A Bridge to Everywhere

Isaiah 46:3-13 | Psalm 127:1-2

There’s nothing in this life quite like the moment you realize you don’t have a clue.

In 1972, a friend of mine went to bed early on election night. She’s a political junkie, but she went to bed early. There was nothing to stay up for. There wasn’t going to be any suspense. Anti-war liberal George McGovern was a lock. It was going to be a landslide. After all, everyone she knew was voting for him. In all the months of campaigning, she’d never spoken to a single person who wasn’t voting for him. Not one. She lived in New York. In Greenwich Village.

When she woke up the next morning, she found out she’d been right about two things—there’d been no suspense, and the winner won in a landslide. Richard Nixon carried 49 states. George McGovern … You do the math.

No, there’s nothing quite like finding out you’re completely clueless. And just plain wrong.

That fascinating fact you learned from CNN? Wrong. The pontificating you’ve been doing based on that fact? Silly you.

The fabulous dress you expected your beautiful fashion-conscious daughter to wear at her church wedding? She went Goth.

Oh, and that theologically-principled, rock-solid, swear-on-the-Bible, strike me dead resolution you made in your seminary theology class that when you became a pastor, you would never, ever agree to “do” the baby of someone who wasn’t an active member of your church…? No drive-by baptisms for you! Backbone! You were gonna have a backbone!

How’s that working out for you?

No, there’s nothing quite like being wrong. Dead wrong.

Like that life-long, pious Lutheran who, at a ripe old age, surrounded by his family singing “A Mighty Fortress is our God”, passed peacefully from this mortal life, and awakened to eternity—in hell. A hell it turned out, that was populated entirely by Lutherans—ordinary everyday Lutherans, very famous Lutherans—and, in its deepest depths, mired in a sulfur pit, the most famous Lutheran of all, Martin Luther himself, the great enemy of all human striving and good works, the great champion of God’s grace: grace, grace, and grace alone. “Father Luther,” cried our pious Lutheran, “What are you doing down here?” Luther looked up. “It was works,” he said.

There is nothing like coming to the end of a project, the end of a discussion, the end of a ministry, or even to the end of a life, only to find out you were clueless. You thought you knew the answers. Thought you knew the questions. You thought you could assume some basic things. Thought you had the key, the magic bullet, but you were off by a mile.

Now, there are people in this room who have never been wrong. You don’t know what it’s like. But humor the rest of us for a minute and try to imagine it. Okay… You’re thinking, how embarrassing. How awful. You’re thinking, it’s bad to be wrong. It’s so much better to be right! Right?

Wrong.

The truth is, being wrong is not always a bad thing. Being wrong can actually be a good thing. Even a great thing. Maybe even the best thing that could ever happen to you.

There are lots of things I can think of that would be fabulously great to be wrong about.

You think life is something you have to get through under your own steam. You’re on your own. And life is such a slog. You have to lug yourself down life’s road. And that would be hard enough. But you’re not the only one you have to carry. You have to schlep everybody else too. Quirky spouses and itchy kids and sick relatives and sullen church moderators and Celebration planning committees.

Once you’ve got ‘em hoisted up on your shoulders, you can’t put them down. Even if you wanted to, you can’t. Because if you do the dishes won’t get done, the car won’t get inspected, the kids won’t get into a good college, the bulletin will have typos and the cranky guy in the third row of the choir will call in the morning to report them to you, there’ll be a famine in lower Slobbovia for which you’ll be solely responsible, the universe will gradually implode, and chaos will ensue. All because of you.

Wouldn’t it be great to be wrong about that?

A million gaping wounds of human want and planetary need cry out to be mended. The ice caps are melting, the whales, the wolves and the warblers are disappearing. The town fathers just kicked all the poor homeless people off the village green, the youth in town have just been caught sexting, the local synagogue woke up to swastikas on its front doors, Congress is tied up in knots over health care, people all over America actually care about who the Bachelor is going to pick, and the United States of America has one of the highest rates of death related to childbirth in the whole wide world.

