Joy Comes in the Morning

Hard times come to every person. Until the grip of this old world is forever broken by that final blast from Michael’s trumpet, we will go on having what one hymn writer called “the night seasons” here on earth. No one is exempt from heartache. But the night cannot last forever, and the darkest hour is just before the dawn. God has promised that “weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning” (Ps. 30:5 kjv).

One night while driving, Bill and I were listening to an African-American pastor on the radio encouraging his congregation—as well as his radio audience. With a heartfelt genuine compassion for his ­people, he kept repeating this promise from Psalm 30: “Weeping endures for the night!” he would say, asking them to repeat the words after him. 

“But joy comes in the morning! Let me hear you, now. Weeping endures for the night…” The ­people would sing that phrase back to him. “But joy comes in the morning!” With one great voice they returned the affirmation. “Joy comes in the morning!”

Eventually the organ punctuated the truth. Its great music swelled like waves cresting on the beach. “Joy, joy comes in the morning!”

As we listened, the problems in our own lives seemed to settle into perspective in the immense power of God and His great faithfulness since the psalmist first wrote the words: “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning”!

The song that resulted from that experience has spoken to us for over 45 years and has been used by God to give perspective and encouragement to many who have written to us or spoken to us at concerts. Over the years we have come to understand that pain is, as C. S. Lewis once called it, “God’s megaphone.” It is a useful tool in the hand of the Master Craftsman of our souls to hollow out spaces in us for holding the joy in the morning!

When the hard times of life come, we know that no matter how tragic the circumstances seem, no matter how long the spiritual drought, no matter how dark the days, the sun is sure to break through; the dawn will come. The warmth of His assurance will hold us in an embrace once again, and we will know that our God has been there all along. We will hear Him say, through it all, “Hold on, my child, joy comes in the morning!”

To share this post with others on Facebook, click below:

Praise You

It was the year we wrote the musical Kids Under Construction. We decided to travel to Puerto Rico to combine a vacation with some work time with Ron Huff: conceive the musical, create the staging, and lay out the plot. Ron and Donna, our whole family, and my mother spent a week on a lovely beach lined by palm trees and tropical flowers.

Our eight-year-old, Amy, thought Donna Huff was the most beautiful woman she’d ever seen. To imitate her, Amy picked fresh hibiscus blossoms to pin in her hair each evening. Benjy, a year younger, caught lizards by the tail and collected sand crabs in his plastic pail. Suzanne, at twelve, teetered between childhood and womanhood. One minute she was chasing lizards or building sand castles with Benjy; the next she was writing postcards to a boy back home.

We all knew how priceless these moments were. We memorized the sunsets, absorbed the music of the birds, and pressed exotic flowers between the pages of the books we’d brought to read.  As for our work, we all wrote and talked about ideas, great and small, and used the welcome break to refresh our spirits.

One day while the children played at the water’s edge with my mother (who was always the biggest kid of all), Bill and I took a walk down the beach. It was easy to walk a long way and not think about how far you’d gone. When we realized how long we’d been away, we turned back toward the hotel. We were still quite a distance away when we saw a child running toward us, waving his arms. Soon we realized it was Benjy, urgently trying to tell us something. We ran to meet him.

“Suzanne lost her glasses in the ocean!” he yelled over the thunder of the surf. “She was picking up shells and a big wave came in and knocked off her glasses. The tide washed them out to sea!”

“How long ago?” I asked, thinking about how quickly these strong currents had been carrying things—even children—down the beach.

“About fifteen minutes ago. ­We’ve been looking for them ever since.”

My mind raced. A coral reef ran parallel to the shoreline about a hundred feet out. There were urgent warnings of an undertow—“Strong Currents.” Objects like sand toys or rafts caught by a wave had been carried down the beach as fast as the children could run to catch them.

By now we were shouting back and forth to Suzanne. “Where did you lose them?” I yelled.

“Right here. I was standing right here!”

She was knee-deep in water as the tide was coming in. “I ­can’t see a thing, Mother! What are we going to do?”

“Let’s pray,” I said and I took her two hands in mine.

Then I thought to myself, What are you doing? You’re going to ruin this kid’s faith. Those glasses have long since been pulled out to sea by the undertow, most likely smashed to bits against the coral reef. If we even find any pieces, they will have washed ashore far down the beach!

But I was too far into this to turn back. Holding Suzanne’s hands and standing knee-deep in water, I prayed: “Jesus, You know how much Suzanne needs her glasses, and that we are far from home and know no doctors here to have them replaced. We are Your children and this is Your ocean. You know where the glasses are, so we’re asking You to send them back.”

Just then Suzanne squeezed my hand and interrupted my prayer. “Mother! Something just hit my leg!” She let go of my hand, reached down into the water, and pulled out her glasses. They were in one piece and not even scratched!

We danced a jig of praise and she ran off to tell the others who were searching farther down the beach.

Much later that evening, after we’d had our dinner and the kids were ready for bed, I took out the Bible and opened it to Psalms to read something that might fit the sounds of the surf pounding the shore outside our room’s open patio doors. I chose a psalm we’d read many times, but never had we heard it as we did that night.

O Lord, you have examined my heart and know everything about me. You know when I sit or stand. When far away you know my every thought. You chart the path ahead of me, and tell me where to stop and rest. Every moment, you know where I am. You know what I am going to say before I even say it. You both precede and follow me, and place your hand of blessing on my head. This is too glorious, too wonderful to believe! I can never be lost to your Spirit! I can never get away from my God! If I go up to heaven, you are there; if I go down to the place of the dead, you are there. If I ride the morning winds to the farthest oceans, even there your hand will guide me, your strength will support me. (Psalm 139:1–10 tlb)

When we had finished all of Psalm 139, we could hardly believe that God’s Word had been so specific for us… so familiar yet as new and fresh as this day’s miracle. Together we thanked God that He is a God who chose to be involved in our lives, that truly He had scheduled our days; we marveled at the truth that we ­couldn’t even “count how many times a day [His] thoughts turn toward [us]” (Ps. 139:18 tlb).

Psalm 139 has returned many times to visit our family. Over the years our children read it to their children. Soon after that trip Bill and I wrote the psalm into a song we called “Praise You.” It has been arranged for choirs and recorded by various artists. But it will always be for us a reminder of the day a little girl prayed with her mother on an island beach for a pair of glasses lost at sea.

To share this post with others on Facebook, click below:

The Family of God

It was Good Friday 1970.  Suzanne had come home early from school, and we had just put the Easter eggs we had colored on Thursday night in a big yellow basket filled with shredded paper grass when the phone rang. A voice on the other end of the line said, “There’s been an explosion at the Faust garage. Ronnie Garner was badly burned. He got out of the building just before it blew apart. But he ­isn’t expected to make it through the night. Some of us are gathering at the church to pray. Call someone else, ask them to pray, and to keep the prayer chain going.”

I hung up the phone and called Bill at the office. Suzanne and I prayed together for this young father from our church. Then I called a few others I knew would join us in prayer.

Only later did we get the rest of the story. Ron was working overtime because he and Darlene needed extra money to pay for heart surgery for their daughter Diane. He was alone at the car dealership and repair shop, cleaning engines with a highly flammable substance without thinking to open a window for ventilation. He was working below a ceiling furnace with an open-flame pilot light. When the fumes from the solvent reached the flame, the whole garage blew apart. When he heard the first roar of the furnace, Ron tried to open the garage door, but it was jammed. By some miracle, with his clothing on fire, he managed to squeeze through a tiny space before the big explosion.

