Arm in Arm

There’s always someone waiting at the busy intersection, wanting something. An old woman selling onions for pennies, a bored-looking young girl with a hand-printed sign, hand upturned, putting in her time. An old man patiently begs pocket-change, knowing in time he’ll have enough to buy a bottle of something to keep him warm.

On this day as the American made her way to the market, an old woman stood there. She wasn’t selling or begging, just asking for help across the railroad tracks. The strong, young girl locked arms with the unsteady, world-worn woman. As they stepped over the tracks, the younger woman slipped. The old woman tightened her grip, held her ground, and kept them both from falling.

The strangers, arm in arm, laughed at the irony. Then each went her own way, leaving the young missionary thinking about her work there and the lesson she’d just been shown. Stateside, she shared the story with church members who had come to hear from the young college graduate who lives among the poor in Eastern Europe.

I knew after hearing this story that I wanted to write about it, but, like snowflakes that fall lightly, it took time for my thoughts to accumulate, to gather into something worth saying. It seems like much of my writing is like that. I’m slow, I guess.

Her story made me think about the nature of helping - of service, sacrifice, volunteering, giving. Does anyone ever give and not receive? Does the person who forsakes personal comfort or pleasure in order to meet another’s needs ever go away with less? A person may think he’s there to serve, not wanting or expecting any payback, but something else is at work here.

Jesus shamelessly advertised extravagant rewards for serving Him:

And He said to them, “Truly I say to you, there is no one who has left house or wife or brothers or parents or children, for the sake of the kingdom of God, who will not receive many times as much at this time and in the age to come, eternal life” (NASB). Luke 18:29.

And, giving a cup of water to a little child is the same as giving it to Him. Or visiting a prisoner, a sick person, feeding or clothing someone. It’s astounding when it really sinks in. Not that He identifies with the needy, but that He so wants to enlist the troops that He offers the highest reward. “You’ve done it for Me.”

My former pastor, Ronnie Stevens, said, “God didn’t give us the gospel so that we would understand life. He gave us life, so that we could understand the gospel.” Ever since he said that, I’ve looked more intently at things in nature. When you look, you see.

That “something else” at work when we give to others can be seen in the way of the bees and the nectar. Of armies of little fish who clean sharks’ teeth, the yucca moth who alone pollinates the yucca plant, even the bacteria that is needed for digestive health. My daughter’s public school science book promotes the idea of random forces, but then calls the environment an ecosystem. System is right. A beautiful, inter-dependent system that shows us in strokes broad and tiny that Someone with a plan designed things to work together.

Rewards, though seemingly built-in, vary according to motivation. If I do a good thing so people will praise me, they will. That’s the reward. After a time, the clapping dies down, but then I can always pat myself on the back. Not a great reward, but sufficient to keep many people serving.

Sometimes service is part of a contract we make with ourselves – our own formula for living in balance. I’ve done something hard that took a lot out of me. I’m tired. I deserve to dish up a big bowl of ice cream and watch CSI. Don’t ask for more. The service becomes a “Get Out of Jail” pass. Again, it’s reward, but it’s not what Jesus meant.

I’m guilty of both the above in my service. But I don’t think they’re the only motivations. There are better motivations which in my better moments I live by, like Eric Liddell’s, “I feel His pleasure.” For now, the reason I serve is that when I don’t, when my life is all about my family and my stuff, I feel this gnawing discontent. Something is off, unsettled, missing. To use my pastor Cole Huffman’s metaphor again, I’m evaporating on the shore.

But when I enter the torrent, (Cole's metaphor) the gospel life of giving water to thirsty people, I am rewarded. Far, far beyond the effort. Far beyond any expectation or deserving. It makes me glad. It makes me happy. I feel alive.

It seems to be part of the system, part of the design, that people are blessed when they help others. Good on His promise, God rewards those who enter into His work. But sometimes He turns the tables and gives an old woman a moment of usefulness, of strength, the spine-straightening feeling of having helped someone else.

Tribute to My Father on His 80th Birthday

When I was little, the big blue eagle on my father’s strong forearm was a thing of beauty. In time, I would sense that he wasn’t all that proud of it, but sitting in his lap, touching it, I knew nothing of sailors’ rites of passage; only that this was a part of him, and I loved it.

