With tears in my eyes, and agnosticism steaming from my pores, I once again thank you Nadia for your loving words and self-revelation.
At 72 there are parts of me I don't accept. Parts of me I haven't come to terms with. And so much of the time I see myself throught the lens of those parts; to my detriment.
So what?
First of all you are not dead yet...and even if you are dead...do you know what is possible then?
Thomas, be patient. Thomas, be self-compassionate. Thomas, extend to yourself the love you would give another under similar circumstances (or maybe not - was that you, Thomas, I just saw judging someone? (-:))
Thomas, be here now. Be here now.
(If even Nadia can do it - you can do it too. Loving you Nadia (-:)) AND THANKS!!!
Oh Nadia: you do make me laugh. This time, it's with your comment "Just LOOK at all the new friends I'm making" per the comments on your Active Voice interview. I too live in a kind subculture. I like it here
So many thoughts... 1. love that parables don’t come with assigned roles... 2. as our culture esteems capitalism and profit ..felt sad about all the sermons i’ve heard where God is the rich, powerful, etc. Of course God can be those roles ... but absolutely love and feel the truth that God is the gardener.... 3. A long time ago, a lutheran missionary taught me that God does not care about efficiency... because it takes two weeks to walk from Egypt to the promised land and the Israelites wandered for 40 years as God transformed them from slaves to a nation.....4. Let me end with a joke (from readers digest) i’ve been sharing as i was feeling out of sync with the pace others seem to be leading their lives. A turtle was crossing the road when it was mugged by two snails. The police came and asked the turtle what happened. The turtle says.... i don’t know, it all happened so fast.
5. So as life happens faster than i can handle, i’m taking comfort that the gardener will supply all i need to mature into what i already am.
Jun 12, 2023·edited Jun 12, 2023Liked by Nadia Bolz-Weber
Thanks for sharing this, Nadia. By the time I was 6 months into sobriety, I was starting to get pretty frustrated. All the people who came in around the same time as me were having these big spiritual ah-ha moments, and even though I was working the steps and doing the prayer and meditation thing to the best of my ability, I just wasn't feeling that warm fuzzy BFF thing with my Higher Power that they all seemed to be feeling. My sponsor and I had many conversations over the next few months about how I was about ready to give up on this whole "God" thing because it just wasn't clicking. He suggested I give it time and reminded me that as with any other relationship, it might take time to cultivate a comfortable one with my Higher Power. I think that's why when I returned to the church 3 years later, I automatically assumed God was the tree in this parable and I was any number of people with any number of attitudes toward it on any given day. Eventually I saw the fruit of that relationship. More importantly, today I realize that even before the fruit was ripe, the tree still provided SO much for me: shade and shelter from the rain, branches that could support a hammock for much needed rest, a chorus of bird song, beautiful fall leaves, literal life-giving oxygen, and so much more than the narrow criteria of value I was demanding.
Thank God the Holy Spirit and my sponsor are both so patient!
I quit my job as a teacher two years ago and have been using my time and savings writing the novel I have wanted to write since I was a teenager. I was visiting some family friends last week, and the patriarch of the family asked me if I was going to return to teaching next year, and I said that I would be taking one more year to write. He kind of rolled his eyes and made a joke about how I had surpassed the age range to even be considered a late bloomer. I laughed it off, but it really hurt my feelings, and I was embarrassed because it became clear that this is how he and his family view me- maybe lazy, aimless, lost, and floundering.
The thing is, I know that I'm doing the right thing. I had an internal crisis when I was doing the math and deciding if I needed to go back to work in the fall or it I could choose and afford to take another year, and the answer was clear, and I chose to take the year.
I get to give it one more year. I feel confident that I actually CAN finish my projects in that time, or at least get pretty darn close, so it feels so good, when I feel like I have been called a fruitless tree, to hear the Man Working In The Vineyard say, "Give her one more year. Let's see what happens."
Thanks so much, Nadia - your reflection helped me meditate on the possibility that even at 70 years old, I am still being worked on and hoped for by the love of God and my neighbors, and like the fig tree that might bear fruit, I still might discover some new and even surprising things.
