The Gifts of Spring

While on my walk, my own heart lately sodden with cares began to thaw with these first gifts of spring. A daring squirrel had climbed to the farthest edge of the highest and flimsiest branch, defying gravity, the tenderest shoots no doubt worth the risk. I loved his gumption, felt proud of his moxey, if envious.

The redbud trees are blooming; impossibly purple and delicate. Their greeting here at the close of winter while most of the other trees are still barren is like some angelic visitation bringing good tidings. I stopped and stared and could hardly believe the beauty, repented of my wintery unbelief.

I found myself marveling at the fortitude of a half-spent dandelion, standing brave and tall, alone, sprung amidst rocks. I fancied myself like that saint of old who was struck by the love of God at the sight of a falling leaf.

Two ducks squawked overhead like some old couple bickering and I wondered what they were saying, thought about C.S. Lewis’ talking animals. I then thought about a story I’d heard a few nights ago.

Pat’s cousin and her husband have some land in Texas – a few horses, fifty head of cattle. Sadly, one of the aging horses had to be put down. Al hired some guys to bury him on their land; Carol Lynne couldn’t bear to watch. That night, after they had gone to sleep, the human mourners were wakened by the animal ones.

“It was the worst sound I’ve ever heard. A crying. A moaning. It was awful.” (Carol Lynn says lots of things are awful, but her shudder convinced me.) “We looked outside and all of them cows had made a circle around where the horse had been buried. And they just kept making that horrible sound.”

And so I wonder about God’s creation. Rocks can cry out. Stars have names. Diamonds are hidden in mountains. Cows grieve for a horse. The sky turns black in response to a man's last breath on a cross. The creation stands on tiptoe. All the collaboration of all the geniuses of all time couldn't have imagined a world as amazing as the one we awaken to each morning.

Not Even Univac Could Figure Her Out

Growing up, my sister and I knew when our mother was talking on the phone with Ann because she always took on Ann’s voice. Ann has this extraordinary speech pattern: Southern and therefore slow and deliberate with added syllables. (My mother’s name Joanne becomes Jo-ah-yuhn.) Unlike other Southerners, though, her voice is not rounded-out, soft, or gravelly, but a roller-coaster voice with peaks of sharp, but still pleasant intonation. Hers is a voice with constant excitement, emphasis, punctuated with laughter, a musical voice that never ceases to make you want to listen.

Friends since they were three years old, “running wild up and down Main Street, jumping from the rooftops of downtown buildings”, it wasn’t until they were in their teens that it occurred to my mother that Ann was “a little slow”. No matter. They’ve remained friends to this day, now in their eighth decade of life.

Ann gets words wrong. She could have been the prototype for Amelia Bedelia. As teenagers, she was so proud of the cashmere sweater she’d bought, calling my mother on the phone to celebrate her purchase. “Is it a cardigan?” my mother asked. “No, Joanne. I already told you it was a cashmere.”

Later in life she showed my mother her “varico” vein. “It’s variCOSE, Ann, not variCO.” Ann said with her customary stubbornness, “You don’t understand, Joanne. I only have ONE.”

My mother and her friends would spend hours sitting around our kitchen table, smoking, drinking, playing a little cards, philosophizing. One afternoon, lips loosened by drink, Mama and Martha got on the subject of Ann’s inscrutability, my mother saying, “Not even Univac could figure Ann out.”

The next day Ann was petulant and cold, yet ready to explain why when my mother asked what was wrong. “I don’t appreciate you talking about me behind my back. Whoever this Univac person is, he doesn’t even know me!”

John Adams

I’ve been living in two worlds – one where I sleep, shower, cook, correct, hug, kiss, sing, pray, write, smile, frown; i.e. live my life in the here and now, just as you do.

The other world is not my own, but one that I’ve nonetheless inhabited for the past three weeks, a world of letters and law, of kings and court, powdered hair and whale-bone corsets, politics and philosophy, treason and heroic patriotism, revolution and the establishment of what was to become by this the year 2009, the longest-standing government in the world.

David McCullough’s biography of John Adams, is, as they tell you on the front cover, “a masterwork of storytelling..” I’m no book reviewer, but what I’ll say is that for me it’s been a time-traveling machine, in which I’ve survived violent storms at sea - as John did, waited months for news about my husband and son - as Abigail did, buried sons, daughters and grandchildren – as they both did. I feel as if I’ve lived in what John Adams would call the greatest of times, in which

“It has been the will of Heaven that we should be thrown into existence
at a period when the greatest philosophers and lawgivers of antiquity
would have wished to live…a period when a coincidence of circumstances
without example has afforded to thirteen colonies…an opportunity of
beginning government anew from the foundation.”