And all these problem are yours to fix. If a need exists, you have to fill it. If a wrong needs righting, you have to do it. And you’re good at saving the world. You know you are because you are exhausted. It’s a tough job, bringing about world harmony, but somebody has to do it. You. Before you’re fifty.

Wouldn’t it be great if you were wrong about that?

 

And ay, ay, ay! The church! It’s going to Lutheran hell in a hand basket. We needs a vision. A strategic plan. A website. No—stewardship! Oh, oh, no, I know! I know! A second service with a rock band. Just one refrain of “Make Me A Sanctuary” and all the youth will come back from Never Never Land where they disappeared to the day after we confirmed them. No, no… it’s programs. The best children’s program money can buy. Oh, wait, we don’t have any money. Uh, PowerPoint, then! No, no, no, the fix for what ails us is… new by-laws! No, no, no… it’s… a… new pastor. A young one. (Do they have young ones?) She’ll bring in new pledging uni--… I mean, people.

Wouldn’t it be great to be wrong about all that?

Well, I’m glad you think so. Because we are wrong about that. About those other things too. It doesn’t all depend on us. World peace is not our responsibility. And there’s no magic bullet to fix what ails the church.

But hey, don’t just take my word for it.

Thus says the Lord—

You have been borne by me from your birth,
I carried you from the womb.
And even to your old age,
even when you turn gray,
I carry you. I make. I bear. I save.

You can spend all the money in the world.
You can hire an artist to make a god of gold.
You can lift that grinning little idol up on your shoulders,
You can carry it around.
You can fall down and worship it.
But watch what happens when you set it down in its niche,
it will just stand there.
It won’t move. It won’t speak.
It can’t move. It can’t speak.
And when you pray to it, when you say, “Help!”,
it will just stand there, unmoved.
it will not, it cannot answer. It can’t save you.
It can’t save anybody from anything.

But I …I am God.
There is no other. No one is like me.
I know the answers. I pose the questions.
I declare the outcome from the start.
I can tell you now about things that will be,
things that have not yet unfolded.
For my purpose governs everything,
And I will accomplish what I purpose.
I have planned it, I will do it.
I am God.

All weekend we’ve been talking and singing and praying about building bridges. And we’ve been exhorting each other to be bridge-builders. To roll up our sleeves. To close chasms and gaps and great divides. To extend the span of justice and mercy from sea to shining sea. To stand side by side and walk hand in hand. And there’s not a bone in this preacher’s body that doesn’t want us to do those things, to do them well, to do them together, and to do them tirelessly.

But, once upon a time, I had an experience in the pew of a local church, and on that day I got a shivering sense of just how easy it is to be wrong about something deep and vital. Something really big.

That congregation had a great pastor who for ten years straight preached up a storm of justice. He was a bridge builder’s bridge builder. And that church was committed, active, busy, doing good. Mission trips, Habitat, homeless ministry, soup kitchen, fundraisers for disaster victims, shawls and mittens and quilts. Even gave a ton of money to OCWM.

One Sunday, as he revved up again, a man sitting next to me in the pew, a pillar of the church and the first one into the trenches no matter the need or cause, leaned over and whispered out of the side of his mouth: “Ya know, Mary, after all this time I think I know what God wants me to do. What I really want to know is, who is this God who wants me to do it?”

You have been borne by me from your birth,
I carried you from the womb.
And even to your old age,
even when you turn gray,
I carry you. I make. I bear. I save.

And it struck me that if we don’t know that, if we don’t know it by experience, by heart, we can know all sorts of other things and still not have a clue. If we don’t believe that, believe it our flesh, we will inevitably be wrong with a kind of wrong that can never be good.

In the last presidential election, there was a lot of hullabaloo about the Bridge to Nowhere. Our sister in Christ, Sarah Palin, bragged to the nation that she’d said no to it. There was some truthiness to her claim, even if it wasn’t the kind of truth we’re accustomed to. But no matter. Wrong or right, Sarah’s not my point. I’m stuck on the possibility that there really could be a bridge to nowhere. And that we could be building it.

