I'm not Fat. I'm Fluffy

Ok, so the years have stored themselves in my body's cells, swelling with memories and every calorie that I have consumed since I was like seventeen.

Someone recently asked me when was I the most fit in my life. I said, "Kindergarten."

I used to try to fool myself that I really had gained all this middle-girth weight. I told myself, "It's because I had children. This baby weight will drop off as soon as I get back to normal."

That was more than ten years ago.

So then I tried working out. I went to the gym, huffed and puffed and then got so hungry from huffing and puffing that I'd head straight to the drive-thru for a number three combo on my way home. That wasn't exactly working out for me. So I stopped. Going to the gym that is.

I thought I had plateaued with my weight. Nope. I got wider. I discovered this as I suddenly was knocking things - and small children - over with my derrier when I would try to squeeze past. I couldn't understand how I'd become so clumsy, knocking over store displays. Or turning towards someone only to have them reel across the room from a hip bump from me. It was bewildering.

I once knocked something to the floor at a small boutique when I swiveled around and a knick-knack broke with a loud crash. I was so irritated with the shopkeeper for having so foolishly placed his inventory precariously near the edge of the shelving. The audacity to expect me to pay for it.

A moment of clarity came when I was cooking the kitchen. My daughter wandered in to see what was for dinner. I bent over to put something into the dishwasher when my backside catapulted her across the kitchen and out the backdoor. She never had a chance. I was finally forced to confront the awful truth about myself: I was no longer a woman in a body of size 8 like in high school, but was in fact a fluffy middle-aged mother with the rear-end power of a deployed airbag.

I reached over the dinner table last night. I misjudged the size of my arm and it swung right into my son Jeremy's face, knocking him backwards right onto the floor. "God, mom, " he shouted, "be careful with that thing. You could kill someone!"

My bosom has become one of the most curvy features of my maturing body. I recently purchased a new bust-projection-minimizing bra at Wal-Mart. It's a roll of duct tape. That's the only way I can keep my balance. Otherwise, it's like trying to walk around with an armload of watermelons.

It's not all bad. My curvacious endowment once saved my life. I was caught in an undercurrent on a swift river, but then my Big Girls caught onto a log, like a couple of anchor weights, and saved me from washing downstream. The buoyancy helped, too. If I had been a skinny-b-cup- little thing I surely would have drowned.

I'm not fat. I'm just fluffy. Like a great,big pillow that is about to smash you in the face.

I Believe in Miracles...sort of ...

Is there any such thing as a miracle?

I have known many zealous Pentecostlas anxious to Just Believe. Yes, faith is a matter of believing matter over mind...but not in absence of the mind. If someone claims that God healed them of a dreadful disease in some instant fashion, ok, then get a doctor's exam to seal the proof. But alas, rarely do we hear of documented medical evidence of supernatural phenomena occurring as a result of Divine Intervention of any kind...

Perhaps.miracles are in the eye of the beholder.

Have I ever experienced or witnessed a miracle

At least two : the births of my children.

Well, actually, Jeremy was a very sick baby. Very very sick. He was diagnosed with a serious birth defect when I was four months pregnant. I was asked to consider my "options" for certainly he would not survive pregnancy, and if by chance he did, he would die an agonizing death upon birth. "I've never seen a baby survive this syndrome," counseled the genetic counselor who explained the gravity of his condition to me.

Obviously I carried him to term. Two in utero procedures were administered. I did not know whether to plan a baby shower or a funeral. So I prayed. Very hard.

He was born early on Easter morning. He had his first surgery at just 5 days old. A total of four by age 2. The chief neonatologist of the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) told me, "We don't usually see babies like this fare so well. Your son is a miracle."

The same day one of the nurses came over to introduce herself to me and to see Jeremy. She explained that her unborn son had been diagnosed with the exact same condition 16 years prior. He died before he was born. She had to meet me and Jeremy, she said, because she wanted to meet the baby who beat the odds.

Was Jeremy's birth a miracle, or rather, the fact that he dodged a bullet, is that because I prayed? Don't all mothers pray? I read about a young Christian couple, full-time ministry who lost their baby shortly after birth to this syndrome. They had people all over the world praying for them. They buried their baby and continued on with their full-time Christian ministry. I wrote them a letter, of condolence. I said to them in the letter, "Perhaps yours is the greater miracle for you still believe in the goodness of God though your prayer went unanswered."

Are miracles real? Do they actually occur? Or are they simply mirages of our hopes for the divine to invade the world we find ourselves in? Maybe it's not a yes/no answer. Perhaps the answer is in the realm of both/and/sometimes/we cannot know.

My simple perspective is this : Life is a miracle. That we even exist and walk upon the earth of a world that sustains us is sheer magic to me. That we can love and forgive and show kindness to the unkind and charity to the greedy and compassion for the hopeless, this is a kind of miracle, the everyday garden variety kind. Perhaps this is why in part Jesus downplayed those spectacular feats he is said to have commited. Maybe in his Divine Wisdom he could foresee that humankind would focus on the Big Stuff, like healing the blind, rather than the everyday stuff, like a Samaritan helping a Jew.

I don't need miracle stories to tantalize my spiritual appetite. In fact, if a preacher comes in with guns blazing of how amazing God's power has been showing up in miracles through him, well, I am automatically on Red Alert.

The best miracles seem to be the obscure, small kind. The kind that can happen to anyone anytime. Like finding that lost item in just the right moment when you could not locate it for months. That's a common miracle, and yes, I very much experience and witness these on a regular basis. I just have to be paying attention.

"There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle." -Albert Einstein

WANTED: adventure in faith for THE BRIDGE

My husband and I first came upon The Bridge on New Year's Day, 2006. Within a few months we knew it was a faith community we were meant to sink our hearts into.

At that time The Bridge was meeting at the Missisissippi Ballroom in north Portland. The space was basically one big room, like a dance hall, and it was rented for a few hours each Sunday. Chairs had to be hauled in every week. Everything had to be tidied up, and there was absolutely no creative space for kids.

But it worked, The Bridge, a community filled with creative, can-do people, made it work.

Alas, we were soon told that we worshipped Jesus too loud and would have to move on. We were given two weeks notice. When Deborah Loyd, one of the founding pastors, made this announcement, there was a resounding chorus of whooping and yelping. Apparently, creative can-do types like challenges.

A small church on the north/northeast boundary of the city were willing to rent to us. They had outgrown their building and were meeting elsewhere. And so, since the summer of 2007 we have been making do in a rented church for four hours each Sunday. We have been so grateful for the Sunday school space where our kids have been able to have Bridge Kids. We are especially thankful for the kitchen space which has allowed Food Church to flourish and be a weekly blessing to many households in the area. Each week there are dozens of people who do not attend The Bridge, but who happily line up at 1pm to get free groceries. It really has been a great space that allows us to do this.

But four hours a week is kind of stifling. We need a place to spread our wings a bit and fly a bit higher in serving each other and especially the community around us.

It is an interesting dilemma, a small church with small pockets but a big heart. And, I must remind myself, a Big God.

The Bridge has provided spiritual shelter for many displaced people for over eleven years. It has been a true post-modern faith community that set aside beliefism and scripturizing in favor of radical acceptance and scandalous grace. Indeed, The Bridge is so much the church of "come as you really are" that there are rumors around the city that we are too loose. Too rowdy. Too unstructured.

These rumors are somewhat deserved. But in all of that we are also known for a transparency and honesty that is both startling as it is refreshing. There is no such thing as putting on a Sunday face at The Bridge. Who you are on Monday is who we want to know on Sunday, and every other day of the week. This insistence with authenticity is sometimes misinterpreted as being loose with the gospel. I would say it's the opposite. Jesus caused more than one uproar with his determination to connect to people right where they were. No expectations...

Paul Young of The Shack fame, said this:

When you live without expectations everything becomes a gift and every moment an adventure.

Totally. I wonder if part of the Put-on-your-Sunday-face thing is the tyranny of expectations within ourselves (and others?) to be a certain way...I don't know...but what I do know is that The Bridge is the first faith community in my entire life where I can be my broken, effed-up messed up self and still be loved without an expectation that I must change.

So we need a home, a place where we can experience the collective beauty of acceptance and celebration of one another amidst the Spirit of Jesus, and also where we can Be the Love of Jesus for others around the city. For a church with a small bank account, this is a big dream. I have no expectations of how it will happen. Or when. I'll leave that to God. We'll do the possible - looking around, advertising, save up every little bit of money that we can, fundraise, etc... and trust our Father in heaven to do for us what we can't do for ourselves. It is for sure an adventure of the best kind: Shared.