Reading good books won’t make you good. But good books will, I believe, make your life better by weaving their truth and wisdom into your heart and mind, expanding and buttressing, correcting and broadening. Reading about the struggle to form a new nation, one like none other, which the rest of the world predicted would fail, is a necessary and fitting backdrop to the current news of the day. Following the lives of our founding fathers, appreciating their genius and sacrifice while not blind to their failings has been for me a rich privilege, made possible by the thousands of letters written during those years.

Within these pages, friendships, fortunes and reputations are made and lost. Monarchies are overthrown and reinstated, people cry for war one day and peace the next. Newspapers slander and libel, duels are fought.

Lest you think it’s one big history lesson, the pages are also filled with the details of domestic life here and abroad. While in France, Abigail grudgingly submits to French fashion by having her own hairdresser in residence. While traveling, John Adams shares a bed with Benjamin Franklin, who lectures him on the necessity of keeping the windows open all night. They raise a son who becomes a President, two others who are overcome by alcohol, faithful daughters whose husbands are wanting. Throughout the book, the love between Abigail and John, and their love for their country, do both them, America, and their God honor. May we learn from them and aspire to the same.

I'm sad to have finished the book, to have no more letters to read, to say goodbye to my new friends. At the same time, I was ready to see Abigail and John reach their well-deserved rest, glad to rejoice with them, they who looked forward to "a future state" with God who
"in his wisdom and benevolence could (not) make such a species as the human merely to live and die on this earth."

A Good Life...or a Godly One?

Three Sundays ago I was minding my own business, doing my part singing in the choir, as I do every week. I had a heart to worship, was looking forward to communion, but other than that wasn’t expecting anything out of the ordinary.

When out of nowhere a thought entered my head, seemingly without context, unprovoked, unrelated to anything in my life. But there it came, like something alive, with form and weight, and there it has stayed, setting up residence these fifteen days.

The thought was this: “What about becoming a foster parent?” Somewhere between the first song and communion these words slipped in, and instead of drying up and blowing away the way they came in, have stubbornly taken root, demanded my time and attention, refused to go away.

Before I could put up my defenses, I was flooded with thoughts in favor of such a thing. There’s such a need. You’ve been given so much. What about “being poured out”, doing things “unto the least of these”? And then during communion, “This is My body, broken for you…” and I’m not willing to set an extra plate at my abundantly supplied table?

Then Cole speaks about readiness and I think about how the need will only increase as the economy worsens and shouldn’t we as the church be ready to help, to be His light? Then he says those who desire to live a godly life will be persecuted, and I think how I’ve got my life so arranged that that’s very unlikely. His final haunting refrain, more words that I can’t escape, “We want a good life, not a Godly one.”

I think, “This idea is crazy.” Must be a hormone imbalance, a midlife crisis, a latent search for significance – something to explain this unwanted intrusion. It’ll go away by the morning. No need to tell Pat. If it is anything, God will tell him, too. That’ll be the fleece.

But it doesn’t go away. Monday morning I tell Pat who, ever the servant willing to say yes to the hardest and crummiest jobs, says, “We’ll have to look into it.” That afternoon I find myself googleing foster care; the kids see and ask what’s up. “I don’t know,” I say with tears, not sure whether they’re from self-pity, having been blindsided with this, for the hundreds of children needing a home, or just the joy from sensing God’s action in my life.

The next day I start reading my book club book, “The Glass Castle”, the memoir of a woman who grew up in a family so impoverished, so messed-up, that she at one point during her childhood, fantasizes that a beautiful foster family is coming to take her and her siblings away. While at the library getting that book, I check out “Hope’s Boy”, another memoir, but this one written by a boy who lived in foster care. If I’m wanting this idea to go away, I’m certainly not acting like it.

It’s a busy week, but I find time to ask Pat, “Are you still thinking about this?” “Yeah. And I keep coming up with objections. But they’re all just selfish.” I’d done the same thing, except I’d used the word “shallow”.

One afternoon, the smell of dinner cooking, listening to music playing on my newly refurbished stereo system, I look at Joanna,who is bent over her schoolbooks, happily studying, the sun shining through the window highlighting her hair. The scene is like a Dutch painting – a tranquil home, blessed with all that is good. I cry this time, overwhelmed with how much we have, how much we could share, that there should be enough love for someone else.

So I’ve gone from expecting the idea to go away, to distress that it hadn’t, to this current place of openness and even hope that we could actually do this some day. Mostly I’m humbled that God would consider me enough to speak to me, to get my attention, to nudge me to join my husband on his well-worn road of servanthood.

