Learning to Love It All

Embracing all of life is a continuing exercise of love

Since the age of sixteen I’ve known that God was calling me into vocational ministry, and while I have lived bi-vocationally at times over the past forty-five years, my heart has always burned bright with a sense of call. I am grateful for so many decades of meaningful, purposeful life, and there many people and faces I am remembering this morning in the midst of my gratitude.

In particular, I am remembering the church I pastored some fifteen years ago. I inherited a flourishing, multigenerational congregation filled with wonderful people of faith. These were challenging years in our family’s life because all of our kids were teenagers and young adults during this era. We had many contacts with law enforcement, and Claudia and I knew several of the police officers by name because of their frequent knocks at our door. In the midst of our lives, this congregation was gracious and loving. I will never forget that.

The congregation had at that time an expanding ministry with children and youth, so I had the joy of working with confirmation-age kids (in conjunction with two other part-time staff ministers) to ready them to confess their personal faith. Early in my years there, the parents of a developmentally delayed young adult took me aside to share with me their concern that their son had never been confirmed. They explained that he would not be able to comprehend the process or the study involved but wondered if there was any way I could work with him at his learning level so that he could confirm his faith.

Aaron (not his actual name) was a gregarious, people-loving participant in all of the church’s life. Those who knew him loved him, and there was no question as to whether he loved God and God’s people. He was a prime candidate for confirmation (and in many ways a better candidate than some other age-appropriately, self-focused teenagers in the traditional confirmation process).

Of course I said, “Yes” to the invitation, and Aaron and I had a few conversations together so that with integrity I could say he had undergone his own preparation for confirmation. In the United Methodist tradition, there are specific questions asked at the time of confirmation that, per church law, cannot be altered even due to a candidate’s intellectual level of functioning, so together Aaron and I talked through the questions in his language, and we prepared for his “big day” to confirm his faith in the presence of the people who had known and loved him since his birth some twenty-plus years earlier.

On the day of his confirmation, standing before the congregation, I asked Aaron the traditional questions, to which he responded with bubbling enthusiasm. Finally, as a means of summarizing the moment, I asked him, “Aaron, what do you most love about this church?” It was not a question we had rehearsed, and it was an on-the-spur-of-the-moment sort of thing for me, but it felt like the right final question.

Without blinking an eye, and looking at me first and then the people he loved, Aaron declared with a tremorous though clear voice: “Oh, Pastor Bart, I love it all!”

My response could only be one sentence: “Yes you do, Aaron, yes you do!”

I’ve been thinking about that kind of love this morning as I continue to live into my new chapter of life. Grief is a highly personal, very unpredictable, many-splendored thing. It’s kind of like the natural world around me. As I returned home yesterday from my two-day orientation in Minneapolis, the sun was scorching the afternoon: my car thermometer told me it was 95 degrees, thick with humidity. (I felt like I really hadn’t moved from Virginia after all!) Throughout the night the weather pattern changed, so that upon awakening early this morning it was in the low 60s and rainy. Grief is like that, I am discovering: there are good days, there are hard days, and sometimes it’s all in the same day.

I’m learning to love it all, and this is not a natural approach to life for me. As I prayed this morning I thanked God, genuinely, for the gift of life and the opportunity this week to be with my children, grandchildren and extended family in our mini-reunion. I am much more aware of how precious each day is, and how, within the “twinkling of an eye” (as the New Testament speaks it) everything can change.

I’m not sure I can say that I am learning to love grief, because I would return to my life of six months ago in a heartbeat, if I could. It’s not the pain of loss that I seek to love, but what grief allows in my life. It allows me to redefine myself, to be more intentional about expressing my love to those in my life, to value each hour of breath I have, to trust that Love embraces me through it all, to know that grief will not define the remainder of my life.

Grief is opening the door for personal transformation “on the regular,” and I am learning to love it all. Each morning as I sit in my prayer chair in my sun room I open the screen door to the patio and listen. I listen for bird song, I listen to the world awakening around me, and I listen to the wind. And I always listen for the wind chimes, gifted to me in memory of my life partner of nearly thirty years. The chimes were a gift from my last church in Roanoke, a congregation where music was cherished and filled the sanctuary with praise every week.

The chimes help me to remember, with gratitude, the years past even as they pull me into the future. Some mornings, like my grief, the chimes are quiet and resting. On other days they are gently undulating in the whisps of breeze that are almost always present here in prairie-land Minnesota. And some mornings, like today, they are continually moving in rapturous tinkling bursts as the wind’s strength churns through.

I don’t have a “chime preference,” because I know that each day will bring its own unique rendition to start my day. I’m learning to love it all, just like I’m learning to love my next chapter of life. I’m never sure quite what to expect in the course of a day, but I do trust that Love surrounds me and leads me forward.

I hear in my mind the haunting refrain from the African-American spiritual: "What wondrous love is this, O my soul?” Indeed, what Love is this that heals my wounded soul and invites all grievers to embrace our whole lives, even when it’s not the life we imagined or dreamed?