Druthers

“Druther”: it’s a contraction of “I’d rather,” or as a noun means “personal choice.”  For example, if I had my “druthers” between eating liver and crunchy green bell peppers, I druther take the peppers any day. But sometimes those “druthers” belong to negative choices. Although posted in jest, this photo of our family cat (“Keep your paws off my remote”) suggests how entertainment can grip us like a cat’s claws. It’s not just about television (programming, videos/DVDs). So can the internet (browsing, games, social media), smart-phone play, music devices, and, on the darker side, pornography. Though technology has changed, the problem is old. Even back in the First century, Peter warned about the “druthers”: “Be self-controlled and alert.  Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour” (1 Peter 5:8).

J. Oswald Sanders, a great missionary leader and preacher in the last century, wrote in The Joy of Following Jesus (Moody, 1994, p. 80): “In one sense, life consists largely of making habits and breaking habits, for we are all creatures of habit.  We are unconsciously forming and fracturing habits all the time, and for that reason this area of life must be brought under Christ’s control.  It is an essential part of the soul’s education.”

Contrary to some popular thinking, God doesn’t treat us like marionettes or string puppets, twisting the guide strings this way and that to rid us of bad habits. They must be broken the way they were made: by our own choices. We’re not left alone in that task: “It is God who works in you to will and act according to his good purpose” (Philippians 2:13). Sanders added: “The aid of the Holy Spirit is always available in the forming of a new and good habit, but it is we who must do it.  God does not act instead of us: it is a partnership.”

When a negative habit lures, some have found it helpful to pray right then, either aloud or silently, “With God’s help, I choose not to do this.” Being accountable to a trusted friend or group may help. So may keeping a log of how much time this habit takes. Sometimes the wake-up call about a habit is a desperate circumstance, like a family crisis, arrest or intervention that leads to a rehab center. 

Not all habits are bad. Saunders points out this one: “In the culture of the soul, no habit is more crucial and formative than maintaining a consistent devotional life—a regular time reserved for fellowship and communion with God.  Not everyone finds that easy, but its importance and value cannot be exaggerated. Since that is the case, it is only reasonable to expect that the habit will be the focus of relentless attack from our adversary” (p. 81).

Talking about “druthers,” Satan would “druther” we neglect habitually drawing close to God. At such times, we need to dig in with spiritual claws and tell Satan to scoot!

The Amateur Hour Christmas Pageant

My son knew he’d finally been allowed a “rite of passage” when he no longer had to play “Joseph” in the annual neighborhood Christmas play. He was sprouting a few whiskers and his voice changing when he finally shed his bathrobe costume. Instead, he showed off his newly-acquired guitar-playing skills as he helped lead the small audience of family and neighbors in singing a few Christmas carols.

Up through the junior high years, my creative neighbor Teri planned a “Jesus Birthday Party,” with our children re-enacting the nativity. As the only boy of the bunch, my son was pre-cast as Joseph, with the girls doing Mary, various angels, shepherds, and other parts, with a doll in a homemade feed trough. After singing, we enjoyed a dessert.

Now, all those kids are out of college, most married, and one (the ex-Joseph) with a son of his own, named Josiah. The other day, when we put four-month-old Josiah on a rocking/rolling horse found in a thrift store, I thought how it won’t be long before he’s ready for his first “nativity story” education.

 

Before my neighbor’s nativity parties began, we’d already started with a hands-on crèche with plastic figures that our kids could touch and move about. Admittedly, telling the story was simple at first. I had a nursery cloth book with this stunning plot line: “Mary” (turn the page). “Angel” (turn the page).  You get the idea.

Then came a little sister, and by pre-school years, we played out the nativity. Dad was the hee-hawing donkey carrying “Mary.” Our son was faithful old Joseph.  And Mom was the angel in the living room, and the innkeeper saying “no room” behind our bedroom door.  In addition, every year the crèche was put at kid-level. My son, who’d grow up to be an engineer, would organize all the people on one side and all the animals on the other.  His sister was a bit more freestyle.  She was our “dolly” girl, and in the midst of her imaginary stories would have her fashion doll drive up in a pink corvette to pay a courtesy call on the holy family.

We still have the crèche under our Christmas tree.  Josiah’s too young to understand it this year, but maybe next year we can find another book with that gripping plot line: “Mary” (turn the page). “Joseph” (turn the page). “Baby Jesus.”

