Making Space for Holy, Ordinary Moments

One of the things that keeps me on social media is my town’s “free stuff” group. You can get everything on there–a balloon arch, a banged up canoe, a picnic table missing a slat from one of the benches. There are clothes that the giver got too fat to wear, or too skinny to wear. They all come with stories of best laid plans gone awry or parties that got a little out of control (some of those balloon arches come looking pretty rough). There’s something hopeful about those neighborhood exchanges. An object reaches the end of one family’s story only to become part of someone else’s. What looks worn out to one person is exactly what another has been looking for. I like imagining all those things beginning again.

My most recent gift to the free stuff page—a dining room bench—has given me all the feels, as they say, and has some resonance with saying goodbye to Grow Christians. I started writing for Grow Christians in 2017, not that long after the page started. It was a turning point in my own life. My kids were 7 and 10 years old, and I’d spent their whole lives in parish ministry. We had moved to a new city, and I had some time before a new call materialized, which meant hanging out with my kids in the pew and being at home when they finished the school day. I wrote quite frequently in those early days, expertly encouraged and edited by Grow Christians’ founding editor, Nurya Love Parish. Writing for Grow Christians gave me a place to notice what God was doing in those days–a season more open than almost any I’d experienced.   In the same way I’d mined my own life for preaching, my life was now preaching back at me. God was doing so much, right there at my kitchen table. I paid attention, and still am.

I’m not sure if I wrote any of those early pieces from that bench, but it witnessed a lot of things in our family life, from solid food given to babies for the first time to packing for college. It anchored our dining room for many years. The bench was always my seat.  I liked the sense of spaciousness it offered, allowing a kid to sit next to me with enough room to squirm or shift to my lap as needed. When we moved to our current house, we bought a new table and chairs, no longer requiring a seat where children could crawl into my lap. The bench was moved to the hallway, a repository for laundry baskets and things that needed to go somewhere else.  Still vital, but somewhat diminished. 

Over the years, I’ve written about the saints who came before us, about making my way through the ethics of a laser tag gun birthday party, and raising kids who love their own bodies while respecting those of others. I got to reflect theologically about Taylor Swift! 

These pages, like that bench, have seen a lot, and both have made space for ordinary holy moments. And now, that bench is finding its way to the free page the same year that Grow Christians is wrapping up. The bench is ready for its next chapter, in a home where I hope kindness and repair welcome it into a new life. As, too, the energies of all the wonderful writers over the years in these pages will be channeled in new ways.

Every season of life comes to an end. The chapter of “all-hands-on-all-the-time” chaos of parenting small children feels like it will never end—until it does. Relationships change, and we grow. Ministries also have seasons. They begin with hope (and maybe some benevolent delusion), gather companions along the way, and eventually make room for whatever comes next. Death and resurrection are the pattern of all things. Through love, and grief, and prayer, we are always being made new.