A Place at the Table, Year 2

Two years ago, Wendy and I were visiting one of my favorite people who happens to work at our favorite church (www.ecclesiahouston.org) when we were introduced to a new way to view Lent.  Having grown up in a good, evangelical, protestant church, I had never really given Lent a whole lot of thought.  It was chalked up as "one of those odd things that Catholics do."  However, one of the men that I admire greatly, Chris Seay, was in the midst of a Lenten experiment that later became chronicled in a book entitled A Place at the Table: 40 Days of Solidarity with the Poor (buy it on Kindle here: A Place at the Table).

Last year, a group of us from the 8th Day Collective jumped into Lent with both feet.  If you search back through my blog, you can find last year's thoughts.  It was an amazing, painful, bonding experience for me personally and for us as a church.  The basic premise of the challenge is this: Lent is the 46-day period from Ash Wednesday to Easter.  During the 40 days (excluding the 6 Sundays), the challenge is to eat only foods that your Compassion/World Vision/CRF/etc. child would have access to.  Then, on Sundays, you can eat whatever you want in whatever quantity.  (You'd better believe that there was a lot of BACON consumed by our church on Sundays!)  The hope of the challenge is that, through the experience and the devotional at the back of A Place at the Table, we would develop a deeper appreciation for the plight of those around the world who live in poverty.  (Interesting side note: Apparently there is a movie coming out of the same title that explores the plight of some 50 million Americans who don't know where their next meal will come from.)  Then, you take the money that you would have regularly spent on food and give it to a charitable organization of your choice, preferably one that is doing something about the plight of the poor.

Even though it seems like just yesterday that we did this, it has been a year, and the Lenten season is back upon us.  So, the challenge is back as well.  And with two days of the fast over, I'm not sure I'm gonna make it.  I don't remember beans, rice, potatoes, bread, and black coffee being quite this boring.  (Actually, I DO remember the black coffee being this boring.) On Ash Wednesday, I walked out of lunch hungry, wondering how long it was until dinner.  And at dinner, that baked potato with nothing but salt was about as bland as a Physics lecture.  Wendy assures me that it was just as bad last year, but this has a different feeling.  Maybe I should go back and read my own blog from last year and remember just how miserable I was.

It's pretty disappointing, really.  I have gotten so used to whatever I want whenever I want it that there seems to be no need for discipline.  No need for Jesus.  No need grace.  Whereas last year's challenge led me into a deep appreciation of the plight of the poor, maybe this year's challenge will lead me deep inside my own psyche to remind me just how poor I really am.  How much I need Jesus.  How much I should depend on grace.

But I sure am hungry today.

A Place at the Table, day 38, 39, 40

So here we are.  In what seems like an unbelievable turn of events, I have survived the 40 day "A Place at the Table" fast with a minimal amount of damage.  As a matter of fact, there have been several positive things that have come out of this fast, just from a physical perspective.  We'll start this blog post with the two big advantages of this fast for me physically and we'll see where the blog goes from there.

Advantage #1: I learned to like beans.
I know this seems like such a minor detail, but for those of you who know how dadgum picky I am, this is a pretty huge deal.  This is going to be of extra significance to me because of where I currently live.  Every other restaurant in Lubbock is a Mexican restaurant, and my ability to get meaningful sides with my quesadillas, tacos, and fajitas is going to greatly increase my opportunities to leave a restaurant full.  I should no longer have to keep my main course separated from the sides, lest the thing that I like get "infected" by the things that I don't.  I could legitimately go to Abuelo's and eat a meal that included no meat and still walk out full.  The implications of this are life-changing.  I hope.

Advantage #2: I lost a bunch of weight.
This is the easiest advantage to behold.  Over the last few weeks especially I have gotten comments on how much weight I have lost.  My insurance guy caught me in the grocery store today and commented on it.  I've actually been losing weight since November (there's a story to it -- you should ask me some time!), and have only lost about 10-12 pounds on this fast.  But I guess it was the kind of weight loss that shows up in my face, which has led to the increase of comments.  I am now (at least according to my scale) at the weight that I should max out at for my age and height.  It's pretty sad that it takes a 40-day fast to get me down to where I should have been maxed out.  But it does feel good to be here.