From Methodist Burn Center in Indianapolis we heard that the doctors had decided not to treat Ron; it was no use. There was little chance of success, and the trauma of treatment itself could push him over the edge. But friends who gathered at the church prayed all the more fervently for Ron, for Darlene, and for their two little girls. All through Friday and Saturday night, the church prayed. With part of our hearts we believed, but, to be honest, with the other part we braced ourselves for the predicted news.

A weary and somewhat tattered group gathered for church on Sunday morning. We lacked the optimism typical of an Easter celebration. The pastor ­wasn’t even there at first; we knew he was with Darlene and the family. No one felt like singing songs of victory. Resurrection seemed a million light-years away. But as the music began, a few weak voices sang less-than-harmonious chords of well-worn Easter songs.

As we were making an effort at worship, our pastor entered from the back and made his way up the center aisle to the platform. His shoulders were slumped, his suit was wrinkled, but there was a glow on his stubbled face as he motioned for us to stop the hymn. 

“Ron is alive,” he said. “They said he ­wouldn’t make it through Friday night, so they’re amazed he’s alive today. The doctors ­don’t understand how he’s hanging on, but we do, ­don’t we? And because he’s still alive, ­they’ve decided to start treatment.”

A chorus of “Amen!” and “Praise the Lord!” rose from the congregation. We all straightened in our seats like wilted plants that had been watered.

“We’re going to thank the Lord,” Pastor McCurdy said, “and then we’re going to see this thing through. This is just the beginning. There will be many needs. The family will need food brought in. Darlene may need help with the kids. They may need transportation back and forth to Indianapolis. Ron will need gallons of blood for transfusions. And they all—the doctors too—need prayer. Let’s think of how each of us can help. We are, after all, the family of God. Now let’s pray.”

We stood and as one voice thanked God for answered prayer and for the reality of the Resurrection. Sunshine streamed in through the windows to warm more than our faces and the room. It seemed that the light of the dawn of the very first Easter morning had come to our weary souls.

What a service of rejoicing we had! No sermon could have spoken as articulately as the news that Ron was alive and our feeble prayers had been answered. We sang the old hymn: 

Low in the grave He lay—Jesus, my Savior.
He tore the bars away—Jesus, my Lord! 
Up from the grave He arose, 
With a mighty triumph o’er His foes! (Robert Lowry)

My, how we sang! And then,

You ask me how I know He lives? 
He lives within my heart! (A. H. Ackley)

We were full of joy and victory as we left the church that noon, loading up our families into cars for the trip home.

In the car Bill and I said to each other, “You know, the amazing thing is, they’d do that for us, too.” We ­weren’t model church members, Bill and I. We were gone virtually every weekend, barely getting in from a concert in time to make it to church Sunday morning. We were never there to bake pies for the bake sales or to attend the couples’ retreats or to teach in Bible school. If you had to pull your share of the load to get the family of God to take care of you, we would surely have been left out. “But they’d do that for us,” we marveled.

When we got home, I checked the roast in the oven, changed the baby, and sent Suzanne off to put on her play clothes. Bill went to the piano, and I heard him toying with a simple, lovely tune. “Honey, come here a minute,” he called from the family room.

He sang a phrase, “I’m so glad I’m a part of the family of God. Dah, dah, dah, la la la-la, la la la-la.”

I grabbed a yellow legal pad and a pencil. The roast was forgotten as we were both consumed by the beauty of “the family,” and I tried to write our gratitude to the music Bill was playing.

We finally did have Sunday dinner, though the roast was a little overdone. On Monday I deviled our Easter eggs, and our life went on, but we were never quite the same. 

Pastor McCurdy was right: that Sunday news was only the beginning. But, then, the Resurrection was only a beginning too! There were months of trips to Indianapolis. Many gave blood and  made casseroles and babysat and cleaned Darlene’s house. Most sent cards of encouragement and notes assuring the Garners of continued prayer.

During the next nine months in the hospital Ron had many skin grafts and experienced much pain, but finally he came home to their house on John Street. Eventually, he went back to Anderson College and finished his degree in athletics. He became assistant coach at Alexandria High School and fathered two more children. Diane got her heart fixed and became a high-school teacher. And one of the children, not yet born at the time of the fire, was one of the top female athletes in the state of Indiana.

And we were filled with joy that the same family that stood by the Garners in a thousand ways has stood by us, too. We ­don’t deserve it; we ­haven’t earned it. We were just born into it. They treat us like royalty, because we are! We’re children of the King!

 You will notice we say “brother” and “sister” ’round here;
It’s because we’re a family and these folks are so near.
When one has a heartache we all share the tears,
And rejoice in each vict’ry in this fam’ly so dear.

I’m so glad I’m a part of the fam’ly of God!
I’ve been washed in the fountain,
Cleansed by His blood.
Joint heirs with Jesus as we travel this sod,
For I’m part of the fam’ly,
The fam’ly of God.

 From the door of an orph’nage to the house of the King,
No longer an outcast; a new song I sing.
From rags unto riches, from the weak to the strong,
I’m not worthy to be here, but praise God, I belong!

Lyric: Gloria Gaither and William J. Gaither
Music: William J. Gaither
Copyright © 1970 Hanna Street Music (BMI)

Last week our friend Hugh Phipps invited Bill to go with him to a morning meeting of a group of praying guys who get together each week here in our town. Ron Garner was there to tell for the first time the whole story of his experience. Ron is now 78, and not only did he live, but went on to teach science, coach, and become Athletic Director in our local high school.

To share this post with others on Facebook, click below:

Technology—Friend or Foe

When new inventions and innovations first invade our world of experience, they are usually vilified, or, at least, viewed with suspicion.  When cars were invented, sermons were preached against them, predicting what damaging effect they would have on peaceful community life.  The telephone was viewed as the purveyor of gossip, and television was condemned as the corruptor of civilization or, at least, the eroder of the next generation’s character.

When Alvin Toffler wrote his revolutionary book THE THIRD WAVE, we could not imagine an economy in which information would be the main product.  “How could an intangible thing “information” be a product?” our elders asked, shaking their heads and insisting that products were things manufactured, things one could touch or drive or put on a shelf at a store.

The outrageous idea that people the world over would carry computers and phones in the palm of their hands with no wires or plug-in cords was beyond comprehension.  And who could conceive of a “friend” or several hundred “friends” we have never met to whom we would reveal the secret details of every day life, show pictures of our children, share intimate thoughts and fantasies, and then have no control over the “friends” to whom they would in turn pass on our secrets without our consent.

We are coming to realize that digital technology is both the best and worst thing that has been invented so far.  Like cars, telephones, televisions, and airplanes, technology can be used for either great purposes or intensely destructive ones.

The naysayers of the past were partially right.  Cars can kill, and television can corrupt and damage the minds of children, youth, and adults.  Airplanes can be piloted into skyscrapers and kill nearly 3,000 people.  But planes can also get students home from college, bring orphans from China to loving families waiting to adopt them, bring Johnny home from war, or get grandma back in time for a kid’s graduation. Technology can make Jesus’s command to take the good news of God-with-us into the whole world a literal possibility.

