A Personal Note From Leslie

Welcome! I’m so glad you’ve found your way here.

My name is Leslie, and if I’ve learned one thing over the last 60 years, it is that God has an exquisite sense of irony and humor. So, I wrote him a poem about it. I don’t know if He thought it was funny or good, but I liked it, and I know He gets a kick out of my liking things. Anyway, it inspired this blog.

So, what’s the joke?

“This petite, feisty, 60-year-old, menopausal, very intelligent, recently divorced, grieving, and dazed woman walks into a seminary…”

It’s definitely ironic, and it might be funny, but it’s actually true. Despite all my excuses and fears, I surprisingly find myself working toward my Master’s in Spiritual Formation at Portland Seminary, getting very serious and official indeed about my spiritual formation and growth. I jest, but only in part; I’ve been following Jesus for a very long time, and we all know what He’s like. Still, although I’ve been intentionally and ardently seeking the Kingdom of God for nigh on 30 years, and accompanying others on their journey, I hadn’t seriously envisioned embracing the rigors of a graduate degree. No, at this point in my life, I had imagined something entirely different.

You see, up till about two years ago, I thought my approaching retirement years would be golden. What I got instead was “nice brown” – which was my Southern grandmother’s wry description of burnt toast – and my maiden name back. It sounds genteel if you say it with a southern drawl – go ahead, try it! But, however you say it, it’s still burnt toast; it stinks up the damn house, and it’s inedible. So, after two gut and heart-busting years of trying to salvage the toast, twenty-one years of my life were tossed with an electronic signature onto the compost pile.

Well, well, well, said I. 

This is when I penned The Joke, or it wrote itself through me. It’s a lament, a raging cry of stunned pain and disbelief, an intimate yet wary, existential query to Abba about the meaning of life, the reality and purpose of suffering and death, the nature of humanity and one human in particular, and the nature of the God who made this world. In other words, what the hell just happened and don’t you love poetry?!

Deep subject indeed. It’s difficult to overstate how this kind of experience pulls you painfully apart from the inside out. Everything and everyone you thought you knew falls away like things attached with glue, till you’re left standing up to your neck in a big pile of dead stuff, talking (mostly yelling) to ghosts in the dark, trying to remember who you are (did you ever know?), what this all means, where it’s all going, and how on earth are you going to recover at this time of life when all the juice in your body, dollars in your account, and “friendship” of so-called friends have dried up. Dear God, just how deep is this pile of shit I just got tossed into?

Seed deep, He replied. Haha, very funny, Jesus, I see what you did there.

But then I actually did see what He did there, but with brand new eyes. Moreover, I realized that although we all wish He was, it turns out the LORD Jesus wasn’t kidding about all the dying to live stuff.

Remember when He said this?
“Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.” John 12:24

And this:
“For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life because of me will find it. – Matthew 16:25

Also this:
“And he said to all, ‘If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.” Luke 9:23

Oh, and this:
“To put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires.” – Ephesian 4:22

Honestly, He just goes on and on about it. Not only that, He put His money where His mouth is and actually pulled it off, achieving nothing less than the salvation of the entire cosmos and our dusty backsides in the process. Definitely NOT KIDDING. And so, behold our Funny Valentine. Our Ironic, Trickster God throws his darlings a cosmic wink as He dies on a Cross not only vanquishing our mortal enemy but making it the very ground of our new life and His new Kingdom. Haha! Very funny, Jesus!

So, taking Jesus at his many Words on the subject and considering I love a good laugh and I’m in seminary, I thought I should probably reconsider how this brand new, massive pile of dead stuff I’m now the reticent owner of might be the hilarious soil of my healing and resurrection. Yes, there are copious amounts of dead things here, but what if all this death is the fecund medium whereof God is fulfilling His loving and faithful promise to ruthlessly tenderly form me into the likeness of Jesus, and give me that abundant life for which I desperately hunger and thirst?

Now, let me reassure you, dear reader. This blog is not the venting of an aging woman about a painful divorce. That’s what Facebook is for. Rather, I provided that bit of drama as a backdrop so you would know I’m as deep in it as you are. And, now that we have common ground (wink wink), we also have ample opportunity for authentic, engaging discussions about what all this shit means. And, in case I didn’t mention it, I’m in seminary. That is to say, I’m surrounded by brilliant, thoughtful, and, most importantly, Spirit-led prayerful people who are masters in the art of dying to live. These incredibly fruitful folks have been through it, and I’m sitting at their feet for a reason.

And so, dear friends, this is your invitation to roll with me in the Seed Deep soil of dying to live, because I know you or something in your life is dying too. How? Because God, in His ironic, weird wisdom, has ordained that life through death be encoded in the fabric of this cosmos; it’s a cosmic joke, remember? If you can’t beat Him (and you can’t), you may as well join Him. And me. Besides, misery loves company (that’s Biblical, by the way). But so do hope, joy, faith, and love (also Biblical).

So does life.

So, if you’re coming along…

Ready. Set. Die.