Tired of being Undeserving

This was a comment that I made on another blog, but I think it stands alone as a blogpost. And - sorry folks - it's another healthcare rant if you want to skip it.

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Speaking as someone who presently can’t afford healthcare, I’m tired (there is a LOT of emotion behind that word “tired” that I can’t properly communicate) of fellow Christians telling me that I don’t deserve healthcare or that “people like me” don’t really want it.

The church has very clearly called upon us to tithe our income which does not currently pay the bills. We do tithe and would have done so anyway, but truth be told, having been told to tithe I now resent doing it. I have gone from feeling good about giving to God sacrificially to feeling that people might be wondering why we are giving so little – surely they must be making more than THAT?

What would happen to us in the event that we had a big medical crisis/bill? Well, we’d be left to accept the charity of the hospital or possibly of family. The church will maybe come up with a casserole. But, in the face of such opposition we certainly can’t be real enough with anyone at church to admit that not having healthcare is a worry. And no one would actually help us out with our real needs. I wouldn’t really expect that either, but I really MIND it in the context of being told that we would not deserve to have medical care on account of not being able to afford it at the moment.

Now that I’m finally getting a job and we’ll be able to pay our bills – although we’ll still worry about medical care and won’t really be able to afford preventative dentistry or checkups – am I supposed to: a) Say “Whew! Now I’m part of the mainstream in my church. I’ll join in the view that people in the condition I was in a few months ago don’t deserve healthcare? or b) Remember what it was like to worry? I’m pretty sure it’s going to be option (b). And we’ll still be worrying that we’ll get away with good health until we are able to earn an upper-middle class wage with all the perks.

New Year New Job

Well, as I alluded to in an earlier post (Pushing on Closed Doors) I've been looking for a job that will help pay the bills since we arrived in the US this past August and such a job has been, unsurprisingly given the economy, quite difficult to find.

Probably like tens of thousands of people, I sent out hundreds of resumes and applications and got very few interviews. But, in a perfect example of all the buses coming at once, I answered two job adverts this past Monday, promptly got two interviews and then two job offers. Both jobs pay the same hourly rate (just above minimum wage) and both were offering 28 to 32 hours/week, but the first job was located about an hour's drive away and would have meant working until 9:45 pm 3 days a week as well as working on Sunday. The second job is in town - about 1 to 2 miles away - and there are no Sunday hours. Even better, I'll be working four 7-hour days instead of a few hours 5 days a week, which was the case with the other job.

I'm not going to give specifics about the job, but it's a locally-owned business providing a service. The owner works on the premises and the atmosphere is in the shop is very good. I've used it myself as a customer and the workers are friendly know many of the clients who come in. The work will be varied; all the employees take turns doing the different functions and I'll be on my feet, which is something that I wanted.

I had a good long chat with the owner (who is a bit older than me) when I was having my interview and he asked me about my job-hunting experience. I told him that I'd sometimes felt there might be some age discrimination going on. I felt this especially with a temporary agency that I signed up with. I did very well on their skills tests and the agency would ring me and say that they had a match of a job for me and they'd just send my resume (CV) over to the client "and then we'll have you out working". Then the client would say that they didn't want me. This happened about 5 or 6 times. Now, I understand someone maybe thinking I'm "over-qualified" for a data-entry or typing job, but I couldn't see why this would matter for temporary jobs. I began to wonder if they really wanted someone young and pretty to look at more than they wanted someone to type.

The owner looked at me with a look of recognition and said "Do you know what I think it was about?" I asked what. He said that many of the middle-aged people he'd hired couldn't deal with the computer. This particular business has a rather complex filing system to deal with clients' orders and it runs on proprietary computer software. He said that many of the people "our age" that he'd hired would get really lost and flustered with the computer and just couldn't cope. Whereas the younger people could intuitively figure their way around the software. He'd stopped worrying about that when I pulled out my iPod Touch to put our appointment in my calendar (diary) and was even more reassured when he had happened to see me in a local coffee shop working on my laptop.

I thought this was a very interesting observation and I think he may have had a point. I'd been trying to figure out possible objections to hiring me and I'd even written on my resume that I am a US citizen and eligible to work in the US without sponsorship, since all my experience for the last 20 years was in the UK. I also wrote in my self-profile that I am "fit and healthy and not taking any medications" since someone mentioned to me that they thought an "older" (hello!) person might be off sick a lot (actually, I suspect that might be a false stereotype, but if the bosses are 30-something and they think that, then I might as well tell them I'm energetic and healthy).

