Crafton: Living with Limitations

Crafton: Living with Limitations

“Just because you’re disabled doesn’t mean you’re not anything else. Have you lost an ability you used to have? Something you loved? Have you had to say good-bye to it? Maybe there’s another way or another place in which you can still do it, or something like it.” Barbara Crafton, eMo from The Geranium Farm, www.geraniumfarm.org August 16, 2018.

 The Center for Disease Control (CDC) this week reports on its website that 61 million adults or about one fourth of adults in this country have a disability that impacts a major part of their lives.  The most common disability deals with mobility, affecting one in seven adults. It is also more common in women, especially those in the South and of lower income. The most common disability in younger adults is cognitive disability.

Barbara Crafton, who will be at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Little Rock, Saturday September 8th from 9 to 1 writes a daily email eMo from the Geranium Farm www.geraniumfarm.org using a piece of art to lead to her story. This week she had a painting, “Summer Wheat Field With Cypresses,” by Vincent Van Gogh painted in his last year from his window while he was in a mental facility.

My experience is that each of us has what Paul calls, “a thorn in our flesh.” If we think the other person doesn’t, we are very mistaken. We have a choice of how to respond to a disability. More and more I see our experience is to ask in our prayers how that thorn brings new light or new direction to our lives. Those in recovery will say that their addiction brought them to a new life they never dreamed. I see people with cancer changing and bettering the lives of others until the very end. I see parents with handicapped children who know more about patience and kindness and love than so many of us. 

There is a new pathway. It is not necessarily overcoming the disability but seeing the message or new direction for us to continue to become the person God has created us to be in each new experience we are offered.

Joanna joannaseibert.com

Facebook first day of school

Facebook and first day of school

“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.” Ecclesiastes 3:1.

grown up too fast

 I get caught on Facebook this morning for almost an hour! I get up early to post the Daily Something and am overwhelmed by the pictures this morning of children going back to school this week. I can’t stop looking at them. I know them from previous churches, children and grandchildren of those I worked at Children’s Hospital, children I sang and prayed with at the Cathedral School, children from so many Vacation Bible Schools, children I learned from and dearly loved.  Some are almost grown.

Most of the younger children and some of the teenagers agree to look happy and excited for their parents’ pictures. I envision these same photographs in albums and embarrassingly shown at future weddings and anniversaries. I think of the joy of grandparents and friends who are not able to see their family and friends as often as they would like but visit frequently with them on Facebook.

“Where have all the years gone?” is an often-quoted heading with the pictures. I agree. Life is so fleeting. That is why living the moment, the precious present, loving and enjoying the moment is so important. I realize I remember these children most because I did for a nanosecond stay present with them at some time in the past. Today I send each of them love. They in turn have sent back love to my heart as I remember who they were and cherish who they are today.

Anthony DeMello reminds us to keep our album of good memories that we can go back to and relive even better than we did the first time the events happened. He believes often the first encounter is too powerful to experience fully. He encourages us to keep these memories when we want or need to reconnect to the love that was present there in the past.

Living in the present is what gives us such beautiful memories, but there also is a season to go back and relive the love of those memories.

Times of transitions in our lives, such as going back to school are such times.

This was a good day on Facebook, worth getting up early to see and forgetting to check the regular news of the day.

Joanna joannaseibert.com   

Canoeing the Mountains

Canoeing the Mountains

“Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” John 12: 23-24.

The Alban Weekly from Duke Divinity school this week interviews Tod Bolsinger, professor at Fuller Theological Seminary, about what he means by the title of his recent book, Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory.

 Bolsinger gives us an amazing metaphor for so many of our transition experiences in life. He tells the story of the journey of Lewis and Clark who thought when they reached the continental divide that they would find a river to travel directly to the Pacific Ocean. Instead, they met the Rocky Mountains.  They didn’t survive by trying to canoe the mountain. They didn’t let this obstacle stop their objective. They had to adapt, and their source of wisdom was not part of their hierarchy or the privileged. The wisdom coms from a teenager, a nursing mother, a Native American who had been kidnapped as a child. “She wasn’t in unfamiliar terrain; she was going home.” 

I think what Bolsinger is trying to tell our churches can apply to much of our own life.  We have so much to learn from people who know what it is like to reach the top of a mountain with a canoe in hand and become survivors of what seems at the time like an unsurmountable task. They have a sense of a GPS calling them back home. Immigrants, people of color, women have had to adapt to overwhelming situations have much to teach us. More and more we are called to listen to their stories.

Bolsinger reminds us that transformation most often comes from loss, and those who do not have power may be the ones who are our experts in loss. They have been trained in survival and wilderness experiences.

 Lewis and Clark had to take direction from a young Indian mother. Bolsinger reminds us this is giving up power so that something much greater can be birthed. This also is a basic premise in recovery programs.  

The canoe metaphor may speak directly to our individual life transitions. What mountains on our journey have we reached where we are trying to cross with a canoe, an energy that was useful at one time in our life, but is not the energy we need now? What does it mean for us to listen more carefully to survivors, survivors in our own world and survivor parts of our inner world who can teach us the next pathway?   

“Tod Bolsinger: What does it mean to stop canoeing the mountains?” Faith and Leadership, Alban at Duke Divinity School, alban@div.duke.edu, August 13, 2018.

Joanna  joannaseibert.com