Addressed by Nikki Finkelstein-Blair

January 27th, 2012

At the turn of a calendar page–be it month or year–I am inclined to fits of organization. This month, when the year changed, I had a list ready:  kitchen cabinets (the ancient crusty skillets, the untouched pastry shaper, the stacks of plastic takeaway kiddie cups); closet (the stay-at-home-mom Frump Girl wardrobe); and the address book (the pages of scribbled-out and rewritten snail-mail addys). Purge, purge, purge.

I couldn’t just pitch my address book without replacing it, so I found a new one with nice big pages, clever “correspondence” quotations, and cool vintage graphics. I dutifully sat down with my old book and the new one and braved the traumas of carpal-tunnel to rewrite the names and numbers and streets and cities of our friends. Many of them are military families, who, like us, move house every two or three years, and my ten-year-old book was beginning to look like a pen-and-ink tornado had swept through it.

I hadn’t even made it off the ABC page when I had to stop. The very first page of my old book contained the dear names of parents and siblings; friends from high school, college, seminary, my first real job; and families from our overseas duty station in London. DEF included the crossed-out contact information for friends who are now divorced, and a British family from our childbirth-prep class in the U.K. when I was expecting our older son. GHI had my grandma’s address–she went to her true Home last summer. (Oh, how I wish the post office delivered there!)

JKL reminded me that the young people I used to know are now adults; from my book I can see how they’ve moved from their parents’ homes, into college dorms, and now into their own first apartments. MNO was friends we’ve lost touch with entirely; the Irish lady who was Sam’s first babysitter in England; and my young cousin’s address from her boot camp days. PQR was my husband’s grandparents, who also passed away in 2011; STU had several new babies (who are now big kids!) jotted into the margins. VWX was all of the above: a snapshot of my life and relationships all on one page, with friends from decades ago, and from across the globe.

I didn’t write all those addresses into my new book. It’s part of the reorganization: get rid of what doesn’t work, what no longer fits, what sits in disuse. I certainly don’t need all those old addresses, those No-One-By-That-Name-Lives-Here-Anymore bits of information. I don’t need to keep on keeping the postal codes and street names of people who were in our lives only for a season–as lovely a season as it may have been–but who, like us, have moved on.

And yet I couldn’t quite bring myself to throw the old book into the bin. As I sat flipping through its pages, deciding whose name and address I’d use again, who should make it into the new book, I felt like I was looking at a scrapbook of our life over the past years. Though I didn’t feel inspired to reconnect with every one of them, each name brought memories of places, of times, of shared histories. They’re the past now, and that’s fine, but are they really disposable?

It got me thinking: Isn’t that just like life? We move on, we cut some ties and let others dissolve naturally. We grow up, grow old, need more space, go a new direction . . .  find ourselves relocating. We spend our lives sending and receiving “change of address” notifications, as our street addresses, our relationships, our vocations, our inclinations change and change and change again. When God calls us–as individuals, as churches, as women–to a new place in life, when God calls us to be new people and to be with new people, it can make for a messy address book. It makes us reorganize our expectations, and it makes us choose wisely: Who will be our constant contacts? Who will receive the yearly update of Christmas cards? And who will stay fondly (or perhaps not-so-fondly) in our past?

I lift a prayer of gratitude for that old book and for the people whose phones I once called, whose addresses I once wrote. I’m deeply thankful for the friends whose names have begun to fill the lines of the new book. And I’m already glad–and so curious!–to discover the new friends for this new season, who will be added to the pages. I’m ready.

Nikki Finkelstein-Blair is an ordained Baptist minister, at-home mom, and military spouse living in San Antonio, Texas. She blogs at One Faithful Step and Ordinary Times.

Where Love Abides: A Prayer of Love by Nikki Finkelstein-Blair

December 21st, 2011

Where there is love, O God,

 . . . . . . . . .

Nikki Finkelstein-Blair is an ordained Baptist minister, at-home mom, and military spouse living in San Antonio, Texas. She blogs at One Faithful Step and Ordinary Times.

A Prayer of Hope by Nikki Finkelstein-Blair

December 8th, 2011

Nikki Finkelstein-Blair is an ordained Baptist minister, at-home mom, and military spouse living in San Antonio, Texas. She blogs at www.onefaithfulstep.blogspot.com.

In a New Voice by Nikki Finkelstein-Blair

August 17th, 2011

I’m often amazed, amused, and at times even taken aback by what the internet does for us. It is remarkable to have such endless and uncensored access to news (and non-news) and opinions, and even more remarkable to be able to respond back to it all in the ever-present “comment” section following each article. Usually, a quick read through comments left by other readers is at least as interesting as the article itself, and even the most innocuous topic can become a hotbed in the virtual discussion that follows.

Now, I do know that you can’t believe everything you read online–and I believe this includes “comments,” where the excuse of anonymity allows people to be more aggressive, more angry than they might dare to express IRL (“in real life”). But I also have a hunch that, at times, behind the internet-induced bravado, there may be kernels of hard truth among the “comment”-ary.

Last week an article about women in ministry made the rounds, shared in the statuses of Facebook friends, sent from email inbox to inbox. As good journalism should (at least the way I was taught it!) it included quotes from people on both sides of the argument; I thought it was basically straightforward story, the arguments that have been the arguments for years, nothing-new-to-see-here.

Then I read the comment section.

I expected to find some ire in the comments… but I expected it to fall along the lines of the typical debate for and against the role of women as preachers and church leaders. Instead, I was surprised to find a great deal of anger at the church itself.

