In 42 minutes–at 10 am–my church is doing its second Facebook live session of worship since “social distancing” began. Now it’s 31 minutes. I sat down here before 8 am to rework a lesson on John 9:1-41 for preschool-5th grade kids and it was going well for a while. Then our choir director texted that she was sorry she could be with us to make music for the online service. Last night she texted that her ex-husband’s partner is awaiting test results from COVID-19 screening. Our choir director and her ex share two beautiful daughters, who have likely been exposed to his partner. So the waiting begins.
But yet again, I digress. From there my squirrel brain–or the one I talked about in my first post where I need the tug on my leash from God to get back to what would be better for me to do–started thinking about how we could make a collaborative music video for church. A friend sent me a couple of funny videos of her and her fellow music teachers out in NJ making collaborative music to share with their shut-in students. So instead of just sending a link and suggesting we look into this, I ended up finding that I can’t install that app on my phone and then trying to find a different app that we could use that does the same thing and on and on. Finally, I cut myself off with a text to the choir director and priest asking if they’d like to try something like this and asking her if, in her now sequestered time, she would want to investigate. I, of course, included many links and examples.
Then I started to try to refocus, deciding that maybe blogging/journaling/praying might help. So I fired up this site and noticed that the “comments” menu had a number 1 next to it. I’ve received a few comments since I started this blog last October, but only ones trying to sell me services related to my site. This one seemed to actually be directed to me. That sent me down a different rabbit hole for a bit, but now I’m finally here, writing.
This past week, while reading and rereading the scriptures for this Sunday, I’ve been developing my lesson. But what’s the point if I don’t ask God for direction? Am I sharing the gospel according to Leslea (probably yes, no matter how much I pray), or the gospel REALLY according to John? Does my interpretation muddy the waters or help? Does my feeble attempt encourage others in the right direction, or lead them astray?
The core of my lesson is that things work the way they work, whether we understand how they work or not. I learned this week more precisely how a candle works. Before that, I really didn’t understand it at all. In my reading and rereading of this passage about Jesus providing sight to a blind man, the message I gathered was that God works the way he works whether we understand it or not and whether we believe it or not. Whether we argue against the true (and likely unknown) nature of things or simplistically (in our human understanding) for the true nature of things, we don’t know completely, but our knowledge doesn’t change what is true.
I hope that’s what God was trying to get across to me. I hope that’s the right message to share with our families and children. I hope that my intentions are in the right direction, whether my actions are exactly right. I hope that all matters.
I have decided that I’m not going to watch the live version of our worship service this morning. I don’t know if our priest is preaching on the same text or one of the other lessons (maybe the 23rd Psalm?). I do know I don’t want to compete with him or suddenly revise what I’ve done because I’ve been pulled yet one more direction.
So are these distractions pulling me in the “right” direction, or the “wrong” direction? Does it matter? I already took those paths and ended up where I am now. And now I’ll take the path back to my color-coded Bible reading and simplify my lesson one more time.
