Super Bloom

After several drought years, California has been deluged with rain adding up to one of the wettest winters on record.  The rainfall has filled the empty reservoirs and swollen the creeks and rivers.  The parched hillsides and canyons that sweltered last summer and sent fire warnings throughout the state are now dazzling eyes with vibrant green.

Wonder of wonders!  The arid desert areas and the thirsty hills have burst into glorious bloom.  Color everywhere!  Following the rains, vivid yellows, poppy oranges, blues, and purples are turning the barren browns into vistas of blossoms, causing traffic to stop on the freeways so drivers can snap cell-phone pictures of the swaths of outrageous color.

Who knew?  Under the wasteland of drought, deep beneath the char of grassfires, lay seeds.  Seeds everywhere—poppy seeds, mustard, goldfield, and phlox seeds have turned into carpets of color.  This amazing season of super bloom can even be seen from satellites that are sending back images to immortalize this fleeting wonder.

Warnings are being sent now asking tourists not to strike out through the fields and hillsides and trample the flowers before they have a chance to run their course and deposit their seeds onto ground that will hopefully hold them through other dry spells.

Ah, to know the seeds are there.  To know that in the barren places and in desert lands there are seeds.  To see proof that no matter how dry the days, how long the drought, there are seeds. To see with our own eyes that even through the fires, seeds remain, and come spring rains, the desert will flower.  The streams of mercy and the reservoirs of grace will fill with life-giving water once more, and the “desert will blossom like a rose”!

Today watching the aerial photos of California in bloom, my soul is saying, “Yes!”  The rains will come.  The thirsty places will flourish again. The seeds are just waiting for the rain.

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What’s It All About, Emilie?

Photo by Ashley Garrett

Bill and I flew to New York last week to see our daughter’s amazing performance in the play about one of the first female physicist whose life work was to disprove Newton’s Laws of Physics and prove the formula that would be used later by other scientists, including Einstein, as the basis for the theory of relativity.

Emilie:  Le Marquise du Chatelet Defends Her Life Tonight by Lauren Gunderson* is a powerful, humorous, and emotional telling of the Marquise’s story by Emilie herself, now three centuries after she died in childbirth before her work was finished and before she received the credit she deserved. 

Photo by Sam Rothermel

In the play, the tensions with which this 18th century woman lived in order to be a mathematician and researcher makes her, now looking back, puzzle over two great forces of her life:  love and science.  These tensions informed many of her choices both positive and negative.

For Bill and me, the power of story and the depth of our daughter’s performance left us both proud and drained.  The conclusive monologues by Emilie were for us reminiscent of both the speeches of the Stage Manager and Emily in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (which Bill and I directed together when we taught high school English) and the conclusions Solomon came to in the final chapter of Ecclesiastes.

Both Emily in Our Town and Emilie le Marquise du Chatelet died in childbirth long before their work was done.  Both struggled with leaving relationships, as well as life itself, unfinished.  Both had revelations about the meaning of life when they looked back at their choices and priorities.

For these two women (one in the 18th century, one in the early 20th century) there was so much that ended before its time.  They both had to come to grips with the questions:  What is eternal?  What lasts?  Did I matter and what defines mattering?  What do I hold to when all else fails?

Emilie La Marquis says at the end:

            All we have is the moment of having
And the hope that we knew something real....

Emily in Our Town ends her conclusion with another question: “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it—every, every minute?”  And maybe this is the question that is as near to an answer as we get—no answers, but better, deeper questions to which (as the poet Rannier Marie Rilke suggested) we are willing to live ourselves into the answers.

Solomon’s Temple

As for Solomon, unlike these two women, his life was not cut short.  He didn’t struggle for publication or options for his days.  He had it all, did it all, indulged himself in every way.  He built it all and enjoyed power, wealth, possessions, accumulation, and prestige.  As for reputation, he was crowned the wisest man who ever lived.  Yet his conclusion for all this was, “Meaningless! Meaningless!  Everything is meaningless!” Looking back with regret on his long life of striving, he declared that the thing he should have known in the beginning was this:

Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man;
For God will bring every deed unto judgement, including every hidden thing whether it is good or evil.

So, what is the takeaway for us?  Maybe it is to live our lives and to teach our children to live each day recognizing what is eternal in each moment—in big things (what makes them big?) and in little things (by whose assessment?). Will it last?  “... And when time has surrendered, and earth is no more...” what then?

In our waking and in our sleeping, in our working and our playing, in community and in solitude, in our aspirations and in any accomplishment, ask God to show us what is real and what is earnest, and then to give ourselves away for what will outlast time itself.

* Copyright © 2010 by Lauren Gunderson
Directed by Kathy Gail MacGowan
Through April 30, 2023
The Flea Theater
20 Thomas Street, NY, NY

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Come Home with Us

As we walk through the milestone moments of Holy Week, trying once more to realize these events in real time and with the wisdom of hindsight, we see so many connections the friends of Jesus must have missed at the time. 

