Remembering Hope: Three-and-a-half Years Later

Today is exactly 3.5 years since we lost our daughter Hope Marie. Sometimes "anniversaries" make you stop and think about things.

Hope is certainly still—and always will be—part of us. We never want to forget her precious life that was so short this side of eternity. We want the children to know they had a sibling. But, although I suppose it can sound cliché, it does seem true that time really does have the capacity to heal wounds. Memories still surface and when they come, they sting... but life and living goes on... and I think I can say it has for the Wards.

There is a kind of "separation" as Becca grows into a very vibrant and spirited little girl and we remember Hope as a two-day old infant slipping away into God's arms. You can almost forget for a while that she was "supposed" to be here. (I'm sure most outside our family have mostly forgotten about her accept when someone or something reminds them; it's only natural to focus most on those actually physically present with us.) We have our two children and we love them dearly. We live our life together and the family seems "complete". But then we'll be doing something together, maybe I am struggling to handle the two children, and it will hit me -- "There were supposed to be three...", or I will see Becca doing something and think that Hope isn't here to experience it.

To this day, when I see a set of twins, I confess it's difficult—and sometimes it seems like those darn double strollers are everywhere! I want to ask parents of twins: "So what's it like to raise them?" (Once in a play area at the mall I am pretty sure that there were two sets of identical twins present at the same time. I'm like, "Okay God, enough already! Oy veh?!")

The grief I feel the most is the sense of our family being "robbed" of experience—and there's nothing I as dad could do about it. Laurie and I missed out on in knowing Hope in this life, raising our first-born daughter (Hope was born first), and getting to be parents of twins. Likewise, Brady and Becca also suffered loss, even if they didn't know it -- they may feel it more as time goes on. They both lost the opportunity to have another sibling in this earthly life, and Becca lost the unique experience not just of having a sister, but an identical twin sister. I'll always wonder how the two girls personalities would have been similar or different? (I suspect they would have looked the same but had different personalities, but I will never know...) What kind of special bond would the two of them would have had? What kind of bond would I as father have had with Hope? (I know I have a special one with Becca.) What does Becca sense she is "missing"?

The kids know about their sister, "Baby Hope." From time-to-time they ask questions and we pull out a memory box with what few things we have left from her brief life. We visit the cemetery at my parent’s church in Calvert County where she is buried occasionally but we certainly don't go often. (I suppose it helps that she is buried over an hour away.) We know Hope is not there... but it is a place where we can pause to intentionally remember that she was real, mattered very much to us, and we miss her presence with us.

Keep us in prayer on this day. This Sunday they have a memorial service at Franklin Square Hospital (where the girls were born) for those who have lost a child. We go to this every year and it is a good thing. Laurie is actually giving the short “meditation” this year—she felt ready to do it this year. The kids always enjoy going outside and releasing a " balloon to Jesus” for Hope at the end of the service.

New Post at Jesus Boat: Portraits of Perseverance

I've got a new post over on the Jesus Boat blog.

It's actually the second of two; the first post is here.

Check it out!

Back at the Hospital: The Best Laid Plans...

We plan, we schedule; we want to know what will come next. We experience anxiety when it all doesn’t go as we planned. Human beings want to be in control of their world—or at least we want to think we are. I suppose the past few weeks remind the Ward family of the fallacy of that belief. Simply put: it’s an illusion!!

On Labor Day Laurie had an episode of sharp pain. The diagnosis was that her gall bladder was “full of stones” and needed to be removed. So we planned accordingly.

We scheduled the surgery; from all reports it was a fairly routine outpatient procedure. Nowadays they use a laparoscope to do the surgery, which makes recovery even quicker. Others who have had their gall bladder out reported that they recovered quickly. Based on all this, we assumed she would be out of action for a little while but nothing too significant. She planned to take one Sunday out of the pulpit in church and be back working the next week, and preaching the following Sunday.

