Sweet Sixteen

Sixteen years and nine months ago, upon the failure of Magic Johnson’s oft-promoted method for safe sex, I said to my husband, “You know what this means.”


Without missing a beat, he said, “We’re having another baby.”

We had decided that our family was complete. It was settled. I had even looked with derision on people who got pregnant unexpectedly, thinking, “What do you mean you don’t know how it happened? There is such a thing as birth control.”

But here we were. Number four. An astronomical number. An embarrassing number. Not even Pat’s Catholic relatives had this many children. Our relatives sighed or were reproachful. Friends looked upon us with sympathetic eyes.

At first I prayed that I wouldn’t really be pregnant, that our family would remain as it was, each child planned, then conceived, with scientific precision. But when the fears were confirmed, our hearts changed, and we welcomed this pregnancy as the others.

With that heart change came the thought that what had happened was possibly, if not really, an act of divine intervention from a good God who knew that we didn’t know what was best for us, but wanted to bless us anyway. It’s hard for me to say that because I don’t breezily slap the label of “God did it” on things that are basic cause and effect. People who have sex should expect to have babies. Birth control methods fail.

Other than the general acknowledgement that all babies are “planned” by God, I can’t say for sure that He actively sabotaged our birth control method, so that we’d have Joanna. What I do know is that we were stupid to not want another child, and had we more say in the matter, we wouldn’t have “allowed” an unplanned pregnancy, but are so glad our plans were overruled.

So, Joanna is our child of grace, the incarnation of blessing promised to people undeserving, undesiring, even unwilling. We don’t know what’s best for us, but God does, and will act in ways for our good even as we ignore or even spurn Him. “Forgive them; they don’t know what they’re doing,” said Jesus, as sublime a statement of our condition and His heart I know of. “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” All action is from Him towards us, wave upon wave of inexhaustible, prolific, often unasked-for blessing.

Joanna is now a young lady, full of sweetness, affection, and compassion. She’s a happy soul, content with her lot, grateful for what at times have been scraps, yet always eager to push forward for what she wants and needs. Her teachable spirit puts me to shame. Literally every single day she has brightened and brought “more” to our lives.

We’re so glad she’s our “one who got through.”

The Current Economic Crisis

When the economic crisis hit the news, I was escaping to 19th century France by reading The Count of Monte Cristo. Who wants to think about a coming depression when you need to find out who Madame Villefort will poison next? And the Count’s manipulation of the stock market is much easier to understand than why our dollar is up when banks are failing. But all good books end, and I've felt compelled ever since to write these thoughts.

I’ve heard all kinds of things blamed for our current woes, but I’ve not heard much about what I think is really at the heart of it. It’s not my idea, but one I’ve stolen from two people I love: my husband and Wendell Berry.

My husband is a home-improvement contractor, or as he calls himself: a handyman. He works long and hard and, like Job’s wife, though I’ve never said curse God and die, I’ve had many suggestions. Such as, “Why don’t you just paint? Or, just do wood replacement? Decks? That way you wouldn’t encounter so many unforeseen problems. You’d know the costs. You’d make more money, wouldn’t have to have every tool known to man cluttering our garage and your truck, and would get really great at ONE thing.” He just listened, said “Mmm”, and kept on doing what he was doing.

If he had answered, “I don’t want to because I’d get bored”, I would have accepted that. But unlike me, he isn’t into self-actualization. He’ll do the most monotonous tasks without complaining. But what I have learned from him, albeit slowly, is that he doesn’t want to specialize because he abhors that mentality. The plumber puts in his pipes without regard for the electrician, who does his thing without regard for the sheetrock guy, who has his way of doing things that make his job easier, more profitable.

What motivates my husband is taking care of the homeowner. Whatever they need. He doesn’t ask himself if it will be profitable or efficient or a job he would enjoy. He doesn’t work with profitability in mind, but rather with quality in mind. That’s why he’ll never “flip” a house. He can’t do it. He can’t slap on a coat of paint and walk away. The work has to be done right, to last. He won’t specialize.

Wendell Berry wrote in 1977 in The Unsettling of America:

The disease of the modern character is specialization. Looked at from the standpoint of the social system, the aim of specialization may seem desirable enough. The aim is to see that the responsibilities of government, law, medicine, engineering, agriculture, education, etc., are given into the hands of the most skilled, best prepared people. . . . The first, and best known, hazard of the specialist system is that it produces specialists - people who are elaborately and expensively trained to do one thing. We get into absurdity very quickly here. There are, for instance, educators who have nothing to teach, communicators who have nothing to say, medical doctors skilled at expensive cures for diseases that they have no skill, and no interest, in preventing. More common, and more damaging, are the inventors, manufacturers, and salesmen of devices who have no concern for the possible effects of those devices. Specialization is thus seen to be a way of institutionalizing, justifying, and paying highly for a calamitous disintegration and scattering-out of the various functions of character: workmanship, care, conscience, responsibility.