In a sense, we’ve already turned the page, passing on the ageless story to our descendants, and that’s a good thing.  And maybe the real-life now-grandpa-donkey will offer his back and a good-hearted hee-haw.  I can hardly wait.

           

A true Christmas story: The Wise Man's Four Gifts

This true personal story, which I wrote thirty years ago, was published by four magazines. It just seemed the right thing to share again with Christmas just a few days away. Maybe there’s someone to whom you can be that “farmer from Bickleton.”

Our wise man came not on a camel, but in a pickup.  His blue jeans bore stains of ranch work, and his thinning gray hair lay in disarray from the icy December wind. He brought three gifts: a 50-pound sack of potatoes from his farm, a quart of his locally famous home-canned sauerkraut, and a freshly killed turkey from his flock.

My sister’s family called this man their “farmer friend from Bickleton.”  They knew him through church.  They were surprised he’d heard about Dad, since very few people in my sister’s town knew him.  And they were even more surprised that he’d come thirty miles over snow-slick, hilly farmland roads just to say,” I hurt with you.”

 A few days before, while 2,000 miles away at graduate school, I got the shocking phone call telling of my dad’s fatal heart attack. It had been just six months since Mom died of cancer.  I wasn’t ready to hear such news again.  Now I was at my sister’s home in a town 200 miles from where our parents had lived.

There wasn’t much time to pause in the kitchen and gaze at the man’s gifts.  On the other side of the wall in my sister’s ma-and-pa style bookstore, customers waited impatiently at the cash register with their Christmas purchases.

“You’ve got to fix the turkey,” my sister said as she rushed out.  I balked.  It wasn’t that I didn’t know how.  I’d fixed my first turkey less than a month before when I helped a Norwegian student family celebrate their first American holiday. It was just that I was having trouble putting my heart into any kind of project.  But dutifully, I gathered ingredients for stuffing and located the roaster.

Outside, snowflakes spit over the gray, chilled parking lot.  People, with lots to do and much to shop for, hastened past.  For us, this Christmas meant a funeral and no more holidays with Mom and Dad.  But for others it would bring happy reunions and parties.  There would be gift-giving to carry on the tradition of the wise men, who gave the baby Jesus gold, frankincense, and myrrh—the king’s metal, a sacred incense, and embalming spice.

Three gifts.  Then I realized our wise man had really brought four gifts, one of which was greater than gold.  He could have stayed home, warm and uninvolved.  But he came, and though he said little, he offered much in offering himself.

The store apartment began filling with the aroma of his turkey, a fragrant offering of love and—in its own way—frankincense for a watching King.

Getting off the Xmas Xpress

The hobby building of our local county fair featured this huge set-up belonging to a miniature railroad enthusiast.  As I listened to him tell visitors how his train-land grew, I recalled the simple set my son set up in his bedroom for several years at Christmas. He had a tiny room, ten feet square, and hauled half of a Ping Pong table in there to hold the train. He had to crawl under it to get to bed!

Lately, I’ve been thinking how the Christmas season is a lot like that miniature train. Once a train is set in place, and the tracks are perfectly aligned, it will go round and round until someone hits the “off” button. So it is with “traditions.”  Yes, we had some “traditions” when our children were young.  On Christmas eve they opened the package that contained their new home-sewn pajamas. On Christmas morning, their first package was a box of usually-forbidden sugary breakfast cereal. (Yes, I tried to be their health-conscious mom.)

But as I consider what has become “Christmas tradition,” I wonder if we have courage to call it the “Xmas Xpress”: the intensive retail and party season that propels us into winter with barely a nod to the huge spiritual significance of God coming to earth as a baby.  Have we made too much of gifting each other, and not gifting back in gratitude to God? I can think of several “gifts” that honor the Lord’s birth lots better than the way many are doing it now:

*The gift of kindness and service.  I hope we’ll never forget the simple gifts of showing the Lord’s love.  Like visiting a shut-in. Taking a meal to someone who’s lonely, ill or bereaved. Offering to clean, repair or do yard work for someone who can’t.  One young couple we know, living on a tight college-student budget, decided to do “Twelve Days of Giving” for their Christmas family gift.  They decided on twelve number-related “giving tasks,” and took photos of each for a small album they gave parents.  For example, for Day 10, the wife had ten inches of hair cut off for a non-profit that makes wigs for medically-bald children.  For Day 4, they offered “four hands” of serving in a local food bank.  Day 8 was picking up litter on eight blocks near their home.

