Midlife Meditation

As a Methodist, I’ve always been equal parts amused and embarrassed at the words John Wesley used to describe his conversion experience, which happened in an extremely odd way. Following a failed experience as a missionary to the New World, during which he behaved abominably toward a woman who rejected his advances by denying her communion, Wesley had been sent home to England. His faith at a low ebb, he was wandering around town when he overheard a Bible study leader reading the preface to Martin Luther’s commentary on Paul’s letter to the Romans, and dropped in. Something about Luther’s words affected him so that, as he put it in his writings, he felt his heart “strangely warmed.” This language never did much for me, though in retrospect, I realize Wesley was much like me: a scholar of religion who knew to much to be drawn in by simple appeals to emotion, whose critique of the Church of England—his mother church—had led to his expulsion from all its pulpits,...

,  I did some of my best ministry in this church, but it was never really mine. "Journalism is my church, reporting is my religion." --Jose Antonio Vargas on the Slate Magazine podcast The Gist , Tuesday, February 24, 2015. "The Lord works in mischievous ways, his blunders to perform." --William Power, Professor of Biblical Literature, Perkins School of Theology, c. 1986. Some people seem to know who they're meant to be from birth. Some have to wait until high school or college for the spirit to move them in the right direction, to hear the call of their true vocation, but once they've got it, they're happy to spend the rest of their working lives answering that call. And then there are those of us for whom the whole vocation thing is a ridiculous 5000 piece puzzle that takes us most of our lives to put together. In case you haven't figured it out over the last 300+ blog posts, I'm in the last category. In high school, ...

Freshly baptized, I begin my journey into doubt. "I want to believe." Those words sum up most of my adult life. It's an odd credo, indicative as it is of the lack  of a creed, but there really are no other words to describe my spiritual journey. I began wrestling with unbelief when I was in middle school. I idolized my father, the small-town minister, and even though my pubescent sensibilities wished there was more adventure in his sermons, I loved hearing him preach. The old church in Emmett, Idaho, was a safe, comforting place to me. Outside its walls, though, I was suffering the worst years of my childhood: merciless bullying; constant reminders that, as a non-Mormon, I was an outsider; and worst of all, the knowledge that, as much as I admired my father, most of the town looked down on him. Why, my young mind wondered, would God allow such storm and stress to fall on our family? Despite these growing doubts, I took confirmation classes from Dad, never t...

  E pluribus unum: out of many, one. That's our United States of America summed up in three neat Latin words. To the world, we're a single, monolithic entity, the only true superpower left. American culture has conquered the world. McDonalds, Starbucks, Wal-Mart--our corporations are everywhere. American tourists are known for their loud, aggressive friendliness. We don't mean to be rude, but sometimes we just can't help ourselves.   25 years ago, I had the privilege of spending two years serving an English Methodist/United Reformed congregation. It was a "united church," a merger between two Methodist congregations and one from the United Reformed denomination, and as such, it had an ongoing identity crisis. Every time there was a pastoral change, the position had to constitutionally switch between Methodist and United Reformed. My first wife, Brenda, and I came to Trinity Church as a clergy couple with one year of student pastorate experience behind...

I spent ten years working toward the moment chronicled in this photograph, my ordination as an elder of the United Methodist Church. I was in the midst of my first divorce, so instead of my wife standing with me, it was my daughter Sarah, six years old and just out of kindergarten. My father was one of two elders I chose to lay hands on me, the other being my mentor, Ernie Bell. My brother Jonathan was ordained a deacon at the same service. I worked hard to get to this moment. I relocated to Dallas to attend seminary, to rural Illinois and suburban England to hone my skills, sweated over volumes of theology, wrote reams of papers, marched myself into hospitals, nursing homes, and living rooms, forced myself to learn new skills for dealing with people passing through the highs, lows, and far-more-frequent mundane middles of life. I taught myself to leave my sermon manuscript in the car, on the computer, and ultimately, not even to write it out, because I knew that I, as a congre...