When You're At the Bottom of the Hill

a quote and a recipe

Hello, Blue Roomies.

It’s Thursday night and I’ve been beating my head against this article all evening. I’ve been thinking about Burning Man and its value of “radical self-reliance” when 70,000 people are six inches deep in the mud. I also wanted to talk about an article that went church-viral about a Presbyterian pastor who left ministry recently. His article, along with his final sermon and a farewell video for the congregation that featured slow-motion shots of him looking pensive on a beach, launched a thousand Facebook comments and think pieces. Oh I Have Opinions.

But I’m in marshmallow brain mode after a lovely mental health day at the Korean spa with Robert, who’s on a brief sabbatical before starting a new job in a few weeks. We spent several hours soaking in pools and sweating in sauna rooms and lounging in comfy chairs. So the words, they are not flowing.

Instead I will share a bit from Michelle Obama’s book The Light We Carry, which I started reading in the aforementioned comfy chairs today:

Researchers at the University of Virginia once set out to explore a certain theory about friendship. They strapped heavy backpacks onto a group of volunteers, and one by one positioned each person in front of a big hill, as if they were going to climb it. Each volunteer was asked to estimate how steep it was. Half of them stood next to someone they’d identified as a friend. And consistently, those who were with a friend viewed the hill as less steep, the climb ahead less difficult. When people who’d been friends a long time stood in front of the hill, the results became even more pronounced: the slope only seemed to flatten out more. This is the power of having others alongside you.

Ministry is a luminous slog. It’s at turns effortless and difficult, a perplexing yet transcendent way to spend one’s working hours. There absolutely are toxic congregations out there; I’m fortunate that none of the three I’ve served have been. I’m also fortunate to have colleagues and friends who love me fiercely—people I lean on and people who lean on me. And I’m grateful for twenty years under my belt and absolutely nothing to prove anymore, which allows me to stay so long as it stays fun and fruitful, and permits me to leave when it stops being so, because I’m good at what I do, but I’m not and never have been indispensable to those following the Way of Jesus. And I’m glad as hell that, while the Church has never once lived up perfectly to its mission statement, that statement has never included a value of “radical self-reliance.”

With that, I will sign off, offering my best wish that whoever you are, wherever you are, you have people standing beside you on the hill, so the path seems just a little less steep.

~

PS. I so enjoyed sharing my granola recipe recently; I wanted to share another. This week I made this chocolate mint sorbet and it was so cooling in this stifling heat. (NYT recipe, no paywall.)

Steady on.

~

Photo by Patrick Federi on Unsplash