Jeanne Zornes

Love's Point of View

2012-02-09T18:24:00.000-08:00

A major river curves through the valley town I call home. The view is magnificent from the foothills, especially a spot that’s well-earned its reputation as “lover’s leap.” Not that local lovers actually leap (as did some historical lovers elsewhere, giving us the nickname)--but you get the picture. I like the view from there during the daytime, as it takes my heart to the opening verse of Psalm 121: “I lift up my eyes to the hills—where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth.”

In recent blogs I have used photos of natural things--swamps, rocks, birds, and paths—for often it’s in the midst of God’s creation that we re-encounter the truths about Him. Psalm 121 is just one example. Years ago I shared with a friend how its imagery of "looking up to the hills" helped me during uncertainty and loss. Later, she wrote me how much she appreciated thinking of the psalm that way. In verses 1 and 2, “looking up” reminds us of how we instinctively look “up” to heaven, and also recalls how Christ ascended to Heaven through a cloud until He was seen no more. Though we don’t know Heaven’s location, God has given us the visual of “up.” “The hills” are a symbol of strength—God Himself, who orchestrates whatever help we need through circumstances and through the human agents of spiritual leaders, other believers, family and friends.

Starting with verse 3, the psalmist affirms God’s character and trustworthiness. It’s helpful to remember that this psalm was one of the “ascent” songs that pilgrims sang as they “ascended” into the highlands where Jerusalem was situated. In those days of primitive transportation through hostile areas, anything could have happened. Feet could slip on rocky, narrow trails. Travelers could be attacked while asleep at night beside the road (Psalm 91:5 alludes to this, too). They could get dehydrated and sick as they traveled on hot days. But, says verses 7-8, they depended on God to keep watch over them.

Reality check: what about the old question of why bad things happen to good people? Jesus clarified the answer in Matthew 10:28: “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the one who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” God is not the author of sickness, suffering or death. If they come into our lives, it is with His permissive will to accomplish His higher purposes. Everything filters through His loving hands.

Especially at this time of year, when our world puts a sentimental and materialistic spin on "love," we need to remember that human love fails us. Valentine's Day can be painful. Not everyone will get a card, flowers, candy, jewelry, or whatever else is advertised out there. There may be heart-breaking loss or hopes that were never fulfilled, making this commercial holiday especially painful. That's why we need to keep the big picture in mind. We need to look up to the One Who knows our comings and goings, and Who anticipates our final coming to Heaven to live with Him forever.

The "point of view" of God's love has no equal. Our Heavenly Lover awaits for us to leap in faith into His arms!

Seven Habits of Effective Friend-Seekers

2012-02-03T11:16:00.000-08:00

The electronic wizardry that allows me to post a blog on the internet has a behind-the-curtain feature that tells me how many have viewed a certain blog entry. The top two for this blog include “Give and Take: A Guide to Friendship” (January 10, 2011) and a humorous takeoff on a bestselling book, “Seven Habits of Highly Distracted People” (June 8, 2010). I’ve concluded that readers wanted something practical and something fun. This week I’m combining some practical suggestions for friendship with some, well, “whiskered wisdom.”

We’d taken our cat to the vet for treatment of a badly infected paw. Now, restricted to the indoors and doomed to wear the hated head cone to curb his licking the wound, he perched in the window with a dejected slump. If it’s possible to read cat body language, his said, “I hate my life. Nobody likes me.”

I’ve long heard the saying, “A dog is a man’s best friend.” But cats don’t quite fit the dog mold. Most dogs (some exceptions—like the dog that bit me!) communicate by licks and tail-wags, “I want to be your best buddy.” Cats, on the other hand, are famously aloof. Ours turns his back on us, ignoring our “kitty-kitty” calls unless he gets a whiff of his favorite cat food. His mouth is a permanent frown and his only clues of pleasure are purring and digging his claws into us when we brush him.

If human instead of feline, our cat would find challenges making friends. Maybe that’s why his neighborhood “playmates”(rather, war-mates) are bad-mannered cats I’ve nicknamed “Pancho Villa” and “Ho Chi Minh.” When he comes in from territorial wanderings, life is all about him: feed me, brush me, let me sleep.

It’s the “all about me” mentality that often hampers people from making friends. Instead, friendship requires some deliberate and sometimes risky steps. The how-to resources abound--from “wiki-how” articles, to books, to the thousands of booklets about making friends sold by columnist “Dear Abby.” Their advice condenses to this simple phrase: It’s not about me, it’s about others. We can’t expect people to walk up to us and say, “I want to be your best friend forever.” It’s a back-and-forth effort that takes some basic social skills. Among the top seven:

1. Spend time around people. We’re not cats, who shut out the world for 13-16 hours a day sleeping. We simply need to be around people, not stay at home in solitary activities. That may mean attending a church, volunteering, or joining a club, sports team or music group—something where you can interact with people. Muster the courage to say to someone, “I’m new around here. My name is…”

2. Smile with eye contact. Remember, cats have permanent frowns and tend to turn away. People, on the other hand, have the ability to raise the sides of their mouths into a smile (or downturn them to a stare or frown). A smile and eye contact communicate, “I feel okay about myself, and I want to know about you.” Frowns are turnoffs. One writer remarked that the expression on one’s face is the greatest asset or liability. So is body language--for example, crossed arms that communicate unhappiness and defensiveness. Believe the best of people—that, given the chance, they would respond to your desire to connect.

3. Initiate a conversation. The mundane things of life, like the weather, are always a starter: “What a storm we had yesterday!” From there, move toward information questions: “How long have you come here?” “What is your profession?” “Did you grow up around here?” If you need practice in casual conversation, greet the clerks where you shop. (Make sure there aren’t gazillion people in line behind you!) Ask questions like, “How’s your day going?” “I suppose you’ve seen a lot of that sale chicken on your conveyor belt.” Compliment them: “You processed my order so efficiently.” A shy kid growing up, I had to learn this skill—and my first job as a newspaper reporter put me on the fast track for learning how to talk to people!

4. Learn the person’s name, and tell yours. Dale Carnegie, famed for his 15-million-copy bestseller “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” said that a person’s name is the sweetest and most important sound in any language. (Our cat knows nothing about this. He comes to calls of “Augie,” “Booboo” and “Slug.”) Figure out a way to remember a person’s name--silly mental connections permitted: “Bob bobs his head up and down when he talks,” or “Kathy is chatty.”

5. Be a good listener. Talk about their interests. Ask leading questions—ones that require a full sentence, not “yes” or “no.” Make the other person feel important. Don’t forget eye contact. Imagine watching yourself via hidden camera. Do you have habits that are annoying? One woman kept fiddling with her hair. I got the message that her split ends were more important to her than our conversation. And obviously, at the “acquaintance” level, resist dominating a conversation with your problems.

6. Expand your own topics of conversation. Become a well-rounded person—one who keeps learning, has a passion about a cause, and isn’t afraid to take on a challenge. Remember the sorry state of our cone-headed cat, who waddles around dejectedly because his vision and whiskers are restricted. If the person is excited about an area you don’t know much about, say something like, “That fascinates me. How did you get into that hobby/line of work?

7. Move into quality time together. After a few no-pressure encounters, if you’re drawn to this person (and they seem interested in you), offer to get together. Be the initiator. Meet at a neutral place (like a coffee house) or do an activity in a public place, like going walking. If a friendship progresses, you’ll sense the timing for more—like a group potluck meal, game night or video. If someone seems reluctant to take the friendship further, let go of your expectations, and reach out to others.

Between leaving home after high school and marriage (bringing me to my current home), I went through ten transitions where I had to establish new friendships. Although I never analyzed just how to do it, all of these principles came into play. Each time of seeking friends meant a deliberate effort of mingling with people and focusing on them until the ones who shared my values floated to the top. Interestingly, I had friends in many age groups, particularly women older and wiser than me. I learned from all, finding true this scriptural premise: “As iron sharpens iron, so one man [or woman!] sharpens another” (Proverbs 27:17).

Another lesson from Mr. Cone-Head Cat: resist the tunnel vision that says, “Nobody wants to be my friend.” Think of friendships as concentric circles: acquaintances at the outer rim, better-known friends toward the middle, and deep, abiding friends at the core. Each level of friendship takes courage, effort and a lot of face-to-face time to develop. But the journey toward finding people you can truly care about is worth it.

Flight Fare

2012-01-27T14:10:00.000-08:00

I don't always have my camera along at our riverfront--and it's the "no camera" times when geese fly close enough for what would have been a great photo. Look close--a few are in the midst of changing the lead position.
Honk, honk, honk…before I even saw them, I knew that Canadian geese were headed my way. I scanned the sky and spotted their traditional V-formation, one of those marvels of nature. Flying in a “V,” with each bird slightly higher than the bird in front of it, is aerodynamic and energy efficient. Because this configuration helps the birds act as windbreakers and reduce drag, they have a 71% greater flying range than if they flew alone.

I also watched them take turns leading, falling back as they tired. I’ve learned that they travel 40 miles an hour (70 mph in a good wind) and can go 1,500 miles in 24 hours with ideal weather conditions. Whew! Just driving four hours wears me out, and I’m sitting!Then there’s the constant honking, like irate taxi drivers in the middle of a big city traffic tie-up. Even this has a purpose: to encourage each other to keep up the speed. Could geese (despite their habit of fouling lawns and beaches) teach us a thing or two? Maybe, that…

*God designed us for community. Sharing a common direction helps us progress in life. Loners have a hard time of it: “Plans fail for lack of counsel, but with many advisers, they succeed” (Proverbs 15:22). Community is better: “Let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds” (Hebrews 10:24).

*We can’t do it all, all the time. Even Moses, to whom God accorded extra responsibility, realized his physical limits. When the newly-freed Hebrews battled the Amalekites, things went well as long as Moses stood on top of the hill holding up his staff. But when the eighty-year-old wearied and drooped, Aaron and Hur helped hold up his hands until victory came (see Exodus 17:8-16).

*Cheerleading is a group activity. In our fallen world, there are “takers” (people who drain us with their constant neediness) as well as “givers.” Proverbs 12:25 addresses all of us: “An anxious heart weighs a man down, but a kind word cheers him up.” It’s not just the idea of “buck up and keep going.” We need to remind each other of our spiritual calling: “For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Ephesians 2:10).

One more goose truth. Sometimes a goose gets sick, wounded, or shot down. It’s not left alone. Two drop out of the formation and follow it down to help it. They stay until it can fly again, or dies. Lessons here: problems that disable us from forward progress become the problems of a few who must care for us. They must give up or put on hold their original plans for living out God’s will in order to “encourage the timid, help the weak, be patient with everyone” (1 Thessalonians 5:14).

Next time you hear honking geese, flying in formation, remember more than their amazing survival habits. Thank the God of creation, even of geese, for how He cares for you.

Parable of the Patchwork Blanket

2012-01-18T18:44:00.000-08:00

(Over several decades I have sewn hundreds of patchwork baby blankets. Last week as I sewed another, I thought of a parable.)

I found you, Little Scrap. How long were you hiding in that messy bin at the thrift store? I have come to give you a new life and purpose.

Oh, thank you, Threadsmith. I have heard of you. But I wondered if you would ever come here. I mean, this is just one of so many places where rejected things come. The clothes, books, and furniture—they don’t stay here long. But my cousins and I wait, and wait. The bigger cousins are lifted out and taken somewhere. But the little ones like me—nobody buys us. Maybe it’s my crazy shape. I’m just good for nothing.

I don’t think so, Little Scrap. I know just where you belong.

Threadsmith! You paid so much more than I’m worth! Why did you do that?

Because you are valuable to Me. I wanted others to know how precious you are.

Oh,Threadsmith, is this your workshop? The machines, the cutting surface, the rainbow of threads, the drawers of fabrics—it is greater than I could have imagined!

Thank you. I enjoy creating, you know.

Ow! How can you do that to me? It’s so hot, this iron you’re pressing on me!

Trust me, Little Scrap, this is the first step. The heat will uncrumple your beauty and help me fit you into the bigger plan.

That’s better now, Threadsmith. I think I’ll just rest and cool off on your cutting board.

Hold still, Little Scrap.

No, no, no, what is that sharp thing? You’re hurting me, you’re cutting part of me off. Why are you doing that?

Oh, Little Scrap. I needed to trim away your raggedness. Parts of your “old” shape won’t fit into my greater plan for you. Look over at this pile of other scraps. They accepted the cutting away of what didn’t fit in My purposes. You’ll understand, soon.

Ouch, ouch, ouch! Now you are poking holes in my sides and joining me to cloths I never met. You know I’m not the social type.

My plan is that you live in community. Together you can do much more than you can alone. Keep trusting me as my needles stitch you to a pattern comprised of you and others.

Oh Theadsmith, there are dozens of us now, all joined. Ah, now there is a softness underneath me.

You cannot see it, Little Scrap, but there is a large piece of fabric at the very bottom. Then comes this cloud-soft batting, that you and those joined to you are now resting on. But we’re not done yet.

Ouch! Threadsmith, why are you poking big needles with streamers of yarn in us? Oh, it hurts when you pull.

Yes, I know the yarn is thick. I am using it to join what I call the fabric sandwich—the trimmed-to-fit “you” joined to others, the cloud, and the large piece of fabric. They cannot remain separated. The piercing is part of my plan. Didn’t you hear about my Son? Piercing was part of the plan for Him, too.

More poking? Hundreds of pokes around the edges of all-of-us-together?

Almost done, Little Scrap. Except I have renamed you. You are now Chosen Color, part of my wise plan.
----
“A patchwork blanket?” said the receiver of the gift. “You sewed this for me? Look at all those colors and patterns! It’s beautiful. I love patchwork. It’s a reminder of how God loves us despite our raggedness. He lovingly trims away so that we fit into His great, beautiful plan. Every square is unique but fits into the whole. How fitting that this is a blanket. Every time I lay under it, I’ll remember how I’m covered by His love.”

Pithy about paths

2012-01-13T11:39:00.000-08:00

This spot on our local riverfront nature trail, its curve obscuring what’s ahead, reminded me of my own journey in life. Often I wished I could see beyond “right now” to my future. Could I get through college? Would I find a job? Would I marry? Would I have children? Would I get past this health crisis? God said, “Trust Me. Keep walking in faith.” Often as I prayed about these life changes and challenges, the assurance of Isaiah 30:21 came to mind: “Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, ‘This is the way; walk in it.’” The verse doesn’t say “sit and think about it,” but walk in it. Or as one line in an old poem (to my knowledge, its author is anonymous) puts it: “One step thou seeth: then go forward boldly;/One step is far enough for faith to see...In all thy journeying—I [God] go before.”

That God is wise in the path He plans is reflected in this statement by Amy Carmichael, missionary to India a century ago: “Often his call is to follow in paths we would not have chosen.” As a child, she prayed for blue eyes, not brown. As an adult, she realized her brown eyes helped her fit in with the Indian culture in which she ministered.

At least two aphorisms about paths from Africa have a lot of cross-cultural truth. One goes like this: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” Those with go-get-it-done personalities want to forge ahead toward their high goals. But they’re apt to arrive lonely and tired. Through friendship, we spur each other on.

The other quotation has this as its key: “My soul needs to catch up with my body.” This quote comes from a story told in Mrs. Charles Cowman’s classic devotional, Springs in the Valley. (She’s better known for another, Streams in the Desert.) A traveler hired local tribesmen to carry his loads for a long journey. The first day they hurried and went a long ways, leaving the traveler hopeful for a speedy trip. The second morning, the tribesmen refused to move. They just sat and rested. When the traveler asked why, they told him they had gone too fast the first day. Now they were waiting for their souls to catch up with their bodies. How often do we rush ahead of God, only to need to stop and wait on Him?

In reading Richard Foster’s new book, Sanctuary of the Soul, I encountered yet another analogy of life and paths. To illustrate the concept of confession, Foster suggested thinking of a path littered with many rocks—some small, some large, and some partly buried so that their true size is unknown. “With compunction of heart,” Foster wrote, “we invite the Lord to remove each stone, for they do indeed represent the many sins and sorrows littering our lives” (pp. 65-66). Even rocks that represent sins against us must be pried out with the crowbar of forgiveness. Foster also reminds us that, in God’s perspective, the biggest sin-boulder weighs the same as the smallest sin-pebble. All sin is sin and offensive to Him.

One of my health goals this year is to walk very regularly. I have a favorite route in a residential area that gives me lots of “think-and-pray” time. Sometimes I pray for those who are afraid to follow God’s path. Other times, it’s for those who need patience. At times, the rocks along the way remind me of sin-rocks that need pried out of my life. And when life’s path curves, I’m reminded that as I move forward in prayer and faith, the Faithful, All-knowing One promises to “make your paths straight” (Proverbs 3:6).

Eyes on Eagles

2012-01-06T11:42:00.000-08:00

Look just above the center for an eagle watching for fish in the river below.

Because our town’s riverfront park sits at the confluence of two rivers, it’s good fishing territory for sharp-eyed bald eagles. They sit in the winter-blackened skeletons of huge shoreline trees, their white heads crowning their dark bodies.The eagle’s status (and protection) as the national bird makes a sighting a special moment. I’m glad that Benjamin Franklin failed in his 1776-1782 campaign to make the turkey the national bird. Turkeys? He argued they’re native to America, and though a bit silly, actually very courageous and smart. One researcher claims 50 different signals exist among their gobbles, clucks, cackling, yelps and purrs.

Yet the Bible accords a lot of symbolic honor to eagles. Thirty-two scripture verses refer to eagles by name, others by inference. Among them:
He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust. (Psalm 91:4 KJV)
But they that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint. (Isaiah 40:31 KJV)
Like an eagle that stirs up its nest and hovers over its young, that spreads its wings to catch them and carries them on its pinions, The Lord alone led him; no foreign god was with him. He made him ride on the heights of the land… (Deuteronomy 32:11-13 NIV).

The symbolism of the Deuteronomy passage struck me when I learned something about the parenting practices of eagles. They begin building their nests (eyries) with a foundation of large sticks, thorns and odds-and-ends. Then come smaller sticks, grasses and twigs. Finally, just before the female lays her eggs, the eagles pluck their own feathers for a soft nest lining. The chicks hatch weighing just ounces. By three months, feathers have replaced their down and they’re ready for their first attempts at flying. The parent encourages its chick to try its wings by cutting back on food deliveries. The adult eagles may fly by with a yummy rabbit carcass, but not dump it in the nest for easy snacking. The parents also start throwing out the soft nest linings so the chicks find the nest increasingly uncomfortable. As the chicks continue growing, life in the nest gets crowded. Their only hope of relief is to try to fly. If they flounder on those first learning flights, a parent is right there to catch them. That’s the picture behind verse 11 (“spreads its wings to catch them”).

What a powerful analogy to human parenting! We nurture our children, and then make the nest “uncomfortable” as we nudge them toward independence. They may tumble a bit at first, but we’re not to hover forever and keep them from the rights and responsibilities of adulthood.

And what a picture of God’s amazing care for us! As we mature in the faith and step away from our immature comfort zones, He’s there to help us rise to new heights—to run and not be weary (Isaiah 40:31).

(For more eagle analogies, check out this article: http://www.ucg.org/christian-living/under-eagles-wings/ )

Happy 100th birthday to a what?

2011-12-30T14:55:00.000-08:00

Several times a day, graffiti-marked trains rumble through the middle of my town, carrying farm produce and high-tech goods like cars. For hundreds of feet, the tracks edge our nearly-two-mile-long nature preserves walking trail. For most of that length, a grassy greenbelt separates rails from trail. They almost merge, however, near a hundred-year-old landmark. The date 1912 is still visible at the top of one cement culvert set under the tracks. A couple times during our walks, we were startled by deer bounding up the steep sides next to the culvert on their way to the grassy part of the wildlife area.

A hundred years this year! It’s hard to think back to life in 1912. Nine years earlier the Wright Brothers celebrated a wobbly “flight” of 120 feet in their great invention, the “airplane.” In 1912 several wars were going on (no surprise), notably one in the Balkans. Women were campaigning for the right to vote. Henry Ford was sketching plans for automobile assembly lines. The electric refrigerator was a year away from the market. It would sell for $900—about $14,000 in today’s money. Some Victrolas (wind-up phonographs) cost as much, limiting their market to the wealthy. The average person earned $1,033 a year. Gas was seven cents a gallon. Oh, and a new car cost about $941.

Thinking about history comes naturally as one year ends and another begins. So does thinking about the future—and how much time we have left to live on this earth. Believe it or not, in 1991 a New York inventor received patent 5,031,161 for a “life expectancy timepiece.” His “watch” tells people how much time they probably have left in this world. It’s based on actuarial tables like those used by insurance companies to guess at life expectancy based on age, health, and lifestyle factors (smoking, drinking, stress). He remarked that his watch “is to make people realize how precious time is, that each day is just here and you can’t get it back.”

I don’t know anything about this man’s faith walk, but he seems to echo the wise words of a man who lived to be 120, about a third longer than most folks. His name was Moses and in the only chapter in Psalms attributed to him, he puts out the facts about how short life really is. From him we have these words of timeless counsel: “Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom” (Psalm 90:12).

In our lifespan, we may support a lot of emotional loads (as opposed to the weight bearing of the 1912 culvert). We may be a place of shelter or transition for family or friends (recalling the culvert’s role with deer). But maybe the better analogy from it is this: are we supporting the things that really matter for eternity? For which we will give account to God?

That Perfect Gift

2011-12-24T14:23:00.000-08:00

I just got back from buying unsliced french bread and bandages at the grocery store (no, the purchases weren't related). To be more truthful, I just escaped mayhem at our shopping center, dodging between preoccupied, frustrated people in the last hours of Christmas eve. Craziness! Soon...we'll be past the advertisements that urge us to keep buying. Earlier today when I logged on to my computer, the "home page" of my internet server boasted, "It's not too late to find the perfect gift." I had no interest in going to the link, but the phrase was pregnant with meaning (and that's pun intended).

After reading the internet's teaser headline, I thought of another "perfect gift" that someone opened before it was too late. I write of it in my devotional, Heaven,The Greatest Home Makeover. In our small town daily newspaper, survivors can buy space for detailed obituaries about someone who died. Some spend lots of money listing memberships, honors, and survivors, right down to their favorite dog. But one day I read a special one in which the family shared its admiration for the deceased person's amazing, self-taught mechanical how-to. Then they added (and for me, this was the best part!) that two weeks before his death (from diabetes complications, as I recall), he "received Christ as his Lord and Savior and was baptized along with his son. God had been patient, waiting all these years for the Spirit to move in his heart, time and again returning him from death's door."

We won't always have chance after chance after chance to receive God's gift of eternal life through Jesus. I think about that a lot when the holidays come and, for one thing, traffic fatalities related to drinking rise. (For those who don't know, my family was almost killed by a drinking driver in 1997.)

If you're reading this and haven't yet received God's gift, why wait? If you've been praying for years for a loved one to make that decision, don't quit. George Mueller prayed for decadesfor two of his friends to come to Christ. By the time he was buried, both made that life-changing decision.

The internet headline, despite its materialistic intentions, is spiritually right. It's not too late to find the just-right gift. It's been waiting for you all along. The perfect gift is a Person, not a package: "Thanks be unto God for his unspeakable gift" (2 Cor. 9:15).

P.S. The photo is of decorations on our Christmas tree. Next to the cross is a note telling of our treasured gift this year: a donation on our behalf to an organization that helps the poor and hungry.

Fullness of time

2011-12-20T09:55:00.000-08:00

The term “fullness of time” came to mind as I admired the amaryllis blooming in brilliant orange quadruplets this morning on our kitchen table. Three weeks ago, it looked like a withered turnip. After weeks of winter fog and cold, we’re enjoying the display.

It’s appropriate that these fast-growing bulbs are popular for indoor blooming during Christmas. At the time of Jesus’ birth, the world was socked in by centuries of hopelessness. The long-ago prophecies of Someone to change that seemed to diminish with each turn of the seasons. Then it came—not as people thought, in the form of a warrior-king born in a palace, but in a baby born to a teenager in desperate poverty far from home.

Here’s the phrase in scripture: “But when the fullness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son” (Galatians 4:4). Every one of scripture’s prophecies was fulfilled with Christ. By one person’s estimate, using just 48 prophecies, the mathematical probability of all of them being fulfilled in one person is 10 to the 57th power. That’s 10 with 57 zeroes after it.

As the buy-buy-buy ads spill out of your newspaper or prance across your television screen, remember that they’ve got it all wrong. Christmas is not about indulging one another, but marveling that God indulged us with the greatest gift of all, a way to be reconciled to Him forever.

And maybe that’s another reason the amaryllis bloom has a trumpet shape, as a special reminder of the eternal view: “Behold, I show you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed” (1 Corinthians 15:51-52).If the birth of Jesus can overrule a probability of one in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,-000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000—let’s celebrate, the Christ-coming past and the Christ-return-future!

Page stains

2011-12-15T10:04:00.000-08:00

When the basket of bananas on our table got past their prime, I faced a decision: banana bread, or banana bread? Pulling out my baking supplies, I got out my favorite recipe book and turned to the page with a tried-and-true recipe. In fact, it bears permanent pureed banana and canola oil stains. Dump in this, stir in that--soon the loaf was in the oven.

My “food-autographed” cookbook reminded me of a story I once heard about some parents who had an out-of-town emergency and had to leave their kids with a trusted sitter—one old enough to cook and run the household.When they returned, the kids raved about how their sitter cooked all their favorite foods.The mother took the sitter aside and asked, “How did you know what were their favorite foods?”

“I just looked through your cookbook,” the sitter said. “I cooked whatever was on the pages with a lots splatters and stains.”

Sometimes when I go to a memorial service, the minister will hold up the Bible that belonged to the person who died. What a joy when they can say, “So-and-so really loved God’s Word. If you looked through their Bible, it’s full of underlining, stars, notes, and even family names by verses.”

As a youngster, I had this mistaken idea that writing in one’s Bible was akin to sacrilege. After all, wasn’t it the “holy” Bible? Then, as a young adult, I came under the influence of godly older women who cherished their well-used, well-marked Bibles. That took care of the silly notion that it was a sin to mark up one’s Bible! Now, in a few places, the thin pages of my Bible probably suggest some wet stuff falling. Sometimes I’ll find myself so gripped by a passage that my eyes “sweat” (as one friend puts it). But those wrinkled dots on a page are reminders that God is real and that He takes notes of those tears. My deepest emotions (even the wet ones) matter to Him. Sometimes there may be no solution to my concerns on this side of eternity. Sometimes, there is--as the Israelites discovered in the seemingly impossible dream of returning to their homeland after the Babylonian captivity: “Those who sow in tears will reap with songs of joy” (Psalm 126:5).

Splatters and stains in your Bible? They’re a good thing, a reminder that the Bible is tried and true.

The Test of the Scary Black Notes

2011-12-09T10:30:00.000-08:00

I read The Great Church Christmas Orchestra Recruitment Letter and said, “I can do this.” When the music arrived, I said, “Can I really do this?” To understand my reaction, you need to know that I play the violin “somewhat.” On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being a squawky beginner and 10 fairly proficient, I consider myself about a 2.7. The number usually suffers when I’m handed music parts that have notes so high I’m almost scratching my chin, or that include 32nd notes in seven flats played at warp speed. And that’s what happened. Admittedly, 95% of the music was at my skill level. But it was the 5% at the musical prodigy level that made me wonder if I even qualified for my preferred perch of last chair, second violin.

To be honest, that’s been my story ever since I picked up a violin in seventh grade. I despaired of sounding any better than a cat in heat. The other way to get better was to try and try—and keep practicing. By the time I was a high school senior, I sat as first chair of the high school orchestra. Then I toted my violin to college and discovered the bar for excellence was raised by students with years of private lessons behind them. Again, the only option was to keep trying and practicing. And I did get better. Then came non-music jobs, marriage, motherhood and a host of other commitments, and my violin took a long nap in its case. My skills went downhill.

But the other day as I practiced those jet-travel (high & fast)sections of the program music, I realized that’s a picture of how God “grows” us into the people of faith and trust that He planned for us to be. Whatever the means—be it a challenging job, stretching college course, or a difficult relationship—we have two choices. We can bail out, fearing failure, or push on, trusting God to get us through it and develop our character in the process.

Robert McGee addresses this in his book The Search for Significance. The thrust of the book is helping people identify negative outlooks and habits and replace them with a Biblically-based foundation of God’s view of them. One of the common false beliefs he discusses is this: “I am what I am; I cannot change. I am hopeless.” Such a perspective is typical of those who feel they’ll never be successful in life, who blame their failures on being undisciplined, who can’t trust God, who say “That’s just the way I am,” and who claim they just can’t overcome a particular sin.

Such negative attitudes crash right up against this truth--to borrow from the famed “Four Spiritual Laws,” that God loves us and has a wonderful plan for our lives, one connected to new life in Jesus Christ. Trusting Him is not mere "fire insurance" (to avoid hell), but a remodeling process. To bring the analogy back to music practice, moving forward with God’s program is a learning and re-training process. It’s loosening up unyielding thought patterns (and, with violin, my age-stiffened fingers).

I won’t claim to now play the pieces perfectly, but I’ll give it my best effort come performance time. I’ll remember God’s promise of help: “I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand” (Isaiah 41:10). And I’m counting on His right hand helping my struggling left hand with all those busy notes! After all, the main purpose of this is to bring praise to Jesus, and His coming to earth as a baby to be our Savior.

