Learning to Sail: part 2
The first time I sailed with God I was sitting in the back seat of a car heading into the mountains to facilitate a mediation between three women who did not like one another.
I worked for the county Health and Human Services division. Each of the women ran a social service vital to the community. All of them served the same at-risk population, but each service was so different and they were so disjointed that people were falling through the cracks. My job was to get them to collaborate so that their services could complement one another rather than compete with one another.
It was a daunting task because all of these women had big egos, different philosophies, and a history of seeing one another as competitors for grant funds. Riding up the canyon with two of them, I listened to professional banter that only thinly veiled their mutual distrust. They were putting on a show for me and I realized that the entire day would be a waste if I couldn’t help them let go of their posturing and the fears they disguised. I further realized that I was in completely over my head. How could I, a 30 something year old with limited experience, gain the attention or the respect of these seasoned women and get them to do anything that would make a difference? They had only come because their funding was threatened if they did not. While I knew they would participate out of fear, there is a huge difference between getting through something with the minimal requirements and embracing a new way of doing things for the sake of the larger community. I knew they leaned toward the former.
As I sat swaying in the backseat feeling helpless, I was reminded of God, so I reached out in prayer. I asked God to show me what to do and, to my surprise, God answered me. I suddenly understood that all I had to do was listen. I asked what that meant, and God said God would show up if I would remain open. In other words, I should not simply ram through my agenda and hope for the best. Rather, I should open a conversation and wait to see how God nudged me.
Once assembled in the conference room, coffee cups filled and white boards cleaned, I took a deep breath while offering a silent prayer of “Now What?” Then I opened the conversation reciting why we were there and shared my expectations for the day’s agenda. But then rather than continue talking, I listened. I simply stopped talking and looked at them.
As they spoke into the awkward silence, I felt their words and their underlying intentions and emotions flow through the room. That was normal, as a trained therapist, I’ve learned to attend to both the meaning of the words and the deeper meaning of all the nonverbal cues. But this time as I listened, something different happened. The non-verbal cues and my recognition and reactions to them now had a new quality. It was almost as if this conversation within the conversation began to glow. It wasn’t visual, but it was equally tangible to my intuition. With each new thread of meaning and intention or emotion, something like a color flowed through the room - more felt than seen, and signaled for my response.
At first, I hesitated, but then I remembered my prayer and chose to trust my instincts. I voiced each nudge and watched in awe as my words somehow pushed past the posturing and touched their hearts. After only a few hours, we had moved beyond the surface conversation to acknowledge the anxiety hovering just below the surface. Once laid bare, the conversation became authentic and the actual barriers to collaboration emerged. Some of the barriers were genuine and others were imagined. But even the genuine barriers became far less intimidating once they were voiced out loud and considered as a shared dilemma, rather than the problem of only one agency. By opening up to one another they began to build trust and that laid the foundation for real progress.
By the end of the meeting, they found an acceptable solution that allowed the county to move forward in productive ways and sent me down the mountain a hero. But, I knew it wasn’t me at all. It was God. God moved through the room entering wherever people opened their hearts in vulnerability and helping all of us see the issues from other angles. This built trust and expanded our imaginations until we could see opportunities that had previously looked like threats.
Swaying in the back seat on the way down the mountain, I quietly wiped tears from my eyes. I gave thanks to God for showing up in such an astonishing way and asked if that would ever happen again. God said that it had only just begun.
I suspect the disciples felt the same way when they returned from their first mission trip rejoicing in how God worked in and through them. Over time, I’ve come to understand that this doesn’t have to be a once in a lifetime thing that only a prophets and apostles ever experience. It can be our everyday experience. Indeed, it is supposed to be an everyday experience. This is one way it can look to abide in God as God abides in us. When we learn to live like this each day, we are no longer floating, we are sailing!