What scares me is the possibility that in all our eager striving to build bridges to somewhere, to everywhere and to everyone, our work could be in vain. We could earnestly do the work we know God wants us to do without ever crossing paths with the one true God who not only wants us to do it, but is also so merciful, so generous and so good, that even if we couldn’t do it, even if we didn’t do it, even if what we do accomplish falls woefully short of the mark, She will always find a way somehow to get it done, with us or without us or in spite of us.

If the Lord does not build,
in vain do the builders build.
If the Lord does not construct,
in vain do workers labor;
in vain they get up early and stay up late.

That’s an uncompromising statement of faith from Psalm 127. It’s inspiring and moving and we all love it. Right? Yes, but hardly anyone really believes it. We are purpose-driven, doing hard labor in the vineyard of Christ, as if God doesn’t even exist, as if God isn’t capable of doing anything on God’s own. And that’s too bad because Psalm 127 is telling the truth. The most important bridge of all is not the bridge to nowhere and not the bridge to somewhere, but the bridge to Someone. The bridge to the God of grace. The bridge to the grace of God.

Want to build a bridge? Then begin by meeting the builder. Begin in silence and awe.

Want to extend spans of justice and joy to every corner of the earth? First enter the secret room of God’s imagination. Dwell there.

Want to close gaps of hate and fear? Sit first, and soak in God’s beauty.

Want to preach up a storm about righting wrongs? Then wet your lips with the honey of gratitude, the nectar of praise.

Planning to put your body on the line for the gospel? Then let the Spirit adorn it little by little, day by day, with the glory of the Lord that rubs off on us in hour after hour of worship and prayer.

Don’t skip this part. Jesus called it the better part. Don’t pay it lip service. Don’t pretend there’s no time for it because you have to go help people. If we still believe the old lie that we have to choose between work and wonder, between service and silence, then the first bridge we need to build is the one that reunites the ancient inseparables of action and contemplation.

When those two are joined, we will learn to build as much by wonder as by competence, as much by ecstasy as by knowledge and skill, as much by trust and joy as by worry and work, as much by beauty and imagination as by plans and programs, as much by gratitude and praise as committees and resolutions. For the God who calls us to this holy work is the same God who pays latecomers to the field as if they'd labored all day in the sun. The same God who gives gifts to her beloved ones even while they sleep.

We say and sing that we are God’s hands and feet. We are wrong about that. The truth is that God is our hands, our feet. And if this is so, rejoice and be glad. For God’s hands reach people and places ours never could, never will. God’s feet walk the mile and bear the load that our feet would tire of in a day. God’s heart sees into depths we cannot fathom. God’s grace works everywhere.

If you really want to cover the world in bridges, if you want to go from here to build a bridge to everywhere for the sake of the gospel of peace, remember this: It’s only the bridge to Someone that is the bridge to everywhere.

Remember this:
Thus says the Lord:
You have been borne by me from your birth,
I carried you from the womb.
And even to your old age,
even when you turn gray, I carry you.
I make. I bear. I save.

Women’s Celebration March 13, 2010--UCC Building Cross Cultural Bridges

The Rev. Carolyn Young

The story begins with the ravages of a tornado which lands Dorothy in a strange new world. Upon arriving, Dorothy makes the incredibly astute but amazingly understated observation: “Toto, something tells me we aren’t in Kansas anymore.” The landscape had changed. The world was a different place. She woke up to a whole new world all around. And in 20010, that’s how it feels to us, isn’t it? So many things we took for granted, even six months ago….but certainly six or sixty years ago…. have changed, and it just isn’t Kansas any more. It’s certainly true of the religious landscape. the radical changes in the religious life of Americans today:

