The Comma

Is it God’s sense of humor, or karma, or my own hubris?  My last post asked the question “can people change?’  Of course when I ask that question about people, I am really asking about myself.  Can I change?  Can I change in the ways I would like to change?

Well, one thing I have been trying to change for the last several months is how often I blog.  In January I made the public commitment to post every Thursday by noon (public commitments do help when I want to be different.)  And though I have not been great at the noon goal, I have been faithful to my weekly commitment.  Until last week.  Until I posted the question about change, gave my defiant answer to Donald Trump, and then promptly missed my next deadline.  

I have plenty of excuses.  It was a very full week.  And I did start to write something.  But of course starting and finishing are not the same thing, and I have had plenty of full weeks since last January.  I guess I could say that it was the curse of the “change” post that laid me low.

So here I am, one week later, wondering what happened, and wondering how to get back. 

What happened?  Well, one thing is that, believe it or not, I really do want these posts to be good and readable, and when I started writing last week, I just couldn’t get the “good and readable” flow going.  But the truth is that in these past months I have posted even when I wasn’t really through with the post, just because I had made the commitment to, and because some of my blogging friends have encouraged me by saying that generally something is better than nothing.  At least it gets the conversation started.

Another thing is that there is so much that I wanted to write about last week.  Things kept coming into my head and then going out again before I made the time to write them down.  I wanted to say something about Memorial Day, a “thank you” to veterans, and to others as well who have worked to help our country live up to its ideals.  People have given their lives for their country in ways other than in war, as a member of my Bible study eloquently reminded me. 

I wanted to write about the Thursday morning “Breakfast of Hope” I went to last week.  That was the name of the fund raising and consciousness raising breakfast of the Northwest Kidney Center, which a member of my congregation serves as the Executive Director.  When she invites her pastors to the breakfast, she always says, “Come see what I do with the other part of my life.”  I always love that invitation.  And  I even had a title for that post- “Hope for Breakfast.” 

And for months now I have wanted to write about our current economic crisis.  Back in February I read an outstanding post on a blog by evangelical writer Brian McLaren who suggested that if we as a nation are looking for recovery, we ought to take that word seriously, like people do in twelve step programs.  There “recovery” does not mean getting back to the good old ways of doing things, but finding a path to a new and more whole way of being.  And boy, could our economy use some of that!

But instead of any of those things, I wrote nothing.  And whatever else might have been happening, that’s what really happened.

Now, how to get back?  Well, now I have to step up to the reality of my post from two weeks ago.  Yes, with Flannery O’Connor I can say that “the meaning of redemption is that we do not have to be our history.”  But then I have to admit that change is not easy.  Often, we (read “I”) will begin, and maybe even succeed for awhile, but then falter.  We (read “I”) will need to summon the courage to show up, even when we’ve blown it.   We (read “I”) will need moments of confession, and the grace of forgiveness.  We (read “I”) will have to decide, over and over, to begin again (never an easy thing, and especially hard when you are doing it publically).  

So I say again “Absolutely! People can change! That is what we do here, or more to the point, that is what God does with us here. That is Good News.”  But then I have to add my own p.s.:  “By the grace of God.  And one day at a time.”