AN AMBASSADOR FOR CHRIST

My vacation surprise was that the day we were scheduled to visit my grandmother was the day I ended up doing her funeral. It’s all good, she was 96 years old and a true saint.

She left me her collection of Bibles and the challenge of being asked to curate the service and burial with two Southern Baptist clergy in a little old Baptist church in the Shenandoah Valley of Southwest Virginia – in the middle of nowhere – where I ran around in as a kid.

My grandmother had been a member of that church for 63 years and was their organist and pianist. And I remember sitting down and saying to myself about the task at hand – working with clergy from my fundamentalist upbringing which was not so rosy – don’t think it, be with it. Don’t think it, be with it.

When I spoke at her funeral, I grabbed the sides of the pulpit and joked I was channeling my Baptist roots. The clergy were so generous, and the service was beautiful. A true celebration of life and the ecumenical possibility of holding a space from the inner world and outer world with clergy, who on the surface, I could have simply disregarded as a motley crew. And then I said we’re not here to check boxes. We’re not here to perform. We all have the same story about Frances – because she so consistently and faithfully lived the path of Jesus’s conscious love. The inside was the outside. What you saw was what it was. And then I said, I’ve learned to live Christianity from the inside-out (not the outside-in, right?) We are not here to check boxes if we’re here for true spiritual transformation. I learned to live Christianity from the inside out. And I learned it from her. A 96-year-old simple woman, widowed for 22 years, who worked at the post office on a country road. What a gift it is to be an ambassador for Christ in all times, and in all contexts, and in all places, giving Christ thanks for all things.

In Christ,

Ben+