But, true to life, things didn’t exactly go as we planned it. The first fly in the proverbial ointment was that the surgery had to be postponed a week because Laurie had a cold. The surgeon and chief anesthesiologist decided not to risk “added respiratory complications” with what was, at the end of the day, an “elective” procedure for Laurie. Ten minutes from the operating room, the procedure was cancelled and rescheduled for the following week. It was a nuisance—okay, it was more than a nuisance; we were not happy. We had to rearrange our lives again. Laurie’s mom had come up and would have to go home and then come back again the following week. Laurie had to arrange her pastoral schedule—which had already been rearranged in anticipation of surgery.

So we came back to the hospital a week later and did it all over again. This time the surgery went forward and seemed to go well. She went home the same day but she just didn’t recover as had been expected. At first we thought maybe it was “just bad gas” after being under anesthesia, but it didn’t get better; if anything it got worse. When she was still unable to eat anything without pain after several days we knew things weren’t going “according to plan”. She continued having pain, and, finally, early the following Saturday morning she went to the Emergency Room, and was subsequently admitted.

That brings us to today. As I write this, we’re in the pre-op area at Franklin Square. The working assumption now is that Laurie has a gallstone blocking one of her bile ducts and causing pain. She’ll have an ERCP (you can look it up if you really want to know what it means) where they go in and explore around her digestive track to try and find the “rogue” stone and if they find one they can dislodge it. It should take care of the problem. The only concern is that about 6% of the people who have these procedures end up with inflammation of the pancreas.

It’s funny isn’t it, “normal life” is really composed of lots of circumstances that don’t go the way we planned them. We take the good, the bad, and the ugly and merge it all together into something we call life.

As a follower of Christ, I believe that these events are not all random and meaningless. Sometimes I don’t have a clue what’s going on in the heat of the moment, but I trust there is a “bigger picture”, a “larger story” that extends beyond my finite perceptions of reality. Sometimes my humanness clouds my ability to see beyond my own nose. Francesca Battistelli expresses it well in one of her songs: “In the middle of my little mess I forget how big I’m blessed...” I get self-absorbed in my own little world; I lose sight of the “big picture”; I experience doubt about whether there really is a “larger story”.

Batistelli’s song lyric continues, “…but this is the stuff you use,”. I like this sentiment. I don’t think God brings “bad” things into our lives; they come because we live here on Earth—a place where sin and death are realities. However, I think God uses all the stuff of life—good, bad, joy, tragedy, and all the everyday moments too—to form us into the people God desires us to be. Paul reminds us that this is a bedrock of our faith. Even when I don’t understand how, God really does work all things together for good for those who love God.

There have been moments, such as when my daughter Hope unexpectedly died two days after she was born, when life’s howling storms stripped away everything else, that bedrock was all I had left to cling to. But the good news is that foundation held; it proved a very present help in time of need.

UPDATE: Laurie has just gone back for surgery now… Please pray that all goes well.

Being Church in The Village

UMODE: Context for A Creed

Five United Methodist congregations located within about 10 miles of each other in the Dundalk and Edgemere communities of Southeast Baltimore—calling ourselves "UMODE"—have been working together for the past couple years. We are each proud of our unique history; our individual efforts to date have accomplished good things. However, we believe we can do even greater things for God's kingdom as five churches working as one than we can as five individual congregations struggling to do effective ministry independently with increasingly limited material and human resources. The effort to work together has not been without complications—it's inevitable that any worthy effort like this would have its "growing pains" and "roadblocks"—but we have persevered together and are making good progress.

Together, UMODE has hired a youth and young adult pastor to work for our five churches . At least as important as what she has done in our churches is the work she has done OUTSIDE our church doors—reaching out to the community around us that, for many reasons, doesn't choose to "go to church" on Sunday. She has spent time building relationships with the people who frequent the "gathering places" of Dundalk and Edgemere. And her work is bearing fruit ...

Building on the efforts to date, and the "seeds" we've planted in the community, this weekend we hope to start "harvesting"—or at least seeing some "germination". Today and tomorrow (August 19-20), we plan two days of outreach to our community at Heritage Park in Dundalk with an informal time of worship concluding each evening.

Please pray for our outreach efforts to be a "success"... and for the PM thunderstorms to not be too intense... (Contrary to popular belief meteorologists like me really can't control the weather; we just report what's coming—and sometimes, as is well documented and criticized, we don't even do that very well!)