Girl, you have got to stop reading my mind and heart and knowing what I need to hear. I am coming out of teaching at a faith-based school that seemed more judgement-based than anything. I feel like I have PTSD from the months of nagging and finger wagging and reminders of how short we all fall each day in God's eyes. It truly sapped some of my joy and spirit. I walked out of church one day in protest, but I did not bring my concerns to anyone official because I was just so damn tired of fighting them off in my mind, and I didn't have the strength to do it in person. Thank you for reminding me that God is NOT the crabby rich guy in the parables! (And that that guy is me...gulp.) I don't want to be that crabby guy, and I don't want to be vulnerable with those kinds of folks, and I'm tired of having those voices in my head from a childhood/lifetime of spiritual slap downs from INSIDE THE CHURCH. I'm a teacher; if I reminded my kids that often how uninformed and undeveloped they are every day, they would certainly not feel motivated, except for the worst of reasons, to trust in their growth and learning and to move toward it. Anyway, thanks for bringing grace to the forefront of the discussion again. Peace and love.
Well shit. 💩 In case you’re wondering whom you wrote that sermon for, it was me. 🙋🏽♀️ Having been an active AA member for nine years now and having begged God to remove my shortcomings repeatedly for quite some time so I can’t imagine it’s just my selfishness and self-centeredness that led me to type that. 🙏🏽 Because on my timeline, surely, that’s plenty of time to remove my shortcomings. The relationship with my mother...the continued advocacy for my son’s dyslexia intervention as he reads at an elementary level at age 13, and behavior issues that come along with it that oftentimes leave me feeling powerless...and then when you started describing my God...patient, understanding, loving, compassionate, and full of grace...😭😭😭 And, finally, I said the words before you that the vineyard owner is me. Thank you for all the times you’ve been God with skin on for me. So grateful for your grace-filled delivery of God’s message that I can hear with my heart! 💗
OMG, Nadia! You can’t imagine, or, maybe you can, how blessed I was to read this sermon. My daughter and I are transitioning from a mentally challenged 20-something & caregiver/Mom relationship to a regular mother & daughter relationship after years of health struggles. Finding our equilibrium has been very difficult, and two weeks ago she moved out to live with her boyfriend. He’s a great guy and that’s fine, but living on her own has been difficult, and I wasn’t sure she was ready. But your sermon reminded me that God sees her and is working on her, just like He sees me and is working on me.... So who knows what can happen in another year. Your ministry means so much to me. Thank you for letting God use you.
This afternoon, as you entered into my messages, I was excited! Looking back at yesterday, our Fire dept, Dawson Volunteer Fire Dept, Dawson, Tx was toned out for a at the time a small 3 acre grass fire, well five other depts later, and a total of 25 acres. Burned, four fire trucks stuck in mud, we were all pulled out of our stuck situation, I get back home around 7:00pm, a mother of a storm blows through, our power went off and was not restored until a little after 1:00 pm today. In reading this I can honestly say I didn’t run about scream and shout, but simply waited. My wife is in Maryland visiting a “ Flattie” friend who also is a breast cancer survivor, so it was just me, Wade the cat, Sadie, Zeke, and Gibbs our dogs who patiently endured. Anyway, this spoke to me because as I read through the Bible, I journal, and share my thoughts on Facebook as a story. I am thankful for another day, another chance to just be still. Thanks Pastor, thank you so much. I truly appreciate you and this ministry.
There is a softening to the hard edges of my judging mind through your words, always bringing God forth in the most loving voice. Surely the arms extended version of God is the intended form in which to know this love we are blessed with. So quick we are to take ourselves down, yet....another year, all the time in the world, this patience we can emulate for ourselves and others. Thank you💛
Hi Nadia, I'm a recent arrival to these conversations in "The Corners." Thanks for your words on that parable.Then I listened to your interview at "The Active Voice." Thanks so much for that too. Both shined some light into my darkness, I lost my wife to pancreatic cancer a few months before Covid hit. Like your sister, I'll never be the same. Yet, like fig trees, I'm in my fourth year of resurrection without much fruit evidentas yet. We were married 42 years. I don't believe I'll ever stop missing her. But I am getting used to life without her, and I never thought I could. You are so right that community is the means by which Jesus brings us into the light. For two years cards, emails, surprise drop=ind by friends, my kids, long forgotten friends on Facebook checked in on me from time to time and loved me back to that realization that, as you said, I still had faith. YouTube helped too. I found people like Pete Enns, Robin Parry, Brad Jersak, David Bentleey Hart, Brian Zahnd, Rachel Held Evans and you to listen to. I'm finally starting to get it that Jesus loves my false self just as much as the true self that he made. Thanl you for this corner.
