Beauty on the Backroads

Stories of grace for life's unexpected turns

Lisa

Together

I have a guitar. It’s older than I am, but I’m not sure how much older. All I know is it belonged to my uncle. He died a few months before I was born. I don’t remember exactly how the guitar came to be in my possession except that I think I acquired it sometime after my grandfather died the year I graduated from college. I asked if I could have it. Someone said yes. I didn’t know how to play it when I asked for it but I had friends who could teach me. 

My guitar playing journey has been sporadic at best. I’m no musician, not really. I know how songs are supposed to sound, sometimes, but I can’t really read music and when the conversation turns to key changes and notes I start to panic a little. I’m forever afraid of being called an imposter at anything I try to do. I live with a ridiculous amount of insecurity inside my brain. Most days, I manage to set it aside and live in the confidence of who I am and who I was made to be and who I am becoming but some days the whispers of “not enough” and “who do you think you are?” are loud and debilitating. I nod in agreement. You’re right, I say to the voices in my head, I’m not the girl for this.

It holds me back from so many things.

Sometimes, though, I move ahead anyway. I ignore the voices (they never really go away) and take the next step and the next one until I’m solidly in new territory and scared out of my mind.

This is where I found myself on Sunday morning–with a guitar strapped to my body standing in front of my church’s assembled people playing songs of praise. It was a moment months in the making and the act of carrying it out had my knees knocking and palms sweating. My fingers shook either from the cold of the sanctuary or the anxiety of doing a new thing. Maybe both.

For months, I’ve been practicing and reacquainting myself with chords and strings and strumming. It’s been a half-hearted effort but something I’ve wanted to do as part of my after-40 plan for becoming the best version of myself. I practiced during the summer and finally in the fall sent our worship leader a list of songs I was comfortable playing. When she scheduled me for an actual date, the freaking out began, and I scrambled to watch YouTube videos and find out how to transpose chords to ones I could actually play. I practiced in the comfort of my home imagining how terrible this was all going to go down because I’m such an unaccomplished musician.

I almost backed out.

By the time I arrived to the rehearsal on Sunday morning, an hour before the service was to start, I was resigned to do my best and let it all happen as it would. I kept making excuses for my abilities and all I found in return was encouragement and acceptance. Those who had more talent and abilities were eager to share their knowledge and make room for me in the group.

And it turns out that playing songs together is more fun than playing them alone. But practicing alone helped me prepare for the time together.

The songs sound different when I’m playing alone, and they are richer and fuller when played with others.

Almost as if that’s how it was meant to be.

—

I can’t help but think that this is the way I’m to practice my faith as well.

To recognize my abilities and do what I can do with them, to practice living out what I believe during the days between assemblies, and to join with others in a collaborative practice and learn from those with more experience.

In the assembly, we are to welcome each other and the unique gifts each of us bring to the group. We are to accept each other where we are and help each other learn. We are to join our efforts in concert, celebrating how different our beliefs “sound” when practiced together.

We are richer, fuller, more vibrant when we are all of us doing the thing we were made to do. In the working together there will be stumbling and fumbling. There will be acknowledgement of weakness and areas of lack but also people to stand with us and beside us to fill the gaps we could not fill ourselves.

We are meant to work together for the common good. It is better this way.

I can’t say exactly what it looks like when it comes to spiritual practice, but I know it involves all of us. Some of us need to figure out what our strengths and gifts are. Some of us need to raise our hands and say, “I can do that.” Some of us need to take a trembling step in a new direction and be strengthened by those who’ve been that way before. Some of us need to extend our hands to the ones who feel like they have no business being there and say, “Welcome. You belong here.”

I don’t know what it will look like specifically, but I can imagine the beauty of it. I know how I feel right now at this moment having taken that terrifying step toward something new.

I am encouraged and inspired and confident and full of good thoughts and feelings. (I am looking forward to church again, which is not always something I can say.) Most of all, I am hopeful. That ordinary people who meet together regularly can influence each other in meaningful ways (and that in turn those people can change a little piece of the world around them.)