• The rapid exodus of traditional worshipers in the Roman Catholic Church, now replaced by an influx of immigrants, mostly Latino, changing the fabric of the church.
• The continued decline of what we call “mainline Protestants” offset by the rapid rise of over 100 variations of Protestantism in America—still accounting for almost 60% of the population.
• Still small by comparison—less than 1%—Islam shows modest growth in America but rapid growth in our neighborhood and in other parts of the world.
• But the biggest change is the number of Americans who claim no religious affiliation. That group has nearly doubled since 1990, from 8% to 15%.(taken from Gallup poll) And at the same time, the religious landscape is changing around the globe.
• In China, it is estimated there are over 100 million Christians, with more people attending worship on Sunday than there are members in the Communist party. China could soon become the country with the largest number of Christians in the world, and at the same time, the country with the largest number of Muslims.
• All across Africa, the Christian church is rapidly growing, while the church in Europe continues to decline, so that very soon the population center of the Christian church will not be Europe or America, but the African continent.
• In Cuba, the churches are literally standing room only in spite of official government opposition.
• And today the largest Christian congregations in the world are not in America or Europe, not in Houston or Saddleback or Willow Creek, but in Seoul, Korea, the largest one having 80,000 members.

Globally, the church is becoming more diverse and more colorful, more African and Asian, less American, western and European. Welcome to Munchkinland! Brothers and sisters, Dorothy was right. We aren’t in Kansas anymore. And the challenge for the church is to discover new ways of communicating the old, old story to a new generation in this new world. We are called to live not in some beloved past, but in this present age. We are called to share our faith amid the marketplace of religious and non-religious. We are called to witness to the risen Christ in a world not unlike the world of the first Easter and the early church, for their world was also a world of incredible economic and political upheaval, the melding of cultures and traditions in the Roman Empire, a world which was often hostile rather than helpful to the cause of Christ. We are called to share our faith in a day when rapid changes make us feel like we are in a whole new world.

Like the Tin Man frozen in time, we must be willing to be unshackled from the rusty past, with a heart filled with love and passion for the world for which Christ died. Like the Cowardly Lion, we must find the courage to stand for what we hold to be true. Like the flimsy, witless Scarecrow, we must be willing to think new thoughts and to work out our faith with the mind of Christ. Like Dorothy, we must find our place and home in the midst of a changing world. We aren’t in Kansas anymore, and we are called to share our story in this new world. And that brings me to the story of Philip.

After Easter and their encounters with the Risen Christ, after Pentecost and the filling of the Holy Spirit, the disciples scattered to share the word in a new world. Luke says, “Philip went down the road from Jerusalem to Gaza. It was a desert road.” Now let’s just pause right there… the road from Jerusalem to Gaza. Could any road be more strategic to our day than the road from Jerusalem to Gaza? Does any road better represent the turmoil and tensions of our world today than the road from Jerusalem to Gaza? It’s certainly not a yellow brick road—more like the road marked with grapes of wrath. But how we need to make that journey in our world today. Would to God that someone could turn that road into a highway of peace and a pathway of hope. So Philip went down from Jerusalem to Gaza, and on the way he met an Ethiopian, the treasurer for Candace, the Queen of Ethiopia. He was black. He was a eunuch, a representative of gender differences and orientations. He was a man of wealth and political power. Again, how contemporary can you get? In a day when Africa is both a center of the world’s greatest suffering and the center of the church’s greatest growth, here is Philip, crossing the color line between black and white, breaking down barriers of gender differences, bridging the boundaries between Middle East and Africa, cutting through the economic and political differences between a poor, itinerant preacher with no political power and the wealthy government official, creating a new, inclusive community of brotherhood.