Computers, I-Phones, and I-Pads can call 911 or deliver pornography to minors.  They can let me in Indiana keep in touch with seven grandchildren in Colorado, New York, Chicago, Nashville, and Vermont.  Or they can be used to bully a high school freshman all the way to suicide.  The devices we have in our pockets and purses and cars can save lives or destroy them.  They can free us or make us prisoners of media addiction.

We can be mindlessly swept along with the digital tides, surrendering our God-given minds to gamers and the peddlers of false information, or we can harness technology for good, give it strong boundaries in our lives and homes, and guard from it our sacred spaces and our abilities to actually converse, meditate, and reason.  May the God of all wisdom help us to recognize every day the blessings and dangers of the devices the ingenuity of man has brought into existence and to have the courage to make them serve us and mankind, instead of the other way around.

To share this post with others on Facebook, click below:

Intervals

We are all thinking about our fathers this Father’s Day week. I found this remembrance our daughter Amy wrote a few years ago about Bill teaching her musical intervals, She has given permission to share it with you.

"This is one."

We’re in the car, he drives.  I sit in the back seat, repeating the tone back to him.

     "One."

     "Now, give me 'three'," he says.

My mind scrambles to make the musical steps.  My pitch is not perfect, but "relative," they call it.  I find the note with mental reasoning, unwilling to let him hear me do the figuring.

     "Three," I sing.

I know he knows how I find it.  It doesn't matter.  The game has started, and we both enjoy it.

     "Give me 'two'."

     Back to one, I think, then mentally, "One"-- aloud--"two."

We play like this: he tests; I challenge myself to do my mental gymnastics more quickly.

He falls silent, and I know he is thinking about-- what?  The days when he was a boy at the Stamps School, first learning intervals and harmonies? Or is he hearing the harmonies themselves? He fades further away, and I think I can hear the echo of a scratchy 78 playing in his brain...sounds drifting down from upstairs at my grandma and grandpa's farmhouse.

I often fell asleep to those sounds, harmonies fading and blaring on what sounded to my ear like very primitive technology, songs with titles like "The Bible Tells Me So," "Happy Rhythm,” singers with names like Denver Crumpler, Hovie Lister, and Jake Hess.

I know he is hearing them now, here, in the car.  I watch him in the rearview mirror.  His mind is always a mystery.  What harmonies, what memories, what beginnings fill him now?

Nights when we had dinner guests, and I would hear my father say, as the candles burned low, "Hey..hey, can I play you something?  Come in here."  And long after I was supposed to be in bed, I would sit at the top of the stairs in my nightgown, peering around the banister watching as my father's face danced with admiration, joy, astonishment, laughter, tears.  And our guests, smiling and nodding and catching his fever.  Then, black gospel choirs, Andree Crouch, and the singers with the Caravans. Larry Gatlin and the Gatlin brothers: "I've Done Enough Dyin' Today" and harmonies that made your heart ache.

     "Daddy."  I have to say it two, three times.  "Daddy.  Daddy."

     "What?"  He is still absent.

     "Earth to Bill," my mother says.

     He blinks, focuses.  "What?"

     "This is one," I say.  Back to one.

     He grins, returning.  "Okay, give me seven."  His favorite interval.

I wonder what memories my children will have of me, what late night reveries and what music will bring them back in their minds to our living room.  I wonder what memories they will imagine I am returning to when I disappear before them like my father does, has always done.  I wonder what will anchor them, like my father returning to harmony, his home base, his roots, his "one."  

I feel him grounding me there: "This is one.  Now give me--"

I wait breathlessly, wondering what I can give him, hoping it will please him, grateful for this reference point.  Back to the one.

--Amy Gaither Hayes 

To share this post with others on Facebook, click below:

Go Ask

There is no such thing as a “risk-free faith”.  We mortals want one, of course.  So did those who walked with Jesus when He was literally walking the physical places He frequented with His friends.  We, as they, want to have the advantages of faith without having to make a fool of ourselves by buying into something we can’t actually prove. 

Those who walked with Jesus were privy to some amazing happenings.  They saw the 5,000 fed with a kid’s lunch.  They saw the man so crazed by demon spirits that he had to be chained in the cemetery to keep him from destroying himself or attacking others, freed at Jesus’s command to become a peaceful citizen, clothed and in his right mind.  They saw lepers healed, the deaf made to hear, the blind given sight, and the lame healed to walk.

Yet, after three years of walking by His side, these followers bombarded Him with questions that were basically asking for Jesus to reduce the risk factor of belief.  One of them asked why He didn’t reveal Himself to the world at large so that proving He was the Son of God would be easier, less risky.  Jesus’s answer was simple, yet anything but fool-proof.  He said that they had to risk loving Him first before His certain identity would be revealed to them.  “I will only reveal myself to those who love and obey me.  The Father will love them too, and we will come to them and live with them.” (John 14:22 LB)

In other words: love and obey first; only then will confirming certainty begin to settle into your souls.  Still today are we asking for a faith we can turn on and off like a faucet when we are in trouble or when we’re in a situation that “faith” is an asset?  But risk-free faith is no faith at all.

I love the story of the man who was blind from birth.  Everybody knew he was blind and had seen him grow up without sight.  Instead of showing compassion, we see the disciples wanting explanations.  They asked Jesus whether this blindness was caused by the sin of his parents or his own. Jesus said the darkness was to show the light. Obviously, Jesus was implying more than the physical darkness a blind man sees, but the darkness of missing the message that Jesus is the light for all kinds of darkness.  Jesus put spit-and-dirt mud on the man’s eyes, then told him to go wash it off in the pool of Siloam.

Instead of rejoicing with the now sighted man, the religious circle around him continued the interrogation about the validity of the method, the timing, the history, and the motivation for Jesus’s miracle.  Finally, in exasperation, the once-blind man said “I don’t know!  I don’t know whether he’s good or bad.  All I know is, I was blind but now I see!”

The only test tube for proving what faith is or does is to risk loving and see the result in the lives of those who “were blind but now can see.”  Risk-free faith is an oxymoron.  In real life there is no such thing.  If we want a proof for faith, go ask the blind man.  Fall in love with the Master and questions will be superfluous.

To share this post with others on Facebook, click below:

The Best Graduation Gift

I’ve been wrapping graduation gifts and finding cards that can hold a gift certificate or a little cash.  This year graduating seniors are excited to be anticipating an actual in-person graduation ceremony instead of last year’s online or zoom virtual ceremony necessitated by the pandemic.  

Our grandson just finished his first year of college in New York state, but is coming back to Indiana for the great pageantry of Culver Military Academy and a year-delayed ceremony.  It will be a treat to have our daughter Amy’s family gathering in to see Simon “graduate”, even with a year of college under his belt.

We already had his party last year.  I spent the month before we met for a small masked celebration going through tubs of pictures and shuffling through memories of him collected since his birth to make a huge scrapbook of this sweet child.  Maybe this year we can just get it out again and look at it together.

All this “double graduation” makes me remember what my mother gave me for my graduation from high school.  It was a full Webster’s Dictionary that I have used in the years since until the pages started to fall out.  It is now in one of the glass cases in the “museum” section of our recording studio.  It is a treasure, not only because of my life-long love of words, but for a poem she wrote in her own handwriting inside the front cover.

The sheep may know the pasture,
But the Shepherd knows the sheep;
The sheep lie down in comfort
But the Shepherd does not sleep.

He protects the young and foolish
From their unprecocious way
And gently prods the aged
Lest they give in to the clay.

