Family

Rich

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My Column for the Elgin Review June 17, 2020

Once upon a time there was a girl who didn’t like me. She made it clear to other girls that she didn’t like me and told them they shouldn’t like me, either. So, they didn’t. She didn’t know me, but she knew my father was a doctor so we had to be rich and I therefore, had to be spoiled and, as a result she didn’t like me. It took two years of me being ostracized by that group without my having any idea why, before she sought me out to apologize. “I hated you because your father’s rich. I told the other girls to snub you. Now, I know you’re actually pretty nice. So, even though your father’s rich, I owe you an apology.”

I was speechless. I accepted her apology but had no interest in then becoming friends. What I wanted to do was tell her about my father. I didn’t do it then, so instead I’ll tell you.

Daddy drove cool cars and had a snazzy sense of style. With Dad’s cool car and snazzy clothes, I understand someone thinking we were rich, and certainly we always had more than enough. We lived in a new, nice but modest, 1200 square foot brick ranch home. We took two weeks of vacation every year to camp and visit national parks. But the truth was Dad grew up dirt poor in rural Iowa and he never forgot what it was to be poor. He went through medical school courtesy of the U.S. Army and paid the country back by taking care of sick kids and soldiers in Sendai, Japan during the Korean conflict. Daddy once told me, “it didn’t matter the color of the soldier’s skin, or which nation’s uniform they’d been wearing, stripped down to their skivvies they were all just scared little boys wanting the war to end so they could go home.”

When I was seven Dad took me and my brother John to the bank and opened savings accounts for us and started giving us an allowance. A whole dollar each week! We were taught to give one tenth of it to the church, 5 cents to Sunday School and 5 cents in the sanctuary. We were taught to put one tenth of it into our savings accounts so we could one day go to college. We were supposed to save ten cents each week in piggy banks on our dressers so when we wanted to buy gifts for others, we’d always have money set aside to do that. The rest was ours to spend as we chose.

Dad did the same with the money he earned. When court ordered bussing came to Omaha and there was white flight from our neighborhood, Dad kept his medical practice where it had always been. “This is the neighborhood I serve.” When insurance companies started dictating what he should charge for different procedures, he rebelled. “I won’t charge more than seventeen dollars for an office visit, because that’s all I need to charge, and it’s all most of my patients can afford to pay.”

Dad was a musician, a physician, a philanthropist, a good friend. He was a bridge player, a faithful spouse, a fisherman and a thespian. He loved words (forever sending me to look things up in the big dictionary on our hearth), and books and gardening. He walked four miles each day with his best friend, Vic, and sang in the Symphonic Chorus. When dementia set in in his eighties, he still loved a nice Pendleton sweater, a cold beer, scaring his nurses with a rubber snake, and holding his great grand kids. Dad was man of faith, and he loved us kids and our kids and all kids. Nine years now he’s been gone, and I miss him.

I want to tell that girl, wherever she is now, I am rich, not because of money, but because Marshall Zahller was my Dad.

Happy Father’s Day to all the men whose children are rich in all the ways that truly matter because of them.

**

Park Congregational Church United Church of Christ is worshipping outdoors during the month of June. You’ll find us masked, sitting under a grove of trees at 9:15 on Sunday mornings. We’d love to have you join us. You can reach me at beckyzmcneil@gmail.com and 402.540.5615My

Teachers

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My Column for The Elgin Review 5.6.2020

“I like your brother John.” Those five words are the words I remember most from High School.

Mr. Burns was one of many English teachers at Benson in Omaha. I was a junior in his honors level Humanities class. He taught us Melville and Hemingway in what he called our “Fishing Unit.” Along with The Old Man and The Sea and Moby Dick, the unit included the enormously popular book that year, Jaws, by Peter Benchley. Mr. Burns created the fishing unit because a boy in the class, Rodney, loved to fish. He was a boy who was constantly ridiculed and who I now assume lived with autism. Mr. Burns created a unit to include a boy who was otherwise excluded and in doing that taught twenty-eight 16, 17 and 18-year-olds more about being humane than any combination of books could have done alone.

