Hen-ce forth and never more

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

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!

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

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

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!

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.

Real Meal Time

We have a mealtime routine. Put heaped spoonful of canned cat food in feeding dish. Open the back door. If he’s not ready to slither in, call “Kitty, kitty, come on, Aug.” If he hesitates, count backwards from five. (At “one” he’s usually in). Then watch him trot to his feeding spot by the refrigerator.

If he were a dog, our cat Auggie would race faster than a derby horse to the feed trough. But sometimes he just plants himself on the rug near it, then looks up as if to say, “I don’t like that flavor.” Usually the wet cat food with egg or cheese as part of the recipe merits his disdain. Or a flavor he’s had three days in a row.

I mutter, Get a life, cat. If you don’t like the menu, you’re stuck with your crunchy food.

The other day it struck me that I sometimes have “cat-titude” about reading the Bible. I have “likes” (Psalms, Isaiah, the epistles) and sit-and-stare books (think: stern and smokin’). Yet all comprise God’s well-balanced nutrition plan.

So how do we move from sit-and-stare-is-there-anything-else-in-the-cupboard to enjoying—truly enjoying and savoring—a regular time in God’s Word?

First, thank God for communicating through written words that express His character and will.

Second, realize that without the help of the Holy Spirit, those words would make as much sense as a package of alphabet pasta.Third, engage thoughtfully and regularly in spiritual meals.

Often when I speak at women’s retreats, I share this little acrostic about spiritual feeding (“devotions”) that many find helpful. Pray for insights, then, using the first four letters of “devotions”:

Delight in it—Read regularly and consecutively through a Bible book. I sewed a second ribbon marker in my Bible to that I can mark where I’m reading daily in both the Old and New Testaments. (I also use a sticky flag on the page to help me remember where I stopped.) But don’t read just to mark off a reading schedule. Savor each “bite” (verse, paragraph, or chapter) for its richness to your life and needs. Think of how you delight in your favorite flavor of ice cream (chocolate chip is up there in my book)—or of how, if you were a cat, one variety of cat food is irresistible, right down to licking your paws afterward.

Engrave it—Mark in your Bible or write in a journal what God seems to want to tell you. Are certain words or thoughts repeated? Is there a sin to confess, a behavior to change, a point to stretch your faith?

Verse it—Star or underline a verse that especially seemed to say, “Notice me.” Considering writing it out on a 3x5 card for memorization.

Obey it—Pray for wisdom and strength to integrate its truths into your life, to help you grow in Christ-likeness.

Trust me, DEVO-ing will change your life. It has mine.