This year my attention focused on the days after the resurrection, the ways Jesus visited His followers to make them (and us) certain that, indeed, He was alive and to bring them a strong hope that He would be with them to the end of measured time.

The more I reread the accounts of these days as told by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and of the walk Jesus took with the two on the road to Emmaus, the more convinced I am that the two were most likely a married couple, both of whom were very close to Jesus.  Luke’s account names one of them Cleopus, a name scholars say had more than one spelling. Like us after a life-changing event (think 9/11 or the assassination of John Kennedy or Martin Luther King) these two were going over and over the details of Jesus’s crucifixion and the events leading up to it.

While they are intent on their discussion, Jesus joins them on the road.  They didn’t see Him coming; He was suddenly just there.  They noticed Him when He asked what they were talking about.  Cleopus said, ”How could you have missed what the whole area is talking about—the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth who many believe was the Messiah?”

Jesus enters the discussion, and as the two recall each event of the last several days, Jesus begins connecting the dots for them from the writings of the prophets and the Psalms and the things the two tell Him that Jesus has said over the time they had been with Him.  The two were so moved by what Jesus was connecting for them that it was evidently an ah-ha moment for them both.

Who was this other person?  I believe it was “the wife of Clopus” (Cleopus), the “other Mary” referred to as being with the women at the tomb the morning of the resurrection.  (Matt. 28:1) In Luke’s account at the tomb were Mary Magdalene, Johanna, Mary the mother of James “with the others” who then ran to tell the disciples that Jesus was alive.

Weren’t Cleopas and his wife Mary two who would have known the details of the story from different perspectives? It was certainly “Mary the wife of Cleopas” who stood with Jesus’s mother, His mother’s sister, and Mary Magdalene at the foot of the cross.  It was they who heard the exchange between Jesus and John when Jesus asked Mary to look to John as if he were her son and John to treat Mary as he would his own mother.

When the two and Jesus came to the fork in the Emmaus road, Jesus seemed to be going on when the two turned toward their home.  They begged him not to leave them, but to come home with them for supper and, since it was toward evening, spend the night.

 The conversation must have been so rich after that.  How their “hearts burned within them” as it does when someone opens our eyes to some brand-new insight. How deep the revelations of the last few hours with Him had been! 

But then this guest that they had invited to eat with them, spend the night with them, stood at their table and like he was the host and they were the guests, took the bread and broke it.  In that moment a sense of déjà vu came over them.  They had seen this before, this breaking of the bread with these hands.  They suddenly recognized Him for who He was.  And just like He had appeared on the road, he slipped away from them and was gone.

What was the conversation after that?  Did they recall the time Judas (not Iscariot) had asked Jesus when he was going to reveal Himself to the world at large so he could get a bigger following without risking so much? And Jesus’s answer that he would reveal Himself only to those who loved Him.  Love first; get revelations after?  And how these two had loved Him! Did the revelations of this night come because they had loved Him so?  One thing was certain—He was alive and being with Him made them more alive than they’d ever been.

There would be no easy way of loving this Jesus.  It would demand everything.  There would be no playing it safe.  It might be dangerous.  But it would also be magnificent like these last few hours had been.  Whatever the cost, they would follow Him.

It Takes Us All to Tell the Story

It was a borrowed room. Who prepared the Passover dinner? We don’t know.  We do know it was the Day of Unleavened Bread on which the Passover lambs had to be sacrificed to atone for the sins of each family.  So many lambs.  So much blood. We know that Jesus had asked Peter to go to the entrance to the city and there would be a man carrying a jar of water.  “Meet up with him,” Jesus had instructed, “and follow him.  When he enters a house, tell the owner of the house that the teacher asks where the guest room is where he may eat the Passover meal with his disciples.”  The owner, then, would show Peter a large upper story room, all furnished where Peter could make preparations.

We also know that Jesus began the evening by washing his disciples’ feet, something that servants usually did for guests that had walk the dusty roads in the sandals of the day.  Peter had objected to this, since the disciples viewed Jesus as their master teacher. But Jesus had said that if Peter didn’t let him serve him, he would have no place in the Kingdom of God. Evidently, the others didn’t resist.  Was it because they understood that they, too, must be servants, or was it because they wanted to ensure that they would have status in what they perceived to be a new earthly kingdom?

We assume that the actual meal followed the traditional ritual that Jewish families had observed since that night Moses helped the children of Israel escape from Egyptian bondage. There were probably four sections of the meal, representing the four expressions of redemption God made to Moses (Exodus 6:2-8): I will take you out, I will deliver you, I will redeem you (buy you back), and I will acquire you (make you my own). With each part of the meal, there was a cup of wine poured to celebrate that completed promise.

Traditionally, there was a fifth cup of wine that referred to an uncompleted promise.  It was called Elijah’s cup, and it sat throughout the meal or was poured last, but was never touched. There was also an empty seat at the table for Elijah, for the belief was that Elijah would return and announce that the Messiah had come.  Some call the fifth cup the cup of sorrows.  We do know that Jesus broke the bread (unleavened bread in remembrance of the haste the bread had to be prepared so the Israelites could flee quickly). He passed the unleavened bread to his disciples and said “Take this and eat.  It is my body that is broken for you.”