Philip saw he was reading the Old Testament prophet Isaiah, but it didn’t make a bit of sense to him. And again, today our world is full of folks for whom the Bible is nothing but a confusing set of fables. In a biblically illiterate world, there are those who, like this man, are trying to make sense of it, looking for someone who can help. So Philip felt the leading of the Spirit. He waited for an invitation, then he stayed with him long enough to take seriously his questions and his doubts, listening to him before, as Luke says, he “opened his mouth,” and then gently helping him find the answers. What a wonderful model for evangelistic bridge building today. Frequently someone will say, “I just don’t know how to witness, how to share my faith with another person.” Well, here is Philip’s way in four steps:

1. Philip was sensitive to the nudge of the Holy Spirit.
2. Philip was willing to cross the lines that separated him from others.
3. He was willing to honor the man’s doubts, wrestle with his questions, and understand his confusion around the scripture.
4. Then finally, at the right moment, he was ready to share a personal word about what Christ meant to him, a word that opened the door.

And my guess is that Philip was as surprised as you and I would be when the man said, “What’s to keep me from being baptized right now? What’s to keep me from accepting Christ into my life? What’s to keep me from the kingdom?” Well, today I fear there are lots of things that could keep him from it:

• churches that are not ready to accept Ethiopians, for one thing.
• churches where you have to say the right words, or have the right answers, or wear the right cloths before you can enter.
• churches where questioning the Bible and doubting the answers are rebuked rather than honored.
• churches that are more concerned about preserving the past than they are about winning men and women to Christ.

In my years and my journeys, I have seen lots of things that could keep this man from becoming part of the kingdom. But bless his heart, Philip was either smart enough or naïve enough or faithful enough to say, “Nothing! Not a thing to keep you out! You are welcome right here, right now.” Brothers and sisters, I want us to be a Philip community:

• a place where people feel the nudge of the Holy Spirit.
• a place where folks cross the lines that divide us from others.
• a place that honors doubt and welcomes questioners.
• a place where people freely share their own experience in ways that will open the door for others to receive Christ.

I want us to be that kind of community in the spirit of Philip. You know there is probably someone out there, someone you know, who is just waiting for someone to help them find the way, just waiting for a Philip to open the door, just waiting for you. No question about it, in so many ways, we aren’t in Kansas anymore. But in this challenging new day, we are called to witness to the Risen Christ. We are called to be the church in the spirit of Philip. We are called to a living, daring faith in the face of the changing world. To serve the present age, our calling to fulfill, O may it all my powers engage to do my Master’s will.

NEW ENGLAND WOMEN'S CELEBRATION VIII TOGETHER BUILDING BRIDGES

KEYNOTE SPEECH, KIMBERLY TRUDEL

I love the title of the conference, building bridges. I’ve always been good a building things. When I was a kid growing up in rural Massachusetts there were few children in the neighborhood to play with. We lived at the bottom of a hill, with a stream and a pond out back. During the spring months, on days much like today, I would go out to play in the water and build series of canals and bridges. This would occupy me for hours for days on end.

After high school I was one of few women who chose engineering as their profession. As a young woman, I had to figure out how to cross that bridge into the male-dominated classes to be successful.

After college I built massive software programs, the type that provide the dial tone when you pick up the receiver. It was then that I discovered I also had a knack for ferreting out good ideas. I could take the smallest kernel of an idea and turn it into a golden nugget. So, I went on to build companies.

I was a key player in bringing a number of highly successful products to market and bringing a number of small companies public. One of companies I helped build had the most successful IPO in the history of its industry. This was a very lucrative profession, but my role required significant travel.

One the eve of one trip I turned to my husband and said ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you in my life.’ Without missing a beat, he said to me ‘You’d go on with your life, that’s what I’d do.’

Little did I know that evening that I would be embarking on a journey building a bridge between the life I thought I was going to have and the life I was given.

The next morning I drove my husband to the airport, where he was departing on a business trip. I volunteered to redeem some of my frequent flyer miles so he could upgrade his coach seat to first-class. In his humble, country-doctor way he said, ‘no, I’ll just take a seat in coach like everyone else.’ His destination was a physician’s conference in San Francisco, so I scratched my head when he said he was connecting through Southern California rather than taking the direct flight from Boston. I started to question this decision, then stopped myself thinking, ‘he’s a smart guy capable of making his own travel plans.’ After all, he was the phi beta kappa grad.

