Just keep swimming

What to do when you want to do nothing

Some mornings dawn with fruitful anticipation and some mornings arrive with shadowed angst. I suppose this reality is not unique to those who grieve, but it seems the grieving process lends itself to many emotional highs and lows. Low moments are often unpredictable and can be triggered in surprising ways.

It is a bitterly cold morning, the air temperature in the single digits and wind chill below zero. There are inches of snow buttressing the streets and my driveway. The potential sunrise is gunmetal grey with scarcely a bright color to be seen. It is a bleak start to the day, but fortunately I have worship this morning. I know that by the time I hit “publish” on this Substack article, gather my Sunday morning things and once again enter the frigid blast of late Winter, I will be in a better frame of mind.

And by the time I reach the church, unlock the doors, turn on the lights, and begin to greet those coming to worship together, I will be in a very good place. But first I have to get there.

I’m reminded of other Sunday mornings in my life. There have been few in more than fifty years that have not included worship of some kind or another, most often in an established religious community with its own patterns and rhythms. Even within the same denominational family, individual congregations have their own unique feel.

The church of my childhood and teenage years was a place where I felt a sense of belonging and identity. Those kind people took their faith seriously and regularly prodded me to deepen my own connections with God. They were foundational in nurturing my spiritual roots, and I am grateful, because I don’t know where I would be today if it weren’t for their presence in my life.

My early years in ministry were spent in part-time staff roles and bi-vocational ministry, and while they were difficult in many ways, I can now see how persevering laid a foundation for my persistent ways. My persistence has been learned, to be sure, because by nature I am laissez-faire.

My first years in my current denomination were as a seminary student in a “weekend church” appointment. It was very part-time, but provided the opportunity to experience gracious, ordinary people who loved God and their small congregation. Their affirmations were the reason I stayed in the United Methodist Church, and I’m glad I did.

Then there was my first full-time appointment to a “two-point charge” (church language for one pastor with two churches), just thirty miles from where I currently live. In some mysterious way, I can now see how those first four years in this part of the state thirty years ago prepared me to “come home” this past June. Although I am now in a different ministry setting, I have returned to a part of the state that is not unknown to me and carries with it a sense that I’ve been here before, because I have.

There were the seven years (my longest pastoral appointment to date) in the south-western corner of the state, where we were mere minutes from both Iowa and South Dakota. These were some of the happiest days of our family’s life (most of my older children consider this community their “home town”) and the church was vibrant and thriving with delightful, salt-of-the-earth people. I count it one of my greatest privileges to have been part of the journey of five individuals who are now in some sort of vocational ministry. When it was time to leave, we sobbed with grief, but we moved forward in our family life and in my pastoral role, and the church has continued its vibrant presence in the community to this day.

For six years we lived in a university town bustling with all sorts of energy. Bigger, more diverse than the communities we had lived in before, our teenage children found opportunities for both constructing and deconstructing their lives in varying measures. But the church was unflaggingly supportive of us and our rapidly changing young adult children. Between our two worship services on special days (Christmas Eve, Easter) we might have nearly 300 in worship. Some confirmation classes were close to twenty students. There were baptisms and weddings and, of course, funerals galore. It was a heady time to be in pastoral ministry with interesting people who loved us in spite of our glaring faults.

Living and pastoring in a first-ring suburb of Minneapolis was an entirely new experience for me and the family. It was while here that Claudia began her full-time work in the foster/adoption space, and it was her attention-getting performance that resulted in our move to Virginia so she could become even more influential in the field. Our time here was shorter than I wanted or intended, but again, we had the opportunity of meeting some of the community’s finest people. And though (most of them) were disappointed at our abrupt, mid-year departure, they understood the vagaries of professional life and respected my desire to follow Claudia after the years she had followed me in ministry,

We spent nearly a decade in Virginia. We intended it to be the second-to-the-last chapter of our lives, so I transferred my “conference membership” to the Virginia Conference of the United Methodist Church and served cross-culturally in four ministry settings. I say “cross-culturally” because as a native Minnesotan, both my congregations and I had a lot to learn from one another. While there I had a glorious few years in a Main Street church that was as close to Episcopalian in its style as it could be. I relished the robes, the elevated pulpit, the historic building, the appreciation for liturgy. The people were gracious and accommodating, and even through one of the most severe crises of our family’s and my pastoral life, we were supported and loved.

I spent a few years in a smaller congregation (and then for another year added a yet smaller congregation) who were very clear that they loved Jesus and they loved their pastor. We both had some adjustments to make, and I am grateful for how much I learned about the Blue Ridge area of Virginia during those years. Beautiful mountains, lovely people.

For one solitary year I commuted to Roanoke from Lynchburg in what would become (unknown to us) my final appointment in Virginia. Claudia and I were excited about the possibilities the church offered, especially to expand the reach of CarePortal and all it does for families and children in crisis. We started strong, and then by the half-way point, Claudia’s massive brain event and consequent death completely rearranged my life. In the short time we had together, the people in this congregation were Christ to me, and I left with a broken heart because I had lost both my spouse to death and a congregation where I had hoped to spend the remaining years of my pastoral ministry.

And here I am now in west-central Minnesota, back to where it all began more than three decades ago, yet different. It has been quite a journey, and it’s not finished yet. Just taking time to reflect on these years of God’s faithfulness have lifted my heart.

And so I have to ask myself a couple of things. “How did you get here?” (That’s kind of explained in the above paragraphs), and “How have you made it to this point?” These are not the same question. One explains the linear progression of my life; the other with the quality that has had to pervade my being throughout all these years. At its very basic, most sub-atomic level, I guess it’s because I’ve just kept swimming.

Those words came as advice from Dory, the dull-witted by helpful guide, to Nemo in the 2004 film Finding Nemo. Here’s my favorite clip from that movie:

And so, on this frigid February morning I think I’ll do what I’ve done for many years. I’ll just keep swimming.