When the young have learned some wisdom,
It is much too late to act;
When the old man knows the method,
He is less sure of the fact.

Ah, the Shepherd knows the answer—
The beginning and the end.
So the wisest choice, my daughter,
Is to take him as your friend.
--Mother

This and many other writings confirm for me, now decades later, that my mother was one of the wisest persons I ever knew.  At 17 I knew she was, but not like I know it now.

Perhaps the line I’ve most thought about over the years is “...Lest they give in to the clay.” 

From the time I was a child, my parents wanted me to be able to recognize and choose the things that last forever.  We had as a family many discussions about what is eternal and what is not, not just when we die, but every day we live.  I remember my mother saying to me as a high school girl, “Gloria, don’t ever forfeit anything eternal for someone whose name you won’t remember ten years from now.”

When we began to have children of our own, Bill and I wrote a song that Suzanne later asked Bill to sing at her wedding.  It was titled “The Things That Last Forever.” Of course, he had a hard time getting through the song that day.

But of all the things my parents made sure I understood, to recognize what is eternal in every moment and to give myself for things that will never die was perhaps the most important— “lest I give in to the clay.”

Now I am in the autumn of my life.  What do I want to have gotten said to our children, to our great-grandchildren, to people who have heard the song of our lives?  It is this: “Think ‘forever’!” because now is forever.  Forever starts here.  Heaven starts here—and so does hell. We’re building forever with the choices we make today.

To all graduates—whether graduating from high school, college, the transition chapter of your life, or from this life itself, think “forever.”  Will what I choose today last forever?  Can I recognize the eternal in this moment, and am I giving myself away for things that will never die?

To share this post with others on Facebook, click below:

Thinking About Vines and Fruit

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about vines and tree trunks and vineyards and orchards. I’ve been taking pictures of our old grape vine that is more than 45 years old now, and the sturdy trellis we built when it was planted to hold the branches that would tendril up to the sunshine.  The vines are now putting out leaves and sprouting new branches.  Come July and August these branches will hold their heavy clusters of purple grapes for making jellies and jams.

I’m watching our old orchard blossom, too.  Pink cherry blossoms, white apple buds, and clusters of pear blossoms make the orchard a fantasy of color.  Some of these trees are decades old; a few are just on their second season.  Some of the trunks and branches can be climbed by our agile grandchildren; some are still spindly but firmly rooted.  Even the newest fruit trees will be full of fruit, come late summer. 

And I’m thinking that the branches and tendrils aren’t much concerned about the fruit that’s coming.  The pruning of dead branches was done last fall, so opening leaves and clusters of blossoms are driven by the strong flow of sap coursing through them to do what strong branches do:  produce fruit.  All they need to do is stay connected.

And I’m thinking about us, about me.  And about the scriptures about fruit-bearing.   These verses don’t seem to imply that we can produce more and better fruit by grunting hard to get more faith or to be sure we are looking more “Christian”.  I don’t think the fruit is our problem.  I am coming to think that the branches are clueless about the fruit that falls off the other end of the twig—that just maybe their only concern is staying firmly attached to the source of the sweet sap that makes them so alive and sends them skyward to soak up the sun.

I am coming to realize that the only way we branches know anything about the fruit we’re producing is when someone surprisingly comes up to us, maybe seasons later, and says,
“Your patience kept me from giving up on myself when I was so discouraged.”  “Who me? Patient?” we are likely to reply.  Who knew?

Or maybe someone has said, “You are the kindest friend I’ve ever had.  When I was so frustrated with life, you were so gentle and kind.”

Or perhaps you received a note that said: “If meekness is gentle strength, you were the epitome of meekness when I so needed someone gentle to lean on.”  Or maybe when the day was gray, and you were longing for the sun, someone called to say “You bring me such joy. You can make a party out of most anything!  I love that!  You bring me such joy!”

So today I just want to stay connected to the trunk, plugged into the vine. Today I just think it’s enough to be in love with Jesus and the life He brings, to be totally aware of His sweet presence and bask in the knowing that I am His child. What drops off into the yard of my life is really not my problem. The fruit will take care of itself. If the fruit nourishes someone hungry, I will just be glad. Surprised, maybe, but thankful.

To share this post with others on Facebook, click below:

A Daughter Remembers

It isn’t often that I get to hear the stories of our lives told from our children’s point of view, but after I posted the last blog, my daughter Suzanne texted me this 2006 excerpt from her journal.  As a mother this week before Mother’s Day, I share her memory with you with her permission.

Dad drives the cheerleaders in Homecoming parade.

Journal Entry--2006
Out on a back road in Orestes, there is an artesian well—you hear it before you see it. My dad used to pile all of us into the old Chevy convertible, and after we got our ice cream cones at Dor-tees, we would go for a drive out around the winding roads, past the landfill and Martin Paving, past fields oof cattle and corn until Dad would turn down the music of Willie Nelson long enough to say, “Listen.”  He would pull up along the side of the road and turn off the engine. 

Photo by Angela Kellogg

Over the sounds of birds and cicadas you could hear the gurgling of the well spring coming up from somewhere deep in the ground.  It was magical for me as a kid, straining to hear the sound of the water, knowing that even while I slept or ate dinner or worked math problems, the spring was always bubbling up and out of the ground, day in and day out.  Once my dad stopped the car, got out, and took me by the hand to see it, even though it stood on someone’s private property.  It was amazing, truly.  I had never seen water so clear or felt anything so cold.  My dad bent me over to take a drink so I wouldn’t get my clothes wet.  The water was as chilled and sweet and untainted as an April rain.

In February of this past year, our family made the difficult decision to move out of Madison County to Nashville, Tennessee, where my husband could be a more “hands on” manager in a music company with which he had been involved for some time.  Our children who are both serious musicians had expressed intertest in getting more involved in a music community and began to desire the move as well.  Toward the end of May, the week before we packed the moving truck and headed south, my dad pulled around our driveway in the old Chevy convertible and told the boys and me to get in.  We drove down the familiar streets of Alexandria—the bakery, the Lighthouse Café, Broyles Furniture—curved around Washington Street, drove out past Martin Paving and what used to be the Madison County Landfill (“the only mountain in the county”, we used to joke), past the cornfields just beginning to emerge into decent-sized plants, until dad came to the road where the artesian well gurgled up out of the ground.  He turned off the car engine and said, “Listen.” We could hear it, the joyful sound of clear, cool water.  

We got out of the car.  It had been years since I’d been to the artesian well, so I was surprised to see that the owners of the property had laid a little stone path which curved around to a podium with a guest book people could sign.  There was beautiful landscaping—hostas, zinnias, daffodils—blooming around the well.  Statues of angels and wildlife stood in their cement stillness as if to pay homage to the flowing water.  Beyond the spring down another winding path stood a miniature chapel with a tiny steeple set up for those who wished to meditate and reflect.  The boys, sensing the sacredness of the place, remained silent.  

Photo by Angela Kellogg

They made their way to the spring which had been connected in recent years to a galvanized pipe so that people could drink from it.   They bent down one and a time to drink from the well.  I watched their faces as each one smiled, tasting for the first time the cold sweetness which I had come to know so well.  “This is good,” whispered Jesse to me as he took another sip.