*The gift of appreciation.  Has someone’s kindness made your life easier?  Tell them in a heart-felt note. Has someone’s close walk with Christ inspired you or helped you?  Tell them. This year, while adding notes to Christmas letters (yes, I still do that, but to a limited number), I took extra time to write some former, aging pastors and their spouses.

 

*The gifts of alms. It’s not just the red kettle bell-ringers. Our mailboxes are flooded with solicitations at Christmas because it is, after all, a time when we acknowledge God’s amazing way of intercepting history with the birth of His Son. He was born into poverty—not the way we might have chosen things for history. He ministered to the poor. In our family, we decide on at least one “Jesus gift” to support a ministry that has burdened our hearts.   We’ve encouraged family members to do the same in lieu of “gifting” us. It brings me joy to know that instead of more “stuff” for me, that money is instead  buying food for a child in Africa, chickens for a family in Central America, or electricity for a ministry to the homeless.

*The gift of deference. Not everyone in my circle of influence agrees with cutting back so drastically. To them, Christmas isn’t Christmas without gifts. They’d be disappointed without several packages to open.  I accept where they are, and try to gift wisely.

*The gifts of reconciliation.  My heart aches for families where there is enmity.  Often it’s because of a divorce or separation or some other family difficulty.  I pray for two families divided after a stepparent's death. I imagine Jesus weeping over this, even more than I do. What a gift it would be for either family unit to write or phone and say, “Let’s turn away from the past.  Please forgive me for my part in our conflict. Let’s make a fresh start before the Lord.” Such bold, humble steps are like the image of reconciliation in Psalm 133--of family harmony like precious anointing oil spilling over a priest’s head.  Surely, this is what pleases God.

The scriptures say of Jesus’ coming, “Thanks be to God for His indescribable gift” (2 Cor. 9:15). As Christians, we know the secular celebration has gotten out of hand. But in simple ways like this, maybe we can show the world that it’s still about how very, very much God loves us—so much that He sent a Savior.

The other Black Friday

Last week saw “Black Friday,” a day that news sources say 47 million shoppers spent an estimated $40,000,000,000. As I considered this annual $pending $pree,  I couldn’t help but think of another “Black Friday.”  We remember it every year, and this year it will return just 19 weeks from today. Last week’s frenzy got its name because a retailer’s “red ink” balance will supposedly turn “black” with pre-Christmas sales.  But the original “Black Friday” came on a desperate, ugly day of execution for two criminals and One without sin:

“From the sixth hour until the ninth hour darkness came over all the land.”—Matthew 27:45

“At the sixth hour darkness came over the whole land until the ninth hour.” –Mark 15:33
Shortly after those three black mid-day hours, Jesus died.

Some try to minimize the importance of the mid-day darkness.  They claim it must have been an eclipse. But this was at Passover, which is carefully dated at the time of a full moon, and eclipses cannot occur during a full moon. In addition, eclipses typically last a few minutes, never three hours. There had to be a supernatural intervention, as happened with the ninth plague of darkness in Egypt (Exodus 10:22) before Moses led the Hebrews out of slavery. 

It’s hard to miss the connection between spiritual and physical darkness. In his inimitable 19^th century prose, the great preacher Charles Spurgeon commented: “The sun could no longer look upon his Maker surrounded by those who mock him.  He covered his face, and traveled on in tenfold night, in very shame that the great Sun of righteousness should himself be in such terrible darkness.”

We’ve come to know that day as “Good Friday,” because the completely good and pure Son of God took on our punishment for sin.  But the day was full of blackness: shameful injustice, parades of misguided mockers, the raw and negative side of humanity.

Hmm...as I read of this era’s disorderly crowds and pandemonium over electronics, big-screen televisions , clothing, and toys, I wonder if we’ve made any progress since the day Christ hung on a cross. The crowds shouting “Crucify Him!” were disappointed that this “Messiah” wasn’t a political figure. They sought a leader to overthrow the Roman rule, which had kept them from enjoying life’s nicer things. They wanted comfort and toys, not a Savior from sin.

Perhaps the psalmist can lead us to an answer:  “How can I repay the Lord for all his goodness to me?  I will lift up the cup of salvation and call on the name of the Lord.” (Psalm 116:15-16).  There’s no “gift” in all the Black Friday sales that can ever match the gift we have of salvation in Jesus Christ. We should respond by giving, not to those who already have so much, but as the hands of Jesus to those who have so little—in our land and abroad.