I'd actually thought about "the computer issue" once before when a twenty-something expressed surprise that I knew what a USB-port was. But I never actually took seriously the idea that someone would assume that I couldn't find my way around a computer.

Anyway, I am very relieved to have a job and it's going to make a big difference to our situation.

Here's hoping for good things in 2010.

Holy Communion

Probably one of the biggest changes in my worship life since I move to the US has been my "relationship" with the liturgy of Holy Communion.

Although congregations in the British Methodist system only celebrate communion once a month, as a minister, I generally presided at a Sunday communion service every week as I served four congregations. In addition to Sunday communion services, I often attended a mid-week communion service at the local Church of England parish and my duties often required me to preside at communion at local nursing homes as well as to celebrate with individuals who were house-bound.

So, it has been a big change to go from presiding at or receiving communion once a week or more to receiving communion once a month on Sundays.

I don't really consider myself an "expert" on Methodism in the New World, but I'm given to believe that within living memory, there were congregations which didn't celebrate communion in the main Sunday service, but which had a "tack on communion" at the end of the service. I remember briefly attending a Methodist church in Washington DC in about 1979 or 1980, where communion was held in a separate Chapel directly after the main service which was held in the sanctuary. Methodist communion here still feels a bit like a rush-job to me: it feels like it's "tacked on" to the service of the word which feels like it's is "the real deal" with communion as something of an embarrassing activity like getting caught making out in the car as a teenager. At least our pastor uses the entire communion liturgy: Great prayer of thanksgiving and epiclesis as well as the words of institution. In a number of places, I've experienced just the words of institution.

Yesterday (Saturday) evening, I attended a local Lutheran congregation which had sent out an invitation to their Christmas service. I didn't want to go to the Christmas service as our congregation had its own, but I learned from the Lutheran congregation's website that they hold a "blended" style of worship on Saturday evenings at 5:30 and the website advertised communion at every service. Yesterday evening was a service of nine lessons and carols (something I think is probably unusual in the US?), with communion at the end. Here again, the "communion liturgy" consisted only of the words of institution, but the rest of the service was somewhat more "liturgical" and everything seemed to flow towards the communion rather than making the communion an embarrassing afterthought. It was a sufficiently positive experience, that I think I will become a regular at this Saturday evening service. It will be good to have communion once a week again.

Pushing on Closed Doors

I'm conscious of the fact that I've not done a lot of blogging since Wonderful Husband and I moved to the United States. I'm not sure of the precise reasons for this. First was the simple disruption and chaos of moving. Moving an entire household overseas is different from moving a household to a different part of the country or even moving overseas with two suitcases and a few posted parcels as I did in my original move from the US to Belgium in 1987. As any middle-aged couple will tell you, house-moving is physically and emotionally demanding but this goes up a notch when the move is international.

More recently, I think that I've not been blogging because I still have not managed to get myself fully "settled" in the US. We undoubtedly picked one of the worst times in our lives to quit jobs and move without any employment prospects. And I have been unable to get gainful employment either in "the secular world" or within the church. But even more discouraging is the fact that I seem unable to even volunteer in the church in any capacity beyond answering a call from this or that committee for volunteers. One of the narratives of my journey to the ministry was a testimony about pushing doors to see if they opened. Here in the US, every door I've pushed has stayed resolutely shut. I particularly miss preaching and presiding at communion, but part of me is aware that these activities are part and parcel of being a church leader, which I am currently not.

I'm reminded of the part of John Wesley's covenant prayer where we pray "let me be employed for you or laid aside for you" and I always secretly thought "thank you that I am employed for you, and - truth be told - I don't really want to be laid aside for you, thank you very much." And then another part of me wonders what John Wesley himself was thinking when he said these words. His life story is not exactly one of allowing himself to be laid aside!

I don't think that this prayer necessarily implies passivity. I don't think it implies giving up on pushing doors. For me, I think it implies the need to find new doors to push and it also implies being patient whilst going through the process of finding new doors and pushing on them. There is also comfort in these difficult words, because other people throughout the centuries have prayed them in far more difficult circumstances than I'm in.

Do I now hit the "delete" button because this is too personal and sounds like whining? I don't mean to whine but I sense that I'm not going to be able to blog further until I'm honest about where I am. We'll see if I find further inspiration in the coming weeks. "Let me be full, let me be empty, let me have all things, let me have nothing".