What really struck me were comments along this line (and there were many): Sure–let women preach. As long as they meet the qualifications of being power-hungry and only interested in money, then they are perfectly suited for the job.

After I got over my initial **OUCH** response, and after I admitted a grudging appreciation for the commenters’ sense of equality, I couldn’t stop thinking about what so many internet-anonymous posters were really saying: that while they could believe in the leadership of women, what they couldn’t believe in was the church.

I can’t begin to reflect on the reasons for such anger. I know every person–including each one of us–has a story, and has experiences of churches, of pastors, of religion and even of God-self that have brought us to our current understandings and feelings, for better and/or for worse, deserved or not.

But I continue to wonder how we all–women and men, vocational pastors and laypeople alike, have a gargantuan job before us: to be the kinds of ministers and Christians who represent a God whose deep love is humanity, not domination; whose activity is full of grace, not greed; and whose church is peopled with humility, not hypocrisy.

It is a job we must all do together–women and men, pastors and laypeople. We need to give the church a new voice, and it occurred to me that women may be in a unique position to do just that, by proclaiming the love of God in feminine terms, with feminine sensibilities, and in, literally, a feminine voice. We are called not to a ministry-marketplace-competition, nor to an angry demanding of equal rights to power, but rather to serve in partnership so we can more fully witness on behalf of the God in whose Image we all are made.

It is a response we owe to The One who gifted and called us. It is also a mission we owe to a world that has been injured, angered, torn apart by those who seek control and wealth in the name of God, and by means of the church. Their positions can be powerful, their pockets stuffed with bills, their speeches booming, but it is for us to communicate to a world that has been deafened by their noise. It is for us to speak a new word, in a new voice, so that all may hear.

Nikki Finkelstein-Blair is an ordained Baptist minister, at-home mom, and military spouse living in San Antonio, Texas. She blogs at www.onefaithfulstep.blogspot.com.

Knit One . . . Preach Too by Nikki Finkelstein-Blair

July 12th, 2011

Through all the seminary lectures I soaked in, all the feminist-language celebrations of worship I’ve planned and participated in, all the arguments (I mean, respectful discussions) I’ve undertaken about the role of women in the church . . . through all those things, I’ve been sitting on a messy little secret.

I like crafts.

I consider myself a feminist; I’m an ordained woman, a writer, a preacher, a communion celebrant… and I’m a knitter, a quilter, and a scrapbooker. I feel called to put words to paper, to stand at a pulpit, to offer blessing and service, and I feel called to have busy hands, paint-y hands, ink-and-glue-y hands.

In seminary I clung to the image of God as Create-or, and turned again and again to Exodus 31:1-3, in which God calls Bezalel of the tribe of Judah specifically to do handiwork for the building and outfitting of the temple: “I have filled him with the Spirit of God in wisdom, in understanding, in knowledge, and in every kind of craft. . . ” But was there room in that calling for scraps of paper and ribbon, for the hum of a sewing machine, for rows of evenly knitted stitches?

Then recently I had an epiphany, thanks not to a volume of heady theology but to a knitting book. Author and designer Debbie Stoller wrote about her own grappling with being a feminist knitter, taking to task the typical feminist standpoint that tends to laud the participation of women in traditionally male activities while denigrating the traditionally female. She writes, “All those people who looked down on knitting—and housework and housewives—were not being feminist at all. In fact, they were being anti-feminist, since they seemed to think that only those things that men did, or had done, were worthwhile. Why couldn’t we all—women and men alike—take the same kind of pride in the work our mothers had always done as we did in the work of our fathers?”

When I read Stoller’s words, I realized I’d been doing it myself: feeling accomplishment and pride in the roles women have increasingly taken in Baptist life and in the church, while at the same time harboring a sense of embarrassment that I just plain like to sew, knit, scrap, paint . . . craft. I’ve even heard myself do it when I meet someone new; I speak with passion and pride about ministry, about preaching and writing, and then I lower my voice and confide with a bit of “aw shucks” self-mockery about my enjoyment of yarn and fabric and pretty papers.

Debbie Stoller’s thoughts also reminded me of my experience at the Baptist Women in Ministry retreat in Nashville about ten years ago, at which the current mission statement was built. We spent a long time discussing how that statement should and could incorporate two realities: one, that BWIM specifically supported women called to vocational, ordained ministries, and two, that BWIM also wanted to stand for women in all their roles within the church—from cookie-baking to baby-rocking to Sunday-School-teaching to preaching. We felt the same tension that Stoller discusses between a feminism that says “women can do the jobs men have always done” and a feminism that says “the jobs women have always done are valued just as highly as those of men.”

We are called to “partnership with God” as creative beings, to reach our hands out to all the earth even as God does—shaping it like clay, painting it with color, blessing it with benedictions, offering it holy nourishment. And we bring all our “gifts and graces” to the divine workshop—whether we are at the table breaking bread, or in the kitchen baking it; whether we are placing liturgical stoles around our necks for worship, or painstakingly stitching bright thread into cloth; whether we are knitting together the lives of people into a congregation, or strands of wool into warmth for winter. We are called, heart and head and even paint-y, glue-y hands, to serve.

Nikki Finkelstein-Blair is an ordained Baptist minister, at-home mom, and military spouse living in San Antonio, Texas. She blogs at www.onefaithfulstep.blogspot.com, and enjoys crafting with her two sons, who are anxious to learn to knit.