I believe that it was, then, Elijah’s cup that Jesus picked up.  I can just hear those nice Jewish boys suck air, for they would have been slapped if they had touched this cup at their families’ Passover meal.  But it was what Jesus said to them that night that makes me believe it was this cup that He picked up now, the cup of sorrows, Elijah’s cup, for Jesus said, “This is my blood that is shed for you.  Share this with me and drink all of it, that your joy may be full.”

Didn’t he say that they would grieve and be filled with sorrow, but that the grieving would turn to joy?  Didn’t he compare this sorrow to the excruciating pain of childbirth—that it would be temporary and necessary so that there would follow a great joy, a joy that would be permanent like the joy of delivering a perfect new baby?

Talk about a cup of sorrow!  He would drink this cup to the dregs in just a few hours in the Garden of Gethsemane where He would see in it all the sins from Eden to Gethsemane and from Gethsemane to the end of time. It would be such a deep, life-threatening labor, this awareness of what was in the cup, that his human body systems were not adequate for this awareness, and his cells would hemorrhage. Yet, he would drink it, all of it.  And, yes, so that our joy might be full.

These last moments with the Master were so packed with dots to connect, things to remember, words to comprehend that we are still unpacking them.  Like witnesses to an accident or viewers at a happening, each of the disciples afterward remembered and reported different specifics as each wrote their own account later. It took them all to give us an inkling, yet the half has never yet been told.

To Judas, Jesus said, “Hurry up and do what you are going to do.”  And to impetuous Peter he said, “You will deny me three times before the rooster announces tomorrow’s dawn.” Aw, but then Jesus follows that sad prediction with these amazing words of mercy: “But let not your heart be troubled.  You believe in God, believe also in me.... I go to prepare a place for you and if I go, ... I will come again and receive you unto myself that where I am you will be also.”

As the events of that last night unfolded, the urgency of Jesus’s words became more and more intense.  Like a parent running down the driveway as their child leaves with the packed U-Haul headed out for college and the rest of their lives, calling after her, “Drive carefully, and don’t forget, you can always call home....”, so Jesus piles on the instructions and warnings, reminding his own of their experiences together and trying to make them understand what is coming, though they have no experiences, yet, to help them comprehend what the future has in store.

And do we? Even now in the aftermath of the crucifixion and the resurrection, the appearances and the ascension, we still stand looking skyward, not sure what we have experienced these last two and a half millennia. Can we hear the voice saying to us why do you stand here gazing into heaven? This same Jesus who ascended from you will one day come again. Stop gawking in amazement and go! Serve as He served. Forgive as He forgave. Love as He loved. Go and be what He is. Just BE!

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Spring Thaw

Something is stirring that I can’t see.  The days are still mostly gray.  The wind that seems to howl through the pines still darken the spirit after the long weeks of winter.  Sometimes the cold rain freezes to sleet and then changes to snow flurries still into March.

But something is stirring in the depths.  I can feel it, this stirring at the core of things, as if the solid ice deep in the dirt is loosening its hold, and the roots of trees are stretching and yawning like a baby awakening from a nap, reaching tiny fingers out to grasp something yet unseen.

Deep below the frozen creek the springs are becoming insistent to urge their way upward.  Fall leaves, frozen to the underside of the ice, are peeling loose to move downstream below the glassy surface.

And something is stirring inside of me.  My spirit is restless to break through the depression of the gray winter and the pessimism of the times to something new, a hope that will not be denied.

Hope will rise!  It always does, because hope is not always “whispering”.  It is also persistent, insistent and powerful.  It is as tough as nails in the face of setbacks.  Something there is that will not accept defeat. Under the ice of discouragement, the push of the current of hope flows to the sea of God’s grace.  Deep below the frozen surface of pessimism, the living roots of faith are expanding, pushing outward to secure the underpinnings of a growth that, above ground on the dark branches, reaches for the sky in fresh blossoms of certainty.

We are living in perilous times.   When has history ever played it safe?  We mark history by the crises faced in every decade and all over the world. But it has always been the household of faith that has taken in the world’s lost and broken, the “wretched refuse of its teeming shores”.  For those with deep springs of commitment, crisis is simply a call to action.

Yes, the ground is thawing.  The green shoots are pushing through to the surface.  In spite of everything winter threatened, the trees are budding, and the underground springs are bringing fresh currents to sluggish streams.  Life wins!  It always does.  God promised:

                           While the earth remains,
                           Seedtime and harvest,
                           Cold and heat
                           Summer and winter,
                           And day and night
                           Shall not cease.

And Jesus said, “...I have come that they may have life, and have it more abundantly.”  Yes!