Personal Update

This is a holding page for a "personal update" post.

You can see some more nice photos of autumn in our Ohio town by clicking here.

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OK, It's November 5th and I'm going to try an update.

I've been hesitating to write an update as it's hard to find words and my brain is telling me that I don't have a lot to say.

Wonderful Husband and I have settled in to our new town pretty well. As you can see from the photos, the town itself is lovely. (By the way, in the two weeks since these photos were taken, almost all the leaves have dropped off the trees! I forgot how quickly the seasons change here.) The contrast from the town we just left in the Midlands in the UK could hardly be greater. But there are many ways in which I feel a fish out of water here. For one thing, as a "socialist", neither WH nor I fit in with the largely Republican environment here.

But let's be honest. What I'm personally finding most difficult is the fact that I have not be able to find a job; as I wrote on Facebook and Twitter "This being laid aside for you lark isn't all that easy". I suspect that some other bloggers could write eloquently about their feelings on the matter. For all my love of analysis, I'm not particularly the sort of person who likes rehearsing such feelings over and over. For me it just leads to negativity and I prefer to simply put my head down and plow forward. But I think that's why it leaves me nothing to say!

I've had a bit of success in being offered a part-time volunteer position with Americorps. The position also offers a small living allowance equivalent to the minimum hourly wage. But because the particular position I applied for involves working with vulnerable adults, Americorps has to do an FBI check on me. I was finger-printed three weeks ago and Americorps are still waiting to hear back; they will not even train me until I'm cleared. (John Menuier, I think this is a good example of where a semi-colon works better than a period. *grin*).

We are lucky that Wonderful Husband was able to get a position with the same retail company that he worked for in the UK. However, he moved from a full-time position at a very good hourly rate to a part-time position at the US's beginning hourly rate. Still, it's a job and jobs are very difficult to find in this part of the Midwest. Seeing WH's job offer with the benefit of hindsight, I don't think we realized at the time that he received the offer that it was indeed a miracle. A very noticeable percentage of people in the congregation I'm currently attending have lost their jobs and Ohio has three of the cities in the US's top ten unemployment chart: Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo.

I've had two supply preaching appointments since I've been in the US and the sermons can be found on my sermon blog. It was good to preach and I'm currently "missing" the fact that I don't have any further preaching appointments in the foreseeable future.

A Star is Born

My brother was on TV. :-)

Ohio

We have arrived in NorthEast Ohio after an 8 and a half hour plane trip from Heathrow to Cleveland Hopkins airport. The trip was mostly uneventful except for customs apparently thinking that they needed to rip the zip off my bag to open it, despite it having an authorized lock; oh well, not the end of the world.

This morning, when I woke up, I was actually a bit teary about leaving the UK. That caught me a bit by surprise but it makes sense when you think that I've spent more than half my adult life in the UK.

It's very strange being back in the area where I was born and which I left at the age of 17 back in the mid 1970s. I never thought I'd be back here and I never thought I'd leave the UK. Wonderful Husband seems to be finding the whole thing less traumatic than I am at the moment.

Anyway, it's now past 1:00 am my 'body time', so I'm off to bed. Today marks a big transition point in both our lives.

M minus 2

People keep asking me what I'm going to miss in the UK. Well, besides the people, I think the answer is 'Fish and Chips'. The movers have packed and wrapped everything and tomorrow the shipping container will arrive to be filled with our things. Here is a photo of my last authentic Fish and Chips meal for awhile. (This one is for my husband's former work colleague who photographs his meals!)

M minus 4

Well, the movers came today and started the packing process. They packed up a good deal of our household goods, leaving us with some basic cooking, washing and sleeping items. Tomorrow and Wednesday they have to 'export wrap' the furniture. Some has already been export wrapped and it's pretty strange. My office bureau, for example, has been cushioned and wrapped in its entirety. Apparently, all of the furniture gets wrapped in paper in a similar way. Very different from a domestic move where they throw blankets over the furniture. We have also been able to give away some of our things to someone in the neighbourhood who is in need of household goods with which to start a new home.

My Wonderful Husband loves packing; something I find exceedingly difficult. He was like a kid in a candy shop this morning and I decided to leave the house. I went to the gym in the morning, popped by the tip with some rubbish and then spent the afternoon having lunch with a friend. I know this sounds totally whimpy, but after having done 4 other moves together in our marriage, this is the best way.