Upon this rock

2011-12-01T10:22:00.000-08:00

They’re called “cairns” from a Scottish word for heaps of stones used for landmarks or memorials. I live tens of thousands of miles away from Scotland, but last spring some wag in our area started heaping cairns from roadside rocks. When you’re used to seeing the typical debris of cans, papers, plastic bottles and the occasional remains of a deceased tire—well, they added entertainment to highway travel. Rocks are not normally conducive to stacking, so I wondered if some super-glue was sandwiched between the stones to help them endure the air whapped off passing cars. I never stopped to find out.

I thought of the cairns again upon hearing that evangelist Billy Graham, now 93, was hospitalized with pneumonia. Even through frail from aging and Parkinson’s disease, the man who has preached in 185 nations had just finished his 30th book, Nearing Home: Life, Faith and Finishing Well. His message and presence have unmistakably marked our world for Christ. Presidents and other world leaders have confided in him. Yet he would consider himself just another old rock in the stack. Those he influenced would be stacked on top of him.

And below him? We could go down a lot of rocks, but I’ve always been moved by the part dating to the mid-1800s. A young man from Boston named Edward Kimball decided to teach a Sunday school class to influence teenagers for Christ. One of them, who worked in his uncle’s shoe store, was quite a handful, prone to profanity and anger. Through Kimball’s influence, that teenager eventually chose to become a Christian. His name was Dwight Moody, and his name became better known as he began holding evangelistic meetings. Moody’s meetings, and personal counseling with Moody, helped a student named J. Wilbur Chapman be certain of his salvation. Chapman became a friend and co-worker with Moody.

A baseball player named Billy Sunday came into the picture, converted at street corner meetings and for a brief time an assistant for Chapman’s meetings. Sunday began holding his own evangelistic meetings and started a men’s prayer and fellowship group in Charlotte, N.C.. In 1934, the group invited an evangelist named Mordecai Ham to preach at meetings. A gangly young man named Billy Graham went forward one night to receive Christ. So did another young man, to make a deeper commitment to Christ. His name was Grady Wilson. Their names would eventually be linked as evangelists known throughout the world.

The bottom rock of Graham's story wasn’t even Ed Kimball. Someone had led Kimball to faith in Christ. That person had someone else lead him or her, and...and.... The Bible tells us about the true bottom rock. While others were having heated discussions about who Jesus Christ really was—human or divine, Peter pounded his faith-stake in the ground by declaring, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matthew 16:16). Of this rock-solid declaration, Jesus replied, “On this rock I will build my church” (v. 18).

Not a flimsy cairn pile, vulnerable to the weather. A solid rock. Unmovable.

Flexibility

2011-11-25T12:14:00.000-08:00

Watching our flexible feline groom himself in positions that would cause me to scream in pain got me thinking about human flexibility tests. I used to be able to do the “back-scratch” position (one arm up the back, the other over the shoulder—hands should meet). Now, two frustrating inches keep my fingers from touching. Well, I may not be built of rubber bands any more, but at least I can get the senior discount.

Other things crossed my mind as Augie twisted himself about to get every possible streak of fur licked down. How did he learn to do that? He was still a kitten when rescued from a public park, where he was abandoned and left for coyote dessert. Did his mother have time to teach him Grooming 101? I also made a connection to something I’d read recently in Richard Foster’s newest book, Sanctuary of the Soul (IVP). I’d read his best-seller Celebration of Discipline decades ago, but never knew about his early life.

In this book’s introduction, he said as a college student he was frustrated because of his “poor academic training and a less-than-stellar intellect.” He said he had to study harder than many others to succeed in college. On top of that, he had two part-time jobs to pay for food and his books. He worked from four to six every morning steam-cleaning machinery at a cannery. Then he went to the dining commons to wash dishes before his first class at 8 a.m. He washed dishes again at lunch and supper—this allowing him to eat in the dining commons. Both of his parents had died, so he and his two brothers lived on whatever they could scrape together. Oh, in addition to college and part-time jobs, he was in a ministry where he and others spoke at different churches every weekend.It was out of this frustration of being overwhelmed that he had his first encounter with the still, quiet voice of God. God seemed to be telling him that having all his desires satisfied was not the route to true satisfaction. Instead, this had to come from just being with God.

Probably a lot of us have had times when we felt all twisted and out of sync, like those people whose extreme limb-contortions give them fifteen minutes of fame in some world records book. But God knows, and that time of pressure is probably what He has permitted to help “grow” our character. Many people quote Isaiah 40:31 in times of trouble: “They that wait upon the Lord will renew their strength.” However, the Hebrew-to-English translation makes some people think it’s a passive situation--God taking over while we wait. Instead, the primitive linguistic root of “wait,” qavah, means “to bind together by twisting.” I’ve heard this rewording: They that twist their weakness around God’s strength will know His renewing strength. I can understand that. I think we’re all prone to want things easy. We don’t like being bent and pulled out of our emotional or spiritual comfort zones. But growth in character doesn’t happen any other way.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go try and touch my toes.

Thirsty

2011-11-18T13:44:00.000-08:00

Close to the middle of this photo are deer drinking in the river.

“I see some deer,” my husband exclaimed as he pulled our car off the canyon road. We were about 80 miles from home, enjoying the autumn colors on a lesser-traveled road. Climbing over a guard rail, we stood on a ledge hundreds of feet away from four deer drinking the chilly river water. They soon detected human presence, and bounded back up the hill into their hiding places.

The opening words to Psalm 42 came to mind: “As the deer pants for streams of waters, so my soul pants for you, O God.” I recalled explaining that psalm to a group of women years ago. One, her face chiseled by her hard life before she came to Christ, said, “I can relate to thirsting for God.”

The Hebrew word that we translate “pant” is arag and this is its only use in the Bible. It also means “to long for.” I can understand the thirst and panting that compels an animal to find water. I once had two fawns in my house (aka long-legged young teens) who became substitute paper carriers for a huge route serving more than a hundred customers. Of course, it was summer’s most blistering week and Mom had to come along as driver. I made sure we all filled our water bottles before going to the paper drop-off point, where we sat in the meager shade outside the car. Unfortunately, that was next to the locked-up swimming pool of a manufactured home community. I shot a mom’s glance that said, “Don’t even think about climbing the fence for a few cannonballs while we wait.”

After an hour, the water bottles were drained and my fawns were gasping, “I’m d-y-i-n-g” (which made me think of a cowboy song that includes a lot of yippee-yi-yoos). Finally, I decided to drive us home to refill the water bottles and call the newspaper about our tardy delivery. “Sorry, the press broke down,” the harried circulation assistant said. “I don’t know when your bundles will be delivered. You’ll just have to stay at the dropoff point.” So back we went to wait. My two fawns were about to drop out of this. Yes, the papers did eventually come and we sweated through the route in record time. Home again, they collapsed with more long drinks of water...while I had to figure out dinner. (How about ice cube soup?)

Whether a blistering summer afternoon, or a chilly autumn morning, thirst is a normal part of our creation. It’s also a symbol of our longing to be refreshed and satisfied by the One who created us. That’s why, as we drove away from watching the deer, I thought of other scriptures that speak of spiritual thirst:
“He satisfies the thirsty.” (Psalm 107:9)
“Come, all you who are thirsty.” (Isaiah 55:1)
“If a man is thirsty, let him come to me and drink.” (John 7:37)
“Whoever is thirsty, let him come.” (Revelation 22:17)

We hear so much today about the “WWW,” the world-wide web. It precedes the internet addresses of sites like mine. But we also need to be life-long students of the Bible’s “world-wide word webs,” discovering how even single words in this God-inspired book are interconnected in amazing ways. When we arag after God—longing for, even panting for Him--He promises to satisfy that thirst in the deepest part of who we are.

Hearing the Quiet Wind

2011-11-10T10:51:00.000-08:00

“Can you hear me now?” One cell phone company’s advertising slogan has gotten to me! But instead of reception maps, I’m thinking more of how sensitive I am to hearing the quiet voice of God.

I’m afraid I’m a lot like the prophet Elijah, thinking God needs to amp the volume to get my attention. After Elijah’s headline showdown with the prophets of Baal at Mount Carmel, he ran for his life from a nasty Queen Jezebel and ended up in the wilderness. Now, that’s a place where modern-day cell phone reception would be iffy! But it was no problem for God. He grabbed Elijah’s attention with the big stuff: a ferocious wind, a shattering earthquake, and a horrific fire. But when God finally spoke, it was in a gentle whisper (1 Kings 19:12).

Whooooooooooooooooooooo.

I thought of that when my husband and I traveled about a hundred miles to see a 90-year-old friend, who recently moved to be nearer her son. Our route included passing through an area notorious for unending wind. At the top of the hill, dozens of ghost-white, 400-feet-high wind turbines came into view, their propellers turning steadily in the unseen wind. I learned that nearly fifty are spread out over 5,400 acres in this area. One claim is that the electricity they generate could power 28,000 average homes for a year. And while the props emit a whine, there’s also the mystery of the silence of wind.

Whooooooooooooooooooooooo.

But I had thoughts other than energy conservation. One was a bit silly. What if the comical Don Quixote of Cervantes’ ancient satire had come upon these instead of windmills, whom he thought to be ferocious giants? Maybe like an ant encountering an elephant?

My other thought was of the Bible’s use of wind as a symbol. Jesus noted that the wind blows where it wishes and we hear it blowing, but we don’t know where it’s coming from or where it’s going. He said the Holy Spirit is like that in the new birth of salvation (John 3:8). It’s also how God’s Spirit still speaks to us-—in that still, small voice that says “do this.” In writing about the “whispers of God” in Sanctuary of the Soul (IVP Books, 2011, p. 84), Richard Foster says he once sensed a distinct pull to call someone. It turned out that the person had deep and pressing needs, making his surprise phone call very timely. Foster added that the “whisper” will often be to do ordinary things, like taking a bouquet to someone who’s “out of sorts,” shoveling a disabled neighbor’s snow, or rising before a spouse to fix them morning coffee. Foster remarked: “We should not be surprised when the whisper of God leads us into simple acts of service and kindness.”

Before I’d even read this in Foster’s book, for several days that “still, small voice” was telling me to take flowers and a note to a friend who has faced many challenges in the aftermath of her parents’ year-apart deaths. Finally, I arranged a bouquet from the best of my fading roses and took it along with the note to her home. It appeared that nobody was home, so I left them by her door. A few hours later she called and expressed her gratitude and sharing prayer needs. She added, “I really wanted someone to bring me flowers today.”

Whoooooooooooooooooooooo.

Is a spirit-directed wind blowing in your heart?

Where's the GBH?

2011-11-04T12:12:00.000-07:00

“Shhh!” my husband whispered as we neared the swamp in our town’s riverfront trail system. “Look by the peninsula on the left.” I squinted to find the hump-shouldered outline of the huge gray bird amidst the dying foliage of autumn. Aware of our presence, it turned its S-shaped neck and waded out of view.I remembered previous times we came upon Great Blue Herons (GBH) in this swamp. One time, a pair startled us as they burst out of the cattails, whapping their six-foot-wide wingspans to lift four to eight pounds of body weight. They’re quite obvious aloft, but silent and nearly invisible as they troll the shallow waters for small fish to eat.

I thought of how we often fail to see God in the swamplands of life. When we end up in a place of disappointment or fear, we may feel He doesn’t notice us. That’s why one of the names of God, “El Roi,” meaning “The God Who Sees Me,” is especially poignant. We’re introduced to that aspect of His character through the Genesis 16 account of Hagar, Sarai’s maidservant. Pregnant with Abram’s child because of barren Sarai’s insistence on a surrogate, Hagar ran away when she couldn’t take Sarai’s jealousy and anger any more, collapsing by a little desert spring. Without hope, without direction, the desperate woman learned that Someone saw her troubles—God Himself. He told her to go back to Sarai and encouraged her with the revelation that the son in her womb would have a significant place in history. An ordinary water hole became a holy place. Thus she named it after her God-visit, Beer Lahai Roi, “Well of the Living One Who Sees Me.”

I find this story of great comfort. If God cares enough to intervene in a domestic dispute (albeit one with significant historical ramifications), surely He is aware of everything that goes on in my life. For many years, 2 Chronicles 16:9 has been a beacon of hope when I felt ignored and insignificant: “For the eyes of the LORD run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to shew himself strong in the behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward him” (KJV). It’s been a part of my memory bank so long that I can’t even recall the circumstances that put its truth into my life. But it’s there, a solid proclamation of God’s watch-care. Nothing can camouflage my actions or needs. He has seen it all, even before I was born and still in process in my mother’s womb (Psalm 139:15).

So where’s the GBH? Alone in his swampy disguise, known to God. And where am I in my deepest need, my most frustrating situation, or a place where God seems excluded? Right in the focus of God’s perfect telescope, its cross-hairs in the shape of a Cross.

Guard cats and fear alarms

2011-10-27T09:58:00.000-07:00

Because it had a likeness of our black-and-gray tabby, named Augie, our neighbor couldn’t resist buying me this sign for the window: “Beware: Guard cat on duty.” Ha! The only thing he guards is his food dish. Whenever he comes inside, he pads over to his water and food dishes and sits about eighteen inches away from them like, Read my mind. Thus I was a bit amused the other day when I answered the door to a muscular fireman and his petite woman assistant. I was expecting them for a smoke alarm program the fire department is conducting. But I wasn’t prepared for his opening remark: “Do you have a cat? Would you please put him out? We’re allergic to cats.”

Dutifully I scooped the lazy lug from his sleeping corner and deposited him in the chilly shock of “outside.” They proceeded with their ten-minute smoke alarm business. When they got ready to leave, Augie was waiting on the front porch, eager to get back to the warm indoors. The sight of him alarmed (no pun intended) the woman assistant, who again pleaded “allergy!” So once again I had to remove the cat, this time from the porch. Funny, there were no allergy flare-ups while they were in our home (which has eleven years' worth of cat dander in it). And our overweight, geriatric feline is the antithesis of vicious, with the rare exception of guarding the back yard from Pancho Villa and Ho Chi Minh (my nicknames for the local desperado cats who dare to invade his home turf). They haven’t been around much since I threw a rotten tomato in their yowling direction.

Our cat’s wimpy representation of the idea of “guarding” helped me appreciate even more the spiritual concept of “guard.” Even a thousand burly firemen (not the “allergic” ones) can’t come close to the “guarding” we’re promised in Philippians 4:7: “And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus” (KJV). One of the key words in this passage is “keep” (more accurately, “guard” in NIV, NASB, ESV, and the New King James). The Amplified version puts it: “shall garrison and mount guard over your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.”

The translation makes a difference. “Keep” has a passive sense, like putting a keepsake in a cedar chest. “Guard” implies deliberate, powerful action. The original Greek, phroureo, was a military term and referred to guarding in a garrison. Of this, Greek scholar W.E. Vine remarked that it described not just protection but “inward garrison as by the Holy Spirit.” One Bible scholar said it’s the peace of “holy repose” that floods the believer’s soul when he leans hard on God. It’s being able to say, “The news or situation is bad, but God is bigger than this and I will trust Him.” Or, as Frances Ridley Havergal wrote in the refrain to the beloved hymn “Like a River Glorious”:
Stayed upon Jehovah,
Hearts are fully blessed;
Finding, as He promised,
Perfect peace and rest.
Remember that, next time your “fear alarm” goes off. Your Holy Guard stands ready.

A vine at a time

2011-10-20T12:10:00.000-07:00

Last week, I “retired” our tomato plants. About the middle of October, I realize that few of those tight green marbles will ripen as we inch toward the first frost. We have only five tomato plants, but they may as well be fifteen. Clipping a branch at a time, I save out the tomatoes with a yellow blush of potential. These I wash and put in a covered box with a red apple, whose off-gassing helps them ripen. Finally, I yank out the main stems that seem to be super-glued into the soil. Goodbye, a couple hours. It’s the down side to having fresh tomatoes the last part of the summer. It’s not my favorite chore, but I get through it.

In the midst of this chore, I thought of tough things in life that loom much more tangled and messy than my autumn tomato patch. One story I’ve often shared with people needing encouragement comes from the life of Dr. A.B. Simpson (1843-1919), a Canadian preacher, theologian, author, and founder of the Christian and Missionary Alliance. Think back a hundred-plus years, before cars, air travel, phones or the internet. Dr. Simpson was preaching in Ireland when he posed the question, “What is it to abide in Jesus?” Then he gave this answer: “It is to keep on saying, minute by minute, ‘For this I have Jesus.’”

That phrase of trust lodged in the heart of the event’s pianist, a young woman whose family lived across the Irish Sea. During the service she received a telegram asking her to come home immediately because her mother was dying. “I have never traveled alone,” she told him. “But for this I have Jesus. I must make a long journey to the south of England. For this and all else that goes with it, I have Jesus.” As it turned out, in those days of slow travel, she arrived home ten minutes after her mother died. Her family was so distraught that responsibility for the funeral service and legal details fell to her. She later told how she kept claiming, “For this I have Jesus,” as she had to do things she couldn’t have done in her own strength.

The message from Simpson’s sermon is echoed in Philippians 4:13: “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me” (KJV). Or, as the Greek-to-English translation is clarified in the Amplified Bible: “I have strength for all things in Christ Who empowers me—I am ready for anything and equal to anything through Him Who enfuses inner strength into me, [that is, I am self-sufficient in Christ’s sufficiency]." My copy of the Amplified version was once my late mother’s, given her in 1962 by a godly aunt. Fifty years later, as I read the same words that my mother had underlined in red, I sense how she embraced this truth for her own overwhelming life challenges. They ranged from being the firstborn of nine in a family that knew profound poverty, to her life-long battle with asthma, to her final, hard-fought battle with cancer.

“For this”—for the intimidating, scary, impossible things of life—“I have Jesus.” The best part is that besides coming alongside in our challenges, He sees the eventual spiritual outcome. Leaning on Him, stretching with Him, and depending on Him are all part of growing in the faith. “For this,” there is a purpose.

I just checked the tomatoes in my “ripening box,” and a few are turning red. There’s another parable here, about God at work in the dark places, but I think Simpson’s hopeful counsel suffices for today.

Sniffing out Truth

2011-10-12T18:03:00.000-07:00

Dogs! Take them on a walk and they only want to sniff the bushes that gazillion other dogs have “marked.” Pictured at right is “Molly,” a neighbor’s dog whom I take care of when they’re away, and incurable shrub-sniffer.

It’s hard to think deep thoughts when you’re trying to keep up with a dog that wants to check every bush on the block in record time, but I tried. While Molly kept her nose in greens, I kept mine on the sky (with the exception of times I needed to whip out the plastic bag for her “deposits”). And it struck me: a lot of people spend their lives sniffing out the bad stuff instead of embracing the beauty around them.Poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning put it so well: “Earth's crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God; But only he who sees, takes off his shoes. The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.”

The “bush” reference is to Moses’ encounter with God in Exodus 3. Like Moses plodding through shepherd duties, I tend to grind out the days by getting through my to-do lists. (Nothing against to-do lists—they both remind and motivate to do what’s needed.) But two books given me this past week by spiritually-sensitive friends have reminded me to look for those common bushes, afire with God.

One was by Ann Voskamp, who as a farm wife and mother of six home-schooled children knows the distracting tyranny of having too much to do. But in One Thousand Gifts (Zondervan), she traces her journey of finding splendor—no, God-joy, in the ordinary. She calls this eucharisteo, the practicing of giving thanks in all things. Her book is the chronicle of that: thanks for the rainbow hues in soap bubbles, of the glory of a harvest moon, even “ugly-beautiful” like mismatched socks.

Author Ruth Meyers encourages focused praise through 31 Days of Praise: Enjoying God Anew (Multnomah). Her month of scripture-based praise-prayers targeted some course-corrections needed in my own prayer life. Touching where we all live, she invites us to thank God for our weaknesses (and His power to remove or change these), for His power at work in untangling the “snarls in my soul,” and for what He’s doing through the people in our lives who cause more pain than joy. Meyers said that as she follows the psalmists’ example of praising God, “sooner or later (often sooner) the Lord releases me from being a slave to my distressing emotions” (p. 29).

She also included a heart-stirring, one-line prayer from the writings of missionary Amy Carmichael (whose Dohnavur Fellowship in India rescued hundreds from temple prostitution): “O Lord Jesus, my Beloved, may I be a joy to thee.” You can’t pray that and say, “I don’t have any purpose in life.” Our purpose is to bring joy to the One who created us. Praise is one avenue, and living day-by-day for His glory through vocation and relationships is another.

So back to Molly the dog. Yes, life stinks at times (like those “marked” bushes along the street). But God invites us to look up, to His glory, and declare it through the praise of our lips and the praise of our lives. And, in so doing, to realize that we stand on holy ground.

Navel-grazing

2011-10-05T10:32:00.000-07:00

I’d just sent my husband off to his substitute-teaching job after one of his favorite breakfasts. I was virtuous and made him waffles with bits of bacon in them. Before going to the computer for my “work,” I took some time after washing dishes to glance at headlines in the morning paper. On the rug in front of me, Augie our cat began his morning routine, licking his already-overgroomed belly. Parts are so bare they look shaved. I thought of the cliché “navel-gazing,” except in his case it’s “navel-grazing.”

“Navel-gazing,” which gives a word picture of constantly inspecting one’s belly button, has come to mean excessive introspection, self-absorption, self-analysis or focus on a single issue. In other words, people start singing a one-note solo, often a pity-party song.

I was thinking about that when I read this headline: “Hit-run victim helped men at homeless shelter.” My momentary sadness deepened when I learned the victim was born with cerebral palsy and was driving his motorized wheelchair when hit by a suspected drunk driver. Tonight, as I do the first Wednesday of every month, I will speak to convicted drunk drivers at an “educational panel” required as part of their sentencing. Two others also speak out about the dangers and prevalence of this serious problem, of which the audience members, because of their arrests, are now a documented part. They’re surprised by the statistics that 12,000 a year die on American roads because of impaired driving. That’s 1,000 a month, about one every 45 minutes. And just as many people grieve their deaths as those who lose a loved one in other tragic circumstances, like war. Most important, drunk-driving deaths are 100% preventable: by not drinking and driving.

Why am I there, since I don’t drink alcohol? Because my family was almost killed by a drinking driver in 1997. Alcohol so impaired his driving abilities that he crossed the center line at too high a speed and smashed into our car. We were about 250 miles from home, headed home from a vacation.Though injured, we survived. But that incident, like the deaths of my parents six months apart when I was 30 and still single, became a defining incident in who I am. Yes, I grieved those losses for a season, but I moved on. I knew I needed to transform the pain into something good instead of prolonging a pity party. In other words, moving past navel-gazing.

Back to the 57-year-old man with cerebral palsy. Despite his disability, he graduated from a university with a major in business and later got a master’s degree in psychology. He was an advocate of handicap-accessible streets and volunteered at several charities, including a shelter for homeless men. For that he received a distinguished award for community service. In an interview after that honor, he said, “I have two choices. I could stay home and be bitter and think ‘poor handicapped me, wah wah,’ or go out and help people and think positively.” Upon reading that, I put down the paper and said “Wow!” That’s a message able-bodied people need. He didn’t spend his life navel-gazing (or even navel-grazing--massaging a certain area of his life to get more sympathy). He pursued compassion and excellence to the limits of his abilities.

I can’t do much about my cat’s excessive grooming. Because he seems healthy otherwise, we’ve decided it’s not that big a deal. We did switch to a gluten-free cat food (more expensive, of course!) upon hearing that it sometimes helps aging cats who overgroom. In a way, I’m glad he has that somewhat-bare belly. For when he does his feline acrobatics to groom, God usually sends me a message: to check where I might be navel-gazing and turn my eyes instead to how He helps me through difficult times. The Bible is full of reminders of that, and one came as I read my Bible just after reading about drunk-driving victim.
But as for me, I will always have hope; I will praise you more and more.
My mouth will tell of your righteousness, of your salvation all day long, though I know not its measure (Psalm 71:14-15).

The prickly and the pruned

2011-09-29T19:15:00.000-07:00

Besides born-to-bite dogs (see last week’s blog), I encounter many thought-provoking sights during my morning walks. One day I took along my camera to photograph two very different roses just a block apart. One is part of a neglected bed of about four rose bushes. A confusion of spindly canes spill out of the weed-choked soil, bearing few blooms. Another yard has weed-free, pruned, cared-for roses with brilliant flowers.

Their contrasting conditions reminded me of John 15, which records Jesus calling Himself the true vine and His Father the vinedresser. Verse 2: “Every branch that bears fruit He prunes, that it may bear more fruit.” Roses aren’t grapevines, but they have commonalities. Both can go wild and get diseased, limiting their fruitfulness. That’s why, in my rose bed, every year I lop off dead or diseased branches, prune off suckers and encourage a “shape” that maximizes strength and access to the sun. The point of it all is to help the branches “abide” in the main stalk, drawing life and nourishment from the soil and water. The spiritual analogy, of course, is that we allow God to prune away the suckers and disease of wrong "me-centered" attitudes and habits that impair abiding in Him.

One of Max Lucado's insightful books is titled It’s Not About Me. In the book's acknowledgements, he told of having a quick visit with an old friend over lunch. Lucado asked him, “What has God been teaching you this year?” The friend responded, “He’s been teaching me that: It’s not about me.” Lucado’s book explores that concept, lifting up the glory of God as a reminder that it’s all about Him.

“Abide in me,” Jesus said, “and I in you.” He is the “main branch” to whom we must remain attached to know true life. The Greek verb (meno) that we usually translate “abide” suggests a continuing, nourishing attachment. No matter if you’re a rose vine or grape vine, you can’t attach and detach at your convenience, like the pump at a gas station. It’s an all-out commitment. And here’s another beauty from that passage. Meno, the verb form of “abide,” has a cousin in the noun form, mone. Know where that’s found? In the incredibly comforting message Jesus left us about heaven in John 14:2: “In my Father’s house are many mone" (most accurately, “dwelling places,” not the misleading idea of "mansions" as some of us grew up reading)." The nature of our residence in Heaven will be intimate connection with the Savior. How that will happen, I’m not sure—but God does.

For now, I see the Creator in carefully-tended roses that help declare the glory of God. And I’m reminded that God loves me so much that He won’t leave me the unruly way I am. He knows how and where I need to be pruned--to abide in Him, and to bring Him the glory.

Sound (grrr)-bite

2011-09-23T12:07:00.000-07:00

It happened here....
So much for healthy habits, like walking three-quarters of a mile to the nearest grocery store to buy fresh green beans. Half a block from the store, as I passed a group of apartments with dead grass and junk outside, I remember thinking, What a messy yard. Just then, a resident opened a door and his dog zoomed out, zipped through the hedge, and headed straight for my legs. In seconds the dog had bitten both my calves before his owner grabbed him. When I lifted my pant legs and saw the blood, I knew I had a problem. I remember saying, “I need to wash my wounds.” The residents offered me the garden hose. Eventually, because I pressed the point, they brought out dish soap, some tissue and a bandage. And then I walked home, with lots of time those eight or so blocks to think! I had done nothing to provoke the attack (my thoughts about the unkempt yard never left my brain). I was walking on the public sidewalk at a normal pace. Yet it happened.

Sometimes life is like that. We’re doing what we should, then kaboom, we’re attacked spiritually, emotionally or physically. Even back in the apostle Peter’s time, people were wrestling with this age-old question of why suffering was part of their lives. If they were following Christ, shouldn’t they get a break from life’s tough stuff? The answer is simple: No, because we live in a fallen world.

“Be self-controlled and alert,” Peter counseled the Christians. “Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour” (1 Peter 5:8). I’d paraphrase that now: Your enemy the devil is like a vicious dog that specializes in surprise attacks on your calves!

The venerable Bible teacher William MacDonald noted that Satan has different poses. Sometimes he’s on the destructive offensive, like a roaring lion. Having a drinking driver smash into your car (what my family lived through in 1997) is lion-stuff. Other times he’s sneaky as a snake, luring people into negative lifestyle choices like financial irresponsibility or immorality. He also disguises himself as an “angel of light,” who tries to deceive people spiritually. He enjoys hearing people whine, “I deserve better. God isn’t fair to me.” Excuse me? Who isn’t fair? Peter’s advice: “Resist him, standing firm in the faith.” The reason? You’re not the only one under spiritual attack around the world. In some parts of the globe today, it’s bad, really bad for believers.

As for my encounter with an out-of-control dog, I dutifully reported the incident to the Humane Society and had my bites checked at a walk-in clinic. They seem to be healing and so far I’m not foaming at the mouth from rabies. But trust me, I’ve altered my walking route to the grocery store. Hopefully, the opposite side of the street will be safer!

4-H and Weeds

2011-09-16T09:10:00.000-07:00

My husband and I recently visited the county fair, browsing exhibits of food, crafts and animals. My favorite: enormous pigs, asleep and crammed into tiny cages like giant packaged sausages (which some of them may become!). In the 4-H crafts building, I noticed an adult mentor conversing with a young 4-H member about her project. The expression on the young person’s face indicated her openness about “doing it better.”