As we got into the car to leave, an old rusty Oldsmobile pulled up behind us.  A heavy-set woman with her hair pulled back in a bandana was driving the car.  The back seat was full of children with dirty faces and faded tee-shirts.  The littlest boy had on only a diaper.  A girl about fourteen got out of the passenger seat.  She wore tattered cut-off shorts and a halter top that said “Baby”.  Her eyes were lined heavily with eyeliner and mascara, and she smelled of stale cigarette smoke.  She only glanced our way briefly, then headed toward the well, an empty gallon milk jug in her hand.  We got into our car and drove away.

Photo by Angela Kellogg

A week later we left Madison County for our new home in Tennessee.  We packed the back of both of our SUVs full of suitcases, dogs, and movies for the trip.  As I was getting ready to close the trunk, I spotted a gallon milk jug.  “What’s this?” I asked.

Jesse glanced behind him and replied rather matter-of-factly, “It’s water...from the well.”  He began fidgeting with his seat belt, then added, “I thought it would be good to take some with us.”

I shut the hatch, “Yeah, it would be.  It would be good,” I said as I got in the car.  We drove the back way out of Madison County, country roads lined with corn plants and soy beans, Frankton Elementary School, Rickers, Hutchinson’s Orchard, Florida Station Church of God, the granary....

To share this post with others on Facebook, click below:

Flowing Well of Hope

Bill has a bright red 1973 Chevrolet Impala convertible that he bought in, you guessed it, in 1973. We put about a thousand miles a year on by driving it around the Indiana country sides on summer evenings. Our fifty-year-old son was three when we got that car.  His sister Amy was four and Suzanne was eight. Back then we would buckle them in and cover their legs with the blue and green quilt we kept from the motor home, and sing our way through the fields of winter wheat, corn, and soy beans to the accompaniment of crickets and cicadas until the sunset faded. Then we would make our way back into town and stop for chocolate and vanilla twist ice cream cones at Dortee’s. This ritual has been celebrated now for over 47 years in the same red convertible. 

Photo by Angela Kellogg

Now we take the youngest grandkids on the same adventure. The magic moment of the trip is when Bill slows down somewhere along County Road 400 and pulls into a well worn path. He turns off the engine and says, “Shh, do you hear it?” 

Like they’ve never done it before, the kids, grown or small, get quiet, quiet enough to hear the sound of fresh cold water gurgling up from some deep place through a pipe someone stuck into the Indiana clay out and down into the pebbles below. We listen. “Where does it come from?” Mia or Liam is sure to ask again. “Who knows,” Bill always answers, “Deep in the ground. It’s been flowing from that source for as long as my grandpa could remember. Want to get a drink?” 

There’s a place, a place in the human spirit, when we can always go to be surprised by hope in the most unlikely of circumstances at the times when hope seems impossible to find.  There’s always a spring coming from the deep places, a well of living water bursting to the surface of our days. No matter how unwise the choices that may have led us to our places of despair, there is always a road back home. Friends may dessert us, promises may be broken, lost can become a way of life, but the Father has provided a spring along our journey if we will just stop there, get still enough to hear, and honest enough to admit our thirst.  There is always, there is always a place called hope.

To share this post with others on Facebook, click below:

Overcoming

When we say, we must “overcome,” the images that most often come to mind are military ones of battlefields, armor, weapons, and strategies.  We think of “spiritual warfare” as being against outside attack forces and of conquering as confronting and eliminating the “enemy” with swords and spears, armor and chain mail.

 While it is true that we “wrestle against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of darkness of this world,” we also war against an enemy even subtler.  As Pogo said, “We have seen the enemy and he is us.” 

The enemy can be our impatience, our propensity to quit before the job is finished, because we expect immediate results.  Often the enemy is our trust in what is evident instead of what is unseen.  Many times the enemy is our expecting to accomplish Kingdom work with the earth’s systems, or to interpret God’s blessing in material terms. Most things of true value require what we least like to do—to wait, and most eternal lessons are learned by waiting with persistence, patience, and, yes, pain.

Ann Smith, a dear friend and mentor of ours who is half through her tenth decade, told us this week that she has chosen her guiding objective for this part of her journey; it is this:  To nurture a “passionate sense of potential” in all situations and with all people.  She says this means that she will try to see clearly what is, then beyond what is to the potential, and finally, to relate to each person or situation based on the potential, nourishing what could be.

Her eyes danced as she said she had discovered a hymn she hadn’t known and had taken its text as her living joy or her life’s last statement, whichever this decade might hold.  When I found it, I loved this hymn, too, and leave it for fuel for thought for all who would overcome!

In the bulb there is a flower; in the seed, an apple tree,
In cocoons, a hidden promise:  butterflies will soon be free!
In the cold and snow of winter there’s a spring that wants to be,
Unrevealed until its season, something God alone can see.

There’s a song in every silence, seeking word and melody;
There’s a dawn in every darkness, bringing hope to you and me.
From the past will come the future; what it holds, a mystery,
Unrevealed until its season, something God alone can see.

In our end is our beginning; in our time, infinity;
In our doubt there is believing; in our life, eternity,
In our death, a resurrection; at the last, a victory,
Unrevealed until its season, something God alone can see.

--Natalie Sleeth © Hope Pub. 1986

To share this post with others on Facebook, click below:

Hope Rising

Thank God for morning!  There is nothing like a sunrise to sing hope to the heart.  No matter how big and insurmountable problems seem in the night, hope rises with the sun!

Thank God for spring!  After the long, cold winter, the days begin to be longer, the creek begins to thaw, and the clouds begin to thin enough to let the rays of the sun shine through.  And even in the rainy season of April, there are more rainbows come spring.

Maybe that is why we love to fly in the winter, too.  As the plane gains altitude through the thick, gray overcastting that has been hovering over the even grayer landscape, the hint of blue begins to show through the last wisps of clouds, and the sun that we had almost forgotten was there bursts through!

Easter is resurrection and hope and awareness of a Life force that has been there all along.  As the old Spiritual says, “Ain’t no grave gonna hold this body down!”  Our awareness may be in “dead mode”, but insistent Life keeps pulling at the seed of the divine that was planted in us from the beginning.  And something—a revelation, a tragedy, an accident, an undeserved kindness—will pierce a passage through the clouds or the night or the frozen shell, and a light, a quickening warmth, will burst through.

Despite the darkness, despite the tomb, despite the obscurity of doubt and pessimism, Life will win!  It always does!  It always does!

As the sun rises, so shall your hope;
As the rain waters, so shall His grace 
Coax from the heart so brittle and closed 
A living green sprout in a once-barren place.

As the sun rises, so shall your hope;
Deep snows of winter cannot chill your faith.
Under the freeze-line the root tendrils grope,
Reaching the strength-giving nourishing place.

From the dry branches blossoms will burst.
Grasses will green the fields and the slopes--
Goodness will come from the darkest and worst;
As the sun rises, so will your hope!

--- “As the Sun Rises” by Gloria Gaither ©
2012 Willowmere Pub.

To share this post with others on Facebook, click below:

Then He Bowed His Head and Died

While the “glory hallelujahs” still ring in the ears of the disciples, while the songs of “Hosanna! Blessed is He!” still echo through the streets of Jerusalem, Jesus goes on walking in the shadow of what restoring broken lives will cost, a toll only He can pay.

From habit His footsteps take Him to the garden of gnarled olive trees and rugged rocks where He has so often gone in the night to pray away the burdens of His heart.

