Listening. To other people.

The following was written on Sunday afternoon, when our interwebs were not functioning, in a Microsoft Word document. 

Well, it’s been a few weeks, the leaves are beginning to do what they’re supposed to do this season, and I am sittin.

The only sound at the instant that I am typing this sentence is the ticking of the clock in our living/dining room. The cars and trucks that rush down the main thoroughfare that goes by our front yard will make some noise every once in a while, but probably not as much on a Sunday afternoon. It’s pretty cloudy outside and drizzling a little bit, and I may be going south again today to go to a pumpkin patch with the youth and families of St. Luke’s. We’ll see how the weather is, I guess.

I have been richly blessed this week with the opportunity to go to the 2010 Theological Conference for the Nebraska Synod of the ELCA in Kearney, NE, somewhere around 2 hours west of Omaha. The big speakers were Shane Claiborne, a really tall skinny thirty-something-year-old with realllllly long dreadlocks and a passion for God’s love that I wish I had seen more of in church today, and Alexie Torres-Fleming, a puertorriqueña from the South Bronx who is on a break from running Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice over there so she can give speeches about all the work she’s been inspired to do since a co-leading a significant protest march against crack in the early 90s. There was also ample time for socializing with Lutheran pastors, including LVC alums, synod staff that I befriended on a work weekend in North O at the end of September, and my present “co-workers” in the inner-city cluster. (It feels weird to call them that, but I think they would be okay with it – Pastor Patti laughs when I call her my boss.) Kayleigh was there too,

But the very first part of my time at the conference was spent in Spiritual Retreat from 8:30-11:30 am on Monday morning. During that time

Stop. That's where I stopped. But during that time, I was listening to other people.

I am RESTLESS tonight. We have our first LVC Twin Cities/Omaha retreat in Iowa in a little more than a week, and each community is supposed to have something of a covenant ready to share by then. Our community decided last night, based on a conversation from the night before, that we would come up with an idea of our covenant on our own, and begin the process of smushing them together tomorrow. So I was writing for a while tonight, and then I stopped, and then I went and played some music, and now I am back on the couch, writing something different.

I want to play music with other people. I need to listen to other people so I can learn what their passions are.

We really need to listen to other people. Really. Listen. Open up our souls to receive something from someone else's.

And then, talk about what we hear.

Yes, self-care is essential to working for peace with justice. But other people of all kinds are why I love life.