Seeing them reminded me of one of the first verses in Proverbs I memorized as a youngster: “Hear counsel and receive instruction, that thou mayest be wise in thy latter end.” Or, in today’s language: “Listen to advice and accept instruction, and in the end you will be wise” (Proverbs 19:20).

As I grew up, I experienced the truth of that verse when godly adults loved me enough to have the courage to offer “advice” and “instruction” about changes needed in my attitudes and behavior. Some of their counsel was like the four “H’s” of the 4-H program, reflected in other verses of Proverbs:
Head (thought life): “The Lord detests the thoughts of the wicked, but those of the pure are pleasing to him” (Proverbs 15:26).
Heart (values): “Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life” (Proverbs 4:23).
Hands (work ethic): “From the fruit of his lips a man is filled with good things as surely as the work of his hands rewards him” (Proverbs 12:14).
Health (the physical-emotional link): “Pleasant words are a honeycomb, sweet to the soul and healing to the bones” (Proverbs 16:24).

So what does weeding have to do with all this? Home from the fair, as clouds moved over the sun to temper an already-hot day, I decided to weed our large rose bed. Kneeling between those thorny bushes with hand tools, I stabbed and pulled, filling a large bin. I found myself comparing weeding to growing in our spiritual walk. Sometimes we’re blind to our spiritual “weeds” until someone who’s more spiritually mature comes along and says, “This doesn’t belong in your life. You need to root it out.”

By the way, the roosters over in the fair’s chicken barn were quite a sight, too. One was strutting all over his three-foot cage and crowing. Talk about pride! And of course there’s a proverb for that: “Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall” (Proverbs 16:18).

Web message (spider type)

2011-09-09T09:54:00.000-07:00

I was on my way to refill an empty finch feeder when I found the way blocked by an exquisite orb web. I stopped to admire its delicate, intricate artistry and thought of several things. One was the fun, yet profound, children’s story, Charlotte’s Web. It tells of a barn spider who, in an effort to save a personable pig named Wilbur from being slaughtered, begins weaving words into her webs extolling his virtues. The words bring admirers from miles around, and Wilbur is eventually shown off at the local fair.

The first words that saved Wilbur were “some pig,” “terrific,” and “radiant.” The last word, spun at the fair as the spider was dying (having laid her sac of eggs), was “humble.”

I also knew the Bible had a couple references to spiders, both translated from the Hebrew akkabish, used of the many common spiders of the Holy Land.* In Job 8:14, one of Job’s misguided “comforters,” Bildad, describes those who forget God as having spiritual confidence as fragile as a spider’s web. In Isaiah 59:5-6, the prophet describes the activities of sinful Israelites as useless as a spider’s web. They’re so frail that they can’t even be used as clothing. Not exactly encouraging images!

But if you read about how spiders make webs, you’ll come away with profound appreciation for the God as creator of even spiders. For one, spider silk cannot be dissolved in water and is one of the strongest known natural fibers. Most important, a web is built one strand at a time with admirable determination and endurance. If a spider gives up, there is no web to catch prey for food. I’m reminded of Peter’s second letter, in which he encourages believers to keep building on to the basic foundation of faith. From that main, anchoring thread, we’re to make every effort to live out behaviors that honor God.

Wilbur was “some pig,” “terrific,” and “radiant.” God wants our webs to spell out “goodness,” “knowledge,” “self-control,” “perseverance,” “godliness,” “brotherly kindness,” and “love” (2 Peter 1:5-7). If all these qualities are evident in our Christian walk, we’re not to boast about them. Instead, we’re to be, as that last word for Wilbur, “humble.”

What of my garden web? I crawled w-a-y under it to get to my bird feeder, not wanting to disturb it. I hoped the spider would catch lots of the aphids that had homesteaded in my rhododendrons. And I thanked God that, on this ordinary summer morning, He reminded me of His creative power and purpose.

*(The King James version also uses “spider” in Proverbs 30:28: “The spider taketh hold with her hands and is in king’s palaces.” However, the original Hebrew word is semamith, for which concordances give "poisonous lizard" as a primary meaning. Thus (NASB): “The lizard you may grasp with the hands, yet it is in kings’ palaces.”)

Home-made Hymnal

2011-09-03T07:33:00.000-07:00

I was having what might be called an “emotionally-fragile day.” My daughter was somewhere over the Pacific Ocean en route to her life’s new chapter in China. Oh, I missed her already. I was also troubled by an insensitive E-mail I’d gotten from someone. But life had to go on, which included buying groceries the other side of the river that divides the town where I live.

Mindful that my emotions could make me a distracted driver, I was on high alert for traffic issues. Just before the river bridge, as I looked ahead to a certain crosswalk where people often barge across the street without caution, a tune suddenly flooded my mind. Then came snatches of words, “There is a river that never shall run dry.” God had sent the reminder of a spiritual river that flows from deep within, no matter my outward circumstances.

Back home, I searched the hymnals kept on the piano for this song, but couldn’t find it. Then I remembered another source: my home-made hymnal. Years ago, as my learning curve of hymns and Gospel songs steepened, I had started a simple Bible-size three-ring notebook with the lyrics to my favorites. There, in the “T” section, between “Take Time to Be Holy” and “’Tis So Sweet to Trust in Jesus,” was “There is a River.” I sang the lyrics, remembering how they tell the story of the Samaritan woman who met Jesus at the well. And I realized, once again, that God had brought out of a deep pocket of memory something I needed for the moment: a reminder of the vast supply of His water—His comfort, His love.

Do you have favorite hymns? Have you considered gathering them into your “personal hymnal”? It doesn’t need to be fancy. Mine are hand-written or cut out from song sheets and pasted onto a page. But they’re there, accessible on paper, when I can’t always pull them out of my memory.

On Bravehearts

2011-08-26T09:58:00.000-07:00

This week my daughter and her husband (left in the photo) stepped into a profound list of “firsts” as they begin a new chapter of life in China. He will teach English at a large city university, and she will—well, we’re not sure. We’re hoping her extensive music skills will find an outlet.

My memory went back over other firsts in her life. Her first breath (a girl!), those first steps, first day of pre-school…I’ll skip the many childhood firsts and get on to the first day of being a licensed driver, first day away at college, first day away at grad school, and her first day as a bride and wife.

Now--oh, the places she will see and the people she will meet.

As she acclimates to new surroundings and especially a new culture, I think back to times my comfort zones were stretched. Though I did go outside the U.S. borders a few times, most of my changes were within the U.S. and didn’t involve a strange language, “what’s that?”-food choices, masses and masses of people, and less-than-ideal sanitation. But when my parents died and I was on my own 2,000 miles from my “roots,” I did struggle with feeling I didn’t fit in…until some scriptures grabbed my heart.

One was Psalm 37:3: “Trust in the Lord and do good; dwell in the land and enjoy safe pasture.” Three verbs stood out: trust, do, enjoy. I chose to trust that even in the negatives, God wouldn’t leave me. I had to take the initiative to do good in the tasks and relationships that unfolded. Then, in a pastoral image, I was to enjoy this place where the Shepherd had led me to graze.

A few pages later, in Psalm 68, came another reminder of God’s love to those with missing links in their earthly families. Mindful of the dangers of self-pity (“the rebellious live in a sun-scorched land,” v. 6), I connected as soon as possible with a church and volunteered in its ministries. I was there only a year before moving away, but because of those connections, thirty years later I am still in touch with one precious couple from there.

One more Bible passage, Jeremiah 29, spoke to me about accepting God’s plan about living in a new place. The circumstances surrounding this passage were a bit different than mine, as the Jews’ move to exile in Babylon came about as a result of punishment, not a step of faith. I cannot begin to imagine what it was like to travel by foot or pack animal, under the uncaring prods of enemy soldiers, over the deserts to the land of their conquerors. But once there, God didn’t want them to give up. The prophet Jeremiah gave them God’s instructions: to accept this foreign land as their home for now. Family, farming and commercial life were to go on, and they were to seek the peace and prosperity of this adopted homeland (v. 8).

Many may not realize that Jeremiah’s letter was the context of the golden words of hope in verse 11: “’For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.’”

Many also forget that this promise is immediately followed in verse 12 by the obedience of prayer: “Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.”

Prayer has covered this move for my daughter and her husband. I believe they will “trust, do, and enjoy” in this land away from their homeland. And even when I can’t hug them in person, I’ll be hugging them in my heart as they encounter many, many “firsts.”

Attitude check-up

2011-08-19T20:45:00.000-07:00

My son drives a car that’s pushing 200,000 miles on the odometer—and I feel a bit like that when I go to the doctor for my annual checkup, as I did a few days ago. The good news is that I’m still “good for the road,” despite the inevitable maladies of aging.

As I came home from being prodded and poked and peered into, I thought of another “checkup” I need from time to time. This one concerns attitudes of “sluggard-ness,” and it gets its exam questions straight out of the book of Proverbs. Among its probing questions:
Do I trust God or cling to unfounded fears? A sluggard fears what is unlikely to happen: “There is a lion outside....I will be murdered in the streets” (Prov. 22:13).
Do I embrace or resist life’s challenges? The sluggard would rather stay in bed than face life: “As a door turns on its hinges, so a sluggard turns on his bed” (Prov. 26:14). He wants an easy life on his own terms, as in this image of needing someone to feed him: “The sluggard buries his hand in the dish; he will not even bring it back to his mouth” (Prov. 19:24).
Am I a “doer” or a “quitter”? The sluggard, says Proverbs 6:10, would rather sleep life away, either literally or by doing nothing. In contrast are the ants (vv. 6-8), which shoulder on in gathering food. Proverbs 20:4 says the sluggard doesn’t plow when it’s time to plow. By procrastinating, he doesn’t reap a crop when others do.
Do I seek solutions or get stuck in problems? The sluggard sees only problems. His way is blocked with thorns (Proverbs 15:19), meaning he gives up too easily.
Am I a learner or a know-it-all? Proverbs 26:16 nails the difference: “The sluggard is wiser in his own eyes than seven men who answer discreetly.”
Do I take care of what God has given me? The includes material possessions as well as abilities and opportunities. Proverbs 24:30-31 says the sluggard’s home and fields are broken down and full of weeds because he doesn’t take care of them. Proverbs 12:27 says if the sluggard goes hunting, he doesn’t dress and roast his game. He lets it rot.

Proverbs 13:4 says “the sluggard craves and gets nothing.” What an utterly sad verse! Thankfully, there’s a second part, a positive opposite: “but the desires of the diligent are fully satisfied.” Even though I don’t have the energy of my “younger” self, I can still set daily goals that seek to bring honor to God. Unlike the “real” garden slug, who leaves a slimy trail, I can leave, with God’s help, something positive behind.

Heaven's wonder bread

2011-08-09T11:43:00.000-07:00

When my children were home, they both savored being able to eat the crusty heel off the freshly-baked loaf of bread. Hmm, good, with homemade raspberry jam. I remembered that the other day when I baked bread for dinner. I also thought of what Jesus, who called Himself the Bread of Life, did by the Sea of Galilee long ago when surrounded by thousands of famished people. Some had walked two hours from home to hear Him and to seek healing.

Actually, the New Testament records two separate occasions when He fed multitudes. But His feeding of 5,000 is the only miracle recorded in all four Gospels. For several reasons, it’s become my favorite miracle. These are the teachings it fed into my life:

*If God wants you to do something for Him, He will put it right in front of you. Jesus didn’t have to look far to see 5,000 men plus women and children needing Him. My circles of relationships include many with baffling and frustrating needs, some of which He wants me to tend on His behalf.

*If you feel inadequate, you’re probably qualified. The disciples wanted to send the crowd away because they didn’t feel they could handle it. Similarly, the expectations of schooling, job, relationships and ministry always look bigger than we think we can handle. When God allowed overwhelming challenges into my life, I didn’t feel that I was the best candidate for His work. I wanted to echo Moses and Jeremiah, “Who me? I’m just a nobody.” But God wanted me to learn that He would help me do what I considered impossible.

*If the task is impossible, it’s just the right size for God. Andrew was the math whiz of Jesus’ followers, and he just knew that five loaves and two fishes wouldn’t even give everybody a crumb. When I left the comfort zone of my first job for mission service, I wondered how I would ever survive on what the mission considered “just enough.” Yet I always had “just enough,” and never had to dip into my personal savings, which eventually paid for a year at Bible college. I even had “fragments” to share with others.

*If God has a task for you, He has a method to get it done. Jesus didn’t randomly throw crumbs and fish bits at the crowd. He had them sit in orderly picnic groups. As the baskets were passed, the miracle of multiplication took place. I saw that happen every time I wrote a book. Yes, I had done my research and had files of loosely organized notes. But the raw form of a book emerged only through prayer-saturated seat-in-chair, one page at a time.

*If God is in it, He will get the glory. The little boy who gave up his lunch didn’t get paraded around the hills as the hero of the day. All eyes were on Jesus. That’s the way it should be. Years ago I had the privilege of hearing Holocaust survivor Corrie ten Boom. The church was packed for the visit of this simple Dutch lady. I’ve been to “speaker training” and learned that speakers should “power dress” and begin with “power stories” to reach an audience. Corrie did none of that. She just came in her cotton dress and spoke about the Bible, God’s care, and the love of Jesus. And when the applause came, she pointed to the ceiling—that is, to Heaven, to give God the glory.

There’s another detail from this feeding miracle worth considering. It took place right after Jesus’ cousin John the Baptist was beheaded. Matthew 13:14 says that Jesus, upon hearing this horrific news, “withdrew by boat privately to a solitary place.” In His humanity, He sought aloneness to grieve. I think God is telling us that when we go through a traumatic time, it’s okay to pull back briefly to heal. But that’s not to be a permanent condition. In Jesus’ case, word of mouth quickly moved the crowd to His new location, and He resumed His role as Teacher, Healer and Savior—the Bread of Life.

The bread I bake from scratch needs to be eaten up within a few days or it will mold. Spiritual riches left unshared by excuses like “I can’t do it” also go stale. Feel you have too little? Remember, Jesus multiplied crumbs.

Arthritically-correct Hymns

2011-08-05T10:02:00.000-07:00

Some of the old, standby (pun intended) hymns just aren’t what they used to be for me. I blame a broken ankle that healed into a weather prediction station. Along with an aging back, both have become hangouts for a nemesis named Arthur-ritis. At my church, we start out upright and at full attention when worship begins with hymns and choruses. But by the time we’re into some chorus’s 18th refrain, sometimes I’m ready to refrain from standing and fold my posterior into a pew.

I do so with great guilt, no thanks to the tradition of hymns built off stalwart verses like “Stand firm” (2 Thess. 2:15). For those of us with lesser endurance who “sit firm,” I propose some arthritically-correct hymns:
1.“On Jordan’s Stormy Banks I Sit and Cast a Wishful Eye.” Outdoor worship? Just give me a lawn chair and warm blanket
2.“Sit Down, Sit Down for Jesus.” Even when I'm good to stand for a while, I might be next to a truly needy sit-downer who needs a friend at his or her level.
3.“I Sit Amazed in the Presence.” That sure fits the morning devotional time—good, quiet, seat-in-chair-with-Bible moments.
4.“On Christ the Solid Rock I Sit.” It worked for the house built on a rock. The one on sand should have had flood insurance.
5.“Sitting on the Promises.” That’s better than pacing around and wringing your hands in worry.
6.“Lord, Lift Me Up and Let Me Sit.” Though I may not see the words on the overhead through the six-foot-four, 280-pound guy in front, I can still feel spiritually lifted.
7.“Sit down and Bless the Lord.” We do this anyway before passing the chicken and veggies.

To be honest, the “arthritically correct” hymns just don’t sound right. But I’ll be happy to belt out the originals, as long as I have permission to eventually obey gravity’s pull on my aging body.

Winners and losers

2011-07-30T14:33:00.000-07:00

I don’t remember this shirt, I said to myself as I hung up the wash the other day. My husband likes to shop for his own clothes, especially at clearance racks or thrift stores, so sometimes surprises show up. You’d think I would have noticed him wearing it, although he does have a lot of gray logo shirts. But this one was philosophical: “Winners train, losers complain.”

Immediately I thought of Paul’s counsel to his spiritual son Timothy: “Train yourself to be godly. For physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come” (1 Timothy 4:7b-8). Some may have grown up with this translation choice: “exercise thyself rather into godliness.” The original text uses a Greek word, gumnazo, referring to the early Greek exercise or games in which participants wore their “birthday suits” (gumnos=naked). Try NOT to think of that next time you go by a modern gym!

Perhaps another way of saying this could be: “Get down to nothing between you and God. Strip away all pretense, all excuses, all fears, all whininess, all doubts, all barriers. Seek after the prize that God has for you and for you alone.” Hebrews 12:1 says similar things: “Let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.”

The respected Bible teacher William McDonald remarked that the weights represent sin in any form, but especially the sin of unbelief. Instead, we need complete trust in God’s promises and complete confidence that the life of faith will emerge victorious. The race isn’t an easy sprint, he said, and neither is the Christian life of faith. But God calls us to press on with perseverance through our trials and temptations to grow into all He intends us to be and have. (Believer’s Bible Commentary, Nelson, 1995, p. 2202).

In other words, winners train, losers complain.

Red-ripe jewels

2011-07-22T08:33:00.000-07:00

It’s raspberry-picking time at the small “patch” in our back yard, meaning every couple days I pick the ripest red jewels and store them in the refrigerator. It takes several days to get the six cups I need to make freezer jam. But oh, how yummy.

I’m a raspberry-picker from w-a-y back as it was my first paid “job” in grade school. One of my dad’s co-workers also had a large berry farm, and was open to having youth come pick. Though I was only about nine, I picked alongside my teenage sister, earning enough to buy my school supplies. Long, hot, dusty days? You know it. But I preferred raspberries over the thorny blackberries we picked at another place.

The other day as I sat on an upended bucket, plying through leaves in search of hidden berries, I thought of how Proverbs 4:2 speaks of seeking wisdom from God: “Search for it as for hidden treasure.”

Like berries, scriptures don’t “ripen” in personal meaning all at once. A passage that seemed “not me” at one point in my life may come alive at a different time. Or, a verse in one chapter may blink like a neon light when I go through a certain hard time. Later on, another part of that chapter will be a guiding light. The other morning, for example, I was reading Psalm 56. In previous times of thinking on this psalm, I’d highlighted verse 8, about God taking special note of our tears. This time, the word “trust” jumped out at me
When I am afraid, I will trust in you. (v. 3)
In God I trust; I will not be afraid. (vs. 4, 11)
David wrote this psalm about being caught between two life-threatening negatives: the murderous rampage of King Saul, and the bloodthirstiness of the Philistines, Israel’s enemy. I’m certainly not running around with my trusty sword and shield, hiding in caves. But I do face invisible enemies of circumstances and relationships beyond my ability to solve or even appease. They’re God-size problems.

That’s probably why “trust” jumped out of this psalm. That word was the treasure with the sweetness of God’s mercy infused in it, ready for “picking” at just this time of need in my life.

Praying for college students

2011-07-14T13:35:00.000-07:00

The store ads are full of things for college-bound students. It's been about a decade since I went through that--looking for extra-long twin sheets, making new patchwork bedspreads, and assembling a "first aid" kit in a plastic shoe box. And etc. etc. etc. Lots of etc.

The child-to-college transition hit me twice as hard because my son and daughter, 19 months apart, both left town the same year for a state college four hours' drive away. You can be sure I prayed for them! After a few months, I realized Paul's prayer in the first chapter of Colossians provided me with a Biblical outline for specific ways to uphold their needs. This prayer guide spreads the requests over two weeks.

TO BE FILLED WITH A KNOWLEDGE OF GOD’S WILL (v. 9)
1. To find a Bible-teaching church at which to worship and to connect with campus ministries so their faith will grow.
2. To acquire a biblical world view and to reject temptation.
3. To identify sinful prejudice but to refuse the pull to condone perversion.
4. To discern God’s will for vocation and courtship. For future mates, for purity in thought and body and a growing faith.

TO BE FRUITFUL (v. 10)
5. To walk worthy of Jesus and to be a testimony among non-Christians and weak believers, “walking the talk” without apology.
6. To witness to a God of order and beauty in how they groom and dress, plus in how they keep and decorate ther rooms or living quarters.
7. To honor God’s gift of time through prudent management instead of procrastination.
8. To demonstrate Christ’s love through acts of kindness, goodness, and generosity, rather than focusing only on themselves.

TO BE FORTIFIED (v. 11)
9. To know God’s power in their lives and to articulate biblical standards of truth when they encounter controversy in class work or relationships.
10. To endure when faced with course work demands, financial challenges, or health issues.
11. To show patience, particularly with difficult roommates, college registration lines, upsets and delays.

TO BE FREE OF WORLDLY NEGATIVES (vv. 12-14)
12. To cultivate a thankful spirit when their peers set a tone of grumbling.
13. To dwell on the spiritual blessings of their inheritance in Christ.
14. To reject the darkness and see their God-ordained role in bringing the light of Christ to their campus.

Both have now graduated, are working, married, and active in church. They have good reputations, and that gladdens my heart. To borrow from 3 John 4: "I have no greater joy than to hear that my children walk in truth."

A Tale of Three Women

2011-07-07T17:22:00.000-07:00

Last week, I shared about the "Strong Woman vs. Woman of Strength" poem that has spread widely on the internet. Here are my own thoughts, but comparing three women. I don't think any of us are entirely one "type" of woman, but writing these out helped me evaluate my own failings in the life-long quest of seeking to have a heart after God. I'd welcome your feedback.

The World's Wonder Woman finds value in being admired.
The Weak Woman values being pitied.
The Wise Woman takes her value from being loved by the Father (1 John 4:9).

The World's Wonder Woman acquires things for status.
The Weak Woman hoards things for security.
The Wise Woman receives things for the eventual blessing of sharing (Proverbs 11:25).

The World's Wonder Woman wants to control the future.
The Weak Woman fears the future.
The Wise Woman trusts God with the future, depending on Him to be a refuge, strength, and help in trouble (Prsalm 46:1).

The World's Wonder Woman manipulates people for her gain.
The Weak Woman wants people to meet her neediness.
The Wise Woman gives of herself to others (Proverbs 31:20).

The World's Wonder Woman resists adversity.
The Weak Woman whines about her adversity.
The Wise Woman looks to God in adversity, giving thanks in all circumstances as helping her grow spiritually (1 Thessalonians 5:18).

The World's Wonder Woman drops people who offend or oppose her.
The Weak Woman broods over people who offend or oppose her.
The Wise Woman loves people who offend or oppose her, seeking to show that love covers a multitude of sins (1 Peter 4:8).

The World's Wonder Woman hurtles toward her goals.
The Weak Woman gives up on her goals.
The Wise Woman seeks God's counsel for her goals, then presses on: "I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me" (Philippians 3:12).

The World's Wonder Woman considers time a commodity in her planner.
The Weak Woman fritters away time.
The Wise Woman invests her time in serving God and gaining a heart of wisdom (Psalms 90:12).
-- (c) 2011 Jeanne Zornes

Strong people or people of strength?

2011-07-03T16:33:00.000-07:00

It was not an easy memorial service to attend—not that any are. My friend Karen, diagnosed about two months earlier with pancreatic cancer, had died at age 58. But as remembrances filled the hour, a pastor told how he’d asked her if she had any regrets to settle before her death. Her answer: none. If any, it would be missing her son’s wedding by a month.

As I listened, I thought of my own father’s memorial and the unusual verse that his pastor had used for the meditation: “A good name is better than fine perfume, and the day of death better than the day of birth” (Ecclesiastes 7:1). At the time, my hurt was so deep I didn’t know if I’d ever heal. My father had died just six months after my mother. He was 63, she was 59. I was 31 and still single.

Now, I see the wisdom of that statement. Our death is a statement, for good or for bad, of how seriously we have taken the gift of life. Karen invested for eternity in children she taught in a Christian pre-school and in her now-young-adult children, both serving God.

One of her teaching colleagues read a free-verse poem about “strong women” versus “women of strength,” found among papers in Karen’s Bible. I had received the same writing from someone via E-mail some years ago. As I heard it again, I realized it set the bar high for any of us who want to be women (or men) of godly strength.

In searching for it on the internet, I realized it is a copyrighted poem, so I will not quote it here. However, this site names the author and copyright date: http://www.motivateus.com/stories/strongwoman.htm

I think the strongest stanza is the last. It reminds us that when life throws us to the ground (and surely this happens when a loved one dies) we’ll never be “strong enough,” for it’s in going through those experiences with the help and love of God that we develop holy strength.

The Ecclesiastes verse comparing a good name to a fine perfume has its fuller explanation in 2 Cor. 2:14: “But thanks be to God, who...through us spreads everywhere the fragrance of the knowledge of him.” It’s not just our good name, but how we honor the name of our holy and merciful God. And when a funeral brings us back to the basics—of trust in God for eternal life, which truly makes the day of death the best of all (for it’s the first day of eternal life)—then it is a good thing.

Next time, my own comparative list of characteristics of a woman of strength.

Beyond first steps

2011-06-23T10:59:00.000-07:00

Photo: Symbols of babyhood--a bonnet and chunky books.
A few weeks ago, the media reported that an 18-year-old from the Philippines was now the record-holder as the “World’s Smallest Man.” This person quit growing at age one year and is only twenty-two inches tall. He has difficulties speaking, easily falls, and must stay home under his mother’s protective care.His family hoped his notoriety of getting in the Guinness Book of Records would help them find medical care for him.

Hormonal anomalies are certainly to blame for this poor young man’s problems. But his situation got me thinking. What if our physical appearance matched our spiritual and emotional maturity?

Both physical and spiritual “growing up” depend on good food and healthy relationships. On the spiritual side, the “food,” of course, is God’s Word—not just head knowledge, but changed-heart results. The apostle Peter said that new believers need “pure spiritual milk” to grow up in their salvation (1 Peter 2:2). Peter also gave us a progressive list of spiritual growth, beginning with faith, then adding knowledge, self-control, perseverance, godliness, brotherly kindness and love (2 Peter 1:5-7). Those latter qualities are honed through social relationships.

I thank God that I had people in my life who cared deeply that I grow spiritually. They helped me develop social skills, challenged me to discover more about myself through volunteering, encouraged me to persevere in difficulties, and prayed for me and with me in life’s tough places.

“Not failure, but low aim, is a sin,” wrote Dr. Benjamin Mays, an American minister and social activist. The rest of his quote goes like this: “The tragedy of life doesn’t lie in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach. It isn’t a calamity to die with dreams unfulfilled, but it is a calamity not to dream. It is not a disgrace to not reach the stars, but it is a disgrace not to have stars to reach for.”

James said the person “who knows the good he ought to do and doesn’t do it, sins” (4:17). We may have failures along the way, but God says to get up, dust yourself off, and try again. You don’t need to stay stunted, afraid of falling.

God cares about this whole spiritual-growing-up process: “The Lord delights in the way of the man whose steps he has made firm; though he stumble, he will not fall, for the Lord upholds him with his hand” (Psalm 37:23-24).

Table talk

2011-06-18T07:26:00.000-07:00

At right, my mother's Bauer pottery turkey platter for her hungry brother. Read on....
The dining room of my childhood home in South Gate, Calif.,wasn’t large—just big enough for a standard table seating four (six, crammed). I began eating there in a high chair, then a booster seat my parents made by tacking plastic onto a five-inch high wooden box. But oh, the memories and ministry in that little room.

My May 27 blog (“I don’t live there any more”), which featured a photo of that old childhood home, brought a response from a cousin, Janet. Fifty four years ago, she wrote, she was a lonely 19-year-old bride living in Long Beach, Calif. Her soldier husband was on duty and couldn’t be home with her on Christmas Day.

“I was so happy when your Mother called to wish me a Merry Christmas,” Janet recalled. “Soon after, the doorbell rang, and there was your Dad, ready to take me to their home, shown in your blog. She had prepared a nice dinner and it was such a warm, wonderful atmosphere. They truly showed love in action. They were such special people and I will never forget their kindness toward me.”

Those who know the map of Southern California knows it’s a bit of a drive between South Gate and Long Beach and the freeways are no fun. I had never heard this story about my parents before, and was grateful for this vignette of their giving hearts. Both died in 1978, aged 59 and 63.

Janet wasn’t the only relative invited to dinner. One of my mother’s six brothers (she was the oldest of nine) came as a skinny, hungry kid who’d just joined the military. Knowing his appetite, Mom tongue-in-cheek offered him the big turkey platter as his plate, and he gladly used it!

I remember something else at that table: how my dad often opened his big black leather Bible, and read a psalm. From what I could glean of my ancestry, there wasn’t much spiritual emphasis in his family of origin. But Dad had made a commitment to Christ, and besides becoming a faithful church-goer, wanted to be a spiritual leader for his family.

I still have his little King James Bible that he passed on to me when I was a little girl for my “Sunday school Bible.” The front fly-leaf has this inscription, presumably by his pastor or Sunday school teacher. The person marked it December 25, 1935, in Missoula, Montana, when he would have been 19 years old: “This marked copy of God’s sure Word is given you as a prize for your faithful attendance at Church School. Another prize is promised you in His book for faithfulness to God: ‘Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life’ (Rev. 2:10).”

The Bible has numerous verses underlined in red pencil. This suggested to me that this person truly cared about his or her students and also loved God’s word. Three verses are underlined on two adjoining pages of 1 Peter: two about Christ’s death for our sins (2:24 and 8:18) and one about temptation (5:8).
Coincidentally, a verse that spoke to my parents’ ministry of hospitality is also on those two pages: “Use hospitality one to another without grudging” (4:9).