The entire process of buying a home has become specialized, creating a system in which a person can make a profit on one little part without being responsible for the whole. A broker can originate a loan and make his fee. His success depends solely on making the loan go through. The loan is then sold, sometimes over and over, with various players along the way getting a piece of the pie, but no one is tied to whether or not that original buyer pays the mortgage.

It’s axiomatic. When you have a stake in final outcomes, in the whole of something, you care more for the big picture. In the mortgage industry, where banks sold and kept their own mortgages, they’ve seen much fewer defaults.

Several years ago when my husband’s grandfather was in a coma, breathing by machine, we would wind our way through a gray maze to get to intensive care, anxious for a divine visitation from a doctor. A surgeon said the surgery went well, even as Pawpaw lay there in a coma. The kidney doctor said the medicine for the lungs was hurting the kidneys. The lung doctor was watching the lungs, not the kidneys. A heart doctor was happy about the heart. We asked, in vain, “Where is the doctor for Pawpaw, the man?”

The tunnel vision and shortsightedness that comes from specialization is made even worse by the fact that everyone is pressured to make decisions that bring profits and results TODAY. A “calamitous disintegration” indeed.

The Weather and Digestion

A Sunday morning, in the choir room, after a typical hello, Deborah said to me, “You look mighty chipper today. What’s up?”

“It’s Sunday. I’m excited and glad to be here. God is good!” I proclaimed. “And,” I added with a little-girl grin, “my hair looks good today.” I knew that because I’d just checked myself in the mirror in the robing room.

Which was true? Did I look happy because I was filled with a sense of purpose, desiring to worship, delighting in being in the family of God? Or did my countenance shine because I was on time, feeling strong, cappuccino in hand, pleased with the thermostat setting?

I often think about a statement C.S. Lewis made in discussing moods. It’s in the first “Faith” chapter in Mere Christianity. He’s actually talking about the need for faith in the face of our changing moods, but I’m applying his point to when our mood is up, not down.

This rebellion of your moods against your real self is going to come anyway. That is
why Faith is such a necessary virtue; unless you teach your moods ‘where they get
off’, you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just
a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and
the state of its digestion.

It’s the “weather and the state of its digestion” part that I’ve never forgotten, realizing that when I’m content, joyful, grateful, even worshipful, it might just be that life has simply been going my way. I’m afraid that is often the case. It’s only when the “lines (that) have fallen in pleasant places” are moved, am I given the opportunity to see if the joy holds.

Perspectives from ESL Students

I’m privileged to teach English to a classroom full of perspective. They come from Mexico, Tibet, Korea, Brazil, Taiwan, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Colombia. There’s a nurse, a dentist, a teacher, a systems engineer, a monk, graduates with degrees in economics, business, accounting, and chemistry.

Last week, in light of our economic crisis, I wrote on the board:

If America falls,

and told the students to talk about this at their tables, indicating they could apply any meaning they wanted to the word falls. (I then hastily changed America to the U.S. in deference to my South and Central American students who have taught me with a little exasperation seeping out that they’re from America, too.)

Here are some of their responses:

1. The economy of the world will go down. Most countries depend on the U.S. (They ALL said this.)
2. People all over the world will lose their confidence.
3. Maybe more people will go to church or depend on the power of religion.
4. American culture will still exist such as fast food, Hollywood, and Starbucks. (Ouch!)
5. It is very horrible to think the U.S. will fall one day.
6. A good thing is maybe the U.S. could learn humility before other countries and understand other countries’ hard situations.
7. The U.S. is the world’s police, so war will increase. North Korea will invade South Korea. China will invade Taiwan.
8. Teenagers around the world might begin to be influenced by other cultures, not just the U.S.
9. If U.S. falls, then all countries fall. U.S. become not number one in the world.
10. Overseas businesses shut down, homelessness, orphans, crime, murder.
11. Decrease in research for health care because most is done in the U.S.

I am humbled and honored to be among these students who haltingly but bravely express themselves in a second language. They add so much to my life, to my understanding of the world and even this current crisis. I’m sobered to realize they feel the effects even before I do. (A month ago the Korean exchange rate was 1000 to 1; the day after the stock market plunge, it was 1300 to 1.) Imagine that happening to your buying power overnight.

