#AwkwardTuesday & the Kazoo Band
March 28, 2017
This week our Community Group celebrated #AwkwardTuesday with… kazoos. I thought it couldn’t get more awkward than washing each other’s feet but I may have been wrong.
We started off, as we always do, with a shared meal. The group in charge of the meal brought food inspired by Spring (since WE’RE STILL WAITING, SEATTLE). Risotto with green beans, asparagus, fresh fruit and bread, macaroons and lemon cake.
IJM
Next we heard from a member of our group (go, Lauren!) about her involvement with the International Justice Mission and learned about how our group might join in their good work. We sent letters to our representatives (this sounds like we were working hard but it only took about 30 seconds to fill out the form online), asking them to fund the End Modern Slavery Initiative (EMSI), which was approved last year but has yet to be funded.
Click here and then scroll down if you want to read more about the EMSI and sign your own name. Even if you live in a state where your representatives are already likely to push for the funding, if the constituents are pounding down their door for something like the EMSI, they are much more likely to keep it on the front burner.
Let’s Kazoo, shall we?
Then we gathered around the living room and went around to check in with everyone. We each answered the question “Where is your growing edge? What are you currently learning/thinking/pushing into? We heard all kinds of things from the group — from patience in a very difficult wait to finding identity in a job to having the courage to speak up when something is bothersome.
After this, Whitney and Donna passed out kazoos and announced that we would be playing a song together. Apparently our growing edge as a group is going to be kazoo-playing. Which, as it turns out, is actually really easy to do. If you can hum a song, you can play the kazoo. Because you don’t blow air into a kazoo. You just hum into it. Who knew? So we sang the song once through and then we kazoo-ed it. There was, of course, as much laughter as kazoo playing and that was kind of the point. Whitney had a particularly rough couple of weeks and said that what she most needed at the moment was a little levity. So she decided that we should form our own kazoo orchestra. Obviously.
Be With Me In My Unfolding
It was, perhaps, a difficult transition to prayer after this but Geoff powered through and closed us with this Springtime prayer/poem by Ted Loder.
It is spring, Lord, and the land is coming up green again,
Unfolding outside my well-drawn boundaries and urgent schedules.
And there is the mystery and the smile of it.
The willows are dripping honey color into the rivers
And the mother birds are busy in manger nests,
And I am learning again that
“For everything there is a season
and a time for every matter under heaven.”It is spring, Lord,
and my blood runs warm with the song of the sap,
longing for a beauty I would become.
And there is the mystery and the smile of it.
The buds are swelling on the bush,
the sun is beginning to coax the color
from where it’s been curled against the cold,
the air is sweet to the nostrils;
even the city seems to be rubbing it’s eyes
from a long sleep;
And there is a promise in the season
I have no name for except life.
O Lord, you have sketched the lines of spring.
Be with me in my longing.It is spring, Lord, and something stirs in me, reaching, stretching,
Groping for words, peeking through my defenses,
Beckoning in my laughter, riding on past my fears, pulsing in my music
And there is the mystery and the smile of it.
Be with me in my reaching so I will touch or be touched this time,
By a grace, a warmth, a light, to unfold my life to a new beginning,
A fresh budding, a spring within as well as around me.
O Lord, you have sketched the lines of spring.
Be with me in my reaching.-Ted Loder