My brother was a Senior that year. He should have graduated the year before but he had dropped out of school for a while. He ran away from home several times from the time he was 15 before leaving for good. His pot-stash in a tennis ball can had been the center-piece of our kitchen table one night during dinner. Stone cold silence while our family ate exploded into a yelling war between my father and John while my younger brother and I escaped outdoors as soon as dessert was done. John snuck out that night and didn’t ever return to live at home. He couch-surfed with friends and I worried he would over-dose and die somewhere and we wouldn’t even know he was dead.

I didn’t realize John was back in school that year until I saw his long blonde hair from behind in one of the crowded hallways during passing period. It had been a long time since I’d seen him.

I don’t remember the exact context in which Mr. Burns said, “I like your brother John.” It was after class, and somehow, I knew John was in one of Mr. Burn’s other English classes. I was always concerned someone might think I was like my brother. It caught me by surprise to hear Mr. Burns say he liked my brother.

My brother was troubled. All the adults I knew said comforting things to me about him. Things like, “Maybe someday he’ll come around” and “I know how hard it has to be to have your family shattered this way.”

Mr. Burns said he liked John. And I’ve never forgotten his words. Mr. Burns helped me begin to see John in a different light, a kinder light. Mr. Burns gave me permission to like my brother, too.

Often times what teachers teach is so much more than the curriculum. In high schools everywhere good people like Mr. Burns are helping young people grow to be more humane, more broad-minded, better equipped to see situations and people in more than one way, in a better, truer light.

As this weird school year draws to its close, let’s give God thanks for every hard working school teacher everywhere who teaches kids and reaches kids with lessons that go beyond the curriculum, lessons that make us all more humane and inclusive and loving.

Thanks, Mr. Burns. I’m a better person because you were my teacher.

**

Park Church is a place where no matter who you are or where you are on life’s journey, you are welcome. We’re worshipping via Zoom right now. Contact me and I’ll let you know how to join us on Sundays at 9:15. Beckyzmcneil@gmail.com 402.540.5615.

 

Snow Angels and other prayers

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They shuffle in, the first two with hair disheveled and bad dye-jobs, locks matted from too much time in their bunks. Faded florescent pink sweats hang baggy on their tattooed frames. Younger than my boys, I guess. Twenty-two, twenty-three perhaps. Another, older, rounder, with a short-auburn bob finds her place at the end of the table, quietly pulling out her chair. The fourth carries a thick red-leather, red-letter Bible in her willowy hands and wears her hair piled on top of her head. Her granny-glasses have lenses so thick her eyes precede her into the room, reminding me of a grasshopper–a very pregnant pink grasshopper. Her stomach swells taut against her sweatshirt, revealing her inside-out belly button below. She talks without stopping to breathe. At the end of this short parade comes a slim, tall woman with curly dark hair cropped like Peter Pan’s, slouching. There’s an energy of anger pulsing just beneath the surface of her skin. A thin blue vein beneath her eye twitches in time to her heart beat. Intelligent eyes silently claim, “I don’t belong here” as she curls, like a fetus onto the rolling chair.

The women of the county jail are a motley crew.

I carry with me, on my coat and in my hair, the crisp, fresh smell of snow.

“We have snow!” I say, with the delight of the first blanketing of a season, when the crisp, cold freshness is still novel and exciting, and driving on ice and through snirt (snow mixed with dirt) hasn’t yet grown wearisome and disgusting. “It’s so pretty out there.”

Without windows, the women were unaware of the hushed beauty pillowing the landscape on the other side of the cinder blocks surrounding them.

“I love snow!”

“I wish I could see it!”

“The men may get to go outside to shovel it.”

“I’d love to see it falling from the sky.”

“I’d make a snow angel if I could.”

Five of the six of us laugh.

It is my first visit to the jail to share Bible study with the women. I didn’t know they couldn’t see the snow.

Around an oval conference table in a nondescript interior room, they tell me their stories. Meth and Crack and a parole violation. Dealing in several counties, and jail time awaiting in each one.

Grasshopper starts talking. Five babies taken away, but this one, this one, she is determined, this one, her sixth, (is she even twenty-five?) this one will be born drug-free. She’s going to give this baby the life he deserves. She knows God is with her always has been always will be she just needs to trust in Jesus and get back to church and doing what the Gospels teach and not listen to the people who are always trying to lead her astray and she may have had the other kiddos taken from her because of drugs but not this one because this time she’s getting into the Word and following the Way and she’s not messing up again no way and if the baby daddy doesn’t want to support her and wants her to get messed up again she’ll just leave this time that’s all there is to it because she knows she’s God’s precious child and so is this baby and this time it’s all going to be alright so she’s actually happy to be in jail because it means less time to be tempted to backslide and turn her back on God which she isn’t going to do this time. No way.

Bonnie weeps. When she finds her voice she says she misses her fourteen-year-old boy. She feels so guilty. She really messed up and he’s the one who’s paying the price. “A boy needs his mother. Mine really loves me.” She says. “I really messed up this time” and again she weeps.

Five of the six of us weep.

Stoney silence from Peter Pan.

We feast on stories shared from our lives and from God’s good book. Grasshopper sings, “Jesus Loves me.”

Five of the six of us sing.

Our hour draws to a close. Teeth are starting to chatter and blue goose bumps have risen on the bare thighs of the bleached blonde girl wearing prison issue pink shorts instead of sweats.

I ask how we can pray for each other. “For my boy.” “For this baby” “For my boyfriend” “For me and my court date on Wednesday.”  I ask them to pray for me and my churches and for my six kids.

Peter Pan unfolds her long limbs and uncurls her lips and for the first time speaks very quietly saying, “Pray for my daughters, they’re 16 and 17 and live in Detroit where I am a social worker with a Master’s degree. Oxycontin got me here and I want out.”

Six of the six of us pray.

I step into the blinding brightness of sunlight bouncing off freshly fallen snow.

A holy dance of longing and liberty moving me.

Ordinary People

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My Column for The Elgin Review January 22, 2020

It was the coldest night of the year and the OB nurse reported to my insurance company she didn’t care what their current policy was, (dismissing new mothers and babies 24 hours after birth), she wasn’t about to send me and my 5lb 2oz baby boy into sub-zero temperatures. If the insurance company wouldn’t cover an additional night in the hospital for us, she would! The insurance company relented and allowed us to stay a second night.

Benjamin entered the world just before midnight on January 22, 1992.  He was three weeks early. The umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck and ¼ of the placenta had died. If Ben hadn’t come when he did, odds are he would not have survived. Things didn’t immediately improve for poor Benjamin after he was born. Though he was not identified as a preemie, he was a tiny, tired little fellow. He was far more interested in sleeping than he was in eating.

After that “extra” night the nurse’s pleading gained us, I awakened in the hospital on the 24th with a high fever. A uterine strep infection kept the two of us in the hospital for the next week. Ben nursed lazily and my fever did a number on how much milk my body was making. When we finally went home, Benjamin, after a week in the hospital with me, was still considerably smaller than either of his brothers were when we took them home as newborns.

Five weeks later, Benjamin still hadn’t topped six pounds, so the pediatrician put him back in the hospital for “failure to thrive.” Unable to tolerate formulas, Ben was given bottles of my milk mixed with a high calorie supplement that cost $60.00 per day. In 1992 $60.00 per day was a fortune for a young family. Our insurance company said they would not cover it. “We don’t cover nutritional supplements” the customer service representative calmly told me. “But, it’s a prescription from his doctor and without it he will die.” I melodramatically, and truthfully, explained. She, still calmly, said she was very sorry, but that was their policy.

Fortunately, our insurance was through my denomination’s pension fund for ministers and the plan’s administrators went to bat for us and the insurance company relented. Ben received the supplements he needed. And now, as he turns twenty-eight years old this week, he’s six feet tall, still skinny as a rail, healthy as a horse, and living a good life in New York City.

I do not remember the names of the nurse, nor the pension fund administrator who effectively lobbied the insurance company on Benjamin’s behalf. But, on his birthday I give God thanks for them. They stepped up and spoke up on Ben’s behalf. Who knows? They may have saved my youngest son’s life.

What’s the moral of this story? There are at least three. #1. Happy Birthday, Benjamin! You are worth the worry you put us through. #2. Trouble with health insurance is not new in this country. It’s about time we make sure folks can get the health care they need. #3. God uses ordinary, everyday people, like OB nurses and pension fund administrators to save lives.

Everyday God uses ordinary people to make the lives of others better. For all of you who step up and speak up, thanks be to God!

God Will

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My Column for The Elgin Review 1.8.20

We gathered outside the Children’s Memorial at Yad Vashem in Israel. Ezra, our tour guide, knew I had a Bible in my pocket. “Becky, read Jeremiah 31:15.” Thus says the Lord; a voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping, Rachel is weeping for her children; she refuses to be comforted for her children, because they are no more.

We were in Ramah, near Jerusalem, where 2,400 years earlier Jewish mothers from all the surrounding area were forced to gather, separated from their children, to begin their sad sojourn into seventy years of captivity in Babylon. Then Ezra asked me to read the story in Matthew of Herod the King, raging mad upon hearing of the birth of a Jewish child (Jesus). Herod murdered all the Jewish babies from Bethlehem to Ramah to Jerusalem to be sure he’d done away with the one who might someday cause him trouble. The story, found right after the story of the wisemen and the star quotes the words of Jeremiah about bitter weeping in Ramah over lost children.

Inside the memorial it was dark, a hollowed-out cavern. It is circular with candles burning in its center and mirrors all around so the candles look like millions of stars reaching in all directions. Portraits of Jewish children killed in the Nazi Holocaust are projected on the walls. As our group moved in hushed solemnity, a voice read the names of every child known to have been murdered by Hitler’s regime. First name, Middle name, Last name. Age at death. Nationality. Read in Hebrew, in English and then in each child’s native tongue. It takes three months for all the names to be read out loud.

Overwhelmed, with tears streaming down my cheeks, I thought of my own sons; Adam Lawrence Zahller Brown 12 years old, American. Daniel Scott Zahller Brown, 10 years old, American. Benjamin David Zahller Brown, 9 years old. American. God, how can human beings be so cruel? How was it, that I was living in a time and place where my sons were safe, but other mother’s sons and daughters were not, are not, will not be?

Listening to the names, I wasn’t aware of the hall emptying-out. Their own mothers were not there to hear their names being spoken. I needed to listen on behalf of the parents whose beloved children were slain.

Eventually, one of the other ministers in our group touched me on my shoulder. “Becky, the rest of us are on the bus now, it’s time to go.”

I asked, “How can we leave? Who will listen to the names of the children?”

Quietly, my friend said, “God will.”

This part of the Christmas story doesn’t make it into carols, or on the front of cards. This part isn’t recounted in sweet pageants with darling children playing the parts. This part is so infrequently told, that those who make it to church only on Christmas and Easter, may not even know it exists.

Who wants to hear of a massacre of children while we’re still finding pine needles in our carpets and the candy canes haven’t all gone from our counter-tops? Who wants to think of Mary and Joseph and their little one, fleeing under the cover of darkness, alone and terrified as shouts of soldiers and cries of anguished parents pierce the silent night?

We don’t want to hear it, but we need to. Jesus’s followers need to know this story by heart. Our Savior was born poor and, though he was visited by kings, his parents had no choice but to flee in the dark of night, lest they be among the parents remaining in Ramah weeping. They were political refugees.

The story is as old as time; 2400 years ago, when the Jews were exiled to Babylon, 2000 years ago, when Herod killed the children, 75 years ago, when Jewish children were slaughtered, and today.

God hears the children’s names. God wipes the tears of the grieving parents. The question for us is will we?

Will we understand that every Jewish child growing up in this season of rising anti-Semitism is a child just like our Jesus? That every child fleeing danger and poverty who arrives on our nation’s southern border is a child just like our Jesus? Will we remember that every child in Iran, vulnerable to the whims and avarice of powerful rulers is a child just like our Jesus?

God hears the weeping in Ramah.

Will we?

Fear is a Trickster

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My Column for The Elgin Review June 26, 2019

We moved to a suburb of Detroit, Michigan when my sons were entering first, fourth and fifth grades. In Ohio where we’d lived before, my older boys walked the block and a half from our house to Lincoln Elementary School. My youngest son, because he had special needs, took a bus across town. In Michigan we lived about a mile from the boy’s school. They were, by then, old enough and easily able to walk a mile to school. I’d done it growing up in Omaha, their Dad walked to school in Cleveland and there seemed to be no reason for my boys not to do it in Michigan—except—there were no cross-walks, no crossing guards and two four lane roads between our house and the school. When I asked why not, I was told, “well, nobody walks to school anymore.”

We lived in Michigan more than a year when I began to hear why “nobody walks to school anymore.” Twenty-five years earlier, two suburbs over, there had been a kidnapping and murder of a child on his way home from school. Tens of thousands of school children had safely walked to and from school for generations before that tragedy occurred, but since then, fear of a similar crime taking place kept a whole generation of school kids from knowing the pleasures of walking to school.

Fear is a trickster. Fear is a natural and needed response, bred into us to keep us safe, but it can also be irrational. Fear can paralyze us and keep us from life’s pleasures. Fear can separate us from our neighbors. Fear can motivate us to take up arms when the arms themselves are a greater threat to us and those we love than what we were originally afraid of. Fear can deceive us into giving up our liberties and freedoms under the guise of security.

One of the more frequent admonitions in the whole of Christian Scripture is “Do not be afraid.”

The Bible was written over a span of 3400 years give or take. Those were years in which people had true and legitimate threats to their safety on a near daily basis and yet again and again the writers of the Jewish and Christian faith stories tell us, “Be not afraid.” God is with us and for us and will be with us no matter what happens in our lives. The one who created everything continues in creative love to make all situations new. No matter what, God’s love is with us. When we know that to be true, we have nothing to fear.

We need to be wise and prudent. We need to take appropriate precautions. Danger is real. Harm happens. Some people do evil things to others. But, live fully. Live boldly. Practice hospitality. Let the kiddos walk to school. Most people are kind and good and loving. Most people want to help others. Most people want the best for each other.

At Park Congregational Church everyone is always welcome. Have no fear, you are welcome here.

Home for Christmas

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My column for The Elgin Review 12.4.19

“I’ll be home for Christmas, you can count on me, please have snow and mistletoe and presents on the tree…” Bing Crosby’s famous song has woven its way like a ribbon around a wreath through our thoughts about Christmas. In the dark of mid-winter, we make our homes cozy with twinkling lights and evergreen branches and anticipate a Hallmark movie kind of happiness to fall like snow upon us. A blanket of white against the chill of what’s real sometimes.

Once, when my boys were little, I left them playing nicely in the family room while I ran upstairs to get something. I had gotten no further than the top of the stairs when I heard a commotion below, wailing and yelling so loud I thought the house was on fire (or something similarly dire). What I found after my mad dash down the stairs was eighteen-month-old Daniel with a death grip on two fists-full of three-year-old Adam’s hair. Dan was holding Adam hostage and banging him against the front of the sofa. “Pow, Pow, Pow, Pow, Pow.” Both boys were hollering and bellering.  It was an epic battle over a toy.

I pried open Daniel’s hands and scooped him under one arm, and scooped Adam under my other arm and carried them into the dining room where I plopped them, one and then the other, onto chairs on opposite sides of the room. When they quieted, I said, “Boys. In our family we do not hurt each other. In our family we love and protect each other.” Yeah. Right! Who was I kidding? I had just seen first-hand evidence that what I was saying was untrue. In our family the little brother took his older brother by death grips on his hair and walloped him!

Except, it was true, too. In our family we love and protect each other. In our family we were raising little boys to be the kind of men who care about and for each other inside our home, and about and for their neighbors everywhere. Time on the chairs in the dining room was a time for recalibrating relationships and remembering who we are.

Advent, the four weeks leading up to Christmas isn’t about appearances and creating lovely memories of a snow-covered, idyllic season at home. Advent, this season we are in right now, is a time to recalibrate our relationships with each other. It is a time to remember who we are, and whose we are. In the Bible, the prophet Isaiah talks about beating swords into plowshares. Advent is a season for making peace and for making right what has been wrong. It is a time to let go of the death grips we have on old resentments and bygone battles. It is time to make our hearts ready so that our homes and our lives will be places where it is clear that God lives with us here.

At Park Congregational United Church of Christ, ten miles west of Elgin on HWY 70 and ½ mile south, you are welcome to be part of a faith home where we gather every Sunday for worship at 9:15 am. Worship is when we sit a while together to recalibrate our relationships and to remember who and whose we are. All of us are welcome home with God not just for the holidays, but every day.

I love to hear from you. My email is beckyzmcneil@gmail.com

Super Duper Deluxe

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My Column for the Elgin Review 11.20.19

We were in the furniture store on the square after buying our first home. The salesman was showing us the washers and dryers. Wanting to be sure we could wash the fluffy comforter for our bed we were deciding between the super-duper sized drum and the super-duper-deluxe when I started laughing. My husband and the salesman, not sure what I found so funny, looked confused. Stifling my giggles, I said, “six months ago we were washing our clothes on a rock in the Zaire river and now we’re being so serious about making the right decision between super-duper and super-duper deluxe. It’s crazy!”

Being in Zaire in my mid-twenties changed me forever. Things I grew up taking for granted, like washing machines and dryers, I no longer take for granted.

The past couple warm spells I spent hours washing the windows of the parsonage. The windows are as old as I am, and the storm windows were hard to figure out, but they’re very well made, and do their job and I’m thankful for them. In Zaire, we had crank out windows, missing their cranks and there were no hardware stores to go buy more so the only way to open or close them was from the outside.  Before Zaire, I took windows for granted. I don’t anymore.

We’ve invited Mike’s girls and my brother to join us for a pre-Thanksgiving/Mike’s birthday dinner next Tuesday at our apartment in Lincoln before we head to Minneapolis to celebrate Thanksgiving with two of our sons and my cousin’s family. Glenna, our youngest, laughed thinking about me cooking a Thanksgiving meal in our little-bitty kitchen in the apartment. I remember Zaire, where we had a little-bitty electric stove with dubious wiring and nothing else and I’m thankful for the apartment kitchen.

Other experiences have given me reason not to take things for granted. A hard marriage and difficult divorce make my marriage to Mike that much sweeter. A cancer diagnosis two years after we married, makes my clean bill of health now that much sweeter. And so on.

As we close in on Thanksgiving, it’s not things like appliances and windows and functioning kitchens for which I’m most thankful, but I am thankful for them.  I’m most thankful for all the people around me, for all the love and joy and laughter that are mine.

There’s an old hymn with which I have a love-hate relationship. The melody is singsongy and becomes an ear-worm playing on a continuous loop in my head after I’ve sung it. The words and sentiment are simple:

Count your blessings, name them one by one,

Count your blessings, see what God has done,

Count your Blessings, name them one by one,

Count your many blessings see what God has done.

(Johnson Oatman, 1897).

This Thanksgiving I’ll be counting appliances and windows and itty-bitty kitchens and a happy marriage and good health and family and friends and you, my new neighbors, among my many blessings. What and who will you not take for granted this season? What and who will you count as blessings this Thanksgiving?

You are always welcome to join us at Park Congregational United Church of Christ at 9:15 every Sunday morning to give God thanks for all the blessings of life. We’re 10 miles west of Elgin on HWY 70 and ½ mile south.

I love hearing from you. beckyzmcneil@gmail.com

 

Maybe it’s Time to Give Church A(nother) Try

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My Column for The Elgin Review, Elgin, NE 10.23.19

Erin was three years old with a mess of loose blonde curls and a button nose sprinkled with freckles and eyes as blue as the Kentucky sky. She was the youngest worshipper at the Sulphur Christian Church when I was their pastor as a seminary student years ago. Most Sundays there were twenty of us. One morning as we prayed the Lord’s Prayer together Erin’s little voice was louder than all of ours. “Our Faaaaaatherrrr, which art in Heaaaaaaaaaaven” she said with as much sass and vinegar as any little girl could muster. Stifling giggles, the rest of us continued praying. By the time we got to “Thy kingdom come” Erin’s voice, quite loud, insistent and still sassy as all-get-out piped-up again in her thick Kentucky accent, “No Daddy, I will not behave!”

Miss Ida and Miss Gladys were Erin’s Sunday School teachers at Sulphur Christian Church until she went off to college. Her Grannie and Grandidaddy sat with her in the pew when her mother helped lead worship. Her auntie and great aunts sat a couple pews up and one sat over, across the aisle. When her aunt was married in the church, Erin was the flower girl. When Erin played in the cemetery on the hill while Grandidaddy mowed, she stood behind a tombstone carved like an open Bible on the top and preached to the cows in the pasture across the fence.

There were two little boys in the congregation, eight or nine years old to Erin’s three years. Once, when they collected the offering as they often did, they brought it forward while the congregation sang, “Praise God from whom all blessings flow.” When the doxology was over and the congregation bowed their heads for me to bless the offerings, these two stinkers, giggling, scooped all the money out of the plates in one swoop and pocketed it right under my nose and open eyes. “Gentlemen,” I said when the prayer was over as I held the empty plates and gave them my best young-preacher raised eyebrow look. With twinkles in every eye in that little sanctuary those goof-balls put the money back in the plates, and oh, so proud of themselves, walked down the center aisle to sit with their mothers.

Children who grow up in small, rural churches are some of the most fortunate children on the planet. They may not have big Sunday School classes or youth groups with lots of peers, but they have this beautifully woven web of people of all ages who know them, love them, pray for them and help them grow up secure knowing they truly belong somewhere.

Studies tell us children are lonely today. Statistics tell us teenagers feel more disconnected now than ever. If you have children in your life who don’t have a church they can call their own; if you don’t have a church to call your own, where you know you are welcome even on the days when you don’t want to behave, maybe it’s time to give church a(nother) try.

You’re always welcome at Park Congregational United Church of Christ, ten miles west of Elgin on HWY 70 and ½ mile south. We worship at 9:15 every Sunday morning.  I love hearing from you. My email is beckyzmcneil@gmail.com.

I Say There is Hope

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My Column for The Elgin Review, Elgin, Ne May 8, 2019

A member of a congregation I once served reached out to me. “If you get a minute, I could use some guidance. In a discussion with my sisters this weekend, all of them said the current political environment continues to push them further from church. They believe they see both Democrats and Republicans using Christianity to tear others apart. And if that’s true, then the church is complicit and is an underlying cause. They feel attending church is now more like belonging to a club, instead of a foundation. This breaks my heart. I know they aren’t alone in this thinking, and I have no idea how to respond. Do you have any thoughts to share? Is there any hope?”

How would you respond?  Are you with my friend? Do you see church as a foundation upon which to build your life? Or, are you more inclined toward her sisters’ view?

In my experience, and in reading church history and the news, church is as it has been throughout millennia, a mix, a collection of human beings joined together for a myriad of reasons, some holy and some wholly unholy. Political parties use Christianity to tear people apart, to sow seeds of dissension and to establish who’s in and who’s out. In far too many cases, Christians bow to the idols of power, influence and wealth and are complicit in the divisiveness of our day.

I’ve had moments when I’ve thought I would just walk away. “Please, don’t associate me with those kinds of Christians.”

I am, however, compelled by a vision of love cast by Jesus who healed and helped and welcomed and lifted up every kind of person toward wholeness and fuller lives. I am compelled by Jesus who empowered all his followers to go and do as he did. In the earliest days the church grew by leaps and bounds because people saw the ways Christians loved others.

I am compelled to cast my lot with the motley crew of the church because I saw a little boy named Calvin, snot nosed, dirty red face streaked by tears, embraced in a big hug by a man who’d never had kids when Calvin burst into a church meeting one evening, “My Daddy’s left and says he’s never coming back. What am I going to do?” Calvin’s dad never came back, but that congregation surrounded Calvin with so much love and so much support that he found his way.

I cast my lot with the church because there is a little congregation in the middle of corn fields where three pajama clad kids wandered in one Sunday morning and asked if anyone had anything to eat. Mom and Dad were still asleep (after a night of partying) and there wasn’t any food in the house. Ever since, the church serves Sunday breakfast to anyone, and now serves breakfast every school day, too, for the kids who wait for the school bus on the corner across the street.

The DNA of the Christian faith is caring for all our neighbors. Out of that DNA has sprung most of the hospitals around the world, most of the orphanages, most of the colleges, universities, and the public school movement, too, the Civil Rights movement here and the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. From the church Habitat for Humanity was born, and Alcoholics Anonymous, too.

It seems to me that attending church is something fairly easy to opt in or out of when culture and politics make us all cranky, but being church is more challenging and far more compelling.

I say there is hope.

You are always welcome at Park Congregational United Church of Christ.