My sister and I also loved to hear his Scar Stories. He has two.

Chopping wood with his father. With an ax. "What’s an ax?" (We’re city girls.) Foot slipped. Ankle cut “near in two”. His mother held him tight while the doctor sewed it back without anesthesia. The scar on his arm is from glass from a window that was struck by lightning while he sat in his desk, a little boy in elementary school.

These three things were emblems of adventure, courage and manhood. Since my father was the only male in the entire extended family, these things formed my earliest thoughts of the differences between boys and girls.

His father died when my father was just 12, having spent the last few months in the chicken coop out back before dying in a TB sanitarium in North Carolina.

High school didn’t hold his interest as much as some ne’er –do- wells that were taking him “down the primrose path.” His mother, raising him and his sister alone, saw the danger. Took action. Signed for him to join the Navy at 17, which he preferred to being drafted into the Army.

He was on Saipan, stood on the site where the 5000 Japanese jumped to their deaths rather than be captured. He got his tattoo. “Why an eagle?” I asked him just the other day. “I looked around for the cheapest thing. It was just $5.00.”

After four years in service he went to Kansas City to Radio School. While there, he was a short-order cook in a greasy spoon, once making a meal for Harry Truman. To this day his default meal when my mother doesn’t cook is a fried egg sandwich.

Job prospects for radio engineers became dim as televisions rolled off the assembly line, so he and a friend joined a traveling sales team who sold magazine subscriptions door to door.

In Missoula, Montana, their boss ran off, taking everything they owned. Indignant, they marched, or I should say, hitchhiked to the home office of Stars and Stripes in Washington State, demanding restitution.

“We don’t have anything to do with independent contractors,” the office said. He wired for bus fare and went home. Unfortunately, this wasn’t to be the only time he trusted an unscrupulous business man.

He and my mother began their life on a wing and a prayer. Well, maybe just a wing. They eloped. She was 19; he was 22. “Why did you do that?” “I don’t know. It’s just what people were doing in those days. Nobody had any money. You just found a preacher and got married.”

He bought “Good Night, Irene” for $100. No windows. No brakes. Soon it wouldn’t even make a right turn. He still laughs ‘til he cries as he relates trying to turn off busy Union Avenue. He’d have to turn a little; put the car in reverse, back up, turn a little more, taking about seven such maneuvers to complete the turn, cars honking, people cursing.

I was born after eight years of trying, he always says tenderly and proudly. My sister two years after that. He worked as a traveling salesman, a manufacturer’s rep for auto parts. No doubt he missed a lot, as did we, by this arrangement, but this was the job that he could get. These were the days when people stayed with a company for years; when personal fulfillment took second place to providing for family.

Perhaps it’s his nature, perhaps it’s the years alone on the road, but he’s content to be alone with his TV and books, though he wants my mother close by. Last week, while we were waiting for the outcome of my mother’s cancer surgery, I asked him about their courtship.

“I married your mother because she was so gregarious and fun. I didn’t have an outgoing personality.” That statement is the only time I’ve ever heard him say anything approaching self-analysis.

He’s among a dwindling number of men unaffected by the self-help movement, by feminism, by the post WWII me-generations. He grew up in a time when what it meant to be a man was clear and simple. I’m sure he never questioned it, never thought to question it. He just was.

My daughter complained that a certain young man didn’t even know how to change the oil in his car. “It’s just not very manly.”

“Well, what is a man, anyway?” I ask her, relishing a possible teachable moment. I’d just read John Piper’s, Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood and was ready. “It has nothing to do with changing the oil.”

“I don’t know,” she actually said.

“I know you don’t know because nobody knows anymore, but I know, and so I’ll tell you.”

A man takes responsibility for the things and people around him. There is a sense of duty, to see that things are taken care of, made better. He does the hard things, the dangerous things, the dull things, without complaint. Because as husband, father, son, son-in-law, brother, or citizen, this is what’s needed.

“So, no, it’s not unmanly if he can’t change the oil. It’s unmanly to ignore it.”

In my teens, I went to work at Young Life camp in Colorado for a month. My father insisted I take his brand-new Delta 88, choosing the older car for himself. I can say about my father that in my entire life, whenever I’ve had a need, asked for anything, he has never once said, “No, I can’t. I’m too busy.”