UMODE has also started a new "informal" worship gathering called The Village that meets in a local coffee shop—with substantial contributions from people in other churches in the area and folks with no formal church connection at present. We had our first gathering last week and it seemed to go well. We had ~72 people in and out during the evening—with a few more lurkers on the perimeter not sure if they belonged yet. We want to make it clear by what we do that ALL are welcome at The Village. We're seeking a form of expression that is "organic", adaptable, and most of all, flexible so we can effectively respond to the pressing physical needs and the spiritual hunger in our community. We would appreciate your prayers for this new worship gathering as well.

The outreach this weekend is taking place in the same vicinity as the coffee shop and the coffee shop owner is helping us, so the events are very much related.

This effort to "take church to the people" is well established in our Wesleyan DNA. When people no longer felt welcome in church anymore, the Wesley brothers decided to take church to the people of their day. We the churches of UMODE are merely trying to do what the Wesley brothers did in our own time and place.

Doing this sort of thing seems a little strange to people (myself included) who have gotten used to "going to church on Sunday" and not thinking as much about "what the church is supposed to be". This kind of outreach pushes us out of our comfort zone, but it is really a good thing in that it gets us back to the root of what it really means to be the church—the Body of Christ—in our world.

So I hope John and Charles would be proud of what we're trying to do, but more importantly, I hope this makes God smile... and I hope the Spirit moves in powerful ways.

"Greater things are still to come and greater things still to be done in this city..."

The Village Creed

I wrote the creed below to describe my aspirations for our new worship.

A creed is supposed to be a statement of what the worshipping community believes and this is really one man’s opinion. So while I hardly place this prose in the same league as the historic statements of our faith (e.g., Apostles Creed, Nicene Creed) that most Christians confess, I share what I have written in hopes that it might be useful to you in your setting. While I wrote it for use in a particular context I think it could be easily adapted for use in other settings. Most of what it is written here is theology on which I think most Christians agree. I just tried to say it in language that is accessible to those less familiar with the jargon of the church.

I set it up so that it might be read as a litany. The people read the statements in BOLD and the leader reads the rest. It could just as easily be read in unison however. The text goes as follows:

We are The Village!

We are a community committed to loving God and loving one another.

We are Trinity people.

We believe in Father, Son, and Spirit. We are caught in a downpour of God’s love that floods our souls and flows to a thirsty world.

We are Emmanuel people.

We believe God was, is, and forever will be with us. Nothing we do can ever earn or ever separate us from God’s love.

We are Incarnation people.

We believe that through Jesus, God got his hands dirty. He lived among us and showed us what we can become and still lives today in the hearts of all who believe.

We are Kingdom people.

We believe that Jesus calls us to live a different kind of life than what this world calls “normal”. Let your Kingdom come!

We are Resurrection people.

We believe Jesus suffered unjustly and died a tragic death… but on third day he rose again! Humanity’s worst couldn’t conquer Heaven’s best!

We are Spirit-led people.

We believe God’s Spirit is moving in our midst and we seek to respond.

We are L.U.P.E. people

We love one another because God first loved us.

We understand God better by getting to know one another.

We pray for God’s peace to reign in our lives and our world.

We encourage one another to be all God made us to be.

We are The Village!

Everyone is welcome here. So, grab a latte; share your story; share your gifts; or simply rest in God’s love.

Come Lord Jesus, come!

Where Are the Fish Biting Today?

I am by no means an authority on fishing; it’s not really a hobby of mine. I do know, however, that many factors go into determining where the fish will be biting today. The temperature of the water, the winds, the supply of nutrients, and other factors can all impact the fish. Fish tend to follow their food sources, so if you find what the fish eat in the water, then the fish are likely to follow.

From my work at NASA, I know that today’s commercial fishing industry is becoming more and more rooted in science. It’s not uncommon for fishermen to consult weather maps, ocean topography charts, and other data from satellites and other sources to help them try to maximize their chances of bringing in a good catch. But at the end of the day there’s still an “art” to fishing. You can go where the data tells you to go and still find no fish…

The men that Jesus encountered along the shores of the Sea of Galilee did not have access to sophisticated technology to track schools of fish, but I am quite certain that fishing the same waters day after day, year after year, gave them an intuitive feel for when and where to cast their nets on a given day. When they put down their nets in a given place, it was because they thought they had a reasonable chance of catching something.