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The Gift of Dandelions

Dandelions dotted my childhood. When the long Michigan winter began to admit defeat, there were dandelions, spreading their leaves like fingers, flat and broad, across the greening grass with their tiny fists of buds in the middle.  Their first spring appearance was signal for my mother to grab a plastic bucket and a long-bladed kitchen knife and hit for the yard and meadow to harvest those tender plants and buds for our first batch of dandelion greens.

I went along beside her to take the piles of uprooted plants and put them in her bucket.  When it was full and pressed down, we went to the kitchen to trim away any extra root or yellowed leaves, then plunge the greens into a sink full of cold water and vigorously swish away any soil and sand.   The greens then went to a drainer while mother filled the sink one more time and added a generous handful of salt to dislodge from the leaves any snails or insects that have survived the first wash. 

While the greens drained from the final bath, mother fried a pound of bacon until it was crispy, draining it, too, on some paper towel to cool.  Next, she poured most of the bacon grease into a coffee can, then began wilting the greens, one skillet full at a time, until all the greens were wilted.  Meanwhile, she mixed in a small bowl, apple cider vinegar, a bit of sugar, and a few dashes of salt to pour over the greens, then kept them warm on the stove until she was ready to serve this delicacy; she put them in her prettiest bowl and crumbled the crisp bacon on top.  There was not another treat like this--the first taste of spring!

As the season progressed, the yard was punctuated with the bright yellow blossoms of dandelions.  I couldn’t resist picking handfuls of them to present to mother as a bouquet.  She always made over them like they were a prize from the most fashionable florist and put them in her prettiest bud vases to display the kitchen window.

Later in the summer, when our family went walking in the field or the woods behind my grandparent’s farmhouse, we would pick the tall dandelions, blow the feathery seed tops to the wind, then sit down in the tall grass and make necklaces, belts, or crowns out of the long stems. I learned to thread the small end of the stem into the tube of the big end, then link in the next circle until the chain was long enough to go around our waists or our heads.

When our own children came along, I passed these joyful rituals along to them, then delighted later to celebrate dandelions with their children. 

To this day my eyes dance when I see the first dandelion in the spring, and suspect that these underestimated flowers are why yellow has remained to this day my favorite color.  And for me, enjoying dandelions is a great metaphor for celebrating the common things, making do with what we have, and paying attention to the glory of every season of the year--and of life.

And maybe soon we could just invite some friends over for a dinner of pulled pork and dandelion greens!

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The Prophet Speaks

Biblical prophets are not soothsayers who sit around divining the future and decrying our inevitable demise.  True prophets are gifted with an intense sensitivity to the tone of the age and are called by God to alert those who are obvious to where their personal and national choices are taking them.  The hope of a godly prophet is to convince the culture of its destructive direction and to persuade the people to reverse direction and return to God, a God of mercy and forgiveness, and thus avoid a calamitous destination.

 With our own culture in such a chaotic time, it seems this might be a good time to reread the biblical books of prophecy and listen to the principles of wisdom and warning God gave those prophets in similar times.

In the time of Isaiah, as now, people wanted the blessings of God without living up to the conditions on which those blessings rested.  Isaiah passionately believes he has this word from God: the trappings of religiosity are not what delights God, and they will not do!  The form, the liturgy, is supposed to be a symbol of a real communication with God and a reckless abandonment to his purpose.  Without the lived-out reality, the symbolic liturgy is empty, hypocritical, and obnoxious to God.

What follows, then, is a series of “if” clauses, conditions on which the benefits of a Godly life depend.  Isaiah wants us to know that the joy and deep contentment, prosperity and growth, are all a reality, but are dependent our being truly God’s people in this world. In our present vernacular this is what Isaiah in chapter 58 says:

This is a message shouted over a megaphone to get your attention.  You come to God and ask for His guidance and support.  You tell Him how you’ve fasted, gone to growth groups, and attended church.  “Haven’t you noticed, God, how religious we’ve been?” you say.  Yet while you go without food, you do whatever you please, exploit your employees, bicker and fight with your associates, and take no long-term responsibility for the relationships in your life. 

Do you think there is no correlation between the acts of  worship and the life you lead? I’ll tell you what acts of worship get my attention:

• to get involved and do something about the injustices done to those who have no clout in this world

• to care when people are trapped and oppressed, abused and exploited

• to open your home to hungry kids and share your resources with the needy

• to do something about street people, the homeless, the unemployed, the destitute, and those left with no place to go

• to care not just about those far away or those who are one step removed from you, but to take serious responsibility for your own family, immediate and extended, those long-term relationships that wear on you and never go away

If your devotions include these kinds of involvement, then I will break in on your life in amazing ways, the light of insight and inspiration will flood your days, and you yourself will begin to experience wholeness.  Your integrity will speak for itself and precede you everywhere you go, and the very glory of the Lord will guard you from attacks behind your back.

