Why I Go to Church

All wrapped up in a sense of well-being in church today, looking out on the somewhat sparse crowd from the vantage point of the balcony, I thought about why I go to church. Not all the Biblical reasons I could recite, but the nuts-and-bolts, "for me" reasons. Plain and simple. Here goes:

1. I have been going to church. Present Perfect Continuous: An action that began in the past and continues to the present, possibly the most powerful verb tense. Ever since Jesus caught my eye in the late 70's, I've been going to church.

2. Music: Somehow when I sing, when I hear and see others sing and play instruments, when the entire assembly is making something beautiful and transcendent, I find it hard to believe this:

3. People. I go because I want to see people I love, people I know, people I want to know. I want to be around people who've cast their lots as I have.

4. To be reminded. I need to hear the gospel again and again, to hear it said differently, to hear how it matters, how it looks to be a person of the gospel.

5. Beauty. Sometimes I see beauty, and when I do, I worship.

6. Where else? I say, like Peter when Jesus asked him if he wanted to leave, too, "Where would I go? You have the Words of Life."

A Kettle Corn Recipe That Works..at last!

After having kettle corn for the first time a couple of years ago, finding it as irresistible as the White Witch's Turkish Delight, I came home and started trying to make it. The carnival guys wear protective gear, stand over a pot big enough for a witch's brew and stir the oil, corn, and sugar over an open flame. My first attempts sent me looking in the garage for the face mask my husband has for welding and some armpit length rubber gloves for...birthing cows or horses maybe? Both the popcorn and myself got burned. Anyway, I failed to make anything like kettlecorn. I tried some tamed-down version where you shake confectioner's sugar over freshly popped corn, but it strangely tasted like confection's sugar shaken over popcorn. And no, microwave popcorn of any variety won't do. I hadn't tried again until the other day when my several attempts produced a flesh wound and more burnt popcorn, but...hidden like treasure were just a few pieces that tasted right: crispy, salty, sweet. Just enough to ignite the craving again, to search the internet for one more recipe.

I did it! Here's how:

First, I halved the typical recipe because I've never been able to keep the stuff from burning and reasoned that I could control the process with less. I measured everything ahead of time because timing is key. I set out the bowl the hot kettlecorn would go into to keep it from burning in the pan after it's popped.

3 tablespoons oil
1/4 cup popcorn (I used Orville's, a new jar claiming to be fresh)
4 teaspoons sugar

Then I mixed the popcorn and sugar together into one measuring cup.

I have a tall, fairly-heavy-bottomed stock pot with a glass lid that has a hole for steam to escape. I think being able to see what's going on helps a lot. If you have only a heavy pot, you will need to vent it slightly because steam does need to escape to prevent tough popcorn, but be careful, the only thing hotter than popping oil is sugared popping oil!

I put the oil in the pot on medium high heat, added 3 kernels of corn, put the lid on and waited for those kernels to pop. When they popped, I quickly threw in the popcorn and sugar mixture, returned the lid and shook the pot a few times while on the burner. The popping started immediately. This is when you take the pot off the heat and shake it. Every 3-4 seconds. Whether you think you should or not. I shook it back and forth. I shook it up and down. The steam prevented me from really seeing all that was going on, so I wasn't sure it wasn't burning, but at least I could see lots of white.

When the popping slowed, just before I was pretty sure all the kernels had popped, I removed it one last time, carefully took the top off and poured the popcorn into my bowl as fast as possible. Added salt to taste.

It was delicious. As good as the kind at the fair? No, but just about.

They Know His Voice

Sometimes, in the rare moments I allow myself to think of such things, I wonder, when I step into the next life in its glowing nakedness, when all that isn't true but seemed to be crumbles into dust, when suddenly in one moment I'm overwhelmed by the brilliance of Jesus, what will be the truth about the life I lived here on earth.

Which is to ask, do I really follow Jesus? At all? A little? A lot?

I confess that I seriously doubt my ability to answer that question. Of course I want to land in the affirmative, can come up with a few potential proofs, and am fairly certain my fellow believers would point to this or that in response.

And yet......

Haven't you ever wondered if when you get to heaven you'll be shown this entirely different life you could have lived? If only?

Most of the time when I ask myself if I truly follow Jesus, I think no, not really. I don't hear him say go here, walk this way. I've pretty much got my course set, my days planned. But then again, it's not that I DON'T follow him. How's that for avoiding the question, for lowering the bar of discipleship? As you can see, I get lost in a quagmire of condemnation on one side, justification on the other.

Yesterday, however, after reading in John where Jesus talks about sheep knowing the voice of their shepherd, refusing to listen to the voice of a stranger, this thought came to me:

What if the life I'm living is just what he wanted all along? He is the Shepherd. He's called me and I heard because I'm one of His. I go in and out and find pasture. I listen for His voice because I belong to Him, and I don't listen to the voice of the stranger because I don't know him.

It's as simple and pure and beautiful as that.

Shalom

One would think you could daydream through a sermon based on the commandment, “Thou shalt not steal”. What more can a pastor say about that? Stealing’s not been a problem for me since I took Ricky’s dare to blow on the wax harmonica in the candy aisle at the TG&Y and my mother heard it, rushed to the scene of the crime, and made me confess to the store clerk. If I don’t have to count taking more than my share of whatever delicious food is in the house, I’m not aware of a personal problem with thievery.

Until our pastor gets a hold of that commandment and broadens it to mean this:

Don’t take away another person’s shalom, shalom being defined as, “the way things ought to be.” What a universe of possible applications and interpretations is opened up by that one statement.