We pulled to the curb. In his enthusiasm, he grabbed his bag and darted off. I called him back saying, ‘not so fast. I need to give you a proper send off.’ So I gave him a kiss, a hug, and watched him walk through the doors, backpack slung over his shoulder.

Two hours later I stared glassy-eyed at the television, emotionless and in shock as I watched his plane crash into the World Trade Center. My hopes and dreams--gone. That life that I thought I was going to have--gone. I had to build a bridge to cross the chasm between my old life and what would become my new life.

I live in Marblehead, which has the highest density of early American homes outside of Colonial Williamsburg. The houses are so close to one another that when the neighbor’s alarm goes off and you reach for your bedside table. All the neighbors socialize and know each other quite well. My neighbors did the thing that neighbors do when there’s a death in the family: show up with food. I’ll never forget Dick and Dorothy walking through the door with every member of their extended family parading thru the house with platters of food to constitute a complete thanksgiving dinner for 20 into the home I was now living in alone. It was all there--turkey, dressing, gravy, mashed potatoes, creamed onions, squash, cranberry sauce, apple pie.

After three or four weeks of severe depression, I came to hear God calling me to use this tragedy to build bridges toward peace and understanding. However, in order to do so I would need to feel comfortable with my new identify as a 9/11 widow. The vulnerability of this identify and the loss of anonymity that came with it made me very uncomfortable.

I’m a closet ‘seeker.’ My family has never been comfortable with the G** word. My mother would duck down below the windows when the Jehovah’s witnesses would call. So even mentioning God was taboo. Three of the four women in my family were widows under age forty, so perhaps that caused us to doubt the presence of God in our lives. But for me, the signs where clearly there telling me I was on the right path, where I was supposed to be. Against my wishes God had called me there.

There were moments of doubt. Ted Jeremenko is a contemporary American folk artist whose paintings of maritimes scenes have gained a national audience. My late husband wanted one of Ted’s prints to grace the walls of our home. Whenever we passed the local gallery selling Ted’s work, he would tug on my shirt sleeve asking if we could buy one. I was reluctant to accept an invitation from the American Red Cross for a support group for mid-30 widows with no kids whose husbands died on 9/11. The first meeting was 1+ hours from my house during rush-hour traffic. I doubted it would be worth it, but something told me to check it out. After meeting four strangers who to this day remain among my closest friends, I remember thinking to myself, “this was worthwhile, I’m glad I did it.” I then opened the door to leave the therapists office to find a Ted Jeremenko print hanging on the wall right in front of me. I knew that I was in the right place.

My husband and I were married in 1997. Our fifth anniversary would have been in 2002. That was also the first anniversary of 9/11. The crescendo was starting to build early in the summer, so I knew it was time to get out of Dodge. I decided to go to Ghana, W. Africa to do some volunteer work. It would be a way for me to escape the 9/11 media blitz and also a way to explore the possibility of changing careers to public service. As I was preparing for my trip I decided to combine my camera bag and my husband’s camera bag, taking the best of each for my trip.

As I was going through my husband’s camera bag, I noticed his camera had exposed film in it. I brought it to the photo shop. When I picked up the photos an hour later there were pictures of friends I hadn’t seen for a while. As I thumbed through them, I realized the photos were taken by him at our wedding. This was even more remarkable to me since the date was June 29th, our fifth anniversary. It was yet another sign that God’s presence was in my life.

There are times when this presence has made me uncomfortable, and I have had to be dragged by the ankles, kicking and screaming along the way. Or have slammed the door. As I said, I like my privacy and anonymity. After 9/11 I took solace in exercise, and cycled the Cabot Trail. It was 5 days of cycling 50+ miles/day starting at day break at the ocean, climbing 1500’ mountains, and returning back to sea level. After the last day of cycling I enjoyed a celebratory ice cream cone. A little boy came toddling over to me as I was sitting on the deck enjoying the ice cream. We exchanged smiles, then waves. We started playing peek-a-boo. I began talking to his mom, a woman slightly younger than myself. I mentioned that I was from Boston, and only visiting Nova Scotia to cycle the Cabot Trail. She mentioned that she was on vacation. She was just staying for a few nights...her first vacation since her husband had passed away last year. *silence* I bid my good bye, got on my bike, and cycled away from there as quickly as my tired legs would carry me. I have come to see that grace occurs when preparation meets opportunity, and I was neither willing nor prepared.