But tonight in Gethsemane the heaviness will not go away.  “Drink ye all of it,” He had said just hours before to His friends as they shared the Messiah’s cup, the cup of the new covenant.  How could they know what now brimmed from the cup He has to drink?  It doesn’t hold the sweet wine of companionship, this cup that now stands like a yawning chasm before Him.  He sees the past in the cup, and the future.

He sees the sick perversions of every Sodom and Gomorrah, the bloody wars of violence of brother against brother, the betrayals of trust against the innocent.  He hears the cries of children violated and abused, the sobs of the wounded battered in body and broken in the spirit, the angry shouts of men in streets where violence tears relationships apart, the bitter voices of young men who have no one to trust.

In this cup He sees teen-agers writhing in the muddy battlefields of some insane war, crying for the mercy of dearth.  He sees long lines of naked Jewish men, women, and children marching, marching toward long grey buildings whose smokestacks belch the sickening stench of burning flesh.  In this cup He sees unborn children and their child-mothers who weep at night for the lost childhoods of them all.

And there is silence in the cup – the long, empty silence that widows know when there is no one to talk to.  The uncomfortable silence as thick as a cement wall between fathers and sons who have never found a way to love or be loved, the panicked silence of mothers who wait for word from lost daughters, the desperate silence of children who wait for an alcoholic parent to burst into the room where they cower terrified in the darkness.

He sees all the violations, and the pain, all the brokenness from Eden to Gethsemane, and from Gethsemane to the end of time.  Since Bethlehem He has walked this earth as a man with all the human limitations…except one:  He has the terrible awareness of God.  And this awareness eats at His soul, confirming that he must not only see all of this pain in the cup, but He will have to experience all of it – become both victim and violator – yes, become sin itself, if the lost children of the Father are to ever be restored to wholeness.  This terrible awareness is more than a human body was ever meant to bear.  Drops of blood begin to rupture from the pores of His forehead as if they were drops of sweat.  He turns for the support of a friend, for someone to just be there for Him in this hour.  

But his friends are asleep.  Human companionship is no match for the commitment this relationship demands.  He will drink alone – as He has walked alone from Eden to Gethsemane and now from Gethsemane to Golgotha.  The road He must take will be called “Sorrow”.  The “Man of Sorrows” must walk “Sorrow Street”, and He must go alone.

From the Musical "Then Came The Morning"

To share this post with others on Facebook, click below:

Gospel Songs--Why We Need Them

In the last blog we talked about hymns and why we so need them to remind ourselves and each other just who is this God that we serve and what are His unchanging attributes that we can depend on in a undependable world.  Hymns are also songs addressed to God in worship and gratitude for our history with Him.

The other kind of song that we need to sing is the gospel song.  Many great gospel songs have also survived the test of many generations of experience and often we even hear these called “hymns” because they have proven to be so true to our shared experience.  While hymns are “vertical” or God directed, gospel songs are “horizontal” or relational. By that I mean that they are “the word of our testimony”-– each of us telling someone else what God has done in our lives.  These songs are our personal story.

I guess I am cynical enough that when I sit in church and hear both hymns and praise and worship songs telling how awesome God is, I am asking in my mind, “How do you know that?  I have my real and complicated life coming up tomorrow morning, and I have to know how you know that God is awesome, powerful, omnipotent, omnipresent and all the things you are singing about Him.”  

There is nothing so powerful to my fainting heart as a real person saying to me, “This is what happened to me, and this is how I know.”  Like the blind man who was questioned by the sanctimonious doubters, he simply said, “I don’t know whether he’s good or bad.  I only know, once I was blind, but now I see.”

We also need these relational songs because love demands action to be valid.  We don’t read the words of Jesus very long before we hear Him telling us to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, give shelter to the homeless and “thus fulfill the law of love.”

It is my deep belief that in our worship, both personal and corporate, we need a good balance of hymns and personal testimony songs.  We do overcome by the “blood of the Lamb” and by “the word of our testimony.”  Nothing is as powerful when some cynic shoves us into a corner of “theological nit-picking” than taking two steps away from the belligerent finger-pointing to simply say, “I only know, this happened to me.”

We need both hymns and gospel songs because every vertical commitment will eventually demand a horizontal living out in relationship with those around us.  It is imperative that we know what God says in His living Word and when we gather to worship express our gratitude for all He is, rising above our smallness to embrace His Glory.  We also need to live out what He says in this word, drawing from the great storehouse of His freely offered resources to embrace a hurting world by being what He has called us to be.  The vertical.  The horizontal.  The hymns of praise and great scriptural truths that have withstood the test of experience must be combined with the word of our personal testimony sharing our stories of God at work through us and in us to conform us to the likeness of His Son.  We need to teach both to our children.  Don’t worry that they might not totally understand all the words.  Did you?  Did I? But hymns and spiritual songs that are worth their salt are pieces of portable theology, and they will throw our children a lifeline when experience is pulling them under for the third time.  As with scripture, the meaning of profoundly true songs will become clear when life gets their attention.

The “praise and worship” vs. “gospel songs” argument should never come up!  We need to sing the songs that have outlived us.  We need to sing the songs as new and fresh as this morning’s experience with our neighbor or our children.  We need the songs that remind us that we have a history with God.  We need the songs that sing our testimony as personal as the text of encouragement we just received from a fellow believer.

All must be biblical, beautiful, true, powerful and, yes, personal.  Let’s encourage each other daily, singing hymns and spiritual songs.  Let us never lose our joy and in the chaos of the world, live at rest in Him who is the alpha and omega, the beginning and the end.

To share this post with others on Facebook, click below:

What Are Hymns and Why Do We Need them?

In times of chaos and uncertainty, there always seems to be a return to hymns, so it is not surprising that so many artists, both gospel and secular, have recently released recording projects of hymns.

A hymn is not just an “old song” we used to sing.  In fact, there are many new hymns being written and whole hymn movements of new writers rising up, not only in the U.S. but in the U.K. and Scandinavia.   Then what is a hymn, and why do we need them?

First of all, a hymn is meant to be sung corporately.  When we gather with other Believers, we sing together praise to God or remind each other just who this God is that we serve. In general, we could think of hymns as those songs of praise and worship we send up to God identifying for all to hear His attributes and thanking Him for His amazing intervention in our world and in our lives.  We sing of the incarnation: God who was before anything existed, the Cause and Source of all things, God of grandeur, power and infinite glory chose to become one of us and to walk with us – Immanuel!  Hymns are God-centered and call our attention upward.  They are lofty in message and lift us above the earthy.  They remind us of our original glory that preceded any “original sin” and remind us of God’s intention to see that glory restored in us.  The exchange in hymns, then, is vertical – connecting us to God and seeking to hear His voice speaking to our hearts in return.

Hymns are firmly rooted in God’s Word and, since they are intended to be sung corporately by the fellowship of believers, pull us above our petty differences by reminding us of God’s dream for us – that we would be one.  

Because hymns are intended to reflect the qualities of God, they must have poetry that is beautiful, reverent, simple, accurate, and pure.  The theme of a hymn should be focused and at the same time universal and not sectarian in its truth, drawing together and then upward all the divergent believers to oneness in Him.

There is no more distilled form of writing than the song lyric, and there is no more condensed form of lyric writing that hymn writing.  The thought must be scripturally sound, purely true and without embellishment.  This requires that every word count – every verb, every noun, every conjunction, every adverb or adjective accurate – the perfect choice to convey true meaning so that there is no misunderstanding.  Every skill of the poet’s art must be called into play in hymn writing so that the clarity and beauty, creativity and purity reflect the Maker Himself in its expression. The music, too, must be harmonically, rhythmically, and melodically singable so that congregations can sing it together.