If you refuse to “use” people, destroy others with malicious gossip, or tear them down with harsh judgments and criticism; if you will spend yourself to feed the hungry and risk your own security to challenge the oppressors of this world, then your light will rise in the darkness and shine like the sun at noon – and you won’t even realize how it’s happened.  You will find descending on you a tremendous sense of confidence; you will know without striving to know that God is in charge, looking out for you all the time, and constantly “up to something” in the regularness of your days.  Without seeking “results,” results will just come like plants “just happen” from seeds in a well-cared-for garden and like water “just happens” when you dig deep enough to hit a fresh water spring.

A lot of the damage that has been done to the trust and confidence outsiders have in “religious people” will be repaired by your straight living, honest dealings, and true no-strings-attached commitment. Many a disillusioned person will learn to believe again because of you. If you take seriously my ancient mandate to sanctify a special time solely for spiritual input; if you’ll guard a time to truly reverence and listen to Me – a day set aside every week – that doesn’t get nickeled and dimed away by your own interests and obligations, then you will find to your utter amazement an incredible sense of joy more satisfying by far than the synthetic “fun” people pursue so frantically.

Finally, you will find that you have, as God promised, “possessed the land” instead of the land possessing you, and you will indeed find it to be a “land flowing with milk and honey.” You shall suddenly realize, “I have come home, and I am contented in every way!”

There is no arguing with this. I said it, and I am God.

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No Status Jobs

The names and faces of Christian artists, musicians, and speakers you have come to love are well known to you because the place God called them to serve happens to be visible.  You see them on TV, listen to their music in the car on your favorite platforms, and have their books in your home.

But it is important to remember that there are no “status jobs” in the Kingdom of God. “Visible” and “significant” are not necessarily synonyms.  For every one of us, if we have any worth, we are where we are because some truly significant people crossed our paths along the way and helped us grow, gave us support, taught us to forgive.  Their faces never appeared on television; if we “googled” them, we probably wouldn’t come up with anything impressive or, more likely, anything at all.  But they were life-changers on our journeys.

I think of people in my life whose names would not ring a bell for you, people like Mildred Shaffer, Louisa Bowler, Ann Smith, and Milton Buettner.  Some were teachers who saw in me something I couldn’t see in myself.  Others were those who through conversation and example gave me the belief that choices matter and every day faithfulness was never an exercise in futility.

Their significance wasn’t measured in hits or awards or positions on charts, but in kids loved, teen-agers encouraged, or dignity saved.  These are the “heroes and the brave” in the trenches of regular life.  They showed up for work, opened their homes, shared their pools and backyards, used their cars to haul kids to youth camp, or gave us advice we can never forget. And they taught us that if any of us are ever truly great, it will be for consistency, selflessness, and a generous spirit.

I’m thinking that this just might be a good day to celebrate those heroes in our lives, to take a few minutes to say by note, email, or phone call, “Thank you” to the not-so-visible giants who made a significant difference in our lives.  If those life-shapers are not still living, maybe a note to their grown children would be in order, to let them know what their parent meant on our journey.

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Beautiful To Me

Bill and I started a puzzle after supper to relax from a busy week and to detox from the evening news and media feeds. We almost finished the picture in two evenings except for the last twenty or so sky pieces.  I will admit that for me working on same-color background of a puzzle is right up there in frustration with untangling the knots in a tiny gold chain necklace.  I just can’t do it!

So this morning, while Bill went for the sky, I began my reading of materials that demand a morning mind.

I’m a writer, so my work and discipline is reading all kinds of writing by great authors and poets, essayists and historians that stretch, engage, and challenge my own writer-mind.  Morning is also the time that Bill and I discuss great ideas, issues of the day, and things that bring us great joy, like our grandkids and our Cavalier dog Windsor, who pulls his bed between Bill’s chair on one side of the kitchen and mine on the other.  He loves a good discussion!

This particular morning, Bill had a late morning appointment at his office, but before he left for that, he started a fire in the kitchen fireplace beside my reading place, piled up enough firewood to keep the fire going through my morning study and took Windsor out between the patches of winter rain that was predicted to go on all day.

Bill and I are both poets and romantics; both of us love music and candlelight. I love beauty and flowers and chocolate as much as anyone I know. And it’s almost Valentine’s Day.  If I know Bill after all these years, he will likely have a dozen multi-colored roses delivered to our door on Valentine’s Day and I will make his favorite dinner, put on some soft music, and light the candles on the table. At bedtime, he will probably light candles in the bedroom and turn on some classical music.

But whether flowers and favorite foods, candlelight and music make our love gentle and beautiful depends as much on the morning as the night.  His completing the sky, keeping the fire going, taking Windsor out in the rain, and us both sharing ideas over a second cup of coffee is as much “making love’ as the tender holding of each other in candle light.

For the last couple of months, the Vocal Band has been recording a collection of classic love songs.  The harmonies and melodies of these songs are break-my-heart beautiful, and they have never been sung as meaningfully and these guys sing them.  A couple of weeks ago all five of the wives came to witness these songs being video recorded at our studio.  Singing these songs to the women with whom they have committed to spend the rest of their lives brought a whole new authenticity to the love songs they were singing. It definitely was a day of “more than the music.”