My parents’ willingness to put out an extra plate (or turkey platter!) spoke volumes about their giving hearts—and their faith. And I am grateful for that legacy.

A stormy revelation

2011-06-10T19:06:00.000-07:00

At right, an evening sky last summer after a violent rainstorm.

The predicted thunderstorm began as I got up at 4 a.m. the other morning—not my usual rising time, but I’d popped awake. Thanks to a hall nightlight, I didn’t trip over the “guard cat” who sleeps outside our bedroom door (he doesn’t want to miss anyone who might know how to open the refrigerator door and dish out cat food). After tending to his suddenly urgent nutritional needs, I settled in my rocker and opened my Bible to my bookmark in Psalms.

A sticky note indicated I would next read Psalm 29. How appropriate for that rainy morning, because Psalm 29 is the “Storm Song.” All through it are images of a horrific storm battering the land, all representing the might and power of God. The word “voice” is prominent and used seven times—seven rightly indicating “perfection” as the “voice of the Lord.”

As I savored the various images, I paused at verse 9. Another time that I studied this verse, I learned it’s a difficult passage to translate from Hebrew idioms. “Twists the oaks”(NIV) is “makes the deer give birth” in other translations. One explanation is that violent weather steps up animal birthing. “Strips the forests bare” is “discovereth the forests” in KJV. Now, that sent me to my Bible dictionaries. How can God, who created the forests, “discover” them? I learned the original Hebrew word is chasaph, which means “to make bare.” The word is used in Psalm 29:9 for violent weather and in Jeremiah 13:20 for exposing the private parts of someone’s body.

So, bottom line, rather than “dis”-cover, it means "un"-cover, as a violent wind might do in ripping branches off trees. The more modern “strips bare” is the better translation.

This little detour to search out chasaph also reminded me how language has changed in the past four hundred years. And it doesn’t even take four centuries for a language to bend and twist. I have friends who are missionary linguists in a tribal language of South America. They began their work in the 1970s, and forty years later are having to revise some of their work because the language has changed.

As Mark Twain once quipped, the difference between an almost-right word and the right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. Yes, big difference.

By the time 5 a.m. came, I had about five Bible study reference aids the size of the metropolitan phone book fanned around me—and the cat was scratching at the door. He had to get out and check his territory (I guess that’s what he does as I’m sure he doesn’t wind up at MacDonald’s for coffee and apple pie). And I ended my study grateful for the affirming last verse: “The Lord gives strength to his people.” Four o’clock in the morning is not my best time, but it turned out to be a good time as I dug a little deeper into a lesser-known psalm.

Hay Field Hope

2011-06-04T15:45:00.000-07:00

At right: the only full photo I have of the home I lived in from fourth grade through adulthood, on a rare snowy day.
Imagine reading an honest “home for sale” ad: “Abused rental house. Oversized lot with knee-high grass. Interior damage from renter who used family bathroom to bathe goats for showing.” That describes the home my father bought in early 1957, after moving our family from southern California to western Washington. Though it had good “bones” as a brick home, it had suffered neglect. That helped bring the price down to something he could afford, if we lived frugally.

I still remember him attacking the hay-field of a front yard. This was before “weed-wackers” with their spinning cutting lines. All he had was his reel-style gas lawn mower. He’d chew into it a few inches, then retreat. Chew, retreat. My sister and I raked the mess into piles.

Looking back, I wonder how he did it. My mother, an asthmatic, couldn’t help much with the weeds. But Dad wasn’t afraid to take on a challenge when he had a vision of the end result. Eventually, my parents lived there more than twenty years. After their deaths, when I moved home to empty it out and settle the “estate,” the lawn-mowing fell to me. As I pushed that old machine around, I had renewed respect for my dad’s hard work.

I think there’s a lesson here for any of us in facing big challenges. I’m reminded of King David’s advice to his king-in-training son Solomon, charged with building a magnificent temple in Jerusalem. “Be strong and courageous,” David counseled, “and do the work” (1 Chronicles 18:20). David didn’t say, “Wish upon a star” or “Let blessings just drop in your waiting lap.” He said to link faith and deliberate action.

As I think over my life, I realize no goal came easy. Some quarters at college took all the grit I could muster. Then I had jobs that stretched my skills, endurance, and longsuffering. Marriage? More stretching. Pregnancy and childbirth? Well, don’t believe the tabloids that proclaim, “Woman gives birth to 24-pound baby while taking her afternoon nap.” And raising children? Think of paddling a canoe with somebody jumping on board.

God didn’t create us to sit around looking at the grass to be mowed. He also promises help for those intimidating tasks. David continued: “Do not be afraid or discouraged, for the Lord God, my God, is with you. He will not fail you or forsake you until all the work for the service of the temple of the Lord is finished.” And 1 Corinthians 3:16 says the temple is now us: “Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit lives in you?”

Got a long-neglected goal to achieve? A calling from God? What’s your excuse? Remember my dad, diligently hacking away at a suburban hay field because he knew this could be a home to be proud of. And it was.

Pepperoni fun

2011-06-02T09:19:00.000-07:00

This week marks the release of a children’s story book titled Family Matters, which includes a fiction I wrote several years ago. I’m glad that my story, “The Big Pepperoni Problem,” will continue to reach kids with the message that being responsible is part of a Christian’s character. The story is about a boy who lost his soccer team pizza sale money in his messy room.

This story was originally published seven years ago in the now-defunct children’s magazine, My Friend. The partner book publishing wing, Pauline Books & Media, asked if they could include it along with other authors' stories in this collection.

Over the years I’ve had more than fifty children’s fiction stories published in twenty-plus Christian kid magazines across the denominational spectrum. One of them became a book about blended families, The Patchwork Family, now out of print but available through used book sellers. That book began as a submission to a contest sponsored by Pockets, a fine children’s magazine published by Upper Room ministries.

Stories for kids represent only about 5% of my writing, but some of my favorite pieces came as a result of letting my inner child come out. These include “Pinkytoes” (about helping), “Backwards Day” (respect), “The Great Garbage Bag Experiment” (friendship), and “Fried Octopus Brains” (comfort zones).

“The Big Pepperoni Problem” grew from the angst my children (along with their mother!) experienced when they faced school fund-raising projects (which included selling overpriced frozen pizzas and cookie dough). I could commiserate, remembering how I struggled to sell “season tickets” to my high school band and orchestra concerts. Nobody wanted to buy those!

The “Pepperoni” story does have an internet presence. Just search my name and the story title. If you do, hope you enjoy it.

I don't live there anymore

2011-05-27T12:42:00.001-07:00

My husband pulled to the curb, turned off the motor, and let me just look for a minute. The house where I grew up in a western Washington town was still standing and well-maintained. I noticed an older woman at the kitchen window. I can almost imagine her worried whisper, “Honey, we’ve got strangers parked across the street staring at us. Think we ought to call the police?”

No, I was just wondering if the kitchen still had that very dated gray and blue checkered tile. If the beast of an oil furnace was still there, with a short clothesline across its sunken room for quick-dry laundry. If the hydrangea outside my bedroom window still bloomed. If the fixtures in the main bathroom were still that ghastly green. I wondered how she’d managed to arrange furniture around an awkwardly-placed corner fireplace.

But I didn’t live there any more. My last time in the house was 1979, the year after my parents died, when I emptied it and repainted the blue/pink/mint walls a neutral ivory in preparation for selling it.

My trip back to Memory Lane (actually, 13th Street) came as a result of attending a family funeral “back home”—that of my sister’s 101-year-old mother-in-law. Besides the home where I grew up, I also found the tiny rental where my family lived a few months after moving from southern California. I recalled how our front-loading washing machine galloped all over its laundry room during the spin cycle. Eventually, Mom planned her washing around times my dad was home to sit on it. As my husband drove between that house and the school I attended in third grade, he asked, “Your parents let you walk home alone this far?” How safety concerns have changed!

It was good to see the “old places” again. But one thing the trip “back home” reminded me of was how careful I need to be to not dwell on the past. I’ve experienced “stuckness” at times in my Christian walk, and I know it’s because I fail to turn problems and disappointments over to God, then seek a fresh start in His strength.

Something I read in a book by counselor Jan Silvious, Please Don’t Say You Need Me (Zondervan, 1989), applies so well to anybody’s spiritual walk. Silvious says her counselees often want to go over and over why they felt they were wronged, and get stuck there. Instead, she says, they need to “move on to forgiveness, healing, and the creation of a lifestyle” in which damaging perceptions and behaviors are left behind. The apostle Paul put it more succinctly in a verse I’ve claimed in moving away from hurts of the past: “Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:14). Jesus died to cover the past and to call me into a fresh and growing relationship with Him.

In other words, I don’t live in my “past life” any more. God doesn’t want me to stay stuck in old habits of blame and fear. He has new plans and joys for me if I’m willing to stretch out of comfort zones to discover them.

By the way, about twenty years ago on a family trip to Disneyland, we took a side trip to the suburb where I lived from infancy until third grade. The little two-bedroom was tidy, its front porch still painted brick red. But graffiti filled the neighborhood and my husband was nervous as I dashed out of the car for a quick photo in front of the house (that's photo at the top of this column). I’m thankful I don’t live there any more!

That date with destiny

2011-05-24T12:24:00.000-07:00

Widespread mocking of Christians was the saddest result of the recent failed “end-of-world” prediction by an 89-year-old engineer-turned-preacher. The whole media-fueled ridicule reminded me of fears of crippling computer glitches when the century turned over to a new millennium a decade ago.

When I first heard of this person’s claim, I reviewed the Bible’s message about end times. Jesus’ disciples, too, wanted to know a date: “When will this happen, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?” (Matt. 24:3). He answered in general terms: the coming of imposters, persecution, famines, earthquakes, betrayals, desecrations, deceptive messages of “He’s here,” and signs in the skies. He added that nobody, not even the angels, knows what date God has put on the universal calendar (v. 36). Those who “predict” are going against this very truth.

Instead of quitting our jobs, selling all, and waiting for the bullet train to eternity, we need to consider the counsel given another generation anxious for the world to end. It’s tucked into the letters Paul wrote believers in Thessalonica, who experienced so much persecution that they longed all the more for Heaven. Some were neglecting the daily tasks of going to work or maintaining a home, causing people to scorn Christians.

As that problem persisted, Paul wrote again against idleness. He reminded them that even as he preached among them, he worked day and night to pay for his own expenses (2 Thess. 3:9), probably following his trade as a tentmaker. He was also displeased that those who weren’t “busy” earning a living were becoming “busybodies” (v. 13).

There’s value in being reminded that Heaven has a clock that’s ticking down. Someday, the Lord will come again. For some, it will be like a dreaded pop quiz they didn’t prepare for--except infinitely agonizing. For others, it will a joyful time of fulfilled hope.

One of my dear friends prayed for years for her husband to become a Christian. Instead of badgering him, she treated him with respect and love. One day he agreed to come to church with her and there heard the message about Christ’s coming again. Matt. 24:40 especially pierced his heart: “Two men will be in the field; one will be taken and the other left.” He didn’t want to be the one left, and accepted Christ into his life. Some godly friends in their nineties lived in an assisted living center. On their door was a sign revealing their hope of Jesus’ return: “Perhaps today.”

Both have now died, but the message is the same: Perhaps today. Perhaps not. But keep on doing what God commands: “Warn those who are idle, encourage the timid, help the weak, be patient with everyone. Make sure that nobody pays back wrong for wrong, but always try to be kind to each other and to everyone else. Be joyful always; pray continually; give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus” (1 Thess. 5:14-18).

Survival of the Floaters

2011-05-17T09:24:00.000-07:00

How God builds your faith often comes down to ordinary experiences. Like a college swimming class.

The college I attended required, of all things, passing a swimming proficiency class for graduation. Most people just quickly splash up and down the pool and pass. But I’d never learned to swim, thanks to health issues as a child. I had an irrational fear of any water deeper than my waist.

Thankfully, the test began at the shallow end. When the instructor ordered us to swim, I attempted my best effort at swimming—one that might be described as tortured Dutch windmill.

“Sign up for Swimming 101,” the instructor told me. She means sign up for Faith-Stretch 101, I told myself.

I had only ten weeks to conquer my fears. By the ninth class week, the agony deepened.

“Today you learn to dive off the board,” the swim teacher announced. The board? Does she mean the plank at the deep end off which I will fall to my doom? I will spare you the details of my first straight-in dive to the utter bottom of the pool.

Still alive by the tenth week, I showed up for the final swimming exam. My classmates curled off the diving board like penguins slipping over an ice float for a frolic around the ocean. As they stroked the required three pool lengths, I took my fateful walk to the end of the plank, er, diving board. My life passed in front of me as I tried to remember the “how to dive” lesson. I sucked in a breath and jumped.

Surfacing for the compulsory crawl (aptly named, for me), I managed two more lengths with other “exhibit” swimming strokes. As I finished, the teacher nodded and mumbled something about how I might enjoy Swimming 102. I chose not to hear her. I was too busy thanking God for helping me get through Mission Impossible.

That quarter, I learned something more than treading water, diving, and the crawl. I also experienced how God could grow me by helping me accomplish something I thought was way beyond me. He specializes in “strength” and “protection” (2 Thess. 3:3). Even in this personal battle (small to others, big to me), God was ready to help me.

He’s continued to see me through lots harder things that I never signed up for, but that are a part of life. As a college freshman, I never imagined I’d be orphaned at 31, face joblessness, stay single until 34, or almost get killed by a drunk driver. At times, I’m sure my ability to trust God looked like that tortured Dutch-windmill stroke. But through prayer, trust in the Bible’s promises, and daily dependence on God, I got through it all.

I think that’s why Paul urged the folks at Thessalonica, “Never tire of doing what is right” (3:13). Even if we think we can’t do it, with God we can. And having God’s love and approval is a zillion times more exciting than the instructor’s nod that I passed Swimming 101!

Do me a savor

2011-05-14T20:04:00.000-07:00

The gift wafted my way the other morning as I painted the deck at my late mother-in-law’s home that we’re fixing up. As I crawled across the weathered wood, paint pad in hand, I paused and smiled as the scent from her lilac bush came my way. Talk about a fragrance factory! This year it’s probably ten feet tall and just as wide, and heavy with blooms.

I couldn’t help but think of how the Bible describes true followers of Christ as a “fragrance” (“savor” in KJV) –the scent of life among those who believe, the stink of death among those who don’t (2 Cor. 2:15-16).

Paul’s use of a powerful olfactory comparison is even more amazing considering how much attention his culture usually paid to “fragrance.” Though the wealthy had baths and some scents (like myrrh) were expensive enough to be part of a dowry, they didn’t have our culture’s obsession with “clean” and “smelling nice.” If you haven’t thought about it, just stroll down the aisles of cleaners, soaps, shampoos, air fresheners, and candles. Then go to the hardware store and check out the shower heads and bath fixtures. Finally, go to a makeup counter and start counting the perfume brands!

I admit to lighting a fragrant candle at dinner, especially when I’ve cooked fish and broccoli (and you know how those smells linger in a house). But I’ve cut back to almost no perfume use—first out of deference to those who attend my church who have profound chemical sensitivities, and second, realizing I’m bothered at times myself. I was reminded of that the other Sunday when someone squeezed in beside me in the pew and her strong perfume was almost more than I could handle.

As I stroked paint on the deck timber, I thought about the “scent” to which Paul referred—that intangible quality of living for Christ. Even among believers there’s a broad variety of “scents” that mingle when we get together. A quiet, peaceful essence emanates from an older, godly woman who’s passionate about prayer and encouragement. A sense of true caring surrounds another person who quietly goes about doing good. Someone who is humble yet wise spreads another Christ-fragrance—not overwhelming, but definitely there.

I thought of negative scents, too. Some are like the notorious Titan Arum, a huge, fast-growing plant native to Indonesia that blooms for about three days every six or seven years. It emits a stench reportedly like rotting meat or garbage. Its spiritual counterparts are described throughout the Bible, but 2 Timothy 3 has a significant list of spiritual stench that starts out: “lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful….” Of such people, it’s easy to say, “Their attitude stinks.”

Instead, I’d rather focus on Jesus and His love, grace, truth, and hope. He is the lily of the valley, the rose of Sharon, the fragrance I want in my life.

What is your favorite floral fragrance? Some of the most scent-sational of the plant kingdom are roses, orchids, gardenias, night-blooming jasmine, and honeysuckle. Any more nominations?

Lessons from a floral flunkout

2011-05-04T20:54:00.000-07:00

I had high hopes for an amaryllis bulb my husband bought before Christmas. I planted the bulb according to instructions, and gave it the water and sunlight recommended. Grudgingly, it sent out its leaves, but never a stem or a bloom. Sadly, I nurtured a floral flunkout. It didn’t even produce one brilliant trumpet flower to cheer our dining table on those gray winter days. So recently I withheld water and let it go dormant, curling up its wilted, yellowed leaves for storage.

I thought of how this plant is like people who plod through life with an attitude of ingratitude. They have so much potential, but they choose to dwell on the negative and never bloom for God.

In saying that, I am aware that when I point my index finger at someone’s neediness, three of my fingers are pointing back at me. I need to regularly examine my heart for ingratitude and confess it to God, asking Him to help me change that behavior: “Who can discern his errors? Forgive my hidden faults. Keep your servant also from willful sins; may they not rule over me” (Psalm 19:12).

In her book Choosing Gratitude (Moody, 2009), Nancy Leigh DeMoss spoke to this issue. She said we are prone to expect a lot from others and life and, no matter how much we get, it’s never enough. She adds: “Needing God but not always wanting God, we expect others to take the place of God in our lives, depending on them to guide our decisions, to love us unconditionally, to provide for us emotionally, physically, socially, totally.” Inevitably, she adds, people will disappoint us. Instead of turning to God, grateful for His faithfulness in meeting our needs, we let “those unfulfilled expectations…turn to resentment that poisons our hearts and relationships” (p. 53).

In other words, we become like a stubborn, bloomless amaryllis. We don’t do what God created us to do: honoring Him in the work place or in raising a family, serving Him in the strength of spiritual gifts, and being His channels of love to the hurting.

I’ll tuck my dead bulb in a shed for another year, and give it another chance next year. That’s what God does for us. He gives us second chances when we’ve gotten muddled in failures and ingratitude. For years I’ve cherished this passage about God’s desire for us to claim fresh starts: “Forget the former things, do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland” (Isaiah 43:18-19).

The Power of One

2011-04-29T11:52:00.000-07:00

One lone tulip popped from a planter I loaded with bulbs last fall. I don’t know whether to rejoice over the one survivor or decide my green thumb carries the black plague. I’m not enough of a gardener to know what went wrong, but I do know one is better than none.

That got me thinking about “the power of one.” I did an internet search and found quite a few sites devoted to that slogan. Then I opened my Bible concordance (the one thick enough for a baby booster seat at the dinner table--wrapped in a towel, of course!). There I ran across about 1,000 references to the number “one.”

I could think of even more where “one” was implied, like the book of Esther. It reveals the power of God through one young woman, chosen to be the number one queen, who did one difficult thing to save one displaced nation condemned through the actions of one evil man.

Some others that came to mind:
“The one thing needed” (Luke 10:42) was Mary’s choice in sitting at the feet of Jesus.
One thing was lacking in the life priorities of the rich young man, who couldn’t bring himself to give away all he had to the poor (Luke 18:22).
One child offered up his lunch to feed 5,000 (told in all four Gospels).
One leper returned to thank Jesus for his healing—and he was a Samaritan who, presumably, lacked the finesse of gratitude (Luke 17:11-19). (Ouch! How many of us fail to thank Jesus for all He has done?)
Committing one sin is as bad as breaking the whole law (James 2:10). But by the sacrificial death of One, we are redeemed (Romans 5:19).
“There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to one hope when you were called—one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.” (Ephesians 4:4-6)
There is one God and one mediator, Christ jesus (1 Timothy 2:5).
One day is as a thousand years to God. The impatient early Christians (and we, too) needed this reminder (2 Peter 3:8). One day Christ is coming again!

My lone tulip bloom, besides reminding me of biblical powers of “one,” also stirred up disturbing thoughts. What of the other tulips that just sent out foliage? They’re not doing what God intended them to do, and that’s bloom. How often am I failing to bloom for God? With what useless activities to I fill my hours? There’s a lot of truth in old poem that adorned many wall plaques (including one belonging to my late mother-in-law): “Only one life, ‘twill soon be soon be past. Only what’s done for Christ will last.”

Easter Sunday Psalm-Drive

2011-04-22T11:26:00.000-07:00

Photo: daffodils blooming in my neighbor's yard. I grew up in Puyallup, Wash., famed for its "Daffodil Festival." Besides a daffodil's bright yellow beauty, I love its "trumpet" shape, so appropriate for proclaiming this promise of our own resurrection: "The trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed" (1 Cor. 15:52).

In my childhood, when gas wasn’t so expensive, my father enjoyed taking the family on a Sunday afternoon drive. Even on familiar roads, we’d discover a new sight. Occasionally, my husband does the same thing. Our favorite spring route winds through orchards and foothills with astonishing patches of wildflowers.

My repeat journeys through the book of Psalms are something like those drives. I have no idea how many times I’ve read that book. I do know the edges of its pages are well-thumbed, with notes and underlining on every page. Yet I still discover new things.

Often when I come back to a psalm, I remember when it previously connected to a life challenge or event. I personalized Psalm 18 in a time of great anxiety and need. I was 32 at the time and still single. My parents had recently died just six months apart. I’d interrupted my master’s degree studies to return home and settle their affairs and empty their home. While it sat unsold, I returned to graduate school and finished that degree. I was near the end of my personal savings and could not find a job in my field. Going “home” was no longer an option. My parents’ still-empty home was 2,000 miles away. I needed to vacate my college housing by the end of July.

My desperate prayers reminded God of scriptural promises to take care of widows (and single women, like me, I hoped), orphans (my parents were gone) and aliens (I was just a temporary resident of this college town). One morning in my personal devotions I read through Psalm 18. Many verses became prayers: “I call to the Lord, who is worthy of praise” (v. 3). “He rescued me because he delighted in me” (v.19). “To the faithful you show yourself faithful” (v. 25).

As I walked to the block-away college track to jog, squirrels cavorted in the old trees along the sidewalk. I thought of verse 33: “He makes my feet like the feet of a deer” (the poetic “hind’s feet” in old translations), referring to the strength and agility of deer in mountainous terrain. This time, however, I adjusted it to the prayer that God would make my feet like the agile feet of squirrels flinging among the branches. I needed His strength and miracle to get through these difficult circumstances.

God did answer my prayers, just in time, that last week of college housing. A failed interview at one large institution opened the door to an interview at a sister company, and a job offer there. Plus, the boss arranged for me to have temporary housing with one of his employees. Because I had no car, she drove out and got me and my few belongings, and took me home with her. For several months, until I could afford to live on my own, I slept on a mattress on the floor. Yet even this was of God, and how He “brought me out into a spacious place” (Psalm 18:19).

Other portions of that psalm reminded me of the awesome power and character of God. But I recently realized how much deeper I could go in understanding it. Bible teacher William MacDonald (1917-2007), in his Believer’s Bible Commentary, said this is really a psalm about Easter and the power that raised Jesus from the dead. Psalm 18:49 is quoted in Romans 15:9 as referring to Christ. MacDonald comments: “Nowhere else in the Bible are we given such a vivid account of the tremendous battle that took place in the unseen world at the time of our Savior’s resurrection.”

May I suggest reading and meditating on Psalm 18 this Easter? Some sections to consider, as broken down by MacDonald:
1-3: Praise to God.
4-6: Christ’s dying.
7-15: Celestial war against evil.
16-19: Victory in the resurrection.
20-30: The raising of the sinless One.
31-42: Christ’s second coming.
43-45: Christ’s reign.
46-50: Closing praise.
For your own closing praise, consider speaking back to God the doxology of Romans 11:33-36 which begins: “Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God!"

It's Friday, but...

2011-04-20T11:14:00.000-07:00

The hardest part about Easter is the Friday before. My church’s Good Friday service ends in darkness with a recording of thunder and storm, and then the wham of a bass drum. And quiet.

The tomb.

That’s the mood I brought this morning to scripture reading. My journey back through Psalms landed me at Psalm 17, a sweet song of seeking to live for God in the midst of arrogance and evil.

“Friday” is the violent (v. 4), the wicked and mortal enemies (v. 9), calloused hearts and arrogant mouths (v.10), predators (vs. 11-12), people whose reward is “this life” (v. 14). It’s life without hope of something better or something pure or something with God.

It’s life without Sunday coming. Without Easter.

A relative died last week at 47. So did a godly friend, at 63, barely home from a trip to Israel to walk where Jesus walked. Such news came like the wham of a bass drum. But to borrow the title of a sermon by Tony Campolo, “It’s Friday, but Sunday’s coming.” Easter Sunday has come. Death is not the final “wham.” Thus the hope expressed at the end of Psalm 17:
As for me, I will behold thy face in righteousness: I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with thy likeness.
Or, as translated with greater accuracy and fuller meaning in the Amplified Bible:
As for me, I will continue beholding Your face in righteousness (rightness, justice, and right standing with You); I shall be fully satisfied, when I awake [to find myself] beholding Your form [and having sweet communion with You].

One of my favorite Christian songs asks us to imagine waking up in glory, and finding it Home. That’s Easter. Not eggs, bunnies, or new clothes, but glory and hope forever after hopeless Friday.

Early-morning groans

2011-04-15T19:07:00.000-07:00

Morning is the great human dividing line. We’re either roosters or slugs (or somewhere between). Aging has shifted me toward the “slug” side, although some mornings I wake up before the roosters and decide to keep going anyway.

That’s what happened the other morning. I eased into my favorite chair, turned on the heating pad for my back (doc says I have arthritis there, oh joy), and opened my Bible to read Psalms 5. Long ago I’d memorized Psalms 5:3 in the King James Version: “My voice shalt thou hear in the morning, O Lord; in the morning will I direct my prayer unto thee, and will look up.”

Well, we got the “in the morning” right, like 5 a.m.! As I re-read this psalm, my memory replayed the Maranatha scripture praise song of the 1970s based on it that began, “Give ear to my words, O Lord, consider thou my meditation.”

Meditation? Just what did the psalmist mean by that? Today we hear “meditation” a lot in connection with Eastern religions, even though the Biblical sense of it is ruminating on scripture, like a cow with its cud. I stopped to explore the word.

Other Bible versions render that word: “groaning” (NAS); “sighing” (Holman); “lament” (Today’s NIV, 2005); “sighing and groaning” (Amplified); “ramblings, groans and sighs” (The Message).

Vine’s Concise Dictionary of the Bible said the word in Hebrew, hagah, means “to meditate, moan, growl, utter, speak.” The author added: “This word means to think about something in earnest, often with the focus on thinking about future plans and contingencies, possibly speaking to God or oneself in low tones.” He added that hagah is an onomatopoetic (“sounds like”) term, reflecting how people of ancient times sighed or made low sounds while musing. By the way, hagah also expresses a lion’s growl (Isaiah 31:4) and a dove’s “coo” (Isaiah 38:14).

I’m not one of the “ancients,” but I can understand hagah. After reading my Bible, I open up my prayer notebook. I often groan over the names on its pages. Some are battling cancer or other serious diseases. I pray for women seared by a spouse’s rejection. Others have baffling and troubling needs, like being “stuck” in life. Still others refuse to see their need for Christ. Sometimes I can only say a name then wait in silence as I ponder the mind of God on this person’s behalf. At such times I cherish the promise of Romans 8:26, that when we’re unsure how to pray, “the spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express.” He gets the prayers, even our groanings, through.

By 6 a.m. the sun had risen, a fitting metaphor for the light that a brief word study had cast for me upon this particular verse. I’ve now written “Heb: hagah=groaning, sighing” in the margin of my Bible to remind me that the word translated there means more than the King James Version rendering of “meditation.” “Groaning, sighing” also fits the message of the psalm, which wrestles with the pain of living among arrogant and evil people.

What comfort to know that God doesn’t expect me to pray eloquently-worded prayers. Sometimes I just groan, and He understands.