Imagine then how you might feel if a non-fisherman standing on the shore presumed to tell you where to drop your nets? Imagine further that it’s already been a long and unproductive night of fishing. You are tired and would just assume call it a day. Would you listen to the suggestion?

Well, in John 21:1-14 we’re told that these seasoned fishermen did listen to the advice of the “stranger”. They knew Jesus, but John tells us they didn’t recognize him at first—they couldn’t see him clearly from where they were. It’s only when they pull in the huge catch of fish it becomes clear to them who was standing there all along. Peter swims to shore (vintage Peter here!) leaving the others to haul the boat into shore. They all sit down to breakfast with Jesus and not one of them asks: “Who are you?” It’s as if what they witness that morning along the shores of Galilee removes any lingering doubts they may have had about whether Jesus is really alive. (These doubts are very apparent in the disciple’s previous encounters with Jesus in Jerusalem after the resurrection—e.g., Luke 24:36-43; John 20:24-29)

I find it interesting that the disciples obey Jesus’ commands to “cast your nets on the right side” before they actually recognize Jesus in the flesh. It says something about having faith in and placing our trust in what we cannot see. I often think it was easier for the first disciples to believe because Jesus was there with them in the flesh, and maybe it was, but this is a good reminder that faith is never simplistic.

Just as these men have an instinctive sense for where the fish are biting, they seem to instinctively recognize Jesus’ authority—he commands not only the fish but the fishermen as well. And after this encounter, these rugged fishermen from Galilee leave their boats on the shores of Galilee once and for all and follow the Risen Lord where he leads them. After Jesus ascends and the Holy Spirit descends these men are sent forth to drop their nets on other seas and their labors lead to a huge “catch” for the Kingdom of God—all because they were obedient to Jesus, and put down their nets on the right side of the boat.

Who Was In the Boat?

The Sea of Galilee has been a source of life-giving water for the people of Israel for centuries. Over the years, many have also depended on its waters their personal economic wellbeing. Such was the case for a group of fishermen who lived along the shores of Galilee in about 30 AD. Fishing was not an occupation for the feint of heart; it was tough manual labor in that day; there were no automatic winches to help. The nets were hauled by hand; the boats required rowing.

Jesus meets these rugged men along the shores of the sea in their natural environment. They are doing the only work they have ever known—no doubt the work their fathers had taught them to do. As lifelong fishermen, their bodies were no doubt weathered and tanned from countless hours spent in the hot sun, their hands calloused from struggling with the nets, their aroma no doubt distinctive as perspiration mingled with the smells of the sea, their language brimming with local color. They were probably not unlike the workers that populate the neighborhoods where I live in Southeast Baltimore—down-to-earth, good-hearted, hard-working blue-collar workers who work hard… and play hard.

Luke tells a story of an encounter Jesus has with these fishermen—see Luke 5:1-11. He describes a series of events in these verses that culminate not just in a remarkable catch of fish but in life-changing experiences for these men. After this encounter, several of them will decide to leave the only career they have ever known to embark on a journey with Jesus that will take them to places they have never been, doing things these unschooled, ordinary fishermen never dreamed they would do.

How does Jesus connect with them? He categorically does not wait for them to come to the local synagogue—you’ll note he just left the synagogue. No, he goes out to them and enters their world. It’s clear from reading the text that Jesus already knows these men well before the events of Luke 5:1-11 unfold. He has observed them as they work; maybe he has even been out fishing with them. Perhaps it is in being willing to get his hands dirty with them that he gains their respect (notice Simon calls him “Master”) and has an opening for more...

From this group of men, Jesus handpicks several to embark on a new mission. They have spent their life catching fish, and now Jesus will train them to “fish” for men.

Where is Jesus calling you to “put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch”? Maybe it’s a place you’ve been “fishing all night” with nothing to show for it, or maybe it’s a place you never thought of fishing. The question is: Will you listen to the call and obey?