Scary things and Faith like a mustard seed

There are big scary things happening. I feel frozen pretty much perpetually. And. If I could get unfrozen and off my couch what I feel called to, are things that are tiny.

Finish my mailbox that I am painting and put it in the ground. Plant the bulbs that I was supposed to in the fall while I am at it. The internet says they might come up this year, and really might come up next. If they don’t come up I haven’t really lost anything. I already bought them. Might as well be sitting in dirt and not on the corner of my dining room floor.

Why does it all feel so hard? I look around at, what my pastor and friend has been describing as “the horrors” in an exaggerated accent from upper-crust Charleston. I highly recommend this method. We need to meet the absolute absurdity of this time with an absurdity of our own.

I feel like I spent so much of my adolescent life learning and reading about what Christian Heroes do. Great big things in the midst of very scary politics sold to me by women who loved me, faithfully discipling me through the felt board and cardboard figures. I wonder if the true discipling was not the stories but the person showing up every week, drinking Tab out of a lidded cup with a straw when Stanley was simply a boys name. I vaguely remember the stories she told and deeply remember her presence in my life and the color of her lipstick on the straw.

I’ve been reading a lot about the children who grew up in the days of Hitler, and did not grow up to be fascist supporters. I wish I had no interest in this. Whether a child grew up to join the nazi army or not wasn’t about class or place in society. The defining force in a child’s adult choices was about if the kids knew themselves. It was about whether or not the kids knew they were deeply loved for themselves and who God made them to be.

I am teaching again. I spend Tuesday-Friday hanging out with kids who were being crushed in other educational systems. If a kid needs to take a nap or says hey, I really can’t do that, we believe them. We try to find ways to let them be weird and wonderful and also do the thinking and writing we are asking them to do, the kind of thinking and writing they are going to need in unprecedented times.

The work can feel slow and confusing. We aren’t sure we are doing anything some days. But then two months later a kid says something and we think….okay. I guess learning has been taking place the whole time.

A few weeks ago the kids at church learned about the parable of the mustard seed. If you spent a few years in Sunday school you are familiar. The mustard seed is very very very tiny and the mustard tree can grow bigger than 5 feet tall. We drew a full sized tree together that Sunday. It was big. Certainly bigger than the mustard seed we passed around. The parable says our faith is like a mustard seed. It feels so insignificant, it is a very small offering. It can grow into something big and sturdy. The bible says that faith is like that.

The part of the parable I never heard before, the part that I guess I never thought of as important, is the last bit. That the faith is like a mustard seed, and that when it roots itself, grows and opens up birds come and make their homes in the branches. They root and nest their lives in that tree as well. I used to think I had to be the mustard seed, starting out tiny and growing and becoming bigger than you can imagine. I now long to be a bird. making my home in a thing that God has grown and made useful even when it just started as a tiny spec someone stuck in the ground.

Everyday I am reading about what to do when democracy is on the line, and it all feels so freaking silly. So so silly. These huge scary sweeping things are happening, laws being litigated, rights maybe being taken, our countries leadership is re-alligning our allies before our very eyes. I don’t know if National Parks are going to make it. My husbands loan forgiveness program we basically planned our lives around is maybe going away. The tiny food pantry at the church is already perpetually strapped and the benefits people do have are being revoked. What do you mean the solution to that is making sure the kids under my care are well loved and have the space to be their whole selves? What do you mean I should invite my neighbors to my house for soup? Shouldn’t I be doing something more drastic? Isn’t there something to strap myself to in protest?

And the answer is not really, the thing we strap ourselves to is each other. We are sometimes the mustard seed, but more often the birds, finding refuge in the little church, the little school, the place where we can meet together and eat a little and rest. I do not know if this will matter, but I know that trying matters. It has to matter.

Here is my mustard seed. I hope I get to rest in it soon.