“The way things ought to be”. So simple. So infinite. It applies to anything and everything. Who hasn’t thought this, cried for this, wondered about this, longed for this?

I take my two dogs for a walk almost every day. I carry plastic bags to pick up their business. I do this because I want to keep up appearances; I’m just sure someone is peering out their window watching me. I do this also because my husband has modeled this citizenry. I have never done it for any other reason.

Until I heard about “shalom”, the way things ought to be. A higher cause, a nobler reason, something to aspire to, a way to please the God who has given me a garden to tend, the privilege of influence, the ability to impact for good or ill this world I inhabit.

The Day of Small Things

Whenever it snows, I’m transfixed by its transforming power. Many of the houses that surround the school where I teach bear the marks of rental property; like the school, the lawns are half-heartedly attended. Trash litters the patchy grass. But covered in snow, all is beautiful.

At home, as I lay on my couch and watched the snow fall for hours, I kept hearing this refrain:

“White as snow, white as snow, though my sins were as scarlet, Lord I know, Lord I know, that I’m free and forgiven.” What a wonderful simile.

The next day was bright and sunny. Bundled up in layers, I ventured out for a long walk in the snow and this time was struck by something else: that the four plus inches of snow so luxuriously gracing everything - so very substantial a snowfall by Memphis standards - was in reality the end result of tiny individual snowflakes falling one at a time.

Which made me think of this verse in Zechariah, 4:10, “For who has had a poor opinion of the day of small things? For they will be glad when they see the weighted measuring-line in the hand of Zerubbabel.” The message here seems to be that big things are made of little things, little things that seem of no importance, things to be ignored, neglected, despised.

And yet everything is made of little things, without which nothing would be anything, so every little thing matters.

So maybe that’s why I decided to pull out the new yarn and needles I’d bought a few weeks ago and begin a knitting project unlike any I’ve ever attempted. Tiny needles, very lightweight yarn, little stitches requiring careful attention. My hands hurt from the contortion of using four needles. I have to keep holding the work up to my eyes, check for dropped stitches. I feel like a clumsy oaf, particularly when my last project was made with needles literally 10 times bigger than these.

But I like it. The progress is slow, but the results very pleasing, and I need this reminder that everything is made from small things.

My Mother, Once Again

My mother can laugh and make me laugh like almost no one else. I still remember finding my mother in her bedroom watching I Love Lucy, laughing so hard she could hardly breathe, tears streaming down her face, holding her stomach, literally rolling on the bed in hysterics. It was the episode where Lucy and Ethel are in Hollywood and Lucy's been gawking at William Holden when he decides to give her the same treatment just as she puts a big forkful of spaghetti into her mouth.

Side-splitting laughter is a gift and a privilege, and I'm so grateful to have had that door opened to me early by my mother. I have an instant affinity with any person who can laugh like that, and, I can't help it: I feel sorry for people who never seem to be able to give themselves over so fully.

Our conversations in this her eightieth year have tended more towards her anxieties, complaints, and daily menu plans, so it was delightful to call her the other morning and hear this story:

She'd gone to see her "intern", her name for her internal medicine doctor, who had told her she might have a blockage in her "corduroyed" artery, which made me smile and file away with the other medical terms she botches like "radio-ologist". Later she called it her "cahterahted" artery, and was upset when I told her that, no, I don't think there's a medicine you take to just clean it out. When she had lung cancer, she insisted on telling her oncologist that on Oprah Doctor Oz says "now there's a laser and you can just zap it".

But that wasn't side-splitting, and I probably can't tell this story to be that funny. Maybe it was funny to me because of our history, because when my mother laughs I laugh, because I'm ever-ready for a good laugh, because I'd not had one in a long time. Here goes and I'll try to recapture her telling of it:

"Terry, It was just awful at Dr. Enzer's. He had me in there talking for 3 hours! " (I questioned that. My mother is very prone to hyperbole, but she held fast, saying, "Well, in and out, but it was definitely 3 hours!)

"Anyway, they put me in that cold room and gave me a gown like they always do, but it was different. It had all these snaps and I couldn't figure out how they worked. At first, I must have been trying to put my head through the sleeve which of course I couldn't. Finally, with just one arm in one of the sleeves, I finally gave up, didn't snap a single snap and just sat there trying to hold the ends together so I wasn't hanging out everywhere. Then I got cold on that shoulder that was outside the gown, so I got my scarf and draped it over that side.

I can just see my mother with her ample bosom, hunched over, trying to keep the gown closed, her stockinged feet and skinny legs dangling off the table, with one sleeve sticking out, her black fuzzy scarf only half-covering her naked shoulder.

Between fits of laughter I ask her, "What did Dr. Enzer say about that scarf when he came in?"

"Oh, he just took it off and threw it over to the side."

"But that wasn't all. Have you heard about those long silk underwear? June gave me a pair and they're wonderful! But they didn't really fit my waist, so I'd cut the band in about six places."

"And you had those on with that gown?"

"Yes, with that band all cut up." By now she was laughing at herself as hard as I was.

"I know I looked like some kind of character. But he's used to me. Remember that time I couldn't tinkle, so I scooped some water out of the toilet for my urine sample?"

I remembered. And laughed again.

Day 100 as a City School Teacher

Most of my blogging efforts have gone to another blog chronicling my first year as a school teacher. The posts are mostly short and not very introspective, written more for my own benefit so that I can remember this amazing year, but today I had the time to write a bit more in depth and I include the link here for anyone interested.