Pray, Learn, Engagage

I took two days off this week because I’m still working on the skill of planning for the Sabbath. I find that I really struggle without a routine and yet, at the same time, I’ve really struggled to get into a routine as a pastor. On the one hand, that’s a delightful part of the job: you never know exactly what each day will hold. On the other hand, that’s the overwhelming thing about the job: you never know exactly what each day will hold. Will today be the day that you engage in a soul-filling conversation about where we see love in the world or will today be the day when you find out, via an obituary emailed to you, that a member of your congregation died weeks ago and no one in the family contacted you? Will today be the day that you get to make a real connection with someone through your words or your actions or will today be the day that someone calls you to tell you that you should quit your job? There’s no way to know.

And yet, it is possible to get into a routine, a routine that feeds you and keeps you rested so that you’re ready to take on anything the day holds. I know it must be possible to get into that kind of a routine, because I’ve seen other pastors do it. But that beautiful routine of honoring a Sabbath day and keeping it holy, planning your work schedule around your rest times… I’m not there yet. And so, instead of my practice dictating my rest times, my body did instead, and I rested from writing for the past two days.

This is not to say that I didn’t think about the prompts for these three of the #30DaysofAntiRacism. I did pray about how I could speak up about injustice this week, but I believe that this writing endeavor, along with other work I’m already doing, might be all that I can manage in this moment. I have learned more about my local elections, but that has been a discipline of mine since I graduated from college. I actually enjoy doing candidate research, but this year, since I’ve been involved in local activism, I haven’t had to do as much because I’ve been interacting with local officials a lot more than I ever have before. Honestly and truly, I can’t recommend local activism enough.

Because, in the process of good local activism, you’ll find yourself caught up in a cycle of doing these three prompts over and over again. You’ll consider, and as a person of faith, you’ll pray about, what you need to do, you’ll learn the local landscape and see how your action fits within it, then you’ll engage in the action, which often involves difficult conversations. Then, once the action is complete, you’ll pray about what you need to do, you’ll learn, and you’ll do it, and the cycle begins again. I might not have a Sabbath routine, but I know this routine well. Think, prepare, do, pray, learn, act, these cycles of analysis, planning, and implementing, they’re what enable us to move forward.

And best of all, when you’re doing this world in a community, when you’re working alongside others to think, prepare, do, and think again, you have ample opportunity to mess up. You have the chance to, in the gracious community of others who want change as much as you do, stumble in any of these steps and learn from others around you. You have the chance to fall short, to apologize, repent, and make restitution, and to forge deeper relationships because you’ve done that work together. If you want to grow as a person, or at least learn about yourself, find a local cause and fight for it.

I mean, in theory, that’s what Christianity is all about. It’s about seeing the vision of the Reign of God as revealed in Jesus of Nazareth, who we call Christ, and coming together to do all that we can to live into that vision. We should always be praying, learning, and acting, and we should always be doing this in community with others who are here to pray, learn, and act with us, who are here to share their wisdom and to learn from us, here to pick us up when we fall and build deep relationships as we all struggle forward. By faithfully engaging in this cycle of praying, learning, and acting, we should be growing into the image of Christ, or at least learning the growing that we still have to do. Christianity, lived out in this joyful dance of praying, learning, acting, praying, learning, acting, praying, learning, acting, should be the work of a lifetime as we follow Christ ever more closely and love our God and our neighbors ever more deeply.

I know that so often, we make our faith and our practices this pretentious list of do’s and don’t’s, but believe me when I say that that kind of list-making is soul-killing. You will never be anti-racist enough if being anti-racist means abiding by an ever-growing list of rules that you have to follow in order to not be racist. You will never be good enough or just enough or strong enough or wise enough by creating and following rules, because goodness, justice, strength, wisdom, love, all of these things are more fluid than that. The only way to engage in these things, to grow these things, is to step into the dance.

So go. Pray. Learn. Engage. Think. Plan. Act. Learn how to dance.

(And learn that resting is a part of dancing too.)