The Library Card and Our Identity

Last Sunday during The Brook, I had the honor of leading our children's movement. The scripture lesson for the day was from the story of Hannah and Samuel. Pastor Jennie’s sermon title was “On Loan from God,” and she talked about how all our children are ultimately God's children. Really, all of us are ultimately God's children, and whatever responsibility or obligation we have to one another is because we are in relationship to one another through our Creator. To illustrate this point to the children, I brought a library card with me.
 
If you were at this service, you might remember a young boy who spoke up before I could get around to making the connection between the library card and our identity. The young boy raised his hand and said, “You must be really smart to know how a library card will relate to God.” He got some big laughs, and he set me up to prove myself. I assured him that I had a plan. I talked about how when we check out books from the library, we don't actually own them, and we must treat them nicely and return them to the library when we are done. Similarly, we as human beings are not “owned" by our parents or our spouse. We are all, primarily, the treasured possession of our holy and loving God.
 
At the end of my little talk, I asked the boy, “Did I land it?!” And he said “yes!” This was definitely a highlight of my ministry, and it reminded me of an activity my youth group used to do on trips and at camp. We would nominate one person to lead a devotional and pick a random thing they had to include in the devotional. Perhaps they had to include a sports team or an unusual animal. It sounds a little impious, but also a great way to stretch our holy imagination.
 
We do not expect to see God working outside of the usual spaces. We do not always look for the connection between the mundane and the holy.  We tend to lead compartmentalized lives, keeping our faith separate, perhaps in an honest attempt to keep our faith holy.
 
A few weeks ago, I was gifted a prayer book called “Every Moment Holy.”  It is a collection of prayers and liturgies for perfectly ordinary moments in life. The book has prayers for washing dishes, doing yard work, dropping the kids off at school, and more than one prayer for changing diapers (something we’re doing a lot lately at my house). In using this book, I have been encouraged to look for the holy amid the ordinary, to see how God might be working or trying to teach me something new. Often, this practice takes just a little bit of imagination (when changing diapers, it takes a lot of imagination). However, using our imagination to see God in the ordinary and mundane helps to break open our compartmentalized lives and connect with our Creator on more than just Sunday morning.
 
My prayer for all of us is that we might push ourselves to more fully participate in God’s holy imagination. I hope that we might more readily see the connection between library books and loving our neighbor, between changing diapers and caring for the least of these. And when we use our imagination to make these connections, I believe we will be transformed along the way. May we have an imagination that wonders beyond our present circumstances, to see God working in every part of our ordinary lives.
 
In Christ,

Rev. Kena Newkirk
​Pastor of Discipleship & Connections