tired, ready to give up. But God kept pursuing them, calling them to listen and obey the crazy things He asked them to do.

He always has the bigger picture in mind. I can never see the bigger picture; I want to so desperately. I struggle to see something that I am starting to realize is impossible for me to grasp. I can only live for this moment. Do my best to stay in when I want to run and strain to listen for God’s hope, help…please, God, just something that I can hold on to.

I think God is speaking to me through my friends. I think He is reminding me that He believes in me. That He knows my life feels hard, that it’s been confusing. He understands I have doubts, fears, that I want to give up. But He doesn’t want me to miss the beauty that exists in this desert. He doesn’t want me to forget the amazing people He has put into my life that love me no matter how small my faith is.

My friends help me believe.

That’s why we need each other so desperately. I want The Refuge to be a community that believes in each other the way God believes in us. Where we see in each other what we can’t see on our own because we’re too messed up. Where we call out God’s plan in each other’s lives and remind each other that this journey is worth it. Where we show up for each other and send little notes out of the blue that say “I believe in you.”

Posted in kathy, shared leadership, the refuge | 5 Comments »

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