F is for Frugal Family

2011-04-06T13:48:00.000-07:00

A is for apple, B is for blog…no doubt you’ve read your share of children’s alphabet books. When I browse the children’s book section at thrift stores, I’m amazed by the variety of subjects that lend themselves to teaching alphabet names and sounds. Sometimes even adults need to come down to basics. Here’s my take for those with tight finances: “F is for Frugal Family.” A is for advertisements, asking yourself “how much is enough?” and deciding you have enough already. B is for bookcase. Each of our children had one, filled with books they picked out at yard sales, thrift stores, or the school’s carnival “used book sale.” When they tired of the books, back those books went for the next year’s book sale. C is for coupons. Clip ‘em, file ‘em, and match them to a sale price for products you actually use when you can do better than with a store-brand or generic product. D is for delayed gratification, avoiding the credit trap. The couch that my beloved brought into our marriage was, well, abstract art. I never was fond of its splotches of turquoise, brown and orange. But I waited several years (knowing its colors would camouflage any baby oops) as we saved up for a couch that wasn’t as flashy. E is for extra life, what my husband gives bikes he finds at yard sales and that need the magic touch of soap-and-water, steel wool, oil, or a patch for the tire. Once redeemed, they’re ready for another little biker. F is for “frugal family,” of course! It’s also for furniture bargains. After used-crib days, our daughter grew into a bedroom set that originated as hand-me-downs or thrift store finds. But white paint and stencils gave her something very feminine. G is for “gift cache,” the dresser full of bought-ahead or sewn-ahead generic gifts such as aprons, homemaking books, burp cloths and newborn baby clothes. H is for haircuts in the kitchen. Hubby’s “buzz” takes five minutes. (I stretch out my cuts, but “invest” in good professional haircuts on my shorter hair.) I is for instruction books, gathered either into a hanging file or punched and put in a three-ring notebook (the sales slip stapled on it in case something goes kaput before the warranty’s out). J is for junque-ing, a cheap Saturday morning date idea. (Junque is junk with a price on it.) K is for keeping my sewing notions in a huge plastic guy-style tool tote with all its handy flip-top sections. L is for library. Why buy when you can borrow? M is for make-do. My parents and grandparents, shaped by the Depression, did. When you’re grateful for what you have, you’re less apt to think you’re entitled to more. N is for napkins, easily sewn from fabric scraps. O is for office supply cache. It has paper bought on sale, spiral notebooks from thrift stores (a few pages are missing, but who cares), recycled file folders…whatever we’ll somehow use and find cheaply through a store sale, thrift store, or yard sale. P is for the patches I ironed on inside the knees of my son’s jeans when he was younger. It’s also for patchwork quilts I make from scraps given me. Q is for quilt. Yes, I just named “patchwork,” but I did create some useable “art” by sewing a "Log Cabin" pattern quilt for our bed. Having sewing for a hobby helps me create things people can use. I just never got into hobbies that result in things you have to dust and move around. R is for rebates and “free offers,” up there with coupons for saving money. We even got a family portrait for sending in the appropriate number of soup can labels. (And it wasn’t cream of say-cheese soup, ha-ha). S is for sun-dried sheets, up there at the top for “simple pleasures” in our household. Sun-dried towels? Well, it saves electricity, but a quick tumble in the dryer might keep them from feeling like sandpaper. It’s also for stretch cords, hung on a curtain rod in the garage. T is for toys that created excitement even though many were used or make-do. Barbie and her family slept on upside-down shoe boxes, covered with a scrap of fleece. The “bathroom” included a sink made of a cocoa box and a tartar-sauce cup from the fish restaurant. Oh yes, the “house” was a yard sale book case, giving her a four-story home. Barbie’s “closet” was jammed with one-of-a-kind garments from sewing scraps. (Don’t ask me about the nightmare of sewing dresses for a doll with a three-inch waist.) U is for “under the sink,” which I’ve claimed for storage in my tiny kitchen. Baking sheets and clunky appliances live there. The covered trash bin is nearby, cleaners on a utility room shelf. V is for vinegar, which is lots cheaper than commercial cleaners and does its share of cleaning tasks. Clogged drain? Soda and vinegar, chased five minutes later by a kettle of boiling water. Vinegar and salt clean copper. W is for wrapping paper, found at yard sales or ironed for re-use from gifts we received, snug in a long box under a bed. It’s also for white toothpaste, which fills nail holes in white walls in a hurry. X marks the hot spot where important act-on-it stuff (like things to deliver, letters to mail, a to-do list) is consistently put. Y is for yard stick. One slipped into an old sock is a handy duster in tight places, like under the refrigerator or tape player. Z is for stuck zipper. Sometimes it just needs some candle wax or soap run over the teeth. Found something helpful here? Please forward the blog link to a friend!

P.S. A special "hi" to Amber who attended the Colorado retreat where my friend Cindy spoke. I'm so glad you connected!

Feed me!

2011-04-02T15:29:00.000-07:00

When our son and daughter went away to college the same year, leaving their parents empty-nesters (at least during the school term), I tried to recruit our family cat for a joke picture. I propped him on our daughter’s dining room chair with his paws on the table and a dish in front to demonstrate that we still had one “child” (a furry one) at home. But before I could get a decent photo, the cat had jumped to the floor, where he knew he belonged.

With both now married, we’re truly empty nesters, and the cat’s still around. No, we don’t set a plate for him at the table. But his internal alarm (or at least his sniffer) knows when we are about to eat, even if he’s off in the corner sleeping. One time as he sauntered between our chairs, his meow coincided with our “amen,” reminding us to “drop it down.” Yes, we have stooped to offering our cat scraps of “people food” —and he expects it!

That’s probably why I had more than the usual level of interest in a passage from which our pastor recently preached. He tackled the story in Mark 7:24-30 about the Syrophoenician woman barging into a house near Tyre, where Jesus had gone to rest. She broke social barriers of both good manners and racial discrimination to beg Jesus to heal her daughter.

Teaching on this passage often explores the use of the word “dog,” used as a negative label for non-Jews. In contrast to our culture (which dotes on animals), dogs of Bible times were dirty, diseased scavengers—something like four-legged waste management. Everybody else would have sneered at her as another non-Jewish “dog.” Jesus used a word with more compassion, kunariois, indicating little dogs, like a family pet (rare in those days, but possible). She replied similarly, but with humility as a non-Jew seeking such a great favor, saying the little puppy-dogs (kunaria) got the scraps under the table.

The spellings differ because of the Greek “dative” and “nominative” cases, but don’t worry about that. My point is that going a layer deeper in Bible study opens up fresh understanding of a passage, even the ones we’ve read repeatedly since childhood without knowing a truly accurate rendering. Bible translation, because it deals with diverse language families and evolving vocabularies, is a complicated art and science. The “close” word isn’t always the precise word. My friends who are translating the Bible into tribal languages can vouch for that!

So what of our cat’s begging at the dinner? Maybe it’s a reminder of how much more Jesus loves us. He doesn’t throw scraps at us. Instead, He offers Himself, the very best. Though unworthy of His extravagant love, we’re exceedingly blessed.

A Quiet Place

2011-03-24T12:10:00.000-07:00

At right: our cat and my rocker. He knows he's forbidden to sit in it, and right after I took this photo he jumped off.

Somewhere between disinfect-the-bathroom and fold-the-third-basket-of-laundry I got a strong SIT WITH ME message. Tired of staring at the rain on the back porch, the cat had come in, snacked in his feeding corner, and now sat plum in the middle of the living room. That’s a dangerous traffic area when I’m rampaging around doing house chores. I reached down to move him to his sleeping corner when the vibrating started.

“Okay, I get the hint,” I told him (which probably sounded like whump ork hooop whump, as in the adult voices for Charlie Brown movies). I sat down in my favorite rocker, positioned him in my lap, and started petting him. Soon, besides purring loudly, he was “kneading” with his right paw—a cat-thing of opening and closing a paw (and extending the claws) to indicate contentment. After about five minutes of getting his “love bucket” filled, he was ready to check out of life in his sleeping corner.

While I was tending to the cat’s emotional needs, for some reason an old hymn came to mind: “Near to the Heart of God.” I mentally chewed on the hymn title and a few of its phrases, like “There is a place of quiet rest” and “Hold us who wait before thee.”

This blue tweed rocker is also the place where I nestle “near to the heart of God.” I keep draped over its back a crocheted “prayer shawl” that someone made for me when I was laid up with a broken ankle. I wrap myself in that shawl when I want to spend some time in my “quiet place,” akin to the lap of God, reading my Bible and praying.

When I was a little girl, my dad had a favorite rocker—a spring-action platform rocker with nubby red tapestry upholstery and wooden hand grips. There I’d come to his lap for bedtime story time. Locked in my heart are the tender memories of leaning back into his chest, hearing his voice rumble the words and feeling the kalump, kalump of his heart.

Perhaps that precious memory is why “Near to the Heart of God” is special to me. Not until recently did I learn the story behind that hymn. In 1903, Dr. Cleland McAfee, a Presbyterian pastor in Chicago, received the stunning news that his two nieces had just died from diphtheria. He opened his Bible and prayed over his grief, and sensed the words to this hymn coming to him. On the day of his nieces’ double funeral, the new hymn was sung outside the quarantined home of his grieving brother.

McAfee’s hymn (the only one for which he’s known) is not the only hymn birthed out of anguish. Many of those hymns we hold so dear came about when people who loved God had to wrestle with the difficult things in life. Because they worked through their issues “near to the heart of God,” we are blessed with a legacy of musical tools for public and private worship.

Has a certain hymn become meaningful to you? I'd love to hear from you.

Some thorny issues

2011-03-18T12:49:00.000-07:00

I’ve already started pruning my roses and pulled out the first thorn that wiggled through my leather work gloves. Right now, my rose bushes are ugly-- just bare, blackened thorny canes. But I think ahead to May when those first blooms come.

One positive of this time-consuming, thorny task is time to think, and I often mull over Paul’s discussion in 2 Corinthians 12:7 about his “thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan to buffet me.” The Greek word translated “thorn” refers to anything pointed, even a stake or goad. That for “buffet” (“torment” in the NIV) is from a Greek word that signifies “to strike with clenched hands, to buffet with the fist” (Vine’s Expository Dictionary, p. 156). This wasn’t a little poke, like I got with my rose thorns. It was Satan’s all-out harassment. For unknown reasons, God turned down Paul’s repeated pleas to take it away.

We don’t know what Paul’s “thorn” actually was, and that’s probably good. That way, our difficulties or “thorns” can find the same hope as Paul did: “But he [the Lord] said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’” With that as God’s answer, Paul responded, “Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me” (v. 9).

One precious detail is lost in the English translations of the phrase “may rest.” In the original Greek, the root word used here for “may rest” is episkenoo. It comes from epi (upon) and skene (skin/tent). Remember that tents of Paul’s day weren’t the canvas or nylon ones we have today. They were made of a cloth woven from goat's hair or from animal hides, and Paul as a tent-maker stitched together countless ones. Remember, too, that animal hides were used for the tented tabernacle, the traveling worship center for the Israelites after they fled Egypt. Exodus 26 says the outer covering of the tabernacle was made of ram skins dyed red and then a covering of the hides of what some translations call “sea cows.” The Hebrew is a bit obscure, but most scholars believe it refers to porpoises or a similar sea mammal.

Pulling it all together, I believe Paul is indicating that this relentless “thorn” gave him a greater sense of Christ’s work in his life—as though Christ were casting a tent over him and turning this weakness into a place of worship. The Lord does this through the inexplicable ministry of His Spirit within out hearts, directing, assuring and comforting us. He also uses the encouragement of scriptures and the ministry of others encouraging us through kind words, practical help, and prayerful support.

If you’re suffering with a “thorn” right now, I hope this little study encouraged you. And I’ll end it with a song, one I learned while serving with an international mission group. Use the tune of “Blessed Be the Tie That Binds”:
As thy day so shall thy strength be.

My grace is sufficient for thee.
My power is made perfect in thy human weakness,
My grace is sufficient for thee.

The quake-proof Rock

2011-03-14T14:45:00.000-07:00

Sometimes the horror of history is so great that just one or two words bring a despairing silence. It may remind us of the evil in men’s hearts: 9-11, African genocide, Auschwitz, Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima. It may bring up images of incomprehensible natural disasters, including the more recent: Katrina, Indonesia, Haiti, Chile, Christchurch. And now, Japan.

Japan’s March 11 earthquake and tsunami—violent, lethal, sudden—leave language impoverished. Our modern electronic age enabled unbelievable scenes to be beamed around the world. Who can forget the photos of the black, rampaging tidal wave, a monster from the depth of the sea? But what can we say? My first reaction was a prayer, “Lord, help these people.” At the same time, the magnitude of this reminded me of Jesus’ warning of great earthquakes, famines and pestilences in the last days (Luke 21:10).

But I was also reminded of something else—a solid truth established in song by a Pittsburg pastor’s wife during the darkest times of World War 2. One day in 1943, while doing her homework, she was thinking of 2 Timothy 3:1: “There will be terrible times in the last days.” Then she recalled Hebrews 6:19: “We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure.” Taking a pad of paper from her apron pocket, Ruth Caye Jones wrote the words and melody for a hymn that begins, “In times like these you need a Savior.” The refrain affirms: our anchor holds on the Solid Rock, Jesus Christ.

When disasters such as the recent one in Japan leave me at a loss for words, I have to turn to God’s Word. Psalm 46 speaks of the earth giving way, mountains falling into the heart of the sea, and its waters roaring and foaming as the mountains quake with their surging. It’s happened before. It will probably happen again. But this will never change: “God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble” (Psalm 46:1-2).

The Name Game

2011-03-09T18:56:00.000-08:00

When I noticed the clerk helping me at the grocery store was very pregnant, I asked her if she’d picked out names for her baby. I had “baby names” on my mind after reading about 1924 Olympic gold-medal-runner Eric Liddell. When his second girl came along, he wanted “Heather.” His wife wanted another name. He told her since they couldn’t decide, they’d put both names in the hat and pull out one. When she pulled out “Heather,” she was of course disappointed. Then she noticed the twinkle in his eye and he began laughing. He admitted that he wrote “Heather” on both slips of paper. She joined in the laughter and let him win.

Anyway, the grocery clerk said she planned to name her baby girl “Grayson Marie.” I remarked that it had a nice sound to it. But when I got home, the name “Grayson” just didn’t seem right. I checked my baby name book (I keep one on hand for naming fiction characters in my writing) and couldn’t find it under girl names. I checked boy names, and there it was. It means….drum roll….jailer’s son. Oh, my.

A couple days later I was reading in Daniel, about how this young cream-of-the-crop teen from Israel was marched off to Babylon and pulled into the king’s service. Today he’d be the teen who scored perfect SATs, was named all-American in two sports, and was an in-demand concert pianist. Daniel, while outstanding, had one problem: he had a Hebrew name that meant “God is my judge.” The Babylonian king tried to change Daniel’s identify by renaming him “Belteshazzar,” which means “Bel (one of the Babylonian false gods), protect his life.”

The Babylonians weren’t the only culture to tamper with names. Our entertainment and sports industry probably is most notorious for changing “professional” names. The front of my baby name book gives some of them: Woody Allen (Allen Konigsberg), Yogi Berra (Lawrence Peter Berra), George Burns (Nathan Birnbaum), Tony Curtis (Bernard Schwartz), Judy Garland (Frances Gumm), Cary Grant (Archibald Leach), Bob Hope (Leslie Townes Hope), Rock Hudson (Roy Scherer Jr.), Michael Landon (Michael Orowitz), Marilyn Monroe (Norma Jean Baker), Roy Rogers (Leonard Slye), Ringo Starr (Richard Starkey), and John Wayne (Marion Michael Morrison).

Back on Belteshazzar, er, Daniel, I’ve been giving second thoughts to something I read recently in Revelation. In the letter to the church in Philadelphia, known for its endurance and love in tough times, God promises that the believers will get “a new name” (Rev. 3:12). I believe this means we will have full identification with God, something like our ancestors did in adding “son” to surnames. Ander’s son was “Anderson” and John’s son was “Johnson.” And yes, the gray (jailer’s) son was Grayson. We’ll still be ourselves, but we’ll have that wonderful, positive, hopeful, clarifying identification as God’s-son or God’s-daughter.

Now that is something to look forward to!

Patchwork

2011-03-02T12:06:00.000-08:00

Photo: my latest patchwork baby quilt project.
I was at the fabric store a few weeks ago and ran into a friend who runs a fruit stand. During the slow winter season she sews aprons to sell in their gift line, so was shopping for cheerful fabric to stitch up more.

“Do you still make those baby patchwork blankets?” she asked. One of her sons was a blanket recipient two decades ago.

“Yes,” I admitted. I’ve lost count, but know I’ve sewn more than 200 over the years. Because each blanket is comprised of eighty five-inch squares, I’m always looking for bright, fresh cottons for a nice variety.

“Would you like some scraps?” she added.

Do cats like cat treats? Do dogs like bones?

Twice in the next few weeks she dropped off the scraps from her latest projects. It was just what I needed to chase the gray winter blues. Some people may get excited about sky-diving, exploring sunken wrecks, or climbing Mount Everest. As for me, just give me an old bag of scraps, my rolling cutter and my well-scarred cutting board.

Random patchwork may not be everybody’s idea of “beautiful,” but it is mine. I enjoy the vibrancy of color and design. The baby quilts are also a great tool for teaching children their colors and names of objects. But what I like best is the spiritual symbolism of patchwork. People without a spiritual focus are like a bag of scraps. A corner, a length on the fold, cutouts—by themselves, they’re not of much use.

But give those scraps to the Master Designer, the One whose fingers touched the earth to bring forth amazing mountains, lakes, flowers, animals, sea life and so much more. Kindly, deftly, He lays His perfect pattern on those motley pieces. If they could talk, they might say “Ouch!” as they’re cut to size. But they need to trust that each cut is made with compassion and purpose. Finally, He joins them together to make something lovely out of the world’s discards.

I’ve seen it happen to real people, over and over. “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come.” (2 Corinthians 5:17).

Beauty from scraps. That’s God’s way.

The UN-bucket List

2011-02-25T11:32:00.000-08:00

One hazard of having a “bucket list” of life goals is that sometimes you need to empty the bucket. For one reason or another, that way-out dream may be okay for some people, but not for you.

That’s why I don’t raise show dogs (an overweight fixed male cat is enough for me), climb vertical rock ledges (one broken ankle suffices for life), or train five hours daily for Olympic figuring skating (avoiding the thorns while pruning our roses gives me enough twist and bend exercise). It’s why most little girls never get a pony of their own or old ladies their gleaming gold sports cars for trips to Safeway. It’s why I’m not hugging the computer to pick up the last-minute deal on a cruise to Outer Pretalonia (wherever that may be), knowing that the germs for Traveler’s Trots have me in their cross-hairs as soon as I leave home.

Maybe I live too vanilla a life, but I can look over some amazing and satisfying experiences. The best of all was helping my faithful husband raise two kids to responsible and God-honoring adulthood.

So, in picking even these minor “bucket list” goals, I think there are some principles to keep in mind.
1. Does it honor a creative God who also examines our motives? Proverbs 21:2 says, “All a man’s ways seem right to him, but the Lord weighs the heart.”
2. Is it a selfish goal that may bring detriment or loss to someone else? Proverbs 28:19 says people who chase fantasy will have their fill of poverty.
3. Could it be the route to a special gift from God? Psalm 37:4 has long been a special verse for me: “Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.” It may not be what I ordered up, but if I’m willing to flex and accept something different, He really enjoys giving it to me.

Enough thoughts for now. I have another “bucket” on my list today. The kitchen floor needs a mop dipped in a bucket of hot water. Been down with the flu, and the house shows it.

Bucket List Checkup

2011-02-14T11:40:00.000-08:00

I’m hearing the term “bucket list” a lot more recently. It refers to goals we hope to accomplish before we die. I just knocked one off my list: to make a large pieced quilt. For years at fairs or quilt stores I’ve gazed with my jaw dropping at the intricate, colorful fabric art created for walls or beds. Yes, I’d made hundreds of baby quilts and a few full-size quilts, but they were of randomly-arranged five-inch squares. They were quick, colorful, and took care of my sewing scraps. But pieced, patterned quilts? I always considered those the realm of the infinitely careful and patient, which I am not.

I did survive putting together my pieced quilt (the log cabin pattern), but it’s not perfect. I had to rip out and re-do several sections that got way off. But it’s done--at least the 611 scraps that went into its 47 squares. Now I need to get it assembled and top-stitched.

I know of people who have amazing bucket lists. My sister’s mother-in-law was promised a glider ride for her 100th birthday. She wasn’t too healthy when Number Hundred came around, but got it in time for her 101st birthday. But I also know of many whose “bucket list” is simply to live longer. A special friend has gone through a year of grueling cancer treatments. Her hope goes up and down with the blood tests that reveal “cancer markers,” and the other day with the markers “up,” she was emotionally down. I can understand that. She has always taken care of her health and exercised, but still those malevolent marauders planted themselves in her body and don’t want to leave.

Sometimes we live under the shadow of genetic predispositions to life-threatening disease. My dad had his first heart attack in his forties, and died of either his fourth or fifth when he was only 63. Guess what: I’m under treatment for high cholesterol. My mother died of complications from breast cancer at 59. Guess what: that’s the part of my anatomy checked the most. And while I don’t enjoy those yearly tests that turn a cup into a saucer, I know they’re my best defense for early detection.

I’ve been thinking recently of a relative through marriage who just lost her mother at age 66. Barely half a year earlier, a stroke robbed the mom of her mobility and go-for-it personality. The tendency to strokes runs in the family. Thus, there’s always the question: will my time come? And when? Strokes (or heart attacks or even cancer) make no appointment to happen. They strike whether or not you’ve checked off all the items on your bucket list. At the mom’s memorial, much was said of how she invested in young women and in her grandchildren. Whether or not she intended that as her “bucket list,” it was worthy—and she did her best in the time allotted to her.

When a friend of mine died in her fifties of cancer after living half her life as a quadriplegic after an auto accident, I asked God some hard questions about her suffering and short life. I recalled how, despite her disability and illnesses, she glowed with faith and trust in God. You couldn’t hang on to your gloomies when you got around her.

I started to get my answer when I did a study of Psalms 90. Psalm 90 is Moses’ lament about the brevity of life. It’s really a downer. Basically it says, “Life is tough, then you die, probably at 70.” He does put out an appeal for joy and gladness “for as many years as we have seen trouble” (v. 15) and then he makes what I’d call a desire for completed bucket lists: “May the favor of the Lord our God rest upon us: establish the work of our hands for us—yes, establish the work of our hands.” Beside this verse in my Bible I had written “9-11-98, Help me make a lasting difference!” Eleven months earlier, at the age of 50, I was almost killed by a drinking driver. A split-second veer to the ditch meant our car was totaled but we lived. Talk about being very aware that God has given you extra time!

More than twelve years have passed since I marked that comment in my Bible. Twelve years of daily hands-on stuff like grocery shopping, meal prep, housecleaning, care-giving elderly parents, raising teens to young adulthood, encouraging and helping folks, pounding out articles on my computer, praying, seeking to do the ministries God put before me. Was this how God established “the work of my hands”?

Yes, there are a few things I might like to do and see on this incredible earth before death comes (although that will graduate me to the new realm of Heaven). In the decades of care-giving parents in their final decline, then tight finances as we put kids through college, we put a lot of things “on hold.”

So what is my bucket list, now that the quilt top is pieced? Although it sounds trite, it’s just to love Jesus more and more. Maybe, when our kids start their families, to help nurture a grandchild. (One of my sorrows is that my mother died before I was married, so she never knew her grandchildren through me.) The next Psalm, 91, speaks of God’s protection and ends this way: “With long life will I satisfy him, and show him my salvation.” “Long life” it literally “length of days.” I think what it means is this: in the measure of our days that God already knows about, we will be satisfied when we keep our focus on our salvation, who is Jesus Christ.

No matter what we may write on our “bucket lists,” this is what’s most important: Jesus first, people next.

Prayer busters: when God doesn't seem to hear

2011-02-08T18:26:00.000-08:00

Until a few weeks ago, our phone reception was about as good as it was in the infancy of the telephone, meaning not very good. For some reason, every call came with STAAAAAATIC so bad it seemed the caller was trying to phone outside in a blizzard in Antarctica. Finally, a repair technician narrowed the problem to a faulty circuit in a box a couple blocks away. Once he replaced it, we were back to normal reception.

Our frustration with bad phone lines got me thinking about clogged prayer lines. I’ve heard people say, “I don’t seem to have God’s number,” “God doesn’t seem to be listening,” “God’s line is too busy for me,” or even “Prayer just doesn’t work.” Some find it easy to bail out on prayer, before they even consider that the problem might be on their end. Could any of these “prayer busters” belong to “U”?

Unrepented sin. “If I had cherished sin in my heart, the Lord would not have listened” (Psalm 66:18). “But your iniquities have separated you from your God; your sins have hidden his face from you” (Isaiah 59:2).

Unkindness toward spouse. “Husbands, in the same way be considerate as you live with your wives, and treat them with respect as the weaker partner and as heirs with you of the gracious gift of life, so that nothing will hinder your prayers” (1 Peter 3:7).

Unrighteous motives. “You want something but don’t get it. You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight. You do not have, because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with the wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures” (James 4:2-3).

Uncaring about the poor. “If a man shuts his ears to the cry of the poor, he too will cry out and not be answered” (Proverbs 12:13).

Unbending spines (pride). “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble” (James 4:6). “He does not answer when men cry out because of the arrogance of the wicked. Indeed, God does not listen to their empty plea; the Almighty pays no attention to it” (Job 35:12-13).

Unforgiving heart. “If therefore you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to your brother; then come and offer your gift” (Matthew 5:23-24).

Unbelief. “Jesus replied, ‘I tell you the truth, if you have faith and do not doubt, not only can you do what was done to the fig tree, but you can also say to this mountain, “Go, throw yourself into the sea,” and it will be done. If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer” (Matthew 21:21-22). “But when he asks [for wisdom], he must believe and not doubt, because he who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind” (James 1:6).

Anybody besides me need the reminder of this list? Please feel free to leave a comment.

Signature additions

2011-02-03T15:39:00.000-08:00

When we’re pushed aside by an illness, accident or circumstance, we’re apt to whine, Why me, why now, why this? We identify with the losses of the Old Testament’s Job. Like Job, we have no easy answer to the why’s of suffering, except that God is sovereign in what happens “down here.”

Yes, it can get rough. I have a friend who was diagnosed a year ago with a cancer that she has fought with determination and grit. In a recent note I wrote her, this phrase came to mind: “Infirmities are a platform through which God displays Himself.” I had just read in John 9 about Jesus healing the blind man. Jesus dismissed the speculation that he was blind because of his or his parents’ sin. Instead, Jesus said, this happened “so that the work of God might be displayed in his life” (John 9:3).

Few of us want to be a display board for God. Quadriplegic author/artist Joni Eareckson Tada isn’t all that fond of her wheelchair. My creative, compassionate friend Shirley, whose life was ended by cancer, similarly spent most of her life on “wheels” after breaking her neck. But I looked to her (as I do the writings of Joni) for encouragement to trust God in the rough places.

I’ve been reading biographies of Scotsman Eric Liddell in preparation for a writing assignment. Liddell took a gold medal in the 1924 Olympics for the 400-meter race after refusing to run his best event, the 100-meter, because it took place on a Sunday. His talent and convictions were brought to movie fame in Chariots of Fire.

Instead of becoming a professional sports person, Liddell set a course to become a missionary to China. Sally Magnusson’s biography, The Flying Scotsman, recounts how the newly-ordained Liddell was asked by a friend to sign a guest book. With a laugh, Liddell signed his new “Reverend” title and then added some Chinese characters. Asked what those meant, he explained, “Keep smiling.” He often used that phrase.

The friend told Liddell of a woman who often used the same phrase. Her name was Bella, and five years earlier she was scalped in an accident, losing one eye and badly damaging the other. She endured painful skin grafts, unbearable headaches, and was nearly deaf and blind. Every month the painful, ingrown eyelashes of her remaining eye had to be pulled out. Yet, according to the friend, the woman remained cheerful, telling people to “keep smiling.”

When he told Liddell that the woman greatly admired him, Liddell asked if he could visit her. The friend arranged it, and Liddell and Bella had an hour together. As she held his hand, she remarked that she worked for God, too. Her sufferings weren’t as bad as some face, she said, but when people complained over little things, she was able to remind them of how blessed they really were.
The next morning, as Liddell hurried to board a train, someone handed him a letter from Bella. He pushed it in his pocket to read later. The letter simply expressed how happy his visit made her.

The man sharing his train compartment was obviously miserable, holding his head in his hands and refusing to look up. Liddell tried to cheer him, and eventually the man started telling his story. He complained he felt like a failure. He did poorly at school, couldn’t keep a job, had conflicts with his parents, and had no friends. Feeling life wasn’t worth living, he was going to kill himself.
Wondering how to respond, Liddell remembered Bella’s letter in his pocket and asked the young man to read it. Liddell explained the woman’s severe handicaps and added that she took care of four people.

Ashamed of his attitude, the young man brightened, realizing he was wrong to lose faith in God and himself. He left the train a different man.

The story prompted me to ask what slogan I’m unconsciously signing after my name. How about you? :)

More lessons from the cat....

2011-01-30T18:14:00.000-08:00

I had a wordless sermon early one recent morning as I left bed about 6 a.m. for my rocker, where I keep a heating pad to help the stiffness from a lingering back issue. As soon as I settled in (ah…warm…soothing), I became aware of a pair of amber-green eyes mounted on a gray striped head staring at me. Thus began the four-point sermon, in true alliterative speech outline style:
LOOK at likely source of nourishment (buyer of cat food, mostly healthy, some filler).
LISTEN for the golden words: “Aug-cat, are you ready for breakfast?”
LICK the dish clean.
LINGER in case the human says, “Do you need more?”

After spooning that disgusting cat food in his bowl, I settled back in my rocker for more back-warming and brought my Bible to my lap. As Aug-cat slurped away, I realized there were some similarities with my “feeding time” with God.
LOOK to God, who wants to nourish me with His Word (100% healthy, no filler!)
LISTEN with my eyes for the golden words that express His love or correction.
LICK the dish clean. I read with a pen, linking repeated words, making comments in the margins.
LINGER, savoring what I’ve just read, then talking to God. If I want more, I know His answer:
LEAP back in.