At one point in the day, Bill asked the guys “Will you still sing to your sweetheart when you both are old?” We all then had a discussion about what exactly is “intimacy”?  With the exception of Bill and me, these couples are young and beautiful.  They are rearing children in various stages of development and are caught up in the mainstream of life. Will these marriages withstand the pressures of life?  Will these families stay intact as they weather the storms of life that will inevitably come?  And what is beauty after all?

Bill and I just celebrated our sixtieth anniversary.  What had brought us to this milestone still loving each other, as the definition of loveliness and beauty gathered new shades of meaning along the way? 

I can only say that through sunshine and rain, this man has gotten more “beautiful” to me one fire at a time, one kindness at a time, one forgiveness at a time, one respected idea at a time. The patience to finish the sky when the picture is incomplete, to bring a hot cup of coffee so life can go on, and to offer so many other loving gestures on life’s wintry, cold and rainy days has made our lives together and each other, well, beautiful. 

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In the Best Light

“Let there be light!”  Should be any good decorator’s mantra.  Other tools of décor—color, furniture, flooring, cabinetry, textiles and fabrics—all are less than effective in creating the homing experience without well-designed lighting.

Light is to décor what punctuation is to as good sentence.  If the room (or sentence) is to convey the intended meaning, it must be present.

Lighting creates the mood, draws the eye to the focal points, invites and ushers the guest into the interior places. It can create the sparkle, calm the weary spirit, or send a subtle message.

Indirect lighting, especially in windowless interior rooms, can open up the space and chase away unintended shadows.  Strip lighting can accent art glass, sculptures, paintings or greenery.  It can also brighten a workspace or play area.

Lamps (with appropriate bulbs) can invite the reader to a book nook, warm a conversation area, or simply create a welcoming place for solitude.

If I had my way, there would be no traditional ceiling lights, because they tend to be harsh and impersonal.  Florescent lights often cool or distort the carefully chosen colors of the room and cast those in it in the worst light—really!  Hanging light or recessed lights over desired areas—the bath, the table, and the workbench—can be both effective and beautiful.

Best of all is the ever-changing natural light from windows, skylights and sidelights.  Leaving these spaces to change as the light changes creates angles and shadows in the room that are often a work of art in themselves.  Sheer curtains or shades that help to filter sunlight when it is harsh and give some privacy at night without blocking the light entirely let natural sunlight work its transforming magic.

Special note to homeowners who want to sell:  Always create the best first impression of the home with complimentary lighting in every room and the wonderful smell of cinnamon and apples or chocolate chip cookies before the house is shown will help the possible buyer “experience” your home in an unforgettable way.

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Staying Put

In a mobile culture, physically, vocationally, and spiritually, it has been delightfully refreshing to discover a small book about a huge topic:  THE WISDOM OF STABILITY by Jonathan Wison-Hartgrave.  Founder of the Rutba House community and associate minister at St John’s Baptist Church in Durham, North Carolina, Wilson-Hartgrave addresses an ancient truth about which the current popular Christian conversations are for the most part silent:  the strength and power in staying put.

Never has the church talked more about “community” and practiced it less.  Living in community has been pretty much reduced to a 20-minute coffee-and-donut break in the lobby of the church or a few volunteer hours in the church neighborhood food pantry.

But actually staying in one place, working out our calling among family and neighbors who know us only too well and whose warts and foibles we would rather not have to deal with over time is an almost lost concept.  We love the “go into all the world” words of Jesus, but are not so fond of the “go back to your village and live it out” mandates. 

By contrast the whole idea of “ministry” and” vocation” is too often “go away to college” so we can “go where God sends us”, usually meaning that if we don’t move around every few years (or months), we are not really ministering or being successful in our chosen professions.

This convicting (and might I say also confirming) book addresses the idea that like a tree, there should be as much below the ground in rooting as there is above the ground in branching if the tree is to survive the storms of life.

It shouldn’t be as novel as it seems to be that some of us are called to make homes that kids can come home to no matter how far away they roam.  The author points out that “the practice of stability, then, is an exercise in putting down roots.  A good tree bears good fruit…but we are product-oriented people, eager to skip over the process and enjoy the apple without attending to the soil and sun and roots that help it grow.”

It seems that our culture is in its death throws because “nobody’s home.”  Kids without parents, houses with no “familying”, neighborhoods with no “neighbors”, churches that are not “sanctuary” for those who need a safe and consistent harbor. Maybe, just maybe, some of us could pledge to stay put for the rest of us.

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How Can We Change?

Transformation.  Conversion.  Alteration. What precipitates change?  Definitely, hitting-the-wall can.  Or a crisis situation in which a human being gets a sudden clear picture of his or her limitations and insufficiencies.  A moment of glory, too, can turn us around:  a transcendent moment, a revelation of a reality beyond the routine of mundane habit.