It is equally imperative that the singer or recording artist not take liberties with the words of a hymn. It is not acceptable to embellish or be careless by changing an “at” to “in” or “Father” to fathers or an “and” to a “but”.  Such changes can totally change the meaning and the theology and violate the integrity of the scripture from which the hymn was taken.

Yes, many of the great hymns have been sung literally for centuries, but we do not sing hymns because they are old; we sing them because they are so true that they have survived all the fads of language, rhythm feels, and musical trends.  If new hymns live, it will be for the same reason.

No wonder, then, that when times are confusing or the world is in upheaval, we find ourselves needing songs that nail to the wall the deep cardinal truths of our faith and the always available and ever dependable qualities of God.  When we cannot sing them as a congregation, we sing them to ourselves to help us remember that the Body of Christ is always at the table and the great cloud of witnesses are always present to encourage, love and support.  When we sing hymns alone, we refocus on the ways this great God has delivered us before; this focus turns our anxieties to praise and our questions to certainties.  

I love the promise found in Revelation (12:11) that we would overcome the obstacles of any age “by the blood of the Lamb and the Word of our testimony.”  This explains the power we find in hymns—those songs that extol and express praise for the qualities of God and the work that Jesus did for us on the cross.  Let’s sing our hearts out in great hymn confirmations of truths that transcend the shifting winds of public opinion and trends of the times. 

To share this post with others on Facebook, click below:

Givers and Takers

Bill’s Grandpa Grover used to say, “There are basically two kinds of people in this world—givers and takers—so decide which one you want to be.”  The longer we live, the more convinced we are that he was right.  There are big-hearted, generous people, and there are clutching, stingy people.

We have also observed that the attitude with which a person approaches life doesn’t seem to have much to do with how much one has.  We’ve seen unselfish, generous poor people, and we’ve seen tight-fisted, grasping rich people.  We’ve seen extravagantly liberal givers who had means, and we’ve seen miserly, greedy poor people who hated everyone who had anything.  It all depends on how we choose to spend the days allotted to us.

Bill’s grandparents, Addie and Burl Hartwell, lived for the joy of giving.  Though they never had much of this world’s goods, it was impossible to get out their door when we went to visit without them thrusting into our hands a head of cabbage, a loaf of freshly baked bread, or a “mess of corn” from the garden for supper.  We wanted to be that kind of givers; we hope that we have taught our children to be givers too.

Maybe one thing the pandemic has taught us all is that we really do need each other.  We have become a little more aware of a neighbor who can’t get out to get groceries, or someone who is stressed by job loss or home schooling or worry about someone they can’t visit.

What could happen if the joy in giving away what we have should be as contagious as Covid-19? Could a new attitude take over the world?  Jesus taught that it could.  He said that sharing our bounty could perfect us.  He said that giving our food to the hungry, something to drink to the thirsty, our hospitality to the overlooked or lonely, our clothing to the destitute, and our care to the sick would make us heirs to God’s Kingdom.  And physical food, water, housing, clothing, and care are just the tip of the iceberg!  What if we were to truly offer food for the soul, water for the shriveled spirit, the shelter of a place to belong, and the covering of encouragement for the raw and exposed heart?

The best anti-depressant to be found is this prescription from the old-timers—and from the Master of Life:

If you want more happy than your heart can hold,
If you wanna stand taller, if the truth were told,
Take whatever you have and give it away!
If you want less lonely and a lot more fun,
And deep satisfaction when the day is done,
Throw your heart wide open and give it away! 

To share this post with others on Facebook, click below:

Love Note to a Teacher

Ione Craig was not just your regular, run-of-the-mill kindergarten teacher.  She defined kindergarten teacher.  And our daughter Suzanne was fortunate enough to have her.  Ione with laughing eyes and smile in her voice made every day an adventure in learning colors or numbers or letters or sounds....

In the fall there was the adventure of gathering leaves of gold and scarlet and orange.  There were gourds and pumpkins to paint and line up around the room and songs about the leaves falling down to sing to the rhythm of shakers and tambourines and triangles. There was the taste of fresh apple cider and caramel corn.

At Christmas there were bells to make and to spell and to ring. There was the wooden nativity to set up and cotton balls to paste onto the beards of the cut-out Santas.  When the big Indiana snows came, there were new words to write and to spell like s-n-o-w and i-c-e and c-o-l-d. There were icicles to cut from white manilla paper and hang from silver cord across the ceiling. There were new ways to fold and cut paper with newly acquired scissor skills that, when unfolded, made magical snowflakes to tape on the big wall of windows that looked out on the drifts of snow outside.

One winter day when I went to pick Suzanne up from school, there were twenty small bumps and one large round bump in the snowy school yard.  Turned out it was Mrs. Craig in her snowmobile suite teaching her kindergarten children to make snow angels in the drifts! 

Then there was the day that Suzanne came out with a big smile on her face, waving a very large sheet of fingerpainting paper. She carefully manipulated the paper into the front seat of my car and said, ‘Mom, we fingerpainted today, and guess what we used for paint—chocolate pudding! Mrs. Craig said we could paint with our fingers or our elbows or even our toes, if we wanted to, as long as we licked it off when we got done!”  I still have that painting in one of the early scrapbooks I kept for Suzanne, and she still grins when she looks at it.

There were days when I wasn’t able to make the school-run, and Bill was on duty. Invariably, it seemed, just as he was leaving for the school an important phone call would come into the office or an interview would run overtime, making him a bit late to get to the pick-up line.  (These were the days before portable cell phones.) By the time he got there, Mrs. Craig had taken Suzanne back inside to wait. About the third time this happened, Suzanne came out with a big note attached to her sweater with a safety pin that said MR. GAITHER on the front.  When Bill unpinned the note and read it, it said.

 Mr. Gaither:
Kindergarten lets out at 11:30. It is very distressing
to your child when you are not here when she gets
out.  I will expect you here at 11:30 from now on.

                          Ione Craig

It didn’t matter to this teacher whether Mr. Gaither was president of the School Board or President of the United States; she expected him to never distress one of her little students again.  When Bill got home that day with our daughter, he said, “What a great teacher!  You have to love a teacher whose top priority is the joy and well-being of her kids.” (You may be sure he was never late again.)

We got to know Ione Craig that year and found there were many iconic stories about her around town from the three generations of students who had her as a teacher.  But the best story was one she told on herself.  She said that by February kindergarteners had learned to write and to spell enough words to write a love note on Valentine’s Day.  They could use scissors well enough to cut out red construction paper hearts and could paste well enough to glue lacey paper doilies to the red hearts to make a pretty Valentine.

So Mrs. Craig’s project the second week of February was for the students to make a Valentine for a very special person in their lives.  To her surprise and delight, one of the little boys came up at the end of the morning and gave his Valentine to his teacher.  Mrs. Craig expressed her gratitude to her student and tucked the treasure into her purse to take home to show her husband.  When they opened the Valentine, it read: 

After reading this, Armond Craig laughed out loud and said, “Well, there’s nothing wrong with the kid’s spelling.  He just can’t count.”

To share this post with others on Facebook, click below:

Puppy Training

We got a new puppy!  We had always been a collie family when our kids were growing up.  We’ve had five collies in all over the years.  We loved their sweet dispositions and the tender care they gave of the children and their friends.  Collies are “herders,” so nothing made them happier than corralling a yard full of children or teen-agers.

