The UN-bucket List

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

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

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

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? :)