"O Worship the King"

Last Sunday we sang “O Worship the King”, the refrain six simple words, six words that tell it all, six words I hope I can sing all my days, even if my mind in old age wears down to just be able to say six words. I want to remember these:

OUR MAKER

When I was in the sixth grade, enamored with the colors pink and blue, I painted a picture of a lady in a long, formal dress with a matching parasol. I loved my picture, and when the teacher taped it above the bulletin board along with all the others, every day my eye would go to my own creation. I admired it as much as I would later admire my “Faberge” monarch butterfly, the personality of my paper mache’ giraffe, and my hand-sewn kimono-clad Japanese doll, complete with toothpicks in her hair.

DEFENDER

During college, as a Young Life leader, I was talking to a group of girls at a football game. These were rough basketball players who often got in fights. One of them, whom I didn’t know, was standing above me on the bleachers, talking fast and standing so close that she spat on me, just a little, but enough that I laughed and wiped my face. Her face went stone cold. She summoned a mouthful and spat it out on top of my head. Stunned, I just stood there, the warm spit slowly sinking into my crown. Juana and Tijuana, twins that I picked up every week for club, found something to wipe it off, and then told me they would beat her up. And they would have if I hadn’t begged them not to.

REDEEMER

Jean Valjean, a hardened criminal, is caught red-handed with stolen goods, taken from a gentle priest who had fed and given him a bed for the night. When the police asked the priest if the tableware belonged to him, the priest insisted that he’d given it to Jean Valjean. The priest then gave him two more pieces, his beloved candlesticks, saying that Jean Valjean had “forgotten” them. After the police left, the priest explained, “I have bought your soul for God.”

AND FRIEND

He could have made us, and left it at that. But He didn’t. He defends us because He has redeemed us. And He still could have left it at that. And, as the Jews say at the Seder, “it would have been enough.” But, astoundingly, He doesn’t leave it at that.

“I have called you friends,” Jesus said. Let the words sink in. Stand there. Don’t move. Think about your best friend or the best one you could ever imagine. Think about all that is involved in a friendship; that free delighting in another person, free of obligation or necessity, where all is given, all is taken, all is shared. Just for the joy of it.

Natalie in France

So, yes, I admit it. I'm living vicariously through my daughter. Something parents shouldn't do. Not often, leastwise. Actually, I just loved this picture, and I want to advertise her recent blog posts because, well, I'm proud of her, and also because she's got some good things to say. If you like travel, if you know Natalie, if you want to see how your prayers for her are being answered, go to: Natalie Bernardini

The Shack

Sometimes when I’m walking to work, I do a bad thing. I cut across the grass of a student apartment complex, reasoning that the path is already there, and no doubt always will be. It’s a well-trodden path. Hard as stone. Nothing grows there and even when it rains, the dirt is so hard that the water just rolls off.

That’s what happens when the same path is taken again and again. There’s no avoiding it. It’s true in nature, and it’s true in people. A song that once thrilled us falls flat. We can say something by rote that once took great courage and conviction. We can look upon stunning beauty and yawn. Words that should inspire like truth, love, hope, and joy become meaningless from overuse. We ourselves become dull, inoculated, impervious.

William P. Young understands that. In The Shack, he goes to great lengths to avoid the beaten path in his effort to tell the story of the three-person God and their love for the world. I won’t spoil the story any more than World Magazine did in revealing that his God figure is a hearty black woman who cooks up greens. And instead of, “God so loved the world”, or even, “God loves you, Willie”, we read, “Papa is very fond of you.”

“Fond of you.” It’s quaint. It’s personal. Granted, word for word it’s not as strong a concept as “God loves you”, and no doubt wouldn’t stand up well under theological scrutiny. But because it’s different, because it’s not used very much, it really can say more, especially to those who’ve heard it their entire lives, even preached it. It can penetrate, cut through, make you question if you really, truly understand God’s regard for you.

Since reading The Shack, I’ve found myself thinking, “Maybe He really is quite fond of me.” And not just way up there in Heaven with arms folded waiting for me to get my act together and really do something for Him.

This sentiment goes well with Isaiah 40, “He gathers the lambs in His arm, and holds them close.” And reminds me of the picture I love of John leaning his head against Jesus’ breast. So warm, so alive, so human.

I'm tired of my worn-down soul. I want to be alive to Him, and He to me. I want to leave the dusty bunker of religion and return to the wild meadow with a thousand delights, walking with Him in the cool of the day.