These ‘little signs’ along the way took me to unexpected places. In the Spring of 2002, the group of close friends that held me during this difficult time invited me away for the weekend. All that week I had been cleaning out my husband’s office. My thoughts were heavy just reflecting about all his stuff, especially the many boxes of books. An article in the NY Times sitting on the coffee table caught my eye. It was an interview with a librarian in Afghanistan. He said to the reporter, if you take only one message back with you, please let it be that we need books. The Taliban has destroyed everything.

This was another one of those ‘a-ha moments.’ My husband was not only a physician, but he was faculty in a residency program for doctors in training. I hoped it might be possible for a physician or medical student in Afghanistan to make use of his books.

The idea seemed kinda crazy, but unlikely things have been known to happen. I chatted up the idea with friends. One of them mentioned that she had recently heard an interview on National Public Radio with a guy that was building schools in Pakistan.

Pakistan is not far from Afghanistan. I wondered....would this guy building schools be willing to help me get the books to medical students in Afghanistan? Since I was the first person in my family to go to college, I understood the power of education to open doors to opportunity. Education had revealed to me the the big, wide world that existed outside of my little corner of it. There was something about this guy’s work that resonated with me.

When I got home, I listened to the interview on Terry Gross’ Fresh Air and researched his organization, Central Asia Institute. I emailed its founder, Greg Mortenson, asking if he might know of anyone willing to help me. Greg immediately responded to my email expressing his willingness to help. I flew to where he was based on Bozeman, MT. to meet him and try to figure out if this idea was at all feasible. If you’ve read Greg’s NY Times best-selling book, Three Cups of Tea, you know that my late husband’s books did indeed make it to Afghanistan.

What you might not know is that sending those books challenged me and challenged those around me. I did, after all, send the books to the very people who fostered the terrorists that killed thousands of innocent Americans, including my own husband. People have asked me how I was ever able to do such a thing.

My answer is simple, I sent those books with the hope that my late husband’s love of medicine would live on by providing valuable resources to under-served medical students in one of the most impoverished parts of the world. It is my sincere hope that his love of healing might come off the pages of his books into the heart of a young Afghani physician.

After meeting with Greg Mortenson, I admired the work he was doing and began to question the meaningfulness of the work I was doing in high tech making rich venture capitalists richer. I went to West Africa to do volunteer work and explore the possibility of transitioning from private industry to public service. When I arrived in Ghana, the sights, sounds, and smells where completely foreign to me. I noticed a topless woman walking down the street with a basket of whole fish on her head. She was as equally surprised by my bare legs as I was of her topless attire. I realized that the frame of reference by which I established my identity had been stripped away. After removing all the familiar things I used to define myself, what was left?

I heard about the program at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Government where they train the leaders of tomorrow in international development. I set my heart on going there. But sometimes in life you get what you need, and not what you want. I was rejected by Tufts, but accepted by Harvard! Unbeknownst to me, the program at Harvard turned out to be a much better match than the program at Tufts. I received the training in leadership and development that I was seeking. I made the professional contacts I needed to make, and it has prepared me well to serve on the vestry at my local church, where the emphasis of our ministries is on social justice. I know too that God is calling me to use this training and contacts to build more bridges in the future.

I tell you these stories because I had expectations about how my life would unfold. I tell you these stories because you are all leaders. In deciding what to do when life takes unexpected turns and twists, I have learned to listen for God’s call. God is talking. God is talking to me and you. God is calling to me and to you to build bridges. The tools that God has called me to use are peace, love, justice, compassion, and understanding. God is talking and I am listening.