Now, as far as the other advantages, I feel like I have only just begun to reap benefits in other areas of my life.  There have been days in the past several years when I have wondered if I was disciplined enough to do anything for a week, let alone 40 days.  This experience has shown me that I do, indeed, have that level of discipline.  And I just can't get away from the linguistic tie between "discipline" and "disciple."  Maybe I do have what it takes to be a disciple of Jesus after all.

The camaraderie that has been formed in our little group during this 40 days has been unreal, even for those who weren't able to participate in the fast.  I don't really understand where this level of community came from or how we got there, but it has been phenomenal for us.  It was the absolute BEST way to begin a journey together, and I even feel like this fast is going to inform where our community goes from here.

Even though the blog will change from being focused on the fast to being more holistic, I feel like the topics and discussions and conclusions that I come to in these writings will be informed by what went down during this fast.  So thanks, Chris Seay (like he reads this!) for having the courage to experience this fast yourself a year ago and for writing it down for others of us to be a part of.  Thanks to those of you who stuck with this blog and encouraged me along the way to keep writing.  And thanks to this little community that enacted this fast together and was there to whine and complain about it with me.  I am so excited about where we go from here.  I mean, after Feaster!!!!!

A Place at the Table, day 25

The conversations of the past week have been enlightening.  My wife is convinced that once I can focus all of my attention on this new movement, I'll have more answers.  I hope she's right, because it sure seems like my answer to every other question these days is, "I don't know."  What are you going to do?  I don't know.  How is this going to look? I don't know.  When can this become an inclusive gathering that welcomes all people?  I don't know.  What are the Cubs World Series chances?  Slim.  And none.  But mostly none.  What does discipleship look like?  I don't know.

It's that last question that I have been wrestling with the most these days.  If I see this little movement as a missional, disciple-making movement, what does that mean?  And how do we get there?  While I certainly don't have the answers, I do have some thoughts.  So I'll share.

I have come to realize that discipleship is an intimately personal endeavor.  So to try and "program" discipleship is quite a misnomer, at least insofar as we try to have a one-size-fits-all approach.  What discipleship looks like to this friend might not be discipleship to the next one.  While there are certainly some overarching principles, one size does not fit all.

And I think that one of the aspects of discipleship that the church has sorely missed is the notion of discipline.  There has been within the church recently (especially within the "emergent" church) a desire to recapture what has been termed the "spiritual disciplines."  Things like fasting and meditation and lectio divina and silence and examen.  These are things that, for the most part, the church has ignored.  I could devote multiple posts to the reasons why we find ourselves in this place, but that's another blog for another time.

But I'm pretty sure that you can't have disciples without discipline.  I know that should seem obvious, especially in the English language, but sometimes we miss the most obvious things because they're, well, too obvious.  As my friend says, "If only there were some clue . . ."  More than anything else, this is what the fast has taught me.  Discipline is a non-negotiable part of discipleship.  The last thing I want to do while making my daughters' lunches in the morning is stick to my beans/rice/potato/bread diet.  I would SO love to lick the peanut butter knife or eat one of those apples.  But I have made a commitment to this discipline, and so I am sticking with it.

My dream for this little community of friends/believers/journeyers is that we would continue to hold one another accountable to some form of discipline.  We're (hopefully) going to follow this 40-day fasting experience with a 40-day experience with reading the Scriptures.  And then maybe a 40-day journey with journaling.  Then maybe 40 days of prayer.  I just can't escape this notion that disciples have discipline.

And the ways that discipleship shows up in the midst of these disciplines is sometimes unexpected.  One family in our group has re-engaged one another in conversations about going on the mission field in a foreign land.  They didn't set out in this fast to find life direction, but it is happening as a byproduct of discipleship.  Another family is re-examining finances and seeing how much exactly they need to live on so that they can give the rest away.  The fast was never designed to mess with personal finances.  Still another family is wrestling with what it means to be a community that "does no harm" in the things that we purchase and where we purchase them from.  Again, this was never a focus of this fast.

But when we go a little deeper than the surface, we find that there is much to be pondered, explored, and discussed.  Many of our deepest wishes and desires show up when we're willing to get beneath the surface.  This is what happens when disciples of Jesus rediscover the importance of discipline.

A Place at the Table, Day 2

I don't know why it is, but day 2 of a fast has always been more difficult for me than the first.  Our community found that to be true yesterday.  One of our friends who gave up candy had to remove a candy bowl from her classroom.  I walked out of my lunch appointment (baked potato at McAlister's . . . again) and was already hungry.  Another friend ate dinner at 5 and was ready for second dinner at 6.  Like he's a hobbit or something.  Still another friend was almost cursing her co-workers for how much they were eating in front of her.

But as some of us reflected on our feelings, we were struck by how good we have it.  If we don't like what the dinner plan is, we can find something else in the pantry.  If we don't like the fast-food joint of choice, we can go to another place, usually next door.

The girl that we met in our reading on day 2 (A Place at the Table, by Chris Seay) is from a family of six children in Haiti.  Some days they don't have enough food for all of the kids to eat.  Are you serious?  When was the last time I didn't have enough food to eat?  Never?  And as a parent, how do you decide which kids eat and which kids don't?  How broken is this world that we live in that some parents have to choose which kids get to eat and which don't while other parents stock their cabinets with enough food to help make their child obese?  God, bring your kingdom! Please!

So how do we bring kingdom in the midst of this level of brokenness?  It starts by a realization of how blessed we are.  Every day I have enough food on my table to feed my family and then some.  I have a job that allows me to not have to worry that my kids will have to go without.  My daily choices are nearly endless -- meats and potatoes, fruits and veggies, starches and grains.  I have more variety in which type of cheese I choose at the grocery store than most people have types of food that they get in a lifetime.

But the blessings of life become curses when we fail to realize that they come with responsibility.  My hope for myself and my community is that during this season of Lent we will be shown how we as a blessed people can bring blessing to the people that we know and people that we will never meet.  If ONLY this happens, it will be worth all of the hunger pangs that we will feel these 40 days.

A Place at the Table, Day 1

Last year, Wendy & I visited Ecclesia in Houston over spring break.  Our friend, Steven, is a pastor there, and we wanted to check out his church.  While we were there, the senior pastor, Chris Seay, was guiding his family through a lenten journey that included eating only what their Compassion child would be able to eat.  I was intrigued, especially when I overheard Chris' teenage daughter telling someone how excited she was that it was Sunday and that they would get to eat something other than beans and rice.

Chris' lenten journey found its way into print in his most recent book A Place at the Table.  It is a short book that lays out the plan and then walks you through the journey.  I won't rehash the book here; if you want to know more, go buy the book.  Then read it.

I challenged our community here in Lubbock to consider joining with me (& Chris & others) in this 40 days of solidarity with the poor.  Several of our families have joined with me, and I thought this would be a good journey to blog about for the next several weeks.

I think what I was most dreading about the diet of our Ethiopian Compassion child was the black coffee.  If you know me, you know that I like my coffee horribly girly.  But coffee was a non-negotiable, so I decided I would have to drink it black.  I'm pretty sure that I didn't like it, but the 6 cups throughout the day kept my mind off of my hunger.

The diet in Ethiopia consists of maize, rice, potatoes, beans, & bread.  Being a picky eater, that leaves me with rice, potatoes, and bread.  Maybe I'll learn to tolerate beans.  I probably ought to anyway, seeing as every other meal in Lubbock includes beans.  I got a text from a friend/fellow-journeyer mid day saying that the purchasing of 5 pound of rice and 5 pounds of beans really made this journey a reality.  I agreed.

I had a lunch appointment, so I sat down at McAlister's with a potato.  No butter.  No sour cream.  Just a potato.  As I was halfway through eating the skin of the potato, my friend asked me if I normally ate the skin of my potatoes.  When I informed him that I did NOT, in fact, usually eat the skin, he asked if I was going to lick the plate after I was done.  Had he not asked me that, I probably would have.

Dinner was a bowl of plain white rice.  I ended up eating less than half of the calories allotted to me by my trusty iPhone app.  As a matter of fact, my app warned me that if I didn't begin consuming more, I could cause some problems to my body.  First world problems, I guess.

Later in the evening I got a text from another fellow-journeyer, comiserating with me about what an unenjoyable journey this was turning out to be.  But then, this friend-who is a hard-core Yankees fan-told me that his family had decided to sponsor a child from the Dominican Republic.  And he told me that the little boy's name was Jeter.  Not gonna lie -- I teared up.  Kingdom was breaking out among us on day one of the journey.

I went to bed on day one of the journey with an empty stomach, but a grateful heart.  I know that it's only the beginning, but I am blessed to be journeying with godly friends.  And I know that feast day is in four days.  Beware, Reese's peanut butter hearts.  Beware.