There are two memoirs by a great Indiana author Haven Kimmel.  One is called A Girl Named Zippy about a little girl who basically (with some help from neighbors, teachers, townspeople and the magazines at the corner news stand) raised herself in the little Indiana town of Mooreland, while her mother sat on the couch and read books from the library.  Then one day (book two) her mother got up off the couch, rode her bike from Mooreland to Muncie and signed up for classes at Ball State University.  She also lost a lot of weight (probably from all the bike riding) and totally came alive! (She Got Up Off the Couch is actually the name of the book!)

The first question is, “What makes people change?” and the second question is, “What good is a ‘faith’ that doesn’t?  Without a transformation, what good is religion?

It his book AHA! about the change-points that actually transform, Kyle Idleman says that there are three stages that are necessary to bring about a life-altering “A-ha!” moment and set us on a new path.

The first is a sudden awakening, a “coming to your senses.” This new realization may be generated by a positive moment, like falling in love, communing with nature, or an undeserved mercy.  Or it could be a negative happening, like a near-death experience, a spiraling out of control, or a time of monumental failure.  But whatever brings it about there must be a wake-up-stupid jolt into a new awareness.

But it takes more than an alarm clock to change the soul.  There also has to be a time—usually a painful time—of brutal honesty.  No more rationalizing the truth away.  No more blaming someone else.  No more living in denial.  An awakening worth its salt must bring a coming-to-grips with the real culprit, and, as Commodore Oliver Perry once said, “We have seen the enemy…” and, guess what?  The enemy is in the mirror!

But even an awakening and a gut-wrenching honesty will fall short unless we “get up off the couch,” or, as the prodigal in the pigpen put it, “I will arise and go home.”  We have to get up and go home—to God, to our messed-up and embarrassing past, to whatever work it will take to us get whole, and, most of all, to the self God created us to be.  Even the self-righteous older brother had to do that.  He had to swallow his I-can-earn-my-way self-sufficiency and learn to dance!

The really great news is that we have an advocate!  The Father has sent us the Holy Spirit of empowerment who will never check out or give up, who will never leave us or forsake us as we make new paths and walk a new way.  He is infinitely patient, and will give us the grace to be patient with ourselves when we fall off whatever wagon we once were on.  As C. S. Lewis said about this advocate: 

“Make no mistake,” He says, “I will make you perfect.  The moment you put yourself in My hands, that is what you are in for.  Nothing less, or other, than that.  You have free will, and if you choose, you can push me away.  But if you do not push Me away, understand that I am going to see this job through.  Whatever suffering it may cost you in your earthly life, whatever inconceivable purification it may cost you after death, whatever it costs Me, I will never rest, nor let you rest, until you are literally perfect.”

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Christmas, Pure and Simple

In our complex, hype-filled, spin-ridden world, Jesus comes as a naked baby—pure and simple.  It is His first and lasting message to us:  life is good enough, beautiful enough, powerful enough.  Without embellishment the Word—the Message—is enough.

The Good News started with a resting newborn infant full of joy and life and peace.  And the final message was the same:  “My peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you.  Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let it be afraid.”

Joy and rest have always been the marks of those who truly follow Jesus.  The great issues of life are laid to rest in Him.

This joy and rest does not require perfect surroundings or easy circumstances.  They are not at the mercy of situation or environment.  This life, pure and simple, is portable and present in the harshest of conditions.  It can make its presence known in stable or palace, hamlet or metropolis. It was present on a midnight escape to Egypt and  in a simple carpenter’s cottage in Nazareth.  It does not need a scepter, badge, or medallion.  It’s purity and simplicity are its own defense.

But we must never mistake the pure and simple for the weak or ineffectual.  True courage, power, and strength are only weakened by distractions and embellishments.  True greatness always seeks to sharpen its focus, pare down accumulations, and strip away impediments.

From the womb to the tomb, the power of Life—pure and simple—has had one piercing focus:  to bring that Life to every person who will receive it.  Life unencumbered by all that would weigh it town or slow it down has come to set us free. Pure and simple!

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He Was Just an Ordinary Baby

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We All Love a Baby

The Christmas story is the greatest story ever told.  It has all the elements; a difficult journey, a young couple left out in the cold, a baby delivered in the crudest of circumstances, a miraculous choir of angels invading a dark and lonely hillside, a new star spotted and followed by foreign astronomers.

But there is nothing more profound or impossible to wrap one’s mind around than the Story behind the story:  that God the source of all things would choose to limit His limitless essence to a single cell to come all the way to where we are—to become one of us—so that we could come to Him and not be afraid.

That story strains human comprehension and defies the boundaries of human logic.  Yet, if it is true, it changes everything we could think about the deity, about what is actually power, and about all the goals we ever could make for ourselves as human beings.  Theology, the study of God, is left speechless at such a profound claim.  Yet, for well over two thousand years, there have been no end to the books and sermons about this deeper story. We will never be done with connecting the dots of every detail of this story from creation to this very day we are living.  Nothing is incidental or accidental.  Every “simple” detail is an eternal metaphor.  This baby began in a rough-sawn wooden manger and ended nailed to a rough-sawn wooden cross. This helpless infant started his life wrapped in long bands of simple cloth to swaddle him and ended unwrapping his own burial clothes, folding them neatly, and walking out of his own tomb.  Every detail in this story matters.

