Here If You Need Me

Well, I got back into reading with this truly remarkable book that is packaged as a memoir of a widow who becomes a warden service chaplain in Maine. It is a book that sneaks up on you. It starts out as charming- or at least a charming style. But coming in the back door is the power of life and death and their intimate, unbreakable connection. Every time you think you have the book in hand it takes a different turn with a different insight into something you had not quite thought of before.

Kate Braestrup is the widow of a Maine State Patrol officer killed in an auto accident. Her loving care for him is the beginning of the skillful weaving of death and life and love and loss into a tapestry of wonder and awe. She is a pastor ordained by the Unitarian Universalist Church and serves the Maine Warden Service. That means she is often there for searches for lost hikers or campers or children. That means she gives a caring presence when such a presence is needed by survivors, relatives, or other wardens.

But always in the background is the reality that we all face day in and day out- death and loss and how we find meaning in life that we know ends in death. As such it is disarmingly readable. But you will be made uncomfortable by her bluntness and, if you are like me, pleasantly surprised and relieved that she doesn't take a lot of easy ways out. She just faces it and moves through it as best she- or any of us- ever can.

Chaplaincy like this is a different form of ministry than the local church.

Or is it?

That tension may be at the heart of some of the difficulties the post-modern church is facing. Local churches, especially longer-established and traditional-style churches, are in fact places where ministry is seen as chaplaincy. There's nothing wrong with that. It is an essential part of ministry. How it competes and challenges and is challenged by an evangelical or missional perspective is part of the issue that will probably never be solved to anyone's complete satisfaction.

This book, by taking it out of the parish setting, allows ministry of this type to be observed in its richness, ambiguity, and hope. In the end, even when death seems to have been the winner, well, we all know better than that.

Or if we don't, this book will help you find it.