They say we learn, for good or bad, what God is like from our earthly father. If so, the best thing I’ve learned from my father is,

When I call, the answer is always, without hesitation, “Sure, hon, I’ll be glad to.”

I Need Some Happy

"I Need Some Happy"

Like most people, my days at work follow predictable grooves. Teaching ESL is the best job I’ve ever had, but, though they keep me laughing with mistakes like, “I put the turkey in my pocket”, most aren’t yet able to communicate much of substance.

I dictate, “What does your mother do?” They write, “My mother is homemaker.” I say, “What does your father do?” “He is businessman.” I tell them to put them together with “and” and a comma.

A Korean girl writes, “My mother is waitress, and my father stays home.”

“You need an “a”, remember? She’s just one waitress; it’s a count noun.” This girl can talk up a storm, so I ask, “Your father stays at home?”

“Yes, well, he’s sick.”

I respond with concern, and pry further. My husband says I make people uncomfortable with all my questions. I call his reticence a guy thing and keep on, though I know he’s often right about that. I just can’t seem to help myself. Nosy? I like to call it “interested”.

“No, it’s not disease. He has mental problem. He was in the war, and saw terrible things. His best friend saved his life. But now he’s so old, like only 60, but from all that he’s so old. It’s so sad.”

What war?

Vietnam.

He’s a Vietnam Vet. Just like American Vietnam Vets. I had no idea.
Only in their country there’s no support, no common knowledge about post-traumatic stress syndrome, why they can’t hold jobs, trust people, talk about it, why they drink “to make the pain go away.”

I move on to the next student, check for the comma, look for the “a”, sobered by her story, by my ethnocentrism. I’m humbled that she told me. It takes so much effort in a second language. And I’m no one, really. Just her teacher. But I feel privileged.

It’s not the first time a student had to leave the room for a few minutes. Last year, there was another student, in his first weeks here, homesick, struggling, the lone Vietnamese student in our program. He could read and write well, but it was almost impossible to understand him orally, but he tried and tried, answering every question.

“What do you need?” I asked round-robin. Others said, “I need some apples." "I need some milk. " "I need some money.”

He said, “I need some…happy.” No four sadder words have I ever heard. He teared up, I teared up – the universal language. He left quickly.

The other students, if they understood, didn’t have the language to pry. I resumed the exercise. He soon returned, took his seat, ready to go again.

I’m amazed at these students, their bravery in their vulnerability. Trying to communicate in a second language things of the heart.

Later, the beautiful daughter of the Vietnam Vet saw me, her eyes brightened, and she gave me a hug – a very unusual thing for a Korean to initiate with a teacher. I said, “I’m sorry I made you cry.”

“No, no. It’s okay. I’m proud of him.”

Across the divides of race, age, religion and language, we communicate. It’s a beautiful thing.

Paul Potts singing Opera

The Skull....or The Three Skulls?

A little boy I know, 6, with his home-made wooden guitar asked me, "Which title for my song is best? "The Skull... or The Three Skulls"? Not wildly disparate, not even mildly disparate. Actually quite reasonable. He'd found what he liked, narrowed it down, and was searching for the best title.

Unlike me. I can't narrow down (either literally or figuratively). I just decided to start a blog during yesterday's sermon, and today I tried to think of a name, which is to try to figure out what the blog will be about, which is to say who am I, and what am I doing here?

I couldn't decide between: Don'tMashMyMilkyWay or NotaPlacidPool . The first comes from a funny story, and I thought my blog could be about all the things that make me laugh.

The second is from a striking statement in yesterday's sermon. My pastor Cole Huffman said, "The gospel is not a placid pool into which you dip and then spend the rest of your Christian life on the shore evaporating." I thought I would write about my clumsy attempts to "not evaporate", to live out what I say I believe, to drink deeply in rivers both clear and muddy.

Feeling scattered, aimless, like a person who flits from this to that, (which I am), I took solace in research. I looked at a blog I respect, Allthings2all.blogspot to become more familiar with blogging, and viewed there a video that spoke to my question.

Who am I? Am I a mobile phone salesman or an opera singer? And what gift do I bring? What is the point in this 50 year old woman writing a blog?

The answer is in my title. "Wildly disparate" describes my schedule, my interests, my heart. I hope that what I offer here will make you laugh, cry, smile, and sometimes bite your lip.