Yet, I hear some say, “Of course, we love Christmas!  It is the story of a baby that doesn’t demand anything from us. We love the helpless-little-baby story.”

I can’t help but think that such comments must come from someone who never had a baby.  Babies demand a total commitment from the start.  There is no backing out.  There is no letting up.  A baby silently demands our all, right from the beginning.

Any mother knows a baby is a 24/7 responsibility.  A baby consumes her energies, her attention, her engagement and her sleep.  Without a word, without a job description, without a recess or a vacation, a baby demands our all.  And there is no ending to this commitment, no moment when a parent can say, “Okay, this child is finished; he’s on his own.”  No, a mother is always a mother.  Every hurt, every rejection, every set-back this child endures tears at her very heart.

No wonder wise old Simeon said to Mary, “... and a sword will pierce your own soul, too.”  Did his prediction come to her mind as she held the bled-out, dehydrated body of her son when the soldiers took him down from the cross?

Even as a grown man, this baby never forced anyone to serve him. He simply invited them to “leave their nets and follow him.”  And still today it is the reality of Immanuel, God with us, that constrains us like a baby does its mother to commit to something that will change everything.  It is the Love that will not let us go.

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A Natural Christmas

When Bill and I built our house 57 years ago, I dug up the stubborn Indiana clay and created what we have always called “the English garden”.  On the white fence around the garden, we installed a white wood fence with two arched trellises, and along one section of the fence we planted three starts of bittersweet, knowing that we had to have both male and female plants.  Evidently all the plants were of one gender because all these years we have never had one berry on the abundant veining plants.

Photo by Angela Kellogg

Around one of the trellises I had planted a start of wisteria.  This fall to my amazement I found the trellis and another section of fence totally covered with a vine that turned out to be not wisteria but bittersweet—loaded with berries.  I was thrilled!  That was the beginning of a “pure and simple” Christmas!  This year I have decided to use only natural things to decorate for Christmas:  lots of bittersweet, fresh holly, some birch logs saved from a clump of birch that had died in our yard, pine branches, and whatever else I could find that was natural.

I will create garlands by stringing cinnamon sticks with cranberries on yarn.  The old yard swing could be wound with pine and cedar branches.  Wide strips of burlap ribbon can be made from the bags we had collected from the corn we feed to the swans. 

While still on the plant, I sprayed-painted the dried blooms of the hydrangeas gold, silver, and copper to fill baskets and other containers, and I have collected the seed pods of the clematis vines that look like fuzzy whirligigs to put in tiny pottery vases with small sprigs of yet more bittersweet.

I will only have to add lights, candles, and a few bows of velvet ribbon, and the house will be filled inside and out with cheer--all natural and simple reminders of the creator himself who came to walk among us!

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These Ol’ Tables

In looking back over the decades living in this house, I am realizing how many memorable moments have been made around the two tables in our well-worn home.  I guess it stands to reason that the place where family and friends come to eat together would emerge as a center of home and its welcome.

In every season the table is where special holidays are celebrated.  At the end of every workday and workweek, it is the food, family, and fellowship that brings us all home.  Christmas parties, Thanksgiving dinners, intimate Valentine desserts, Passover and Easter rituals, summer birthday parties, graduation gatherings—great memories of all kinds—are honored around the table.  Indeed, so much of what we have all become after spending our lives together as a family has been informed and influenced by experiences around these tables.

Both the kitchen table and the dining room table at our house seat ten.  In the beginning, we chose big tables because we wanted to always be able to “set another place.”  But it has been not only meals together that have shaped us, but the conversations and shared activities at these tables. The tables were often spread with homework, poster paints, family puzzles, writing projects, and remodeling plans.

The tablecloths, runners and centerpieces have chronicled the changing of the seasons.  Around these tables kids, grandkids, and their friends have made valentines, colored Easter eggs, strung Christmas garlands of cranberries and popcorn, and played dominos and Scrabble.

Here at these tables we have discussed our faith and our doubts, cried and prayed over lost loved ones and broken relationships.  We have laughed our heads off and been silent over disagreements.  Through the seasons and the years these old tables have been a magnet for feeding both the body and the soul.

Soon these tables will draw us all home again to give thanks for the years and miles and to remind each other that there will always be a great table, where our place will be set and our special chair will be waiting.  Yes, there will always be a place at the table at the end of our journey home.

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Keep Telling the Story

Was it the farmhouse smelling of wood smoke and pumpkin pies?  Was it the sound of the pump organ or guitar; piano or harmonica?  Was it the crunch of snow underfoot or the corn shocks leaning into each other in the fields?  Was it the candles in the windows or the happy voices of the whole clan playing dominos, Rook, or Pit around the kitchen table after supper?

Photo by Angela Kellogg

Was