Together

Hi. My name is Andrea Lingle. For many of you, you know me as the name near the top of these emails. Others of you may know me as the woman who teaches writing-as-a-spiritual-practice with her eyes closed. I am not bragging about the ease with which I teach. I find myself talking to you all with my eyes closed. Why? I don't know. Y'all aren't that scary.

I am part of the Missional Wisdom Foundation.

Five years ago I got an email from Larry Duggins inviting me to help develop this newsletter as a way to connect with the MWF Dispersed Community (that's you). Since that time I have spent quite a bit of time on Google and YouTube trying to figure out how to justify text correctly or keep images from getting blurry. I have learned things like what a "bleed" is on a printed document, how to navigate downtown Glasgow, Scotland, when my phone reception can't quite handle the tall buildings, (You just walk confidently until something looks familiar...), and how to teach with my eyes open.

I have also spent some serious time wrestling with what it means to be a community of grace. I read, listened, questioned, externally processed Denise Crane's ear off, drug you all through a definite "lack" phase, and went to philosophy school.

Not only have I not nailed down what a community of grace is, I now am pretty sure I don't know exactly what grace is.

But I have figured something out. All that wrestling is the stuff of a community of grace. On pilgrimage, we walk out transformation; in imagining our contexts missionally, we struggle to believe in something new; in forming communities of broken, preposterous people, we learn to love our neighbors—even when it is really, really hard.

That is the barest edge of grace.

The year of our Lord 2020 has been difficult on all of us. We have all been touch by grief. We have lost loved ones, livelihoods, dreams, and certainty. For the Missional Wisdom Foundation, it has meant that our largest sources of revenue, The Mix in Dallas, Texas, and Haw Creek Commons in Asheville, North Carolina, have been closed or drastically reduced. We find ourselves dramatically in need of our community's financial support. For us, the future must include the financial support of our community.

As I have pondered writing this letter this week, I have come back to one question over and over. Why should people financially support the Missional Wisdom Foundation?

My answer can only be why I support the Missional Wisdom Foundation: Imagination and grace.

I am a lay-theologian because someone had enough imagination to believe that a homeschooling-musician-writer who has a penchant for big words and bulky novels, struggling to create a (tidy, efficient, nurturing) home for her family could be. The Missional Wisdom Foundation believes in what could be. I have been companioned through the ongoing struggle to become who and what I am by the community of support within the Missional Wisdom Foundation. By the Dispersed Community Monthly Prayer group, by those who hit reply to these emails to thank or challenge or correct me, by the pilgrims who have shared tears and miles and fairy stones with me, by the thinkers and theologians of the Missional Wisdom Foundation who taught me to think and breathe and imagine Contemplatively and Missionally: these have been my companions along this deep and wide path.

Where will it go from here?

I ask you. When you sit on your front step and imagine, what do you see? Can we help? Together, could we help create something beautiful?