Actually, the cat does say something to me in cat language. He trills a little “brrruppp?” and turns on his purr. Feeding time over, he’s at the back door, scratching at the threshold, eager to face his fearful world and protect his territory…for about half an hour.

Oh, cats. Sometimes the analogies end....except to remember that I should be even more eager for my morning "manna" than he is for cat slop!

Give and Take: A Guide to Friendship

2011-01-20T10:28:00.000-08:00

Photo: The wall of my office where I have a display of "friendship"-related sayings--daily reminders that friendship is both a gift and responsibility.

A reader of the Dec. 1 blog, "In praise of Girrll-friends," expressed her desire to have such close relationships, but how? My best answer, as trite as it seems, is that to gain friends, you must be a friend. We need to take the initiative in getting to know people on non-threatening turf, like group activities--even if we need to set those events up ourselves. Friendships begin in shared experiences, like volunteering together, having a pizza-and-video night, walking a nature trail together. I know of some friends who go to yard sales together! One time I stopped at a local eat-in bakery, I noticed a group of older women having a great time together at two corner tables. They keep their friendships growing over coffee and a sweet roll.

As I pondered how to encourage this person, I thought of an article I wrote several years ago. Below is what first appeared in Pursuit in Spring 1992, titled, "Give and Take: A Guide to Friendship." I know it's lengthy but hope you'll read to the end of it, and find something to encourage you.

I was midway through a mundane Saturday morning when the phone rang. “Hi, this is Char,” came my friend’s voice from 250 miles away. The morning’s dullness dissipated as we chatted. Moving away usually takes a heavy toll on friendships. Belong long, once-close friends are reduced to sparse greetings at Christmas. But sometimes there are long-time friends like Char, to whom I am bonded by common struggles. She is nearing 40 and single; I didn’t marry until 34. Thirteen years after my mother died of cancer, hers also died that way. We write and call. When she stops on business trips, she’s once again “family.” One time she gave our then-small children a stuffed toy lamb from New Zealand, named “Lamby-kins.” When our kids grew up and pared down their huge collection of stuffed animals, Lamby-kins was kept--so strong was the symbolic connection to her enduring friendship.

LEVELS OF FRIENDSHIP
Like favorite stuffed toys, friendships change with the ebb and flow of life. They vary in numbers and intensity. They would graph like a pyramid: many acquaintances at the base, a few closer friends in the middle, and a few, very close, at the top. Psychologists have estimated that the average person makes 500 to 2,500 acquaintances a year. These come from everyday contacts through leisure, work, or religious activities. Such people are friends only as their interests or memberships cross ours.

Deeper than “acquaintances” come “core friends.” We see these friends more regularly and usually know them by first name. We have 20 to 100 such friends from work, school, clubs, church, and the neighborhood. They may be relatives with whom we have only limited contact. They may be people we admire and seek out as “mentors” for a period of time. Finally, a person develops an average of one to seven “intimate friends.” These are people who, as one saying puts it, double our pleasure and divide our grief. We feel comfortable together even when we do nothing and share few words. It’s enough to have each other’s presence.

WHY WE NEED FRIENDS
“No man is an island, entire of itself,” wrote John Donne (1573-1631), long before psychologists started amassing the evidence that friends are essential to physical and emotional health. A study conducted over a nine-year period in California showed that people without a good network of relationships had more health problems and a mortality rate two to five times higher than others. Stress-related health problems seemed to increase as a person had fewer friends and relatives to help him cope. In line with these findings, other studies showed:
*Pregnant women under stress, without supportive relationships, had three times more complications than those with a support network.
*The divorced and widowed had a higher rate of disease, including terminal cancer.
*Unemployed men who had a good support from family and friends reported less depression, fewer illnesses, and lower levels of cholesterol.
*Women who had a close friend to confide in were less prone to depression.

Friendship answers several deep human needs. These include the desire to be known, to give, to be encouraged, and to have someone to admire and follow. I experienced this as a single woman in my first job in a strange town. I felt very lonely and vulnerable. Then a widowed nurse 50 years my senior, whom I met at church, invited me to dinner. Learning of my unpleasant experiences in the local public laundry, she offered use of her washer and dryer. That grew to a weekly Friday night “date” to share our leftovers for dinner while I did my wash. My laundry money (left in a special piggy bank I bought her) gave her some extra change, but I benefited beyond price as I was nurtured, encouraged and mentored. I had friends my own age, too, but none as true and caring as this older woman.

Ironically, those deep human desires that draw us to one another in search of friendship also keep us from making friends. We want to be known, but we fear rejection if we are truly known. We want to give, but we fear being turned down. We want to be encouraged, but risk being despised. We want models, but wonder if they will fail us.

HOW TO MAKE FRIENDS
To make friends, we must be friends. We have to take that first step which takes the attention away from our own struggle with shyness and focuses attention on the other person. Friendship starts with going where there are people who share our values and interests. It begins with a smile and a greeting: “Hi, I’m John [or Jane]. I’ve not met you before.” Learn a person’s name right away—a person’s own name is the sweetest sound in his language. Say it several times in the first conversation. Use memory devices, if necessary. Offer your own as an ice breaker. A jolly, “ample” switchboard operator at work volunteered her own memory phrase, “Kelly with the big belly.” I never forgot that!

Keep the conversation focused on the other person. Ask open-ended questions about the other person’s work, schooling, or interests. This question often works for me: “How did you get interested in that field?” Finally, make them feel important. Encourage and admire them: “I’ve always appreciated the way nurses help ease the emotional pain.” “Without music teachers like you, we’d lose a precious part of our culture.” “I could use some hints from an experienced mother like you on helping my children keep their rooms clean.”

HOW TO KEEP FRIENDS
As these “casual” friendships deepen over time into “core” and “intimate” friends, they’ll need nurturing to continue. The acronym FRIEND is a good way to remember how to grow a friendship.
F—for FUN. Friends aren’t afraid to be crazy around each other. Margaret kidnapped Irene on her birthday and took her to a park. She set an old picnic table with china and candles, put a birthday hat on her friends, and served her a birthday breakfast with candles in the eggs.
R—for READY TO LISTEN. Rick was going through a divorce and needed to talk out his confusion and anxieties. His friend Tom assured Rick he could call any time the emotional baggage got too heavy. He did.
I—for INTERESTING. Iron sharpens iron, a proverb says, and so one person sharpens another. Janice’s love for great literature got Jamie into books that broadened her reading tastes. Mike helped John with a remodeling project, and realized he could handle a hammer after all.
E—for ENCOURAGING. Jenny’s out-of-town friend has a child with cancer. Regularly she writes “thinking of you” notes. When Ken wanted to change careers and go back to college, his friend slipped him a check as “seed money” for that goal.
N—for NOURISHING. A friend feeds the relationship by remembering dates and events that are uniquely “you.” He celebrates birthdays, births of children, and achievements. She brings over a meal when you’re sick or under pressure. He’s there with emotional support when a family member is injured or dies.
D—for DEPENDABLE. A friend is loyal and reliable. When Sue confides in Betty, she knows her secrets are safe. Norm has seen Joe at the worst in his addiction. He’s now seeking help and knows Norm will stay by him in the struggle. Howie’s personal and physical problems have distanced many people, but Andy remains true. When Howie needs a listener or an extra hand, he knows Andy will juggle his obligations to make time. Andy also does yard work for Howie’s widowed mother when Howie is away.

How many friends do we need? Ben Jonson (1572-1637) wrote, “True happiness consists not in the multitude of friends, but in the worth and choice.” Over a lifetime we’ll come in contact with thousands. But true friends will be there in our greatest need—and be glad they are. I met Peggy through church and our friendship grew during a commitment to exercise together. I knew she was becoming a true friend when she risked my giving her a home permanent!
One Mother’s Day morning she broke her foot. I felt privileged to be able to take her to the emergency room. When a cast put her in crutches for more than two months, I insisted on coming to help clean and do laundry. “Only a real friend can fold your underwear,” I teased. “Besides,” I added, nearly falling down her stairs one day as I helped, “I may need you when I break my hip!”

In Julius Caesar, Shakespeare wrote, “A friend should bear his friend’s infirmities.” In the cycles of friendship, we each will have a term of infirmities. A healthy friendship has give-and-take on both sides. But as we give, we take away something of immeasurable value: the joy of being part of something that really works.

First published in Pursuit (Spring 1992), Copyright © 1992 by Jeanne Zornes.
*Most names have been changed to protect privacy

Radiant hope

2011-01-13T15:58:00.000-08:00

Shown: a rainbow in the sky north of our home (you can see the snow on the rooftop). I was working at the computer and took an "eye-break," and this glorious sight was just out my window. I speak in this blog about iridescence, and here's one example of the creative wonders we can see--one that clearly reminds us of a Creator.

A few years ago when I taught writing through a correspondence school, I had one student who aspired to write travel articles. He must have had a mathematician’s brain because no matter how much I encouraged him to appeal to the senses in describing things, he’d end up using cardboard words like “lovely” or “interesting.”

Make me taste, smell, see, touch this setting, I urged. Use figurative language. I gave him examples. Instead of, “It offers good ice fishing,” I suggested, “When the rising sun first spills pink on the glazed lake, dots of fishermen in bear-size neon parkas are already huddled around lucky holes.”

Okay, so I got a little carried away, but I really was trying to help him think outside the box. Sometimes, though, we simply can’t think outside the box. Describing Heaven is one such time.

I recently finished reading Randy Alcorn’s novel, Safely Home, about the persecution and death of a Chinese Christian. The novel ends in a sweep of grand scenes about how the author imagines Heaven. Even though Alcorn also wrote a scholarly book on Heaven, the bottom line is this: nobody knows for sure. No one has traveled to and from to report on it with credibility—except for Jesus Christ. He told us, “In my Father’s house are many”—and here he used the Greek word mone, which simply means “dwelling places.”

But we’ve been given glimpses—and this aside from those who claim to have had a vision of heaven while clinically dead. One such glimpse comes out of the first chapter of Ezekiel, which, coincidentally, I read in my Bible about the same time I was finishing up Alcorn’s book in my leisure reading.

The vision Ezekiel had of the glory of God defies description. In fact, the best he could say was that what he saw “looked like” or “appeared like” something known on earth. Over and over he used those conditional words. Artists who have attempted to draw what he described just can’t do it. Our finite minds can’t wrap around the magnitude and greatness of it, any more than a mosquito could understand an explanation of jet propulsion.

One thing caught my attention from Ezekiel 1: the repeated mention of glowing and radiant things. One such verse (29): “like the appearance of a rainbow in the clouds on a rainy day, so was the radiance around him.” It made me think of the claim of Don Piper, author of 90 Minutes in Heaven, who said his vision of Heaven included a sense of a “bright iridescence.” Something “iridescent” constantly changes glittering colors. The closest I’ve come to such a sight is seeing the sun sparkle off a fresh snowfall. When that happens, I ponder how, if this little piece of earth is so glorious, how more so in Heaven.

I have to admit that when it comes to describing celestial habitations, my vocabulary is as limited as my student who said “the lake has good fishing.” Someday, though, we’ll know for certain what hides behind the veil between earth and Heaven. And what a glorious day that will be!

Some lessons from viral fame

2011-01-08T18:16:00.000-08:00

Thanks to U-Tube, Nora was probably the most famous musician of 2007.That year, her owners uploaded a video of Nora playing the piano, and her renown went viral. Her style was, well, what you’d expect from a five-year-old cat from Philadelphia.

The big cat, rescued from a shelter by a piano teacher, had heard enough during her master’s lesson days to know that when you press those black and white things, they made noise. If you did it while someone was watching, they praised you. Though Nora had a decidedly eclectic style, a Lithuanian composer-conductor actually wrote a four-minute “catcerto” to a video of her random plunkings. Performed by the Klaipeda Chamber Orchestra, that too went viral on-line. Her owner said of Nora’s exploits, “She does like attention.” As the sixth animal in the household, it proved an effective way for her to get verbal praise and petting.

Fast-forward a few years to a talent competition in England, April 11, 2009. A very ordinary, even plain, 47-year-old unmarried woman stepped on stage and took the mike. The audience twittered over the audacity of this woman thinking she could make it where glamour and style counted.When she opened her mouth, the judges dropped theirs in amazement. As Susan Boyle brought vocal excellence and drama to “I Dream a Dream” from Les Miserables, her dream came true. Overnight, this unknown daughter of a miner and typist—youngest of ten born when her mother was 47—became an internet sensation. Ten minutes after hearing her sing, an engineer created the YouTube channel dedicated to her shocking “Britain’s Got Talent” performance. Just overnight, it generated 20 million views.

She was the unlikely winner. Because of oxygen deprivation at birth, she was always a bit “different” and as a child was bullied. But she found her love in singing, and regularly sang in her church choir and in karaoke bars. She took some singing lessons to improve her skills. Finally, to fulfill a promise to her late mother, she mustered the courage to audition.

Today, the frumpy look is gone. Her clothes are more stylish, and her hair and face show a beautician’s touch. But the voice is still there, smooth and vibrant. Remarkably, when asked what she’d do with her new wealth, Susan replied, “I’d like to get some teeth fixed but I don’t have a lot of needs.”

The difference between the two ‘net musicians? Nora was random, a novelty who thrived on attention.Susan quietly prepared, then dared to try. Nora reminds us that humor and fun can crop up in unusual places. Susan’s story reminds us that a lot of hard work precedes what the world calls “big breaks.”

Few, if any of us, will sing like Susan and wow a crusty panel of talent show judges. More of us will be asked to be faithful in becoming better at what we do well, regardless of public acclaim.It’s easy to be Nora the cat, looking for approval from The Master for some plunking around. It’s harder to take what God has given you, work at expanding and perfecting those skills, and blessing others along the journey. But someday, when you least expect it, your final performance will come and you’ll stand before The Master.

Now? Never forget Philippians 3:14: “I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.”

Digging through the dust

2010-12-29T14:42:00.000-08:00

I haven’t yet met a writer who didn’t have stacks of dusty stuff in the “office.” I plead: guilty, as charged. Thus, in attempts to get better organized, this week I bought a five-shelf bookcase to replace a rickety two-shelf one held up by stacks of books in front of it. As I dusted and re-stacked books on actual shelves, I discovered some I forgot I had.

Something similar happened this morning as I read to the end of Jeremiah. For a lot of people, Jeremiah is a dusty, obscure book. I understand! But little by little, it’s opening up for me.

Jeremiah’s long prophecy ends in a big swash of condemnation of nations near and far who didn’t follow God. It reminded me of the 1960s and 1970s when it seemed the continents took turns having “coup of the day.” But this was 597 B.C., and the stakes were huge, thanks to super-power Babylon and its ruthless ruler Nebuchadnezzar. He was eyeing a prize called Jerusalem and its young king, Jehoiachin.

Age 18 when he officially took over the throne, Jehoiachin wore the crown for a mere three months and ten days. The Bible’s analysis of his kingship: “He did evil in the eyes of the Lord” (2 Kings 24:9, 2 Chronicles 36:9). Not too great a job evaluation, huh? He’d barely warmed up the throne when the Babylonian king marched him off to captivity with the rest of the royal family (including the Queen Mother—imagine how she felt about his job performance!) and about 10,000 fellow Jews.

In this riches-to-rags story, Jehoiachin sat in a primitive prison for 37 years! Do the math: from age 18 (barely shaving) to age 55 (definitely sagging). He’d probably lost all hope. Then Babylon’s leadership changed. Power-hungry Nebuchadnezzar died and was replaced by Evil-Merodach (how’d you like that for a name?), who freed Jehoiachin from prison.

Then the Bible records an amazing event. You don’t expect it of a ruler whose nation is known for brutality: “He [Evil-Merodach] spoke kindly to him and gave him a seat of honor higher than those of the other kings who were with him in Babylon” (Jeremiah 52:32). Besides being removed from prison, Jehoiachin was given fresh clothes and invited to eat regularly at the king’s table the rest of his life.

There are several ways to look at this story. One is this: Jehoiachin got better than he deserved, though it took a while. However, he never returned to Jerusalem to resume his rule. Plus, the Bible never indicates if he softened his heart toward the things of God. The man who “did evil” in his short reign didn’t emerge from prison on fire for God. He was content to slum along in the royal dining room until he died.

Another way of looking at the passage is this. Sin and godless living can land any of us in desperate circumstances. But God, who unlike Babylon’s pagan king is absolute righteousness, sees us in the dark prison of our own making. Instead of some plebian guard, He sent His own Son to unlock the dank chamber where we rot. He bids us come with Him, gives us fresh garments, and leads us to the King’s banquet hall. There He wants to fellowship with us, forever. For me, it puts another face on that memorable verse: “I will come in and eat with him, and he with me” (Revelation 3:20).

As we end one year and begin the next, Jehoiachin’s story presents us with some searching truths. Have you given up hope in your negative circumstances? Would you be ready if the King called you?

Gift-wrapped

2010-12-24T15:53:00.000-08:00

Charlie Brown had his wimpy Christmas tree. In our house, the art of gift wrapping suffers greatly. I know and admire those who elevate gift-wrapping to an art form. Every corner of wrap on the box is folded as neat as sheets on a hospital bed. The tape is pressed on in perfect parallels to the top and bottom of the box. The ribbons color-coordinate and sport little mini-gifts in the bows. Generous poufs of tissue sprout from gift bags.

Let’s just say that protégées of Martha Stewart do not live at my house. I have an under-bed box of wrapping paper, about half of it saved and ironed to recycle, the other half from yard sales. A large box in the garage holds “gift boxes,” which could be anything from a former candy box to one that held an assortment of greeting cards.

Wrapping holiday gifts reminds me of the adage, “It’s not the wrappings, it’s the love inside.” And I remember that God’s one-of-a-kind gift to the world came in humble packaging. Luke 2:7 says Mary wrapped her just-born baby “in cloths and placed in him a manger." The world's most precious baby didn’t wear disposable diapers and cuddle up in a soft, sanitary blanket sleeper. He was bound in long swaddling rags, the custom among the poor.

Recycled cloths—I never thought about it before. But God doesn’t always do things the way we expect.

Merry Christmas! And as you gather up the gift wrappings for the recycling box (or carefully fold them to iron and re-use), make this your prayer: “Thanks be to God for His indescribable gift!” (2 Cor. 9:15 NKJV).

Finding the perfect (sensible) gift

2010-12-20T11:18:00.000-08:00

In the Middle Ages, children's gifts came in bundles of three. They got something rewarding, something useful, and something for discipline. You might call it the original sweet-and-sour. That heritage came down to my own childhood Christmases with candy bars in my stocking, gift-wrapped new underwear, and something strange or unneeded. The last gift involved the discipline of a prompt and gracious thank-you note.

“Dear Uncle Bob,” began the creative exercise. “How did you know that a Rudolph the Reindeer knitted red nose-warmer was a wardrobe urgency?”

I always wondered how people could so badly misjudge what a kid really wanted. Then I became an adult and the buyer of kid gifts. The minute you enter a store, your mind turns to pudding. You wonder as you wander...and wander...past bulging shelves. What do they need? What do they want? Yes, they offered a suggestion list, but it was coded with strange letters. CD--candied dates? DVD--dark velvet dungarees? Wii—women’s indigo ice-skates? Two hours later, unable to find those items, you emerge--exhausted and exhilarated. You have bought traditional gifts of discipline. They will require creative thank-yous.

A tie, to hone acting abilities. "How did you know I needed another tie? I really do need to switch my garment of choice from tee-shirts to collared shirts. This tie that lights up when you insert the batteries will become my favorite."

Perfume, to sharpen olfactory acuity. "What a splendid fragrance. It seems a mix of passion blossoms and spearmint. I've never sniffed just that combination. Maybe I'll take some to my chem teacher for help in analyzing its content."

A book on study skills, for the study-challenged. “What timing to get this book on academic excellence. In barely a month, I will face finals but with renewed confidence from this book’s wisdom.”

Pajamas, to reinforce healthy habits. "Mother dear, how did you know I needed new garments for the eight hours of sleep I will get every night? I have forsaken my habit of staying up until midnight. From now on, I will put them on promptly at 9:30, rise at 6:30 and neatly tuck them under my pillow upon making my bed."

Who says it's hard to buy the perfect gift?

Okay, end of teasing! I’m grateful that God doesn't get befuddled about his gift-choosing and bestowing. He knows exactly what we need. He may give a reward, something useful, or something to discipline us, but it will be His very best. Matthew 5:17 says even though we humans, inadequate that we are, “know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!”

Too busy? Break a leg....

2010-12-15T19:25:00.000-08:00

The usual too-busy Christmas season was underway that Saturday morning, Dec. 16, 2006. I had hurried to the shopping center with three items on my to-do list before returning home to wash and set my 86-year-old mom-in-law’s hair. I just needed to find a citrus peeler, buy some groceries, and mail a stack of holiday greetings.

I had checked off item number one and was carefully making my way down an ice-covered public stairway in the mall, gripping the handrails, when my life was changed. Somehow, between handholds, my feet gave way and I landed at the bottom with a broken ankle. I sat on compact snow and ice in pain as passers-by walked around me to take care of their errands. Finally, somebody stopped, saw I wasn’t getting up, and offered to call an ambulance.

Later that evening, as a nurse rolled me out of surgery recovery, she said, “Honey, you won’t be going very many places for six weeks, at least.”

This could not be! It was Christmas! Plus, I was a care-giver for my mother-in-law, whose Alzheimer’s had progressed to the point where I was taking her meals, dispensing her pills, doing her laundry, and generally keeping her clean and healthy. Once the do-it-all person, now I had to sit back in a recliner, broken limb elevated, and learn a few lessons. Among them:
*The world will not stop even if I do.
*My family would survive.
*Care-giving my mom-in-law would happen with others pitching in.
*I had to accept help (meals, laundry, housework) because I just couldn’t do it.
*My family would find me to be a source of humor (pain pills do that to you).

I wouldn’t wish a broken ankle on anybody. I walk very carefully now when there’s ice about. I have wicked grippers for my snow boots. I’ve healed as best as possible, but those traumatized bones (the surgeon said, “You smushed it good”) let me know in advance that the weather is changing.

And when Christmas comes, I’m no longer the holiday tornado.

Yesterday morning before going to his afternoon substitute teaching job, my husband was listening to a Bill Gaither vocal band video featuring Larnell Harris. As I heated soup and made grilled cheese sandwiches for his lunch, I listened…and was touched by these words Larnell sang: “Precious Lord, take my hand.”

This year, more than any other, that expresses my heart. I’ve learned to cut back on expectations at the holidays. I am seeking more quiet places to listen to God, to sense Him taking my hand.

And it won’t take breaking a leg (or an ankle) for that to happen.

Have yourself a merry lesser Christmas

2010-12-10T10:04:00.000-08:00

A few years ago, a frugal living specialist mentioned she made cheap Christmas gifts by stitching pot-holders out of old jeans. To her surprise, hundreds of fans pressed her for step-by-step instructions.

I’ve not yet gone the jean pot-holder route, but I’m still dreaming of a recycled Christmas. I caught the vision a few years ago when my husband and I taught kindergarten Sunday school, a job whose perks included being invited to the annual Sunday school Christmas party. Requirements for attending: two dishes for the potluck and one “white elephant” gift (something humorous you don’t want any more).

One year I retrieved my party “elephant” from my daughter’s wastebasket, where she’d tossed a black plastic spider ring spit out by a grocery store trinkets machine. I tucked it in an old velvet jewelry box.

At party time, who would choose that anonymous gift but our church’s most eligible twenty-something miss, who taught public school music. Her scream of horror was the party highlight. But true to her gracious personality, she actually expressed delight in her creepy gift.

“I’ll wear this when I direct my children’s choir,” she said. “They’ll watch my hands for sure!”

Oh, the variety of gifts in that room. Like a bar of deodorant soap (what I unwrapped). A nine-inch golf bag. Old rock-and-roll record (actually, a secret Elvis fan got it).Of course, the highlight was waiting to see who got the party’s perennial joke gift. Its recipient was supposed to carefully store it during the year, then bring it back cleverly wrapped for the next year’s joke gift exchange. The gift? A crocheted duck filled with melt-in-your-mouth-not-in-your-hand candy, which it dispensed via an unmentionable place.

In contrast, I shake my head at the advertising that bombards us in this season. Who really parks in their driveway a luxury car topped with a bright red ribbon, just for Mom? Who really needs diamond necklaces or electronic gadgets? It makes more sense to me to honor the Gift-giver, and that’s why the check’s already gone to a carefully-chosen ministry.

No, I didn’t stitch gift potholders out of old jeans (though I did sew the annual pajamas for my sister’s grandkids). But I am thinking of how my family might revive the hilarity of the Sunday school teachers’ traveling gag gift. Let me dig around in the garage. There ought to be something. Maybe even a spider ring…..

Awry in the manger

2010-12-06T11:54:00.000-08:00

I knew something was awry in the manger when the sputtering stopped. I was used to motor noises. I had a boy. Among his first toys were matchbox cars and trucks. They ran on, well, sputters. Little girls giggle. Boys sputter, especially when they’re three and haven’t yet learned words like “carburetor” or “horsepower.”

Advent had come, and we'd put out our child-friendly creche of fake moss on wood with plastic figurines. I sat little Zach down with his cloth Christmas book and related its profound plot of single words to the plastic figures. "Mary." Point to plastic mother. "Joseph." Point to plastic father. "Baby Jesus." Point to baby in animal feeding tray. Then on through the cows, shepherds, and wise men. I left him to review the lesson while I did housework.

All mothers of pre-schoolers worry when there is silence. Zach wasn't at the creche any more. All was okay--except the baby Jesus had a visitor. A four-inch motorcyclist had leaned his wheels against the corner by the cow.

"Zach," I said, calling my son to the scene of the personalized manger scene. "Doyou think Baby Jesus might wake up when the motorcycle goes vroom-vroom?” You don’t argue with a sputter specialist. The rider stayed in the no-parking zone.

Another year, when his younger sister Inga reached fashion doll age, the Holy Family had another unscheduled visit. She pushed the Wise Men to the side so that Barbie could pull up in her hot pink plastic Corvette for a social call. As I noticed Inga "walk" the doll over to the manger, I was just grateful Barbie, for a change, was modestly dressed.

We owe to St. Francis of Assisi the heritage of nativity re-creations. His outdoor manger scene helped tell local peasants the story of Christ's birth. But I doubt he imagined a set director like the one that emerged in our home. It was the year one child's personality bent became evident. As I passed by the creche in its traditional spot, I noticed something else awry in the manger. Sputter Boy had become Mr. Neatnik. My emerging perfectionist had lined up all the "people" on the right, and all the "animals" on the left.

I smiled at the sight, grateful he still left Jesus at the center of it all.

In praise of GIRRLL-friends

2010-12-01T18:57:00.000-08:00

I’ve done some thinking about quality friendships as a result of speaking at the bridal shower for a special neighbor girl, uh, young woman. Where did the years go? When her parents moved across the street, she was a toothless baby grinning up at me from her crib.

During my shower talk, I referred to how even after marriage, you need women friends. Your husband can’t possibly meet all your needs. Researchers say the typical woman has 20,000 words a day that need to get out. A man can get through a day with about 7,000 words, and often less (unless he’s a salesman, of course). He's pressed to keep up with her three-times-greater need of conversation. And unmarried women have just as big a need for verbal connection.

That’s where women friends come in—more accurately, the sisterly connection that I’d call (with a southern drawl) girrll-friends.

At the shower I quoted from Pam Farrell’s book Fantastic After Forty (Harvest, 2007) about how we never outgrow (or marry out of) our need for true girlfriends. Afterward, I thought of things I’d add to the list in Farrell’s book, based on the blessing of a girrll-friendship in my life. A girrll-friend:

*Has a “history” with you from years of building a friendship.
*Gives you clothes you can really use when she cleans out her closet.
*Helps you hold a put-off but needed yard sale—and adds her stuff, too.
*Listens to you, helping nudge you toward godly perspective on issues (as in “such-and-such drives me nuts” mellowing to “God’s using that to build my character”).
*Doesn’t keep track of who hosted the last informal lunch together.
*Permanently loans you her house key (1) in case she locks herself out and (2) because she trusts you and knows you probably will use it to sneak a meal in her refrigerator when she comes home from a long trip.
*Anticipates and shares life’s pleasures, like buying a whole watermelon and bringing you half, because neither of you can eat a whole one up before it spoils (and letting you pay for your half because you grew up not wanting to be ‘beholden’ to someone).
*Calls when she spots a bargain you might be interested in.
*Doesn’t force you to agree with her.
*Shares tips for healthier living and encourages you follow through.
*Helps you in humble, practical ways. One of my five-star events was the morning she helped wash my scaly, withered broken-but-healing ankle on the first day out of the hard cast. This act reminded me of Jesus in the Upper room, and I cried over her gentleness).
*Shares good books and videos.
*Prays for your kids like a second mom.
*Comes up with the idea of visiting while running errands together—especially when you’re too busy for time together otherwise.
*Shares your idiosyncrasies, like a fondness for split pea soup.
*Feels free to just drop in, even if it’s for an emergency bathroom stop.
*Clips cartoons that hit home.
*Alerts you to other friends’ needs and sorrows, without gossiping.
*Doesn’t care how messy your house is, but will lend a hand for a quick cleanup.
*Prays for you—for things you’ve mentioned and things she’s just wise about.

I’m sure I could go on about the nurturing connection points of such friendships (and use up some more of my allotted daily words), but that’s a start. I’d love to hear some traits you recognize in girrll-friends!

White wake-up call

2010-11-23T15:35:00.000-08:00

One of the advantages of living in a northern climate is Nature’s winter alarm clock for sleepy children and teens.It’s been a few years, but I still remember the routine. They’d go to bed begging for an extra afghan on top because it was so cold. When morning came, they’d remain cocooned under their multiple layers unless somebody whispered two words and opened the curtains to reveal the truth.

It snowed.

Plus, it happened on a no-school day. Can life get any better? Suddenly, they were awake, eager to rush through breakfast (mean Mom says, “No corn flakes, no snow flakes”) and dig out those snow pants, caps, gloves and mufflers. A white world meant snowballs, snowmen, heaping snow for your own three-foot sledding hill, and making a snow fort. Oh yes, maybe scraping a few sidewalks to be “helpful.”

The only downside was Mom, who kept an eye on the clock and temperature and called them in before they turned into snowmen. Then it was hot chocolate while the wet snow gear tossed in the dryer for another stint in that wonderful white world.

Our first significant snowfall of the winter came yesterday. But those kids who sprang from their blanketed cocoons to revel in its wet whiteness don’t live here any more. They’re grown up and on their own. Now, snow means getting a shovel out to clear their own walks before anything else. Then, if it’s not a work day, maybe a trip to the ski hill.

Yesterday, as I scraped the driveway and sidewalks, I wistfully remember seeing snow through a child’s eyes. I have a picture of my son and daughter all bundled up, faces toward the sky, tongues out, trying to catch a flake on their tongues. Learning each snow flake is unique, they also tried to examine them with a magnifying glass. But their breath melted the fragile flakes before that happened.

The only member of the family not too excited about snow was Aug the cat. He made no secret of disliking having to hop through cold, wet stuff to his favorite guard station under the bird feeder. Who knows the mind of an animal, but snow clearly impaired the smells along the route of his daily territorial policing.

Of the Bible’s 14 references to snow, one of my favorites is in Isaiah 1:18:
“Come now, let us reason together,” says the Lord.
Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.
When we ask God for forgiveness of our sins, a blizzard of mercy pours out from Heaven, covering the dirty stuff in our lives.

And even though most of the world doesn’t experience a “white Christmas,” there’s a lot of symbolism in those Currier-and-Ives snow-time scenes. For isn’t Christmas about the Divine storm of mercy? And of Jesus coming to a sin-polluted world, spreading the soft blanket of pure hope?

Book it!

2010-11-20T13:54:00.000-08:00

When my children were in grade school, they participated in a program called “Book It!” which rewarded reading goals with personal pan pizzas. While they grew up enjoying reading and didn’t really need gastronomical incentives, we were grateful for the investment that local pizza parlors made!

Books are still big in our family’s life, but now that the kids are grown and on their own, Mom is the one who usually has a book in her hands. I’ve had the privilege of contributing to about thirty compilations over the years, including three recently published.

Lucinda Secrest McDowell oversaw the assembling of 30 Ways to Embrace Life: Wise Women Share Their Secrets (Quiet Waters Publications). A broad assembling of women have shared what they learned in change points of their lives. My essay is about simplifying your life.

The editors of Guideposts are publishing a series titled “True Stories of Extraordinary Answers to Prayers,” and the volume Praying Together has my essay on persevering group prayer. I tell about praying for missionary colleagues during the 232 days they were captives of the Viet Cong, and how participating in this prayer season gave me new insight into Psalm 126.

Finally, a smile. When Pam Farrel and Dawn Wilson were writing LOL With God: Devotional Messages of Hope and Humor for Women (Tyndale), they put out a call for funny happenings to which women could relate. I told about my dear friend who, learning I faced a surgical biopsy, phoned and offered to bring my family dinner after my autopsy. Uh, huh. I lived to eat it. The Farrel-Wilson book has a good format for women of the electronic age: a short essay, a reaction point, pertinent scriptures, and then that release of laughter to wrap it up.

Each of these books offers bite-size spiritual nourishment—something like those personal pan pizzas that fed my kids years ago. I include such books in my reading diet in addition to more challenging “reading menu” items. If you see me browsing at a thrift store, you’ll probably find me with my head cocked to the side, reading the titles off the spines of used books in search of a classic spiritual treasure.

And yes, from time to time, I spot one of my books among the discards. It keeps me humble!

Grace places

2010-11-20T12:29:00.000-08:00

Once in my life I did win a national contest. To help publicize a new book on mentoring, a Christian publisher had sponsored a contest seeking essays about “women of influence” in someone’s life. When I first saw the ad, I thought, “Oh, what’s the use.” But I was compelled to tell the story of an unusual woman of influence in my life, a retired nurse in my church who took this rookie newspaper reporter aka young chick under her devout wing. She loved on me and encouraged me in my growing faith through simple potluck meals in her very humble little home.

Just before the contest deadline in spring 2000, I sent off my article about “Grandma G,” my unlikely mentor. A few months later, as I sat writing fillers for my part-time job at the newspaper, I got a call from the sponsoring publisher. Out of hundreds of entries, they decided mine was the winner. My prize would be a weekend trip to Indianapolis to meet the book’s author and be honored at the large arena “Heritage Keepers” women’s event where she would speak. Oh yes, the weekend would include “the works” at a day spa. The trip was for two—for me and my “mentor.” One problem: she had died years ago. Could I take my daughter, then 16, in her stead?

And so Inga and I flew to Indianapolis and spent time with international Christian speaker Carol Kent, an author whose works I had read and enjoyed, and whose book Becoming a Woman of Influence prompted the contest. Carol and her husband were models of graciousness in helping Inga and me feel welcome. But I sensed something amiss as I watched her greet professional friends and share tears and emotional hugs. Finally, as we left, I dared to ask. I learned their son (and only child), a military academy graduate who wanted to honor Christ in his occupation, sat in prison on charges of murdering his wife’s ex-husband, who was suspected of abusing his little daughters.

Carol’s writing and speaking took a major turn after that heart-breaking event, which resulted in her son being sentenced to life without possibility of parole in a Florida prison. From this life-shattering sorrow came three books to uphold and encourage people who face unthinkable circumstances and are struggling to trust God to help them through it. They have included When I Lay My Isaac Down, A New Kind of Normal, and the just-released Between a Rock and a Grace Place. This newest book encourages those who suffer to look for the God-things that emerge from dark places—like faith, mercy, contentment, thanksgiving, favor, joy, freedom, and adventure. Though the book shares their journey with their son’s incarceration, it also includes stories of others who have found themselves on the dark and despairing side of life. It’s lived-through, cried-through, and trusted-through responses to the life circumstances you would have never chosen.

I’d encourage you to read this book. Request it from your public library so that it can be ordered and put on the shelves for others. Share it with those who may seem ready for its liberating message. I’d venture that many of us know someone with a desperate outcome from their choices. Some remote branches of my family tree, grafted in by marriage, include those who suffer greatly because of a family member’s crime. One man is serving his sentence for murder; another has recently been charged with the same crime.

If you know of someone who is incarcerated and don’t know what to do to help that person’s family, consider learning about a non-profit ministry Carol began to help inmates and their families: www.SpeakUp ForHope.org.

When I entered that essay contest a decade ago, I had no idea how it would expand my world. The manicure is long gone and I’d never had another massage since that contest win. But it touched my life in a good way. I pray regularly for Carol and her husband, who have not shrunk back from this sorrow, but embraced it to bring glory to God.

Cereal thriller

2010-11-18T14:11:00.000-08:00

I was dumping a bowlful of heart-healthy oats into my bowl the other morning when the advertising on the box caught my eye. “You could win the ultimate chance to do what you love!” the box promised.

Can life get even more thrilling, suggests that bright yellow box? An innocent visit to the website (to divulge your E-mail) and Somebody Somewhere could be off to the Stuff of Dreams. Like a custom trip anywhere in the US. A VIP trip to the Grand Canyon. Getting up close with a celebrity chef, race car driver, or movie stars.

Okay, true confessions. Contests have lured me. Whenever one offered a free trip to Hawaii, I dropped my name in the box. The black hole box. The-live-volcano-on-Hawaii-must-have-incinerated-my-entry box.

Yes, somebody else does win such contests. Yet my family has had the thrill of some small-potatoes contest. Our daughter won a hula hoop contest at the local grocery store and brought home a large picnic cooler. Our son’s artwork got him a black jacket emblazoned with “Dusty’s In and Out” (a local burger place) that he wore for most of grade school. We visited a motel open house and won a night in the bridal suite another motel of the same chain. There were restrictions, of course, which is why mom, dad and two grade-school kids enjoyed the suite on New Year’s eve in the middle of Eastern Washington’s barren sage brush country. The in-room hot tub was nice since it was snowing and bitter cold outside.

I think God smiles when He drops those surprises in our laps. But as I gulped down my cereal heart-helpers, I got to thinking about what might be my “ultimate experience.” When you get right down to it, there’s only one “ultimate experience” for those who call themselves “Christians.” A fellow named Paul, reduced to sitting in a filthy Roman prison on trumped-up charges, said it best:
“I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” (Philippians 3:8)

Someday, seeing Him in all His glory in Heaven, will be the ultimate experience. I’m convinced of that!

10 Top Things About Having the Stomach Flu

2010-11-13T18:07:00.000-08:00

10. You can break out the retro décor, like that red rubber hot water bottle.
9. It’s not morning sickness—and certainly not if you’re a post-menopausal woman or a man of any age (and if you’re a man, you can finally experience one thing pregnancy does to women).
8. You have new purpose for those fancy fragrant candles you got as generic gifts.
7. You can try new food combinations, like lemon-lime pop, Jello and custard with saltines.
6. You can head for bed long before bedtime.
5. You have a fresh excuse when a telemarketer calls.
4. Taking a long bath and burrowing under several blankets is part of the “cure.”
3. You can lose weight.
2. You find new things to be thankful for, like modern indoor plumbing.
And finally:
1. Even if your head is banging, your stomach rolling, and your lower quarters rumbling, you’re still alive.

The flu visited our home this week. It puts a new spin on “give thanks in all circumstances” (1 Thessalonians 5:19). Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a hankering for some saltines.….

Praying Without the Book

2010-11-04T14:01:00.000-07:00

No time to pray? Maybe this will change your mind.....

Yes, you can pray without “the book”—the personal prayer notebook I’ve talked about the last few blogs.In fact, we must pray when something stirs our heart. God has no office hours. He hears whenever, wherever, however.

If you’ve never read anything by the 17th century monk Brother Lawrence or 20th century literacy advocate Frank Laubach, you should. Both wrote about practicing the presence of God, of being aware of Him and conversing with Him throughout the day. For Brother Lawrence (The Practice of the Presence of God), that could happen even as he went about his duties in the monastery kitchen. Laubach’s The Game with Minutes spoke of minute-by-minute awareness of God. Their books will move and challenge you.

But, for starters, consider these ideas for quick prayer:
*Waiting-time prayers. Instead of shifting your thinking into neutral when you’re on public transportation or in a waiting room, pray for the person sitting next to you or someone whose body language (tears, anxiety) points to a serious need.
*Siren prayers. Instead of saying, “Better move over to the side, or “I wonder where they’re going,” whenever you hear a siren from an emergency vehicle, pray. Ask for physical and emotional strength for the unknowns that police, fire or ambulance workers will face. Pray for the victims in their panic and confusion.
*Driving prayers. Pray for that sloppy or cell-phone chatting driver who doesn’t realize others on the road are being put at risk. Pray for businesses or government officials when you drive past stores or city hall. Thank God for stoplights, highway signs, and even good roads to drive on. Praise Him for the invention of vehicles to move people and products.
*Housework prayers. On laundry day, pray for the person whose clothes you’re folding or ironing. When cooking, praise God for your electric and gas “servants” (stove, refrigerator, microwave, dishwasher, etc.). Thank Him for safe water, farmers, a garden, and stores.
Don’t forget:
*Arrow prayers. When a crisis slams into your life, pray briefly. “Lord, help me.” “Holy God, control my tongue.” “Jesus, be with me through this.” “Help me be loving to this disagreeable person.”
*Breath prayers. A Christian practice that’s millennia old, it combines breathing and short petitions. When you inhale, you say a name or attribute of God. On exhaling, you add the petition. The classic breath prayer: “Jesus, Son of David…have mercy on me, a sinner.” The “A-Z” names section of your Personal Prayer Notebook will help you with more brief breath prayers. S-Shepherd: “Jesus, my Good Shepherd…lead me by the still waters.” “God of Truth…show me the way through this confusion.” “God of Peace…calm my troubled heart.”
****
I just finished reading The Hole in the Gospel by World Vision CEO Richard Stearns. Powerful book! In one of his chapters (“What Are You Going to Do About It?”), he lists more ideas for spontaneous prayer, focused on the hurting world. Some of his suggestions for prayer (from pp. 291-192):
Morning shower—pray for those without clean water.
Packing family lunches—for the billion chronically hungry in today’s world.
Job commute—those unable to support their families or the millions of children in harmful or exploitative labor.
Dropping kids off at school—children barred from an education because of poverty or discrimination.
Taking vitamins—those without adequate health care.
Coming home after work—the homeless.
Night-time tuck-in—the millions of AIDS orphans, many surviving without guardians.

Would you care to share some of your ideas or experiences? Please feel free to add a comment in the space below.

Praying by the Book, Part 6: Jordan Stones

2010-10-30T10:52:00.000-07:00

How do you record family history? Some of us have multiple charts of names with birth and date deaths. My husband has several notebooks of such charts plus old photos from his interest in family roots. I have some family history information that goes back to a great-great-something grandmother from Norway named Ingeborg, which means “hero’s daughter” or “refreshment.” (I named my daughter “Inga.") I also have a note, passed on by my mother, that somewhere in distant family lore a Viking ancestor eloped with a French nobleman’s daughter, probably a princess. Because she disgraced her family by running off with a wild man, her family expunged her name from local records. Whoa.

Let’s get serious. How do your record your spiritual history? In Bible times, rocks were often heaped in a pile to note a historical or sacred occasion. One of the most famous was on the west side of the Jordan River. It marked the end of forty years of wandering in the wilderness, the completion of an entire nation migrating from slavery in Egypt to a new homeland in Canaan. The book of Joshua tells about this monument, established about 1400 B.C. As the Israelites crossed over the Jordan River—its waters miraculously held back--Joshua relayed God’s command to have a leader from each of the twelve tribes choose a large riverbed stone. These they were to heap at Gilgal, just east of Jericho, as a monument for future generations to remember both miracles of water-crossing: the Red Sea and the Jordan (see Joshua 4).

The “Jordan Stones,” the final section of your Personal Prayer Notebook, is an ongoing list recounting what might be called the “God-times” in your life. There may be happenings prior to your faith decision where, looking back, you realize except for the protective hand of God you wouldn’t be where you are now. Perhaps there was serious health issue, a car wreck or a bad relationship you left. Your decision to follow Christ would be one “Jordan rock.” Maybe there was a financial provision that had to be a miracle. Births of children are definite “God-times”!

Take some time in compiling your “Jordan rocks.” Think through stages of your life (childhood, teens, early adulthood, marriage, children, career, and so on). Identify what might be the fingerprints of God on your life. Write them down as God-moments. For example, next to 1978, the year I turned 31 and both my parents died, I wrote: “God in the darkness of grief: ‘I will never leave you not forsake you.”

The use of this list? As you look through it, to praise God for His faithfulness to you. This is a time when it’s okay to dwell on the past, when you see it through the lens of how God is moving you forward in His purposes for your life—and for eternity. It’s an open-ended list because—as that old saying goes—God is not finished with you yet. The list might also be a tool to share your faith with others.

In the spirit of the Jordan monument, you remember… “so that all the peoples of the earth might know that the hand of the LORD is powerful and so that you might always fear the LORD your God” (Joshua 4:24).

Next week: Praying without the book

Praying by the Book, Part 5: A-Z praises

2010-10-24T16:50:00.000-07:00

Ever thought how you’d like someone to describe you to another person? Think beyond age, height, body build, hair and eye color. If there was a hidden microphone and you were listening in, would you hope to hear positive, kind things said about you?

Imagine that you didn’t have a legal name, but you were called by some sort of attribute. Hopefully it would be positive! One of my dad’s pet names for me in childhood (and I hated it) was “Prune Juice.” I don’t know if that had something to do with a physical issue or a facial expression!

Now think of how you use God’s name when you talk with Him. Are you in a rut on the names you use? Do you ever dwell on Who He really is? His attributes? His great works? His character?
The “A-Z Praises” section of your personal prayer notebook is something you build, name by name, attribute by attribute, as you discover new ways to describe and honor God. Psalm 105:3 says, “Glory in his holy Name.” We do that when we speak back God’s Names to Him in praise and adoration. It also expands our vision of God’s infinite greatness and wisdom.

Designate separate pages for letters of the alphabet, perhaps combining P-Q, V-W-X, and Y-Z. As you become aware of a special name of God, write it down. Include a reference if you wish.

The A-Z Praises section will help you avoid the trap of letting your prayer notebook become a list-reading time. Pondering the meanings and promises of God’s names will help you worship in wonder and love at all God is. An example: “God is LIGHT.” Beside that word in my prayer notebook I have written three verses that I came across in my scripture reading times.
Isaiah 9:6: “On those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned.”
John 1:3-9: several verses that speak of Jesus as “the Light.”
John 8:12: Jesus’ own statement, “I am the Light of the World.”
Prayer: “Light of the World, I think of the problems, the dark places, that shadow the things I pray about. There is the darkness of bad choices. The darkness of living apart from You. The darkness of losing hope. Thank you, God of Light, that Your light of truth will never go out. I am so grateful that light dispels the darkness. Thank you for the physical light that comes with each sunrise, a promise of your infinite love and care. Thank you for bright hope. I praise you, Light of the World. Amen.”

There are 26 letters in the English alphabet, and 30 to 31 days in a typical month. As you build your “names” list, using a different letter per day, your understanding and love of God will grow.
If you need some starters, this website has hundreds of names: http://www.characterbuildingforfamilies.com/names.html
I also commend this list from The Navigators: http://www.navigators.org/us/resources/items/Thirty%20Days%20of%20Praying%20the%20Names%20and%20Attributes%20of%20God
One of several books I’ve read and appreciated on this topic:
Praying the Names of God by Ann Spangler

Next week’s blog: Prayers from your “Jordan Stones”

Praying by the Book, part 4: Praying for adult family members

2010-10-17T13:43:00.000-07:00

When my friend’s daughter was in the foot-stompin’ twos, an important attitude change took place. That’s when her daughter quit saying “Mommy help?” and declared with a pouty voice, “Do SELF!” That stubborn streak of independence follows us way into adulthood. Rather than ask for prayer, we insist, “Do SELF! Me do it!”

That’s not quite like the Bible says to do it. Life is hard, seek support! Or, as the apostle Paul put it: “Be alert and always keep on praying for all the saints” (Eph. 6:18). “In everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God” (Phil. 4:6). “Devote yourselves to prayer, being watchful and thankful. And pray for us, too….” (Col. 4:2).

In reading through Paul's letters, I'm amazed by how he wasn’t shy about asking people to pray for him. Even though people might hear his letters read aloud months after he wrote them, he sought prayer—holy co-involvement—in his life and ministry. He would have loved the immediacy of E-mail to get the word out!

The other thing I noticed about Paul’s letters is how he prayed BIG for others. His letters to the churches are marked by bold requests for their growth in spiritual character. Check them out: Ephesians 1:16-19. Ephesians 3:16-19, Phil. 1:9-11, Col. 1:9-14, Philemon 4-7, 2 Thess. 1:11-12.

Among contemporary authors, I appreciate how Stormie Omartian has compiled scripture for bold, character prayers for loved ones. I’ve given copies of her “Power of a…” series as gifts.

If you want a simpler approach to praying for the adults in your life (parent, sibling, spouse), here are the character-based petitions that I drew out of one of my favorite prayers of Paul, from the first chapter of Colossians.Incorporate them into your Sunday-through-Saturday sections by writing them on the back side of the tab page for that day’s prayer section.

SUNDAY: To follow God’s will, for spiritual wisdom and understanding. Scripture: “Asking God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all spiritual wisdom and understanding” (Col. 1:9).
MONDAY: To live worthy of God and to bear spiritual fruit. Scripture: “to live a live worthy of the Lord and…[to]please him in every way, bearing fruit in every good work” (v. 10).
TUESDAY: To continue to grow spiritually and to love the Bible. Scripture: “growing in the knowledge of God” (v. 10b).
WEDNESDAY: To experience God’s strength for spiritual, emotional and physical challenges. Scripture: “being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might” (v. 11a).
THURSDAY: For endurance and patience in life’s hard places. Scripture: “so that you may have great endurance and patience” (v. 11b).
FRIDAY: To have gratitude for God’s gifts. Scripture: “joyfully giving thanks for the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the kingdom of light” (v. 12).
SATURDAY: To love God wholeheartedly. Scripture: “For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins” (vv. 13-14).

Are the adults for whom you pray not walking with God? All the more reason to pray for them. They may have few, if any, believers in their support network. Offer to pray for needs they express to you. And while you also pray for them to know God, pray that they’ll desire the hope and relationships expressed in Paul’s Colossians 1 prayer.

Right now, they may be saying, “Do SELF!” But they’ll find out it doesn’t really work out. We have a Savior who is waiting and watching, and who yearns to help them.

Next blog post: Alphabet praises

Praying by the book, Part 3: Special prayers for your children

2010-10-11T06:23:00.000-07:00

Central Washington, where I live, is a high desert area with inspiring mountain views, irrigated and fruited valleys, and a moderate climate that gives us four seasons without too many extremes. We don’t have hurricanes (though sometimes a wild wind storm), tornadoes (just dust devils in the wheat fields), blizzards (though a few significant snowfalls), or major earthquakes.

But we do have fires. Whether lightning- or man-caused, they quickly churn through dry forest or brush lands toward homes and towns. Sometimes smoke settles on our valley like a dirty shroud, hard on those of us with asthma and other breathing issues. I remember a couple summers when our urban area of about 40,000 was put on notice for possible evacuation because the fires were rampaging our way. Thankfully, it never happened for us.

As a result, those who live in rural areas prone to wildfires have learned what not to do, like not planting trees near a home where they’ll just act like torches. Instead, they create firebreaks with cleared, bare land, often ringing homes with gravel.

This whole scary fire scene is a picture of the need to pray for our children. They’re out there in a fierce world where sudden gusts of opposition or trouble can put them at risk. Spiritual battles aren’t fought well with the garden hose of wimpy prayers on the order of “Bless Billy” or “Be with Jane.”

For years, I prayed with my kids at bedtime and privately when there were crises, like a health issue or a difficulty at school. But I wasn’t consistent in prayers for the “big picture” of their lives. When they got to high school, I realized that needed to change. Every time they entered that big, gray, almost windowless building, they were in a battlefield of standing for God in a culture that for the most part ignored or dishonored God in word, deed, and purpose.

That’s when I decided I would pray for character issues for my children on a daily basis, in addition to whatever immediate need they faced. I came up with seven big areas on which to focus their prayer, one per day of the week. These I wrote on the back of each divider page of my personal prayer notebook, as follows:

Sunday: growing faith, place of ministry.
Monday: to delight in God’s Word.
Tuesday: purity, future mate.
Wednesday: health and safety.
Thursday: careers, values
Friday: positive attitude, gratitude
Saturday: true, godly friends.

My son and daughter are now in their late twenties. They upheld purity and married Christians. They’re active in their churches. They survived hundreds of miles driving to and from a college four hours away. They prepared well for their careers. They value simple things, like growing a garden or enjoying a community park. They express gratitude to their parents and others. They’re helpful. They have chosen good friends. They are good friends.

As I write this, I thank God for His care as they navigated those turbulent teen years. Many of their peers got too close to the fires of bad choices and continue, as young adults, to grieve their parents.

I still pray for them daily, revising those big areas for the needs I’m aware of in their lives. For example, instead of “future mate,” I’m praying for the mate they now have.

A special note to those who have no children or may not be married: carry the prayer burden for the children or a relative or special friend. God will honor that. Just as dozens of fire fighters stave off destruction in a real fire, there’s lots of room for those who intercede for the next generation.

PRAYING BY THE BOOK—Setting up a prayer notebook, continued

2010-10-07T09:24:00.000-07:00

In my Oct. 3 blog post about setting up a prayer notebook, I summarized the nuts-and-bolts of dividing prayer requests among days of the week, including missionaries or Christian workers you know. I promised to detail later more about praying for your children and for adult family members.

I forgot something! As you spread out your heart concerns among days of the week, consider adding some other prayer areas. Mark them on the back of each day's divider tab. Here are ones in my notebook:

Sunday: specific needs of my church. For example, mine had two extended pastor searches. Now, our church is being challenged to participate more in serving the local and global poor.
Monday: my own work and ministry. Even though praying happens in front of my computer when I really struggle with a piece, I also pray about the big picture of my writing/speaking ministry.
Tuesday: the 10/40 window (the greatest concentration of Islam between these latitudes on the globe) and a child in Haiti we sponsor in a compassion ministry.
Wednesday: government. This includes local and national leaders. How much we need to do this! Check this web site, sponsored by a non-profit group, for some specifics: www.presidentialprayerteam.com
Thursday: neighbors. While praying, I imagine walking around my block and stopping to pray for each household. Addictions, broken marriages, spiritual apathy—there’s lots to pray about.
Friday: the spiritually troubled, including specific prisoners I know of, others with addictions, and those family members and friends who don’t see their need of Christ.
Saturday: long-term special needs. My list includes friends and relatives with rebellious children and others struggling to “do life” in their Christian journey. Most are not aware that I am praying for them.

Next post: praying for your children. Is this helping you? Please forward the blog link to others: http://jeannezornes.blogspot.com

Praying by the book, Part 2: Setting up a Prayer Notebook

2010-10-03T13:55:00.000-07:00

Ready to be more proactive in your prayer life? In this blog I’ll explain, as promised in last week’s blog, how to set up a personal prayer notebook.
You’ll need:
*A small ringed notebook and at least about 30 sheets of filler paper. I prefer a six-ring notebook that measures about 4 ½ by 7 inches, small enough to fit in the pocket of my Bible cover. Mine was second-hand; my local drug-etc. store sells them for $5 in the stationery aisle. For some reason, I haven’t found them in office supply stores in my town.
*Small photos of people you pray for regularly, such as missionaries
*Heavier paper, like card stock, to make dividers
*A paper punch
*Stick-on colored tab dividers. I cut them in half, which means several people could share one package for the 10 sections I suggest. Instead of the heavier plastic dividers, you could use self-adhesive blank address labels (the 1x3” size), folded over to make a tap on the outside of the paper.
*Sticky notes (like Post-it ®)
*Paste
*Scissors
To assemble the notebook:
1. Using the heavier paper, cut ten dividers the size of your filler paper.
2. With your filler paper as a guide, punch ring holes.
3. Prepare divider tabs: one for each day of the week plus one labeled “A-Z” and another “Jordan Stones.”
4. Attach tabs to divider pages. Your first divider will have no tab (it’s for daily prayer reminders). The second one will start with “Sunday.” Your last two dividers will be “A-Z” and “Jordan Stones.” [These last two involve praise reminders.]
5. Add filler paper behind each tabbed section.
6. Consider putting an address label on the front inside cover of the notebook, just in case if gets lost.
7. Place a sticky note on the front blank tab and write on it the names of those in difficult situations that you decide you will pray for daily. This may be people with serious or terminal diseases, the grieving, and those in troubled marriages. When someone I know loses a spouse or loved one, I tell them that I will commit to praying for them daily in the first year of being alone. I mark after their name the date of their loved one’s death, so I know when the year is up. At that time I write them a note of care.
8. Behind each divider for a day of the week, use separate pages for people you will focus prayers on. For example, on Sunday, I pray for my church and for a pastor. I divide missionaries and Christian workers among other days of the week. Each person or family has its own “page” with a photo, contact information, birthdays, and a sticky note for current prayer needs. (The sticky note enables me to make changes without re-doing the whole page.)

NEXT BLOG: Praying for children

Praying by the Book, Part 1--Persistent in Prayer

2010-09-27T19:04:00.000-07:00

My husband had brought home a “fixer” bike that came with a four-number combination lock and security chain tightly looped through it. Enter his assistant, the Great Bike Chain Sleuth, aka me. I methodically went through all possible combinations of the six-number reels. You math whizzes, that’s six to the fourth power, or 1,296 possibilities. Actually, I did that three times. Somehow, I didn’t have the winning combination exactly lined up, and the chain stayed shut. Only on the third try—my “entertainment” as a passenger on a long road trip- did it fall apart at 6214.

I looked up, rested my bruised thumbs, and said, “Thank you!”

Diligence. Perseverance. We need them in life’s daily tasks. We also need them in our spiritual lives, particularly in the calling to pray.

