(Written for the Wayland UMC November/December 2017 newsletter) The fourth quarter of the year is filled with energy and inspiration for me. October is my half-birthday month and includes the World Series. The colors and temperature of the world change. November begins with All Saints’ Day and concludes with Thanksgiving. December introduces Advent which prepares and leads us to Christmas.
In the last newsletter, I wrote about (next to Beverly) my best friend whose cancer treatment was becoming more intense. Thom Andrews died September 14 at home with his family. We celebrated his life on September 23 at Westwood UMC in Kalamazoo. For several years, Thom created, curated and led a public ministry called Season of Forgiveness (http://www.seasonofforgiveness.org/).
At his funeral, I shared a portion of his blog post from 12/20/16 where he described his then current round of therapy:
“I’m in the midst of a five-treatment Stereotactic Body Radiation Therapy (SBRT). Its cooler name is cyber knife. Whatever you call it, it involves high doses of radiation converging on a tumor buried in my Lumbar 2 vertebrae. Awesome…For me, this adventure is my version of skydiving. It takes some precise preparation, an expensive machine, and the willingness to jump and hope it all works out.”
And then he wrote this:
“Another thing: it involves trusting my life to a lot of people. I trust doctors, nurses, technicians and other specialists to get things right when doing treatments. We’ve been blessed in this regard.”
Thom was an incredible person to be around. He gave me heart and our conversations were filled with insight and laughter. Thom trusted his life to us and we responded in kind and I wonder if that is a deeper way to understand Christmas: God trusting the divine life of Jesus to us and inviting us to trust our lives to Jesus and each other.
The apostle Paul described Christ Jesus this way in Philippians: “When the time came, he set aside the privileges of deity and took on the status of a slave, became human! Having become human, he stayed human. It was an incredibly humbling process. He didn’t claim special privileges” (The Message).
The journey to trust God and each other and ourselves is a profound experience filled with energy and inspiration and desperation and grief and celebration.
To whom do you trust your life?
In this world with family, friends, strangers, and enemies, Jesus calls us to recover life, take a real rest and learn the unforced rhythms of grace; to live freely and lightly. Jesus asks us to trust our lives to him enough to be made new people whose rhythms are graceful and natural, fitting to who we are in God’s image, like my dear friend, Thom. In the fullness of Thanksgiving, Advent and Christmas, I invite you to trust God a couple more degrees, take a few more steps toward intimacy with significant people in your life and be open to those to whom love is a stranger, like God did with Jesus.
Thom described the trusting of his life this way: “But, if I want a good cry, all I need to do is think of how I trust the support that I’ve received and continue to receive during this wild adventure. It’s humbling and overwhelming. Every thought, prayer, well wish, email, text, call, etc. adds another layer of warmth, another plank under my feet. It means so very much.”
Let’s not be afraid to enter this spiritual season with open hearts to trust our lives to God and each other.