There was a meme on FB recently that quoted Hemingway to the effect that to search for “meaning” in his work was to, effectively, strangle the work. We risk the same with the parables, though I hadn’t considered it prior to Nadia’s sermon. In the Ignatian Exercises, one imagines themselves in different roles in Bible story. Sometimes the woman at the well, sometimes the Rabbi, sometimes the people the woman evangelizes, for example. Why don’t we imagine the Holy One in different roles as the Teacher tells us these parables.
As I listened to the sermon, I realized the “landlord” image of G*d is similar to a modern efficiency expert. Even worse, the landlord asks for the extreme, likely in the hopes that the peasants will achieve the most profitable outcome. I’ve experienced bosses like that. It’s soul-killing.
But if G*d is not an efficiency expert. The seven days of creation weren’t efficient. Don’t you suppose the Creator could have done it all in a microsecond, faster than a modern stock trade? No: instead, the Holy One was beyond time; S/he lovingly dwelled over creation insuring that each part was “good.”
It feels so right to envision G*d as a gardener. After all, Mary called Magdalene imagined the risen Jesus was a gardener.
For so many years I assumed this was a parable about Gods judgement and surprise....it’s about Gods Grace and OUR judgement. For me it’s more than impatience, I look at my fig tree and get mad when it doesn’t produce oranges! Henri Nouwen said that the the greatest temptation isn’t money,
sex or power, the greatest temptation is self-rejection. That rings true for me. Why is it so hard to believe we custom built and perfectly loved?
(On another note, I’m not a biblical literalist, but it is also true that throwing the manure of life on my roots does somehow ensure my spiritual growth will continue, so there’s that)
I can't even TELL you how much I love having found this glorious Substack stream. Have been blissfully sharing your "Forgive Assholes!" video for years, but never followed the trail. Wish more Christians were even HALF this fucking cool, in deeply honoring what is loving and true. Will be annointing my soul here for all the many moons to come. THANK YOU SOOOOO MUCH!!!
This is the only moment in which I am alive.
With tears in my eyes, and agnosticism steaming from my pores, I once again thank you Nadia for your loving words and self-revelation.
At 72 there are parts of me I don't accept. Parts of me I haven't come to terms with. And so much of the time I see myself throught the lens of those parts; to my detriment.
So what?
First of all you are not dead yet...and even if you are dead...do you know what is possible then?
Thomas, be patient. Thomas, be self-compassionate. Thomas, extend to yourself the love you would give another under similar circumstances (or maybe not - was that you, Thomas, I just saw judging someone? (-:))
Thomas, be here now. Be here now.
(If even Nadia can do it - you can do it too. Loving you Nadia (-:)) AND THANKS!!!
I didn't see your comment when I wrote mine - we are both in our 70s and still reveling in life!
Oh Nadia: you do make me laugh. This time, it's with your comment "Just LOOK at all the new friends I'm making" per the comments on your Active Voice interview. I too live in a kind subculture. I like it here
SAME! That made me giggle!
So many thoughts... 1. love that parables don’t come with assigned roles... 2. as our culture esteems capitalism and profit ..felt sad about all the sermons i’ve heard where God is the rich, powerful, etc. Of course God can be those roles ... but absolutely love and feel the truth that God is the gardener.... 3. A long time ago, a lutheran missionary taught me that God does not care about efficiency... because it takes two weeks to walk from Egypt to the promised land and the Israelites wandered for 40 years as God transformed them from slaves to a nation.....4. Let me end with a joke (from readers digest) i’ve been sharing as i was feeling out of sync with the pace others seem to be leading their lives. A turtle was crossing the road when it was mugged by two snails. The police came and asked the turtle what happened. The turtle says.... i don’t know, it all happened so fast.
5. So as life happens faster than i can handle, i’m taking comfort that the gardener will supply all i need to mature into what i already am.
Thanks for sharing this, Nadia. By the time I was 6 months into sobriety, I was starting to get pretty frustrated. All the people who came in around the same time as me were having these big spiritual ah-ha moments, and even though I was working the steps and doing the prayer and meditation thing to the best of my ability, I just wasn't feeling that warm fuzzy BFF thing with my Higher Power that they all seemed to be feeling. My sponsor and I had many conversations over the next few months about how I was about ready to give up on this whole "God" thing because it just wasn't clicking. He suggested I give it time and reminded me that as with any other relationship, it might take time to cultivate a comfortable one with my Higher Power. I think that's why when I returned to the church 3 years later, I automatically assumed God was the tree in this parable and I was any number of people with any number of attitudes toward it on any given day. Eventually I saw the fruit of that relationship. More importantly, today I realize that even before the fruit was ripe, the tree still provided SO much for me: shade and shelter from the rain, branches that could support a hammock for much needed rest, a chorus of bird song, beautiful fall leaves, literal life-giving oxygen, and so much more than the narrow criteria of value I was demanding.
Thank God the Holy Spirit and my sponsor are both so patient!
I can't tell you how timely this is for me.
I quit my job as a teacher two years ago and have been using my time and savings writing the novel I have wanted to write since I was a teenager. I was visiting some family friends last week, and the patriarch of the family asked me if I was going to return to teaching next year, and I said that I would be taking one more year to write. He kind of rolled his eyes and made a joke about how I had surpassed the age range to even be considered a late bloomer. I laughed it off, but it really hurt my feelings, and I was embarrassed because it became clear that this is how he and his family view me- maybe lazy, aimless, lost, and floundering.
The thing is, I know that I'm doing the right thing. I had an internal crisis when I was doing the math and deciding if I needed to go back to work in the fall or it I could choose and afford to take another year, and the answer was clear, and I chose to take the year.
I get to give it one more year. I feel confident that I actually CAN finish my projects in that time, or at least get pretty darn close, so it feels so good, when I feel like I have been called a fruitless tree, to hear the Man Working In The Vineyard say, "Give her one more year. Let's see what happens."
Thank you so much for sharing this.
Thanks so much, Nadia - your reflection helped me meditate on the possibility that even at 70 years old, I am still being worked on and hoped for by the love of God and my neighbors, and like the fig tree that might bear fruit, I still might discover some new and even surprising things.
Girl, you have got to stop reading my mind and heart and knowing what I need to hear. I am coming out of teaching at a faith-based school that seemed more judgement-based than anything. I feel like I have PTSD from the months of nagging and finger wagging and reminders of how short we all fall each day in God's eyes. It truly sapped some of my joy and spirit. I walked out of church one day in protest, but I did not bring my concerns to anyone official because I was just so damn tired of fighting them off in my mind, and I didn't have the strength to do it in person. Thank you for reminding me that God is NOT the crabby rich guy in the parables! (And that that guy is me...gulp.) I don't want to be that crabby guy, and I don't want to be vulnerable with those kinds of folks, and I'm tired of having those voices in my head from a childhood/lifetime of spiritual slap downs from INSIDE THE CHURCH. I'm a teacher; if I reminded my kids that often how uninformed and undeveloped they are every day, they would certainly not feel motivated, except for the worst of reasons, to trust in their growth and learning and to move toward it. Anyway, thanks for bringing grace to the forefront of the discussion again. Peace and love.
This is beautiful Nadia. Thank you.
One more year.
Then another one more year.
And another.
And on...
Watching and listening to you speak is so heartening. Thanks for finding the right words for the right moment.
Well shit. 💩 In case you’re wondering whom you wrote that sermon for, it was me. 🙋🏽♀️ Having been an active AA member for nine years now and having begged God to remove my shortcomings repeatedly for quite some time so I can’t imagine it’s just my selfishness and self-centeredness that led me to type that. 🙏🏽 Because on my timeline, surely, that’s plenty of time to remove my shortcomings. The relationship with my mother...the continued advocacy for my son’s dyslexia intervention as he reads at an elementary level at age 13, and behavior issues that come along with it that oftentimes leave me feeling powerless...and then when you started describing my God...patient, understanding, loving, compassionate, and full of grace...😭😭😭 And, finally, I said the words before you that the vineyard owner is me. Thank you for all the times you’ve been God with skin on for me. So grateful for your grace-filled delivery of God’s message that I can hear with my heart! 💗
So glad it resonated. xo
OMG, Nadia! You can’t imagine, or, maybe you can, how blessed I was to read this sermon. My daughter and I are transitioning from a mentally challenged 20-something & caregiver/Mom relationship to a regular mother & daughter relationship after years of health struggles. Finding our equilibrium has been very difficult, and two weeks ago she moved out to live with her boyfriend. He’s a great guy and that’s fine, but living on her own has been difficult, and I wasn’t sure she was ready. But your sermon reminded me that God sees her and is working on her, just like He sees me and is working on me.... So who knows what can happen in another year. Your ministry means so much to me. Thank you for letting God use you.
This afternoon, as you entered into my messages, I was excited! Looking back at yesterday, our Fire dept, Dawson Volunteer Fire Dept, Dawson, Tx was toned out for a at the time a small 3 acre grass fire, well five other depts later, and a total of 25 acres. Burned, four fire trucks stuck in mud, we were all pulled out of our stuck situation, I get back home around 7:00pm, a mother of a storm blows through, our power went off and was not restored until a little after 1:00 pm today. In reading this I can honestly say I didn’t run about scream and shout, but simply waited. My wife is in Maryland visiting a “ Flattie” friend who also is a breast cancer survivor, so it was just me, Wade the cat, Sadie, Zeke, and Gibbs our dogs who patiently endured. Anyway, this spoke to me because as I read through the Bible, I journal, and share my thoughts on Facebook as a story. I am thankful for another day, another chance to just be still. Thanks Pastor, thank you so much. I truly appreciate you and this ministry.
There is a softening to the hard edges of my judging mind through your words, always bringing God forth in the most loving voice. Surely the arms extended version of God is the intended form in which to know this love we are blessed with. So quick we are to take ourselves down, yet....another year, all the time in the world, this patience we can emulate for ourselves and others. Thank you💛
Hi Nadia, I'm a recent arrival to these conversations in "The Corners." Thanks for your words on that parable.Then I listened to your interview at "The Active Voice." Thanks so much for that too. Both shined some light into my darkness, I lost my wife to pancreatic cancer a few months before Covid hit. Like your sister, I'll never be the same. Yet, like fig trees, I'm in my fourth year of resurrection without much fruit evidentas yet. We were married 42 years. I don't believe I'll ever stop missing her. But I am getting used to life without her, and I never thought I could. You are so right that community is the means by which Jesus brings us into the light. For two years cards, emails, surprise drop=ind by friends, my kids, long forgotten friends on Facebook checked in on me from time to time and loved me back to that realization that, as you said, I still had faith. YouTube helped too. I found people like Pete Enns, Robin Parry, Brad Jersak, David Bentleey Hart, Brian Zahnd, Rachel Held Evans and you to listen to. I'm finally starting to get it that Jesus loves my false self just as much as the true self that he made. Thanl you for this corner.
Welcome, Bob. Glad you're here.
There was a meme on FB recently that quoted Hemingway to the effect that to search for “meaning” in his work was to, effectively, strangle the work. We risk the same with the parables, though I hadn’t considered it prior to Nadia’s sermon. In the Ignatian Exercises, one imagines themselves in different roles in Bible story. Sometimes the woman at the well, sometimes the Rabbi, sometimes the people the woman evangelizes, for example. Why don’t we imagine the Holy One in different roles as the Teacher tells us these parables.
As I listened to the sermon, I realized the “landlord” image of G*d is similar to a modern efficiency expert. Even worse, the landlord asks for the extreme, likely in the hopes that the peasants will achieve the most profitable outcome. I’ve experienced bosses like that. It’s soul-killing.
But if G*d is not an efficiency expert. The seven days of creation weren’t efficient. Don’t you suppose the Creator could have done it all in a microsecond, faster than a modern stock trade? No: instead, the Holy One was beyond time; S/he lovingly dwelled over creation insuring that each part was “good.”
It feels so right to envision G*d as a gardener. After all, Mary called Magdalene imagined the risen Jesus was a gardener.
For so many years I assumed this was a parable about Gods judgement and surprise....it’s about Gods Grace and OUR judgement. For me it’s more than impatience, I look at my fig tree and get mad when it doesn’t produce oranges! Henri Nouwen said that the the greatest temptation isn’t money,
sex or power, the greatest temptation is self-rejection. That rings true for me. Why is it so hard to believe we custom built and perfectly loved?
(On another note, I’m not a biblical literalist, but it is also true that throwing the manure of life on my roots does somehow ensure my spiritual growth will continue, so there’s that)
I can't even TELL you how much I love having found this glorious Substack stream. Have been blissfully sharing your "Forgive Assholes!" video for years, but never followed the trail. Wish more Christians were even HALF this fucking cool, in deeply honoring what is loving and true. Will be annointing my soul here for all the many moons to come. THANK YOU SOOOOO MUCH!!!