I’d like to suggest that a little hand-size notebook that costs about five dollars (or less if you find a used one) may help you be more consistent and fervent in prayer. I started using a home-made “personal prayer notebook” sometime in the Eighties—yes, that era of fluffy hair, huge shoulder pads, and ankle-length skirts. Styles may change, but the need of purposed prayer doesn’t.

Even with the availability of today’s electronic personal calendar and reminder devices, there’s still nothing like the paper version.

Some of you may remember how the personal planner craze of a couple decades ago popularized notebooks that got as big as a book. Their binder rings captured everything from a comprehensive daily schedule to shopping lists, family sizes, wish lists, personal goals (like “get organized”), financial records, addresses and maybe a personal journal. Some included a calculator and ruler. As I browsed office supply stores, I thought a few seemed huge enough for the agenda for the National Security Council of the United Nations!

I never went for the donkey-cart size. I made my own with a palm-size six-ring notebook. Just the basics, ma’am, to survive life with a busy family, which meant a calendar, to-do list, and a place for coupons. I also had one back section for “prayer requests,” all lined up with columns for “date asked, date answered.” But after a few years, that approach to remembering who and what to pray for just wasn’t working for me.

It seemed, too, that my prayer life was dropping to the level of a snack machine. You know the type: insert money, pull a lever, enjoy-empty-calories-that-plunk-into-slot. Plus, to be honest, my lists were getting so long. I was rushing through just to “finish the list,” not genuinely speaking to God about the people and things that I cared about.

For me, the solution came in separating it from the other “organizing” stuff of life. I started another small six-ring notebook, just big enough to fit in the pocket of my Bible cover. With stick-on labels, I divided it into daily sections, Sunday through Saturday, assigning prayer commitments to certain days. In the next few blogs I’ll explain just how it’s set up.

In recent years I’ve been sharing the specifics of this “personal prayer notebook” concept when I speak at women’s weekend events. Many find it helpful and buy up all the little notebooks I’ve created for them. My handouts disappear. What works for me seems to be what other women want, too.

Okay, I’m old-fashioned, still using paper. But it never fails me. It never needs recharging. And I don’t wear out my thumb knuckles looking for elusive information.

Over the next few blogs I’ll cover:
*Setting up a notebook
*Special prayers for your children
*Special prayers for adult family members
*A-Z praises
*Jordan Stones (got you curious on that?)
I’ll try to post them every Monday. Hope after visiting, you’ll forward the link to others.

(Did I say “link”—as in chain?)

DEVO your Bible

2010-09-10T12:46:00.000-07:00

You’ve probably heard this saying about Bible reading: “A chapter a day keeps the devil away.”

Well, if you tried that and got stuck in the Old Testament genealogies with all their “begats,” you know that’s not true. Not that you can’t find some fascinating truths in those lists! One of my former Bible school profs, Bruce Wilkinson, became famous for a book on the “begat” that produced “Jabez,” a poor fellow whose name means “pain.”

But if you’re trying to read the Bible and it sometimes seems like you’re checking off a list of what you ought to do, but it’s not getting through to you, take heart.

It was in Bruce Wilkinson’s class on Bible study methods long ago (1977, if you really want to know) that I did a paper advocating a devotional methodology with the acrostic DEVO (the first four letters of “devotions,” if you didn’t notice). I still have the paper I did on it. (Yes, he gave me an A+.) Since then, I’ve had articles based on DEVO published in about a dozen magazines.

Though I didn’t know it then (hey, I’m slow), the Bible reading approach that worked for me is much like that from ancient church history, called Lectio Divina (“divine reading”). Basically, that involves reading a passage aloud several times and thinking it through (lectio), reflecting on the text (meditatio), praying a response back to God (oratio), and resting in God’s presence (contemplatio).

Here’s the DEVO approach—preceded by prayer that God will open your heart to understand:
DELIGHT in it. The passage you choose from scripture need not be long. Savor it as you read it, as you might stretch out a bowl of your favorite ice cream with tiny spoonfuls. The famed preacher Charles Spurgeon once remarked, “I would rather lay my soul asoak in half a dozen verses [of the Bible] all day than rinse my hand in several chapters.” You might feel “fed” in a chapter, or a paragraph or even a verse or two.

ENGRAVE it. Long ago before computers there were clay tablets in which scribes twisted sticks to make crude letters. Zoom into 21st century with pens and pencils and highlighters. Interact with something you write down. You may choose to write insights in a journal or write right in your Bible. As a kid, influenced by grade school rules that said NO WRITING IN TEXTBOOKS, I had the cleanest Bible around. Then my life intersected with a godly older woman who personalized her Bible by starring verses, writing dates by them, circling key words, drawing lines between similar words or passages, adding notes from sermons….you get the idea. She wasn’t checking off a reading schedule. She was interacting with the passage.

VERSE it. Go back and choose a key verse of that day’s passage. Decide how it spoke to you. Did it encourage you? Chastise you? Remind you of something to do? Do you need to put it in a bank? (The memory bank, that is.) Keep a supply of 3x5 cards in the back of your Bible to write out those special-to-you verses. Start reading them repeatedly until they become part of your memory.

OBEY it. Close your Bible-reading time with prayer. If the passage prompted a prayer for yourself regarding an area of your life which hasn’t been on board with God, confess it, and ask for help to change. If it reminded you of another person’s need, pray about that. The other morning I was in Isaiah 40. Oh my! That chapter is PACKED with good things. When I read it, it’s like the days we have storms blowing through. There’s sunlight, and then storm, then the sun peeks through again. Here, there’s judgment and hope, hardness and tenderness. I stopped at verse 11:
He tends his flock like a shepherd, He gathers the lambs in his arms and carries them close to his heart; he gently leads those that have young.

A lot of things came to mind—for one, how that passage inspired a magnificent solo in Handel’s Messiah. I thought of the Shepherd Psalm (Psalm 23) and Jesus’ declaration that HE is the good shepherd (John 10). One of my read-again-and-again Christian books is Phillip Keller’s A Shepherd Looks at Psalm 23. As a shepherd he brought wonderful insights into each verse.
But mostly I thought of a mom with three college-age kids, left alone after a divorce. I closed my eyes and pictured Jesus picking her up in her trials and sadness, and then scooping up her lambs (yes, as teens/young adults they’re still “lambs”) in one big, comforting hug. I prayed that she would know how close to His heart she really is.

Does that make sense for you? Does it help you? I’ve often shared DEVO when speaking at women’s retreats, where my feedback is always positive. Feel free to give me some feedback, too. Below these blogs there’s always a place to do so.

P.S. I’ve noticed some “followers” from Malaysia. Welcome! At Wheaton Graduate School about 1980 I had a roommate from Malaysia. I still have the “Star of David” pin she bought for me on a Holy Land tour and I’ve wondered through the years what she is doing. I believe her name was Jeanette.

Some burning questions

2010-09-10T11:22:00.000-07:00

Hi! I usually aim for something light and hopeful in this column, but this subject weighed on my heart even before the recent news about a Florida church's controversial plan to burn the holy book of another religion. For comment on that, I commend a column by Christian author and pastor James Watkins: http://www.jameswatkins.com/toptentopten.htm#5.
Now, my thoughts....

The magazine’s cover photo is compelling: a woman in Laos cradling her charred Bible. The accompanying story in the September 2010 Voice of the Martyrs explained how villagers who opposed her faith ransacked her home for Christian materials and burned them.

This is not a feel-good magazine. It’s full of reports of people paying dearly for being Christians. This woman is from the Khmu tribe, considered the original inhabitants of Laos but called by other Laotians the khu, a condescending term that means “slave.”

Even though the world looks down on slaves, the Bible exalts slavery as symbolic of living for Christ. The Greek word doulos, which means “slave,” is found more than a hundred times in the most authoritative Greek manuscripts, many times referring to Christians.

Hold on with me. This will get a little technical, but you’ll be glad you did. Translation is a complicated science. Even within language families, the variations and rules are diverse. For example, we might look at the sky and say, “See the bird.” But go a few more layers. What is its specie? How is it flying? Is it male or female and in a certain cycle of life? Would you need the specific word, for example, that names a male red-winged blackbird that soars in mid-sky but is now chirping in the cattails for a female to mate with? Some languages can get that picky.

While serving with another mission group years ago, I remember hearing of a well-meaning but naive elderly woman who wanted to help Bible translation efforts among tribal groups. She said if they’d just send her the dictionary for a language, she’d sit down and translate from her beloved English-language Bible. It just doesn’t work that way. Languages have different grammar rules and layers of words for concepts.

That’s especially true in translating New Testament Greek into English. The King James Version, for example, uses only one word, “servant,” for several very different Greek words, depriving us of a deeper understanding of the text. Some words it translates “servant”:
*diakonos--one who serves or ministers (like the helpers who drew water in John 2’s water-to-wine miracle).
*therapon—derived from therapeuo (“to serve, to heal”—origin of our word “therapy”) and considered a term of dignity and freedom, used only once of Moses, faithful as a servant of God (Hebrew 3:5).
*huperetes—an “under-rower, underling” (like the high priest’s guards in Mark 14).
*oiketes—a “house-servant” (“a servant can’t serve two masters”--Luke 16:13).
*doulos—one who serves under bondage, a slave. Doulos comes from the verb deo, which means “to bind, be in bounds, knit, tie or wind,” and used of those bought for a price. The closest words in English are “slave,” “bondman,” or “bondservant,” all used in newer translations. The First Century doulos held a lowly position, serving completely at the will of the master. Its frequent use in the New Testament reflects how slaves comprised half the population of the Roman world.
The Voice of the Martyrs article suggested that the first translators of the New Testament (from Greek to Latin) toned down the shocking term “slave” for the more socially acceptable “servant." Even today, servant is a more pleasant term, making us think of Fifi the laundress, Helen the cook, or Jeeves the chauffeur.

But doulos-servanthood is more intense, costly, even darker, a difference you won’t catch unless you read a Greek New Testament or do a word study. It’s also the role believers assume in love for Christ, who paid the price for them on Calvary. In the Upper Room before His crucifixion, Jesus told the disciples to expect persecution, as no servant (doulos, or slave) is greater than his Master (John 15:20). In many of his letters, the apostle Paul referred to himself as “Paul, a doulos of Christ Jesus.”

For the Khmus, persecution is losing homes, being beaten, having Bibles burned. Asked how they felt about that, they said their persecution is just what Jesus said would happen in the Bible, and their suffering proves He is God.

What more can I say, except ask if my faith hears the call to be a doulos for Christ?

Vaporized

2010-09-01T15:12:00.000-07:00

It happened here in my kitchen--a reminder that life is brief.

A few Saturday mornings ago, I opened my E-mail and discovered a writing friend from long ago was coming through the middle of the state. Could they swing by, about noon that day, so she could see me? We’d met at the Mount Hermon Christian Writers conference the year she was honored as its outstanding new writer. She has several books behind her now plus speaking here and abroad.

Noon…that calls for lunch. I decided chef’s salad would be a good choice, especially since we were having a mini-yard sale. I put four eggs on to boil and set the timer for twenty minutes, taking it with me to my writing corner.

About fifteen minutes later I smelled something bad and followed my hunch to the kitchen. While the eggs were happily rolling in boiling water, the red-hot burner had melted a hole in a plastic container of Stevia, a natural sugar substitute, sitting about six inches away. Stevia had poured out of a half-inch hole and headed right to the burner.

While I pulled away the mess with a damp cloth, I realized I was feeling very, very sick. After opening windows and turning on fans, I went outside for fresh air. Soon, my husband came in and discovered my mess and me sick. He called the Poison Control Center and they researched Stevia. It’s a plant sugar, so shouldn’t be toxic. But I took to bed by an open window like a lady of old on her fainting couch.

I was still pretty puny by the time my friend and her husband arrived. They’d gotten plenty of fresh air en route…on his motorcycle. As they pulled off chaps and got alerted to my “incident” (which really seemed insignificant...burnt sugar?) she graciously came in the kitchen and helped me pull together a salad. By then the odors had dissipated.

Later, I mentioned my feeling so silly about my cooking incident to my daughter…who mentioned it to her husband…who asked, “Was it odors from the melted plastic?” That seemed far-fetched until I did a little search on the ‘net and came across dire warnings about a toxic substance called dioxin released by burning plastic. So maybe there was a real reason I got so sick….

But the bigger perspective? I have it above my sink, just an arm’s length away from the stove, There I hung some calligraphy done years ago for me by the husband of my girlhood Camp Fire leader. (We’re talking ancient history.) Using a translation he especially appreciated, he chose an old-style alphabet for this from Psalm 90: “Our lives are over in a breath; Teach us to count how few days we have and so grain wisdom of heart. Let us wake in the morning filled with Your love and sing and be happy all our days.”

Tonight I speak to convicted drunk drivers, something I do every month as part of my “giving back” after surviving being hit by a drinking driver in 1997. That night, my life could have been over in a breath. I also realize how few days we have in eternity’s perspective. None of us can presume to live to old age. The time to love God and others is now.

How can I put a sweet ending on this? Well, it did involve “sugar,” or at least a sugar substitute! And trust me, it no longer sits on the stove where it was so handy to add to a cup of java. One time of being a dizzy graying brunette is enough. And by the way, my friend’s signature book and speaking topic is rising above your fears. Is that a funny coincidence, or what!

Hen-ce forth and never more

2010-08-12T09:44:00.000-07:00

Sunday morning, en route to a bran muffin, I heard clucking outside the kitchen window and was shocked to see a reddish brown chicken strutting around the fenced back yard.

We do not live in the country. We’re surrounded by houses, except for a vacant lot behind us where a tree removal service dumps wood to cure and later sell for firewood.

Our cat was hugging the back door, desperate to get in and afraid of this beast that outweighed and could outpeck him.

I thought of that ancient Chinese proverb: “You cannot prevent the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can prevent them from building nests in your hair.” In our case, we couldn’t prevent a chicken from strutting through the open gate to our back yard—or so I assumed, because our fence is five feet tall. I couldn’t imagine this plump lump flying any higher than a foot.

I put some wild bird seed in a cup, make sure it had water, and realized that other than visiting some nearby urban farms, there wasn’t much I could do until Monday. Urban Farm #1 had a burro and goats, but no chickens. Urban Farm #2 boasted a horse, goats and chickens, but not reddish brown ones.

On Monday I entered an ad in Craigslist, and immediately got scam Emails inviting me to amazing business opportunities (I forgot to disable the Email reply feature). I sent another ad with photo to our local newspaper, but it wouldn’t run until Tuesday. Then I called the Humane Society with a “found animal” report. After causing the officer to laugh hysterically, I got the report filed.

In the meantime, Henny Penny (as I was now calling the chicken) was wearing trails into our back yard as it paced back and forth. And our cat was the one jumping the fence as soon as we let it out—to get as far away as possible from this intruder on his territory.

On Tuesday morning, as I hung up laundry, Henny Penny kept coming near me. Finally (as an experienced petter of cats) I leaned over and stroked its back. Immediately it squatted as though wanting more. I realized this had to be a pet—but whose?

My husband took a call from a man whose friend had told him about the ad. He asked if he could have the hen, since he lost four chickens to a dog attack. When he arrived, we realized he lived just around the corner, beyond the tangle of blackberry bushes and underbrush. This hen had survived the massacre of its family and managed to get over the fence to our yard.

Lured by chicken mash, Henny Penny (real name “Kibbles,” because it likes dog food) was grabbed and taken home.

Well, the sky didn’t fall while Henny Penny paced our back yard, and I’m glad the story had a happy ending. I never thought I’d foster-care a chicken, but I was reminded of the observation of Proverbs 12:10: “A righteous man cares for the needs of his animal.” It makes me think of Eden and the perfect relationship and sweet companionship that Adam and Eve had with all of God’s creation.

Will there be animals in Heaven? As scripture speaks of the new heavens and the new earth, I ask why not? If they were in His original, perfect plan, why not again? By the way, Henny Penny didn’t leave an egg—or at least I didn’t find one in places where it nested. But who knows, next spring, when I’m cleaning out winter yard debris….

Defense mode

2010-08-01T17:24:00.000-07:00

One piece of enduring advice from ancient King Solomon is to go on fox-watch. I don’t mean watching Fox News, nor the whole fox-and-hound thing like British monarchs. Instead, we’re warned, “Catch for us the foxes, the little foxes, that ruin the vineyard, our vineyards that are in bloom” (Song of Solomon 2:15).

For a long time, I thought that verse a bit strange. Then I learned it comes from the realities of farming grapes. In spring, fox and jackals sneak into the vineyards to burrow under the roots of the grapes, undermining the plant root system.

The context is Solomon’s love poem for this little maiden who has the king loopy-in-love with her. The common interpretation is this: don’t let anything undermine your marriage. Like, is the foot of the bed a magnet for his dirty laundry? Trap the complaint fox! Does she have enough shoes to open a store? Trap the gripe fox!

May I be so bold as to offer an alternative to the fox analogy? Drum roll: Bait the ants.

Unwelcomed, a gazillion sugar ants have moved in to taunt us. At first there were just a few, like the 12-man search party Moses sent to check out Canaan. Surely, like the Israelite spies, our ants saw giants (people) roaming around the kitchen. But this was a land of milk and honey. Or at least honey. Dried fruits in bags of trail mix. Friskies left in the cat’s dish. And breakfast cereal, which, even though supposedly oat-healthy, in small print admits to sugar in the manufacturing process. Cheers.

As soon as a few hundred more invaded, I battened down the hatches. Anything with a remote hint of sugar went in a canning jar. Plastic pour bins containing cereal got an extra seal with plastic wrap.

The kitchen started looking like a mine field with those little black disk ant baits. We loaded up on ant antidotes. My husband sprayed, powdered, and spread nuggets of disgusting stuff touted to send ants back to Ant-arctica. (Cue card: laugh.)

Every morning, we thumbed dozens of ants to smudged oblivion on the kitchen counters. The dried fruit armored against attack in canning jars seemed to be holding defense….until the morning my husband decided to go for a handful of his favorite trail mix.

Let’s just say as many ants as people at Chelsea’s wedding reception were having a gala among the nuts and dried fruits. I checked the lid. It was a one-inch turn from “tight.” Advance spies apparently figured out that they could crawl along the screw lines of the jar and enter the forbidden territory. Overnight, they were in full attack.

Well, I just dumped half a canning jar of trail mix into the garbage. It wasn’t worth trying to pick the ants out, no matter how much that stuff costs.
There’s got to be a lesson here, right? I think I found it in some notes I wrote in my Bible next to Solomon’s little-foxes verse. The great Bible teacher H.A. Ironside identified some spiritual foxes as:
*Carelessness
*Neglect of the Bible
*Neglect of prayer
*Neglect of fellowship with people of God
*Vanity, pride, envy, evil thinking, impurity
Each time we engage in one of those negative activities, it may seem a little thing. But like the ants in my kitchen, they’ll multiply until they make life miserable—for you and the ones you love.The defense mode? Each one’s opposite.

So, look to the ant (another Solomon saying, Proverbs 6:6). Better yet, I say, look forward to winter when they fade away for a long winter’s nap!

For crying in the sink!

2010-07-17T10:34:00.000-07:00

My late father never used foul language, but he did have a few expressions of frustrations. One was “Horse feathers!” and the other was “For crying in the sink!”

Well, Dad, the other day I was crying in the sink. Copious tears. And I hadn’t broken a dish or cooked a wretched dinner.
My husband had just sold a bike he fixed up, and in the door along with payment came two large onions. A tip from the buyer? Sometimes, I just don’t ask. Because I don’t use onions much in cooking, I chop them up and freeze them in egg-size portions to use as needed.

As so, weep, bawl, buckets of face-dribblers, I was rendering those big white tear-jerkers to freezable portions.

If you really care to know, we cry when chopping onions because they produce the chemical irritant known as syn-propanethial-S-oxide, which stimulates the eyes' lachrymal glands so they release tears.( For you avid chemists, learn more at: http://www.loc.gov/rr/scitech/mysteries/onion.html.)

I’d been thinking about crying lately, anyway, as I mull over writing something on the blessing of tears. Revelation 21:4 has lodged in my heart in recent weeks: “He will wipe every tear from their eyes.” The scene is Heaven. No more death, mourning, crying or pain, “for the old order of things has passed away.”

My prayer notebook has a few tear splotches on it. I’m going to more funerals where tears leak unashamedly. Some early mornings when I rise to hear the birds and listen to God, tears come. I think of the perfect place, the “abode” (the accurate meaning of the Greek mone in John 14:6, not “mansions”) that God is planning.

I dug a little deeper into the verse and looked up the Greek word we translate as "wipe away," exaleipho. It comes from two words, "out" and "to anoint," and means "to wipe out or away." This is the picture it provides me: Yahweh, the Sovereign of all time and place, comes to me. With the fingers that created a universe, He cups my face and thumbs away the earth-stains of tears. He whispers, “No more tears. Come to My joy and peace.” Every tear, gone.

And once the vision blurred by pained tears is cleared, I will stand amazed at what I never knew.

In the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis, there’s a conversation that always made me think of arriving in Heaven. Lewis had the talking unicorn in The Last Battle declare, “I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now.”

For crying in the sink? Not at all. For crying for joy? Maybe.

And here’s my trivia question: Will there be onions in Heaven?

Birthday Babe

2010-07-06T10:02:00.000-07:00

Hear ye, hear ye. I declare the truth, that I am turning 63 this week.

Sixty three!

In childhood you never consider yourself getting old, gray, and wrinkled. Or having a droopy anatomy (including wobbly upper arms--cluck, cluck). Enjoying your daily prunes. Having to say, “Just a minute until I get my glasses on.” Realizing you’re saying “huh?” a lot more than you used to. (My hearing loss began when my kids participated in puberty’s art of mumbling.)

Yup, I’m there. But I also realized I’ve now outlived my mother (she died of cancer just after her 59th birthday) and soon will outlive my father (he died of a heart attack at 63 years, 3 months).

I take comfort in knowing I’m not the oldest chick working out at a women’s gym. (It doesn’t have mirrors, dahling….)

This past year, as I’ve transitioned out of years of care-giving, I’ve been asking what the Lords wants of the rest of my earthly life.

I certainly have some role models. Noah, boat-building and zoo-keeping at 600. (Alas, maintaining a 15-pound cat doesn’t compare.) Abraham and Sarah, outfitting a nursery at 90 (let’s skip that one, though I am collecting classic kid books for future grandkids). Moses, going on an extended wilderness trek at 80. Caleb, homesteading at 80. Not to forget Anna, still serving in the temple at 84. John, in his 90s, writing in his spare time in a hard-labor prison.

Right now, the word “continue” comes to mind. As in: continue enjoying my “senior discount” at the thrift stores (some kick it in at 55, others at 60).
But even more important: to “continue in your faith, established and firm, not moved from the hope held out in the gospel” (Colossians 1:23).

By my bed I’ve hung a framed copy of the words to my favorite hymn, “Be Thou My Vision”:
Be Thou my Vision, O Lord of my heart;
Naught be all else to me, save what Thou art—
Thou my best thought by day or by night,
Waking or sleeping, Thy presence my light.

I need that reminder on the days I look in a mirror and the face looking back has more lines than notebook paper and those once dramatic black eyebrows are more like a weed patch. (I won’t even start in on the chin thistles.) My neck has a backup crew and everything south of there has gone south.

But the curtain hasn’t fallen yet. Moses, who knew plenty about “the best is yet to come” (his most significant ministry happened between 80 and 120), wrote, “Satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love, that we may sing for joy and be glad for all our days” (Psalm 90:14).

That’s my birthday song, friends. Each morning, glad for a fresh start.

Seven Habits of Highly Distracted People

2010-06-08T10:06:00.000-07:00

Just for fun, a reprint of my humorous essay first published in the Seattle Times, June 28, 1998. Can you relate? Leave a comment!

People like me, who read best-sellers long after their prime, are waiting with breathless procrastination for the Seven Habits of Highly Distracted People. I borrowed its antithesis from a highly-effective friend, got to page 9 of 352 during car pool stops, then lost the book.

It surfaced a week later at my mother-in-law’s, where I’d dropped it before hauling out her garbage. That’s when I came up with seven habits that every distracted person can practice with pride.

1. Be reactive. Plan not to plan. Be spontaneous and mysterious. Posting the week’s nutritious and color-balanced menu may work for effective people. But after a long, disorganized day I’d rather play “What’s My Menu” with leftovers. I rationalize that I’m passing on the heritage of my Scandinavian ancestors, who gave the fancy name “smorgasbord” to refrigerator potluck.

2. End with the beginning in mind. Every project is worth starting. The other day I opened my sewing box to mend socks and encountered scraps to cut for my next quilt. That required clearing dirty dishes off the table for a cutting space. The soaking dishes reminded me to treat a grass stain on my son’s jeans. Opening his closet, I decided to sort out the clothes he outgrew six inches ago. Someday, I’ll sew that quilt.

3. Put last things first. Effective people ruthlessly sort their junk mail over the wastebasket. They miss reading about the joys of vinyl siding and easy credit They never find, as I did, a sample copy of a “life planner,” which promised to reduce my chaos to charts and disarray to discipline. Right away I wrote in my first and last priorities of the day: get up with the chickens and go to bed with the teenagers. I achieved both. The items between those didn’t fare as well, but there’s always tomorrow.

4. Think win-a-few/lose-a-few. One day it was just me and one of my young teens in the car. Realizing my offspring was staring at me soulfully, I jumped at this golden moment of parent-child bonding. “What’s on your mind, my dear?” I gushed. “Hey, Mom,” the child replied, “How come you have whiskers?” In true lose-lose form, I told the rude child that I was interviewing for a job as a circus bearded lady.

5. Understand that you never will. My graduate degree in communications doesn’t count a whit at 5:30 p.m. when a child is in distress over algebra homework sprawled all over the kitchen table. My suggestion that we re-attack homework after dinner reveals my ignorance of the intellectual process. “You never understand,” wails the child, who uses the same phrase on shopping trips when I choke over mini-skirts and platform shoes.

6. Syncopate. Highly distracted people are one-person bands who do it all with off-beat style. We all need those days that we discover—at noon—that our jeans are unzipped and the turtleneck is on backwards (no wonder it felt like a noose). Who cares? At least I pried a family out of bed, plunked a chicken in the crock pot, tossed a load in the washer, and delivered kids to the right schools before I showed up at the hardware store with my apron still on.

7. Grow wizened and wise. Distracted women may buy “Oil of Delay” by the Costco gallon and rub nasty stuff into their hair to cover up the silver. But we don’t believe that life after forty means a brain shrunk to the size and texture of a walnut. Every day holds wonderful learning experiences—if we can find where we scheduled them in our daily planners.

I once thought I wanted to be abnormally perfect. But now I’m content to be perfectly normal. I take courage from my great-great-something grandmother, whose perfect day included milking the cow, getting pecked gathering eggs, pumping the water to boil for laundry, knitting Pop’s socks, and plucking the feathers off the candidate for chicken dinner. Then when every last pot was scrubbed, she sat down at her little pump organ and sang, “The End of a Perfect Day.”

Well, it was almost perfect. She was supposed to ride the buckboard to town, but forgot to write it down in her planner.

That's, uh, some baby!

2010-06-02T16:04:00.000-07:00

One of my former pastors had a fail-safe way of admiring wrinkled newborns who were far from “cute.” “That’s some baby,” he’d say with a smile as a new mom or dad peeled back the swaddling blanket. The proud parents usually didn’t catch the double meaning.

At times, people come to show me their writing “babies.” I could say, “That’s some article/story/devotional,” and wish them well. But if they want to be published, they need an honest critique. The fine art of critiquing was never easy for me, even after working several years as a teacher for a national writer correspondence course. I’d rather have people like me than disappoint them by saying their writing needs better organization or its passive verbs and mixed metaphors weeded out.

Thus I have great respect for those who both succeed as writers themselves and in mentoring other writers. One such person is Cecil Murphey, a former pastor who is probably best known as the second byline on Don Piper’s best-selling book, 90 Minutes in Heaven.

Several years ago I saw Cecil across the room at a writer’s conference, but I don’t think I ever introduced myself. Perhaps I was in awe of this unimposing man with a mop of curly gray hair. After all, he was the author of more than a hundred books, most of them on Christian living, care-giving and Heaven. He also weathered tragedy when a fire destroyed his home (including his office) and took the life of his son-in-law.

Yet Cecil has steadily invested his writing earnings to help other Christian writers. He has funded scholarships for writers’ conferences and backed other help for communicators. I benefited when Cecil paid for a professional makeover of publicity flyers for a selected group of Christian women speakers. Let’s just say mine went from a dented old jalopy to a gleaming sedan.

Proverbs 22:9 says, “A generous man will himself be blessed.” This month, those touched by Cecil’s generosity have been encouraged to commend his behind-the-scenes efforts in the Christian writing world.

For a window into his mentor’s expertise, visit his blog about the writing life: http://cecmurpheyswritertowriter.blogspot.com/ . Its entries are a reminder that writing is plain hard work. A just-born literary offspring might be, well, ugly. It needs to mature to usefulness.

To characterize Cecil’s legacy, I want to torque Proverbs 22:29 just a bit: “Do you see a man skilled in his work? He will serve before kings, he will not serve before obscure men.” Cecil serves both the King of Kings and the more obscure men and women serving the same King.

He’s some author—and we’ve been blessed.