This is how the good news is showing itself to me today. This is what will carry me through a week that is sure to be full of reasons to doubt (myself and others). This is what will buoy me the next time I need to take a new step.

This is what is saving my life right now.

Abundance

I’ve been avoiding the garden.

It is overgrown and overwhelming and even though the red tomatoes have tempted me, I’ve continued to make the excuse, “Not today.”

The last time I was in the garden, something moved in the weeds, and I startled, afraid of a snake/gopher/opossum/rabid squirrel attacking me in my own garden. (When my husband identified rabbit droppings, my fears were somewhat calmed but then I imagined accidentally stepping on a bunny or worse, disturbing a nest of babies. I have since seen the bunny outside of the garden, still I will not go in it.)

Besides, it is October, even though it feels like June. Humid mornings that linger through the day just enough to make life uncomfortable. I always think October is optimistic to still be harvesting from the garden.

Aren’t gardens a summer thing? I ask myself every fall.

There is also the problem of time and energy. I tell the children that in the summer I can handle taking care of them and the garden/porch plants but when school starts, I have to exchange one of those things for the students at my job and since I would not neglect my children, it is the garden that suffers from my inattention.

But one day this week I stepped outside with a bowl and scissors, thinking I could just reach over the fence for whatever tomatoes might still be edible. I was not hopeful that there would be any harvest at all because, I thought, I deserve to come up empty-handed after letting so much of our garden rot on the vine.

Guilt over the abandoned abundance followed me to the garden and with each soft and rotten tomato I snipped off the vine, my spirits sagged as well. So much waste. How could I let so much of it go to waste?

I focused my attention on what could be salvaged from the safety of outside the garden perimeter. I did not feel like traipsing through the weeds or stepping on rotten veggies or finding a pile of rabbit droppings on the bottom of my shoes. I reached and tugged and snipped.

And this is what I took inside.

It is not a lot by summer standards, but it is more than I expected. The summer growing season was so weird this year that some weeks we pulled less than this out of the garden.

Apparently, we are not finished with the garden yet. Nor is it finished with us.

—

I have this same expectation in my approach to God.

He is always there, like the garden in my backyard, but my faith feels a little overgrown and overwhelming these days. It is a tangled mess of weeds and fruitful vines and picking my way through seems like an effort I can’t make right now. I glance that way from time to time, sometimes on Sundays, sometimes on other days, and I think about the good fruit that awaits.

Photo by Kevin Fitzgerald on Unsplash

Still, I often say, “Not today.”

And yet when I do venture in the vicinity of my spiritual life, what I find is as surprising as a bowl of ripe tomatoes: there is still fruit and it is abundant.

I used to believe that spirituality was transactional, an exchange, like a sale at a store or a deposit at the bank. What I put in is what I would get out of it and if I didn’t put anything in, I wouldn’t get anything out. Maybe this was based on a parable about talents or maybe it was just what I heard when faith was talked about. Deposit your time and tithe in spiritual things and you will harvest more than what you put in.

There is some truth to this as there is with the garden. If I had been picking the tomatoes for the last few weeks now I would have more usable ones than rotten ones. And it is true that the practice of my beliefs increases the richness of my spiritual life. But it is also true that we do not control the abundance merely by effort.

I do not believe that my soul withers and dies when I neglect the tending of it, that it suddenly rots and there is nothing usable left. If God can turn even a mustard seed into a gigantic tree then even the smallest measure of faith can still grow into something beautiful.

God draws me toward Him like ripe fruit dangling from the vine, and when I finally decide I cannot ignore it or Him anymore, I find myself overwhelmed by an abundance. Of grace. Of love. Of fruit I don’t think I deserve.

All this to say that neglecting your spiritual life or abandoning it for a time does not disqualify you from receiving an abundance of good things. In a story Jesus told about a father and two sons, the son who left and took everything he was owed with him, the one who squandered it all and returned home penniless and ashamed, that same one was the guest of honor at an extravagant banquet. His father lavished him with love.

Our Father does the same.