I'm Shallow, Too

I've mentioned Gary Cleveland's blog here recently. One of my favorite entries on South Moon & A Cup of Java is one of the earliest, so you have to search the archives for August to find it. It's titled "Way Down Deep I'm Basically a Shallow Person." I enjoy that entry because I've often thought of myself that way.

Some of my friends are academicians. I admire them. It just makes my head hurt sometimes to try to be like them. I've concluded that some of us are destined to be deep thinkers, and others of us were made to appreciate deep thoughts. I'm with the second group.

Maybe it's not so much that I can't/don't think deeply, it's just that I don't do it quickly. I'm what happens when you replace the incandescent light bulb with a flourescent one — the light just comes on a little slower after you flip the switch. I'm definately a crock pot rather than a microwave.

So even though the event in this entry is almost 100 days old now, and though it's not particularly deep, it needed some time stew in the mental crock pot for me to figure out what it all meant. My profile mentions that I spend two weeks every summer counseling at a Christian youth camp in Wisconsin. I've done it for many years. Except for this last summer, when I needed to stay home. Many of my closest friends meet me in those woods the first two weeks in August every summer, and I missed them deeply this year. Wasn't a waking hour during the session that I didn't think of them.

One of the moments that defines our camp session each year happens on the second Thursday of the session. We call it an annointing. It's a tradition that started....I don't know, eight years ago maybe, if that long, yet it's hard to remember camp without it.

It's remarkably simple, and it works like this: a couple of bowls of oil — baby or olive, doesn't matter, the magic's not in the oil — are placed on a table in the center of the Great Hall. You dip your fingers in the oil, and go find someone in the room you want to annoint with love. When you find your person, you rub that oil into their palm and tell them what you want to say. And it's a speech, not a conversation. Only the annointer can talk. If the anointee wants to annoint the annointer, he has to go get oil and repeat the process as the annointer. For about two hours, campers and staff navigate through the maze of bodies in the Great Hall, looking for the ones they want to annoint.

Simple, but powerful. It's an emotional time, and frankly, I often find myself dreading it for that reason. I've never yet made it through an annointing night without having to walk outside for a few minutes to get some air and clear my head before going back for another run at it. The evening is intense, and worth it. Campers and staff alike love it, and I pity the person who somewhere down the line decides to put that tradition to rest.

Of all of the days I was away from camp this year, that Thursday was the hardest, because I knew what I'd be missing. All day long there was a gnawing somewhere in my stomach that wouldn't go away. I felt like I was missing out on something I badly needed.

One of few neat things about missing camp was it gave me the opportunity to participate in an outreach program at my church here in Oklahoma City that before I never got to experience because of camp. Our church is located in a rather poor neighborhood of the city, and a few years ago, we started providing school supplies for neighborhood children who needed them. And there are a lot who need them. We hand out flyers in the neighborhood door-to-door on a Saturday to advertise the giveaway, then the following Friday and Saturday the parents and children come to the church to pick up their school supplies.

So on Friday — the last day of camp and the day after the annointing — I volunteered to help pass out the school supplies as people came to get them. In addition to bags of paper and pencils and binders and stuff, we also offered Bibles to families who wanted them, and an opportunity to pray with a minister or elder from the church.

It's a sad indictment on me I guess that I don't even remember her name. But she came into the church with her children to pick up school supplies, and she wanted to take us up on the offer of prayer. Trouble was, all of our ministers and elders who were there that night were currently busy praying with other customers. She would have to wait for the next available minister to hear her call.

I could tell she was getting a little impatient — it's hard when you have three small children with you and they're bored. But I didn't want her to give up waiting and just go on home. So I went ahead and asked her: "You know, if it doesn't matter to you if the person you pray with isn't a minister, I'll be glad to do it." It didn't matter to her, so off we went to the training room outside the auditorium — a quiet place to talk and pray.

I remember the story about how her brother died in the spring. Suicide. I remember her talking about being a single mother, about her anger toward God for her brother's death and how she didn't want to take those frustrations out on her kids. And then we prayed, hugged, and on her way she went, kids in tow. Ten minutes, tops.

It took awhile, weeks in fact, for all the carrots and potatoes and meat of that encounter to become stew in the crock pot of my head. Shouldn't have been a big deal to me, but I couldn't get it out of my thoughts. Eventually, I figured it out.

God provided the annointing.

He knew what I needed and made it happen, even if it wasn't the way I was used to having it happen. In the act of listening to and praying with the woman, I was annointing. And in that simple act, the oil was turned on me by God Himself.

Different place, different people. Same mercy and grace. He is good.