As our lives got more complicated though, we decided to not get another dog after we lost our last one, Lord Townsend.  Until now.

With concerts and events cancelled because of Covid-19, and with my decision to travel less and write more, Bill and I decided it was time to get a puppy again, a Cavalier King Charles spaniel.  We learned that this was the favorite breed of Queen Victoria, England’s longest ruling monarch, who was the last of the House of Hanover transitioning into the House of Windsor.  So, we named our puppy Windsor, our transition dog into this new chapter of our lives.  

And what a joy this little guy is! He is sweet and smart like our collies were, but smaller and so easy to train because he so loves to please.  We thought we’d use these months of isolation to teach him, but truth be known, he is teaching us.

He’s teaching us to be consistent and to pay attention to his subtle signals.  He’s teaching us that playing hard is as important as working hard and sleeping well.  He’s reminding us that touching and expressing affection, rewarding and confirming kindnesses are as vital to a relationship as honest confrontation.

And here is the best Windsor-lesson of all!  I accidently stepped on his little toes not realizing he was right under my feet.  Amazingly, as soon as he let out his sharp yelp, he turned and licked my shoe.  He looked up at me as if to say, “I know you didn’t mean it, did you?  We’re still okay, right?” His only response was to forgive and restore our bond.

Wow!  What if that were always my first response to a harsh word, a slight, a hurt?  What if mercy and grace and forgiveness were as natural as the first cry of pain?  What if a healing gesture could rush to fill the moment of conflict?

We thought we were just getting a puppy for the joy of him, but we have gotten a whole lot more, and even at this late date in our relationship, I think Bill and I are loving each other better than ever.  And a puppy shall lead them...

To share this post with others on Facebook, click below:

Keys

I could write my life in keys.  The first key I remember was to the 1878 farm house my parents bought after we moved back from Intercession City, Florida, where daddy had been in Bible College.  I was four.  It was a squarish house that I now know was in the Federalist style of architecture.  It was just down the gravel county road from my grandparent’s small farm outside Burlington, Michigan. There was no inside plumbing or running water, but the house was one of my favorite childhood memories.  The key to the front and back doors was what daddy called a “skeleton key,” I guess because it had a thin back bone, a round head, and notched feet that unlocked the door.

Then there was the key to my grandfather’s 1932 Ford.  That was key to the adventure of running boards, scratchy horsehair upholstery, and put-put-putting down the country roads at the speed of a tortoise.  When my pastor-parents were out of town for a church convention or state board meetings, Grandpa and Grandma would drive into town to pick me up from school.  I sat on the prickly back seat with my chin on the windowsill to watch the farmers plowing the fields or harvesting the crops.  Sometimes a killdeer would limp away to distract us invaders from her eggs that she had literally laid in the edge of the road, where it was hard to tell the gravel from her small spotted eggs.

Daddy and mother had a “wad” of keys.  I always wondered how they knew where they went. Some went to the church and its various doors; some went to not only our parsonage, but to my other grandmother’s mobile home, and my grandparent’s farm house, though they only ever locked the front door to their house.  At the back door was a stoop where there was a bolt that went through a hole in the thick wooden door.  The bolt had a string attached to it with a ring on the end, and the string ran through a wooden block nailed beside the door.  The string with its ring hung in the corner beside the door where grandma propped a mop on its handle so the strands of the mop could hide the bolt string.  We just knew to move the mop, grab the ring and pull; the bolt would slide out of the holes holding the door.  Tight security!

Years later as a budding lyricist, I was to hear a song by Stuart Hamblen, one of the greatest songwriters of all time that had this line:

Each day is a measure on life’s little string;
When reaching its ending, tired eyes will behold
The string tied to the doorlatch of my Father’s house—
One day nearer home.

One Day Nearer Home
Stuart Hamblen
Hamblen Music Company, Inc. (ASCAP)

I knew exactly what that image meant, though Stuart didn’t mention the mop.

I had two treasured keys of my own, too:  the key to my sidewalk skates and a tiny key to a diary I got for my birthday one year.  The diary key was so small that I was afraid I’d lose it, so I kept it tied with a ribbon to my journal.   What I wrote was never very secret-secure.  

Ah, but my precious skate key!  That one I kept on a cord around my neck.  Every recess and noon hour, my friends and I would skate the sidewalks and blacktopped teachers’ parking lot around the school.  Unless there was too much ice and snow, we skated. Skating was our passion!  Skates for sidewalk skating had no boot, then, but clamped onto our saddle shoes; the key closed the clamps until they were tight.  The skates also had a leather strap that buckled into place around our ankles to hold the skates in place. 

Now, many keys later, the keys to my grown-up life hang on a key holder by our back door.  One day when Benjy was small, one of his friends ask him why his parents had so many keys.  “Because they have a lot of keyholes, I guess,” he answered.  I think that is as good an answer as any.  Gates, padlocks, ignitions of cars, trucks, busses, offices, golf carts, guest houses, utility closets, garages—all these have need of keys. Some have been there so long, we’re not sure what they go to, but we’re afraid to throw them away in case the keyhole is still somewhere in our lives.

Hearts and minds and souls have keys, too, and once you discover what that key it is and someone opens up to you, well, you just never throw away that key.  Even though there may be spaces of time and distance when you might not have a chance to use it, you always keep a key and just wait for the day when you get a chance to use it again.

Here are the keys Saint Paul gave us—fruits of the Spirit, he called them. These are well made keys that never stick or get jammed, but open the strongest bolt locks smoothly and without force. These keys have names engraved on them. Love. Joy. Peace. Patience. Kindness. Goodness. Faithfulness. Gentleness. Self-control. How our locked up relationships need this fistful of keys!

To share this post with others on Facebook, click below:

Home of Your Dreams

We are all at times homesick.  And the home that we long for in our bones has very specific characteristics.  Some of us are fortunate enough to have known a home that had many of those specifics.  Some of us have never had a home like that, but are nonetheless homesick for such a place.  

We know that “home” is peaceful, full of joy, and comfortable – that is, we immediately feel at home in our own skin when we get there.  Most of us think of home as a place where there are wonderful meals around a common table, a place where real conversations happen naturally, where great ideas are exchanged and laughter is easy.

Beauty, too, is a part of “home.”  Good sounds, good smells, good tastes greet us when we walk in the door.  Flowers from the garden, clean linens, a handmade quilt, a piece of art, the morning sun shining through the window, a bowl of fruit, music from the piano or the flute, a candle in the window, all may be a part our idea of “home.”

The home we long for is also known for what is missing.  Ugly words and anger are not what we long for in this home of our dreams.  Discouragement and belittling comments, put-downs and reminders of past failures would never draw us “home.” Home is not cold, empty, lonely, drab, dark or dirty in our dreams. It is not confused by clutter or dampness from a lack of warmth and light. What is the home of your dreams? 

We know that heaven is ultimately the home of our dreams.  But Jesus prayed that God would let His kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.  Could it be that He was praying that we would take seriously the calling of making our homes the kind of place to which we all so long to go “home”?

Could it be that Jesus was praying that more and more we would “get it” while we’re on earth and make our habitat here more like it will be in heaven so that others would be drawn to our homes like we’re all drawn to the hope of going to His home?

To share this post with others on Facebook, click below: