Hope's Cafe

Our church sits next to the original building called, appropriately enough, The Little Stone Church.  It is sometimes rented out for showers, weddings, other events.  Last weekend it was rented for a craft show.  I went over to introduce myself and the organizer said, “Oh, yes.  I’ve heard all about you.”  The next day I conducted a memorial service where I was introduced to someone from out of town.  She said,“I’ve heard a lot about you”….Small Town Living

              We live close enough to the church for me to walk to work.  This week we had snow.  As I walked to work, I encountered someone blowing snow off what I assumed was his driveway.  I laughed and said, “I need to send you down the street to my house.”  He said, “Where to you live?”  Startled, I gave him my address.  “You live two doors down from my mother,” he replied.  I asked what he charged and he said, in a tone that bordered on embarrassment, “Oh, just whatever you want to pay me”…..Small Town Living.

              The next day I went back to pay him.  When I knocked at the door, to my amazement, Dick, a church member, answered.  It turns out the snow blower is a neighbor, who blows off the snow and shovels the sidewalk for Dick in return for some of Dick’s home-grown vegetables…..Small Town Living.

              I was told when I moved here that helping one’s neighbor is characteristic of this ranching and farming area.  If a farmer or rancher has encountered some problem or disaster, neighbors help out, knowing next time it could easily be you.  And you know that when your time comes, they will just as quickly come to your aid. 

              This awareness that we have some responsibility to others and that we engage in some mutual benefit by serving one another, seems to me to be lost in our current milieu.  So much of what is wrong in the world, boils down to a person or group of persons or a corporation, deeming their needs or desires supersede anything or anyone else’s needs or desires. 

              Years ago I read the book The Navigator, a novel with detailed a group of people who decided to establish their own colony, with no rules.  Anyone could do whatever they wanted.  They discovered this was really untenable.  There had to be some ground rules that made living together in community possible.  Rugged individualism is one thing.  To totally disregard the needs, rights and well-being of others is a totally different thing. May we seek always to be good neighbors and to cultivate community.

May we be bearers of hope, the “wait staff” of Hope’s Café for each other and all those we encounter.  Shalom, Kate

Hope’s Café Bonus:  If you google “Cultivating Community” you will find a group in Portland, Maine, organized to support ” teaching people sustainable farming practices and connecting them to the community through our food hub.” They “support and manage diverse urban growing spaces, enabling community members to grow their own food within city limits.”  They also “increase access to local, healthy foods for low-income consumers, providing affordable produce through CSA shares, farm stands, and mobile markets.”

“Tempus Fugit”—Time Flies…..how well I know!  A year ago we were about to wrap up a near four-month stint of caring for our grandsons.  I returned to supply preaching while trying to figure out how to search for a call during covid.  Then when I least expected it, I got a call to, of all places, Montana, where I had never even considered going. Suddenly we were selling our house and moving.  Then last month we bought a house and so we have moved from our apartment into a home—right at the church season of Advent!  To complicate matters, we were without internet for a week and my printer crashed.   

All this is to say, Hope’s Café has been neglected!  I return to you today with the recognition that likely everyone reading this shares the experience of life being disrupted in ways you didn’t anticipate.  So I count on you to “give me some grace,” as I am fond of saying. While in the Christian tradition, grace is the free and unmerited favor of God, another definition is “an extended period granted as a special favor,” the response I am seeking for my delay. 

So, in return for the gift of your grace, I offer this:

Now is the time to know
That all that you do is sacred.

Now, why not consider
A lasting truce with yourself and God.

Now is the time to understand
That all your ideas of right and wrong

Were just a child’s training wheels
To be laid aside

When you can finally live
With veracity
And love.

Hafiz is a divine envoy
Whom the Beloved
Has written a holy message upon.

My dear, please tell me,
Why do you still
Throw sticks at your heart
And God?

What is it in that sweet voice inside
That incites you to fear?

Now is the time for the world to know
That every thought and action is sacred

This is the time
For you to deeply compute the impossibility
That there is anything
But Grace.

Now is the season to know
That everything you do
Is sacred.

– Hafiz

Hope’s Café Bonus: There is a PBS piece  from September 2019 on Joy Harjo, which I could not seem to copy the link to and make it work.   Ms. Harjo is an internationally renowned performer and writer of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and has been the United States poet laureate.    She is from my native Oklahoma and later taught at my alma mater in Knoxville, TN.  Among many youtube videos of her, there is one available of her reading her poem “Grace.” I would encourage you to check it out.  😊

About three years ago I began to have some difficulty with my right leg.  Periodically I would get severe cramps in it, unlike any leg cramps I’d ever had.  Peripheral artery disease was ruled out in 2019.  I didn’t get a diagnosis and I dropped the matter.  In 2020 when the problem evolved from cramps to pain that was becoming more and more frequent, I decided to pursue this again.  Knowing that I was likely going to be accepting a pastorate and wanting to get the procedure taken care of before moving, I got a referral to a vascular clinic.    But there was a delay after the ball was dropped in the office where I had completed testing and gotten a diagnosis. Then, though insurance approved it, Medicare denied it.  The day before the movers came in August to move me to Montana, where I had in fact accepted a call to serve a church, I received a call.  The news? That Medicare had approved the process on appeal! Great—except that the move was about to ensue. 

So, now established with a new doctor in Montana, I began the process anew.  I got a referral almost immediately.  The new office was extremely efficient.  And, biggest surprise of all, the nurse practitioner  spent nearly an hour with me!  I got much more in-depth information than I had received in my pre-move appointment and was very impressed with the nurse practitioner.

I am reminded of the Sufi story “Good Thing, Bad Thing.  Who Knows?” which I first heard years ago.  The farmer’s horse runs away…oh no!  Then it returns with a second horse….oh good!  Then the farmer’s son falls off the horse and breaks his leg….bad thing!  Then a war breaks out and the son is ineligible for the draft because he is physically not able….good thing!  He doesn’t risk worse injuries or death.

I was so disgusted when I wasn’t able to get the surgery last summer. (Bad thing!) Now I am much more comfortable with the care I am getting.  (Good thing!)

When we look back at our lives, we likely all can point to experiences such as these.  In 2010, my position was cut from a hospice job I loved and expected to continue to retirement.  I was truly devastated.  But that led to my path towards ministry and a position I deeply love.  And my hospice experience is valuable in this new vocation. 

Ironic as some twists can be on our journeys, all these experiences contribute to the tapestries of our lives.  Think of it as “irony as gift.”

May we be bearers of hope, the “wait staff” of Hope’s Café for each other and all those we encounter.  Shalom, Kate

Hope’s Café Bonus: “No problem comes to you without a gift in its hands.”—Richard Bach

I have encountered several situations recently where compassion would have been the charitable response.  Judgement so easily comes first.  I would love to say these were all judgements other people made.  But even ministers are capable of tripping over judgements.

 I got a voicemail from someone looking for a minister to marry her and her fiancé.  Were they a local couple?  No, they were “travelling around and ended up in Montana.”  Some other plan had relied on a relative to arrange for the wedding but that had fallen through.  My first reaction was more of curiosity.  What was the story here?  But I also thought, Really?  As a pastor, I take the authority to perform marriage ceremonies seriously.  This struck me as something of a lark.  I felt a little offended:  Don’t ask me to bless something that is less than full commitment. 

Then I thought back to my own first marriage, how it was all about “being married,” not about being committed.  Who am I to judge?  Even if that were not the case that when I took those vows, I was less fully invested in what marriage would involve, it was still not my place to judge.   Judgement reinforces our sense of superiority; puts distance between us and those folks with whom we don’t want to be identified.

Certainly, in today’s milieu we are in need of some means to build bridges.  Although I don’t have any foolproof remedies for this, I am intrigued with folks like Daryl Davis, 63 year old black man who has successfully engaged Ku Klux Klan members and neo-Nazis.  As reported by Nicholas Kristoff in the New York Times in June:

“Davis began to work on answers after he graduated from Howard University and joined a band that sometimes played in a Maryland bar that attracted white racists. Davis struck up a friendship with a K.K.K. member, each fascinated by the other, and the man eventually left the K.K.K., Davis said.

One of Davis’s methods — and there’s research from social psychology to confirm the effectiveness of this approach — is not to confront antagonists and denounce their bigotry but rather to start in listening mode. Once people feel they are being listened to, he says, it is easier to plant a seed of doubt.”

So perhaps we can at least pause when our first impulse is to judge and seek to at least consider an alternative response.

May we be bearers of hope, the “wait staff” of Hope’s Café for each other and all those we encounter.  Shalom, Kate

Hope’s Café BonusAccidental Courtesy | Film about Daryl Davis Meeting KKK …

https://www.pbs.org › independentlens › documentaries

              I grew up in a small Oklahoma town, about 9500 population.  Until now, that was the smallest town I had ever lived in.  My new home isn’t quite 2,000.  Some folks who have seen my photos on Facebook have commented that it looks like we live in “Mayberry,” that we seem to have stepped back in time. 

              There is a sense in which this experience does indeed feel like we have entered a time machine.  As a kid, I walked everywhere or rode my bike.  Growing up, Main Street was the focus of the town. Little shops lined the streets.  Lew’s Drug boasted a soda fountain along with medicines and merchandise.  Link’s Drug, the competition, was across the street.    Security Bank where my mother worked was on one corner.  The National Bank was one block down.   The town was on the Chikaskia River, a tributary that eventually becomes part of the Mississippi River.

              In my new home, I can easily reach on foot any place in town I want or need to go.  Main Street is a central “shopping district,” so to speak, where one can peruse little shops, go to the bank or the florist or the auto parts store.  Sadly, the drug stores with soda fountains have mostly disappeared from American culture.  But we do have a Whistle Stop Café and a Chinese restaurant.  And our town is right on the Yellowstone River, a tributary of the Missouri River.

              Here is the pivotal difference in the two experiences:  Growing up, I knew or knew of most of the folks living there.  When I was downtown, inevitably I encountered people with whom I was familiar.  In my new home, I am perpetually aware that I am a newcomer.  People are friendly enough, but I am an outsider.  I met with two pastors of nearby Congregational churches, one of whom I was meeting for the first time.  She asked where I was from.  When I replied “Tennessee,” the other pastor gently teased, “Can’t you tell when she opens her mouth? That lovely accent!” (I am thinking, “What accent??”)

              So as we move on from our known experience to the unfamiliar, we can be certain that change will bring some discomfort.  I am enjoying so many aspects of my new life.  But I don’t like being “the new kid on the block,” aware that other people have deep roots and longtime connections here. I am challenged to consider these folks “ friends I just haven’t met yet”  and  reminded of the old adage “to have a friend, one must be a friend.”

May we be bearers of hope, the “wait staff” of Hope’s Café for each other and all those we encounter.  Shalom, Kate

Hope’s Café Bonus: “There are no strangers here; only friends you haven’t met yet.”—William Butler Yeats        *        “The only way to have a friend is to be one.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson