Month: May 2022

This is Where I leave You

~ Sharon Abbott ~ Leave a comment

Ministry has always been a part of our story. A big part. For the last 33 years it has been the ministry of Cedarbrook. As this chapter comes to a close, there are two stories that should be told.

We met Johnnie Benton the day we walked into a Classical Rhetoric class at Southern Colorado State College in 1969. We were both speech majors and this was a required course.

Dr. Benton was sarcastic, cynical, outspoken and disapproving of most things – particularly anything religious. He mocked, challenged, scoffed at and belittled anything having to do with faith. He was a self-proclaimed apostate and had renounced not just the fundamentalism of his youth but all things associated with the church, declaring that all preachers were hypocrites, charlatans, or just too stupid to realize that what they were preaching could not possibly be true. But in his eyes, their most egregious sin was that he found them to be terrible communicators. So you can imagine his disgust and his dismay when he discovered that one of his favorite students iin the speech department was planning on going into ministry.

“You’re too smart for this,” he told Paul. “You’re an analytical thinker with a good mind and the ability to see both sides of an argument. What the hell are you thinking?”

But the student could not be dissuaded. So finally Dr. Benton said, “Okay, then. If you’re going to do this, then you’re going to be good at it.” And he set out to make this student not just a passable public speaker, but a really good one. And while the professor would not have been anybody’s choice to mentor a future pastor when it came to theology or building strong character, I would argue that there was no one better to mentor him in writing and delivering a sermon. He gave him the toughest of assignments and graded him mercilessly. When he detected even a hint of BS or trump-ta-tra, he called it out. His first response in critiquing a speech was to ask with a smirk, “”So what?” Meaning – why should I, the listener, care about what you just said? How does this relate to me? He taught that it is the listener, not the speaker, who is the most important person in communication and it’s the job of the speaker to find and make the connection. I sometimes think of Johnnie Benton when people say to Paul on any given Sunday morning, “I felt like you were talking just to me.” And I know of course, that it’s the work of the Holy Spirit, but I also think maybe that mean ole’ cuss of a professor played a part in it as well.

And then there was Mr. Chmel, the high school drama director. I did theatre in high school – it was one of my things. I even started out as a theatre major in college. I liked being somebody else – creating a character that was nothing like me and living inside that person for a while and bringing her to life. Paul did NOT do theatre. For a good reason. He could not act. Not even a little. But in our senior year, Mr. Chmel was short of males for the play he had selected and he asked Paul to take a role. Paul told him, ” I can’t act.” But you’d only have like three lines.” Nope. He was not interested. So Mr. Chmel told me to ask him. “If you ask him, he’ll do it.” I don’t think so, I said. He can’t act. But I asked. “It could be fun to be in one play together before we graduate – we could go to rehearsals together and the cast party. It’ll be fun. ” He grudgingly agreed. Poor Mr. Chmel. He probably spent more time with Paul working on those few lines than he did with the rest of the cast put together. At the cast party he said to me, “You were right. He can’t act.”

I say all that to say this: with Paul, what you saw is what you got. It wasn’t a show. It wasn’t an act. He wasn’t playing the role. He never pretended to be someone he’s not to build a bigger church. He doesn’t even know how to do that – it just isn’t in him. He is the same person at home that he was when he stood before the church. He treats the servers at McDonalds the same way he treated you when you talked to him in the lobby after the service. In this day of “The Celebrity Pastor” and all the heartache and grief and shame that has brought to the Church, Paul was simply who he was. You may not like who he was and you may have wanted a pastor who was more extroverted, more charismatic, or just more. But he didn’t know how to play that role. God knows he isn’t perfect and there are a myriad of things he would do differently if he could go back. But he wasn’t acting – he brought his true and authentic self – for better or worse.

Paul, thank you for bringing me with you on this adventure of a lifetime. For all of our starts and stops, all the things that we got wrong and those times we succeeded in spite of ourselves and only by the grace of God, we have been partners through it all. I am forever grateful. And for the record, I think over the years you have preached a handful of sermons that would have made Johnnie Benton proud.

“There is a difference between curing and healing, and I believe the church is called to the slow and difficult work of healing. We are called to enter into one another’s pain, anoint it as holy, and stick around no matter the outcome.” Rachel Held Evans

This is the work we are here for.

They Didn’t Even See Us

~ Sharon Abbott ~ 2 Comments

or “the day my mother and my 16 year old self went shopping for a new car.”

I was raised by a single mother. In the 1950’s. In the days when June Cleaver and Father Knows Best came into our living rooms on black and white televisions. But my mother. . . well, my mother was not June Cleaver.  

She was born in 1903. At 17 she became a teacher in a one room school house in a farming community in Nebraska. She married a farmer when she was 20 years old and became a mother at 21. In the next 10 years, she had four more children, one of whom was mentally and physically disabled. Every day she cooked a mid day dinner for the hired field hands – on  a wood stove – in a house with no running water and no electricity. She drove a tractor at harvest time, planted and cultivated a HUGE garden every summer and canned the produce to get them through the winter months, She baked bread, corn bread, and biscuits to go with the butter and jelly she made. She milked cows, raised chickens, churned butter and when the Great Depression threatened their lively hood and very existence, she cleaned houses to pay the doctor. My mother was fierce.

 When My father died in a car accident in 1954, leaving my mother with a four year old daughter, a 21 year old daughter with disabilities, and a farm, she sold the farm and she and my sister and I  moved to what must have seemed to her a different planet. We left the plains of Nebraska for the mountains of Colorado. Country living outside a small town for a city where she could find work. We left everything that was familiar and loved for a place which was strange and unknown. She traded the life of a farm wife for the life of a single parent so she could provide for her family. But like i said, my mother was fierce.

We rented a small, one bedroom apartment and she cleaned houses until she could get established and find a more permanent, better paying job with benefits. We lived frugally and my mother saved until she could make a down payment on a house that was within walking distance of the hospital where she had secured a job as a cook (all those years of cooking for farm hands paid off!) Our home needed to be within walking distance of her job because, of all the things my mother could and would do, driving a car was not one of them. When we needed to go to any place that was not within walking distance, we took the bus. A neighbor who lived across the street took us grocery shopping with her every week so we didn’t have to to lug our groceries home on the bus. God bless Annie Brooks.

 I remember when I was in grade school and my sister Minnie would visit from Nebraska with her daughter who is a year younger than me. At least once during the visit we would go “downtown” to go shopping. My niece Shirley always begged to take the bus, which to her was part of the adventure in the city. I begged to take the car because I was sick of the bus: walking to the bus stop, waiting for the next bus, transferring to another bus, and then walking the three or four blocks to the final destination from the drop off spot only to do it all over again at the end of the day. But she was the guest so we took the bus. I’m sure the only reason I didn’t spoil the day for everybody by being sullen and grumpy was because my sister promised that after we got home she would drive us to Baskin Robbins for ice cream. Which was a real treat since the bus didn’t go to Baskin Robbins!

The day I turned sixteen my mother enrolled me in Drivers Ed,  and the day after I got my license we took the bus down to Santa Fe Avenue which is where the big car dealerships were located. Lest you think I had the coolest mom in the world who would buy her sixteen year old a brand new car for her birthday, let me be clear. This was about providing transportation for my mother; the car would belong to her. I would drive her to the grocery store, to the doctor,  and any other errands that she needed to run. In return, I would be allowed to drive it to school and back. 

So she had done her research, knew exactly what she was looking for (I never knew what her criteria was but she clearly did), moved money out of her savings account into her checking account and with her checkbook in her pocketbook, we walked into a dealership where she was going to pay cash for a brand new car. So here we stood: a 63 year old woman who had worked the late shift the day before and looked it and a kid in her mini skirt and white go-go boots. We were quite the pair.

A group of men in plaid sports jackets stood to one side of the showroom, chatting and drinking coffee. A man and his pregnant wife were flanked by one of the jacketed salesmen as they eyed their prospective new car and discussed the ins and outs, pros and cons of the latest and greatest station wagon. The overly-friendly, extremely attentive salesman assured them that this beauty had just been on the floor a couple of days and would be gone by Monday if they didn’t act now. Wouldn’t they like to take it for a test drive?

My mother and I walked around the showroom and looked at some of the cars. I sat behind the wheel in one of them and imagined me and my friends cruising Main and hanging out at the Freeze. My mother stood there, watching the men laughing and drinking coffee. Finally she said to me, “Come on, let’s go!”  “But wait, we haven’t bought a car yet!  Why are we leaving?” I complained as I trailed after her. We walked out the door and down the street toward another dealership. “What’s wrong with you?” I snapped at my mother. “Let’s go back in and just tell them we want to buy a car.”  My mother stopped walking and turned to me. “If we had walked in there with a man, there would have been a salesman at our side before we got both feet in the door, ready to help us. But they didn’t even see us. We’ll take our money to the next dealership down the street.”  And we did. By this time my mom had spent twelve years feeling unseen as a single woman. And she wasn’t having it. 

What she didn’t say to me that day, but what I now hear in that memory is: “You may just be an old woman or a  young girl, but that doesn’t mean you don’t matter. You have worth and value. As a woman, as a human, you matter.  You are enough.” 

And if you’re wondering – we did buy a car that day. It was a blue and white four door Dodge Dart with a V-8 engine. The sticker price was $2400 which in today’s dollars would be about $21,000.  Gas was 30 cents a gallon. And while I would have rather have had a Mustang, I spent many happy hours running around in that car with my friends, hanging out at the Freeze and yes, taking my mother to run errands.  

I would have rather had a Mustang. . . but still. . .

June Cleaver had nothing on my mom.