This evening, we will pack our clothes into suitcases even though we're spending Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nights here. Tomorrow, most of our clothes will get packed for the 10-week journey to Ohio although two large boxes will be shipped air freight on Friday; allegedly they will arrive on Monday or Tuesday next week.

M minus 13

Moving day minus 13.

This blog isn't meant to be a special interest blog at all but I guess I usually write on topics that could be considered either 'spiritual' or 'practical theology'.

I'm aware that a number of people I know 'in real life' read this blog and I thought I'd write a bit now about our impending move. Partly because people are asking me questions and it occurred to me that others might want to know the same information.

We are going to be leaving Kidderminster on the 7th of August to travel to Heathrow for our flight directly to Cleveland Hopkins Airport on the 8th of August. This ends 20 years and 8 months' residency for me in the United Kingdom and, for my British-born husband, it begins his first experience of living abroad. He has always wanted to live in the United States and, although we are both looking forward to the change, I think he's probably more excited that I am!

For me, I'm going back to the general area of the United States that I left at the age of 17, and there is something extremely odd about that. People ask me how I'm feeling and I have feelings that are genuinely mixed. On the one hand, I'm looking forward to living in the US again and being near my parents. On the other hand, I'm sad to be leaving here and I'm also aware of the fact that we're leaving at least two years' earlier than anyone thought we'd be leaving.

My congregations have been wonderful to me. I've now had my 'last service' in all four of my congregations and all of them were special. Nonetheless, they have all been a bit sad. This evening is the leaving service that is going to be put on by the Circuit: a cream tea at 5:30 and a 'Songs of Praise' service at 6:30. Naturally, what else would someone who loves to sing want to do on their last Sunday?

I still have one Wednesday morning communion to 'do' this coming Wednesday: an ecumenical service with our local Anglican congregation in the Methodist church (if any of you are reading this, be prepared to get 'little cups' so we don't have to take communion in just one kind!) I have three meetings left, including an extraordinary church council meeting to tie up loose ends and I have a bit more visiting to do.

The house is starting to look like chaos, but we need the removal company to pack for us due to US customs regulations and worries about importing dangerous materials (do bibles count?). For anyone who doesn't know, we do have a house to go to in Ohio but we'll need to wait about ten weeks for our furniture. We are hoping that my husband may be close to having a job offer from the local branch of his current employer, and I'm going to 'play it by ear' and hopefully find a useful ministry - either paid or unpaid. Watch this space.

An 'Interesting' Day

It started out as a typical Saturday. I did a visit in the morning, a few errands later and then home to prepare two Sunday services. Confession-time here: I rarely get my sermon done before Saturday and usually spend Saturday afternoon writing it.

At about 3:00, Wonderful Husband rings from work to say that he's seeing 'flashing lights and black spots' and he's booked a check-up at the Optometrist after work. Immediately, I'm thinking 'detached retina'. WH said 'I rang NHS direct and they told me to go straight to A&E ('accident & emergency' - 'Emergency Room' in American) but I thought that was a bit over the top.'

I told him I'd be happier if he went straight to A&E. Which he did. To the 'wrong' hospital which didn't have a facility to look at eyes. He finally ended up at the 'right' hospital which has an ophthalmology unit that seems to be a national centre of excellence; well, according to their website, they do eye surgeries that can't be done in any other part of of the UK.

Anyway, they found that he had a tear in his retina and they have performed laser surgery and sent him home.  He can see;  his eye isn't bandaged and there is no worry about driving or travelling.

This leaves me in awe and amazement and also reminds me that I'm getting old! I reckon 15 years ago, it would have had to have been conventional surgery with a knife. (I know someone who had this sort of surgery in the early 1980s and it was major surgery.)  Now it's a quick procedure and home. 

Right now this feels rather 'Star Trek-ish' (think walking into Sick Bay and having the doctor wave a computer at you and everything is sorted) and it also feels like an amazing blessing. It also reminds me how lucky we are in the West. In some countries, a person would just start losing their sight at this stage.

Thank you, Lord.

Yikes! How did that happen?

Fourteen years ago, my husband and I attended my university's 15-year reunion.

Today, I've just received an invitation to our 30th reunion.

Yikes! Where did those 15 years go? It doesn't seem that long ago.  The 30 years since graduation does seem 'long ago', but it seems more like 20 years than 30.

And yes, I'm waiting to be told that time only goes faster as one gets older, so go for it! ;-)