Whether we end up doing this or not, the question has left its mark on me, done its exploratory surgery, revealed that I had succumbed in great measure to desiring a good, safe life. I had managed to sew up tightly my life and lifestyle, content with lines that had fallen in pleasant places, resistant to things that might spell trouble, the down and dirty, sacrifice. I’ve discovered that I live in a family of servants: my own children and husband, who each so readily welcomed the idea of opening their hearts, sharing their home, following wherever Christ might lead. May I deserve to be in such company, to live a life worthy of Jesus' name, ready to go, ready to stay, willing to hold His people in my heart.

Kitchen Nightmares and a New Year's Prayer

Somewhere between Christmas and New Year's, I watched a reality show in which a master chef comes into a struggling restaurant and gives them the riot act. Apparently the owners asked for this even though surely they've seen the profanity-wielding chef humiliate and rant and rave, bringing hapless workers to tears.

Granted, it was a TV show, replete with stylized camera angles and shocking moments repeated over and over; and is probably just one step up from Jerry Springer on the evolutionary scale, but I watched it and am still thinking about it now three weeks later.

These poor owners had asked an expert to swoop in and tell them what they were doing wrong. They'd been in business for a while; they had customers, they thought they were doing okay, just wanted some pointers.

What they got was a full-scale condemnation of just about everything they were doing. When Chef Gordon Ramsay went into the back of the refrigerator and scooped up a wet handful of nastiness for a camera close-up, the owner protested that the kitchen was a lot cleaner than it was before he bought it. The more things Chef Ramsay found wrong, the more defensive the owner became, finally stomping off and declaring he'd rather shut the doors and walk away than put up with that kind of "worse than a dog" treatment.

Yes, yes, I know that it was possibly 98% staged, and my writing about it is not to give creedance to reality shows, but to relate how the premise of the show struck me the next morning as I lay in bed thinking about it.

What if I asked an expert in, say, marriage to come in and see all? To move the boxes out of the way, with his bare hand reach into long-neglected places and bring to light the refuse of years of accumulated grime? In the face of a glaring, tell-all camera, would I insist that my marriage (or work-ethic, parenting, citizenship, discipleship) was just fine, better than it used to be, not nearly so bad as the guy's-next-door?

When Chef Ramsay asked the cook, "So what's the deal with these potatoes in a box?" and she said sheepishly, "I mix in a little instant with the leftover potatoes from yesterday to stretch them", I pitied the girl. She must have thought it seemed like a good idea at the time, and surely would never have done it, much less told him, if she'd seen the dastardly deed through his eyes. His admonition, "We will serve nothing but FRESH food" was so simple, so pure, so basic, but had obviously been grossly forsaken.

I can't forget the Instant Potatoes Lesson. How often do I serve up worn-out leftovers, depending on the loyalty of yesterday's affections, assuming, albeit unconsciously, that even half-hearted tokens will suffice? Am I, like the poor cook, lacking in passion, just putting in my hours?

This year, for the first time in years I didn't make any New Year's resolutions. But I do have a New Year's prayer and I ask you to pray it with me. "Expert in all, Maker and Sustainer of all, please come on in. Tell me what you see. Show me the back of the refrigerator. Tell me how it ought to be."

He Watching Over Israel

When a friend’s ax hit a stubborn branch, volleying the ax back onto his head, leaving him on the ground to be found by his children and subsequently air-lifted to the Med, some of us who gathered to help and pray, couldn’t help but ask, “Why?” Just one swing of an ax, perhaps just an angle, a few degrees, a shifting of weight, an error in judgment, and a brilliant oncologist, fresh out of residency, married, with four children is struck down.

Fortunately, that story ended well and he recovered fully, but I remember finally acknowledging the obvious, “He got hit in the head with the ax because of the laws of nature.” It’s not that life is random or capricious or that God is off-duty. It’s just that cause and effect are realities. And as much as we want God to intervene to prevent accidents and illnesses, we know that often He does not.

But He does intervene. He does heal. He acts. He works. He causes things to happen. He parts seas, confuses enemies, sends angels, warns of imminent dangers. I’m sure we’ll all be astonished when we get to heaven to see how much He did intervene and we didn’t see it, acknowledge it. For every time something awful doesn’t happen, the cynic recalls the hundreds of times it did, and concludes that God is helpless or unconcerned, and I confess that even as a Christian, I can think that way, too.

But not today. Today I’m filled with thanksgiving for what I see as divine intervention, divine protection.

Natalie was driving on I-40, three hours into her trip back to school at UT Chattanooga, our minivan packed to the full, when she decided to stop for a bathroom break and fill up the tank. The price wasn’t good, so she pulled up to the front of the quick mart instead of the gas pump. As she pulled into the space she noticed a burning smell, saw smoke, jumped out of the car, was met with someone yelling, “Your car is on fire!” She then saw the flames coming out of the hood. Within seconds they had a fire extinguisher and were able to put the fire out. The wonderful people at the Pilot Gas Station in Dickson, TN made sure the fire was out completely, took Natalie inside, comforted her, offered coffee.

Those of us who’ve had cars start smoking or catch on fire while driving down a highway know how frightening that is. We’ve seen a car in flames on the side of the road, the poor owner standing there helpless. We know of worse outcomes I’ll only allude to, myself unwilling to let my mind go there.

When an oil cap falls off in a moving car, oil spills out onto the engine. Engines get hot. Oil catches on fire. Fires burn and destroy. It’s cause and effect. It’s as it should be. A world that didn’t follow laws of physics would be much more precarious and dangerous than we imagine this one to be. (I guess it would be impossible to have a world without these laws, but I can’t speak on things scientific though I am currently trying to read, “Intelligent Design”. Trying being the operative word.)

Natalie was protected. She is safe because she got off the interstate and stopped at a safe place with a fire extinguisher close by. A skeptic would say that was cause and effect, too, a lucky coincidence. We don’t see it that way. We are so thankful that He directed her to stop when she did, just in time, protecting her from all that could have happened had she not stopped at that time, had no one been there to help her, had the price of gas been cheaper, the fire extinguisher empty.

We praise Him for protecting her, for guiding her to safety, for making a bad situation turn out so well. I just wanted you to share in our joy, to join me in worshiping the God who is there, who condescends to involve Himself in our affairs, who "watching over Israel, slumbers not, nor sleeps.” Psalms 121:4.

Why Have a Party?

Several times along the way I questioned it, wished we weren’t doing it, wondered what in the world was motivating us in the first place. No, I’m not talking about getting married, or buying a house, or having kids. It was just a New Year’s Eve party.

But any party takes time, money, and effort, so there are qualms. The cynic in me says, “That’s much ado about nothing. It’s just another day.” The frugal side says, “You could get the car fixed with that money.” My insecurity wonders, “Will they want to come?" The ascetic whispers that it’s frivolous. The melancholy says, “How can you celebrate in the worst recession in history?”

(I thought all these things and more, which I won’t relate lest you think I’m the most hopelessly introspective and analytical person you’ve ever met.)

The day of the party, around noon, I got a call from the place we were renting saying there was a big problem. Plumbing? A fire? Vandalism? No, they had double-booked the place. For about three hours it was up in the air, but in the end our party was trumped by the square dancers who refused to do-si-do somewhere else.

I’m in tears when I call Pat, so of course he becomes optimism incarnate, “I’ll borrow some tents from the church, get some heaters; we’ll have it at our house and in the yard. It’ll be great.” It was going down to 23 degrees that night.

Fortunately, another place was found for us, and after a flurry of phone calls and Facebook messages, a small window of time in which to decorate, and a scramble to find speakers for our messed-up stereo system, we ended up having our party in a much nicer place than we’d originally paid for.

The next day, exhausted, reflecting, I wonder ...

Why do people have parties? Why do we celebrate? What is in us that wants to mark the end of something, a new beginning? Why do we go to great lengths to make special foods, polish the silver, string lights, starch shirts, squeeze into high heels, all for just a few hours of fun?

Because celebration is in the heart of God, that’s why. As creatures made in His image, we want and need to celebrate, to rejoice, make merry. In every culture, there is this desire to single out one day, one person, one event, to focus energy and resources to culminate in a gathering that is festive, separate from the hum-drum of everyday life.

That celebration is often expressed with more vigor outside the faith community than inside is a shameful irony. Of all people, we have the most to celebrate, but we’re often like the pious people in Babette’s Feast, who lived joyless, grim lives in the name of religion, and didn't see that all good things are gifts from a loving, joyous God.

Before the party, a minister friend asked what kind of gathering it would be, saying that while his wife liked a “spiritual” New Year’s Eve, he preferred a fun one, a party. For me, the two go together. Like Babette, like the father for his prodigal son, like God Himself who promises a feast beyond compare, I enjoyed providing a party for those I love.

Eric Liddell, the Olympic runner become missionary whose story is beautifully told in the movie, Chariots of Fire, said of his running, “I feel His pleasure.” When I saw that movie back in the 80’s, I longed to have something like that in my life, something so tangibly human that was also so profoundly spiritual. Alas, I never felt it running, but I do feel it when I’m preparing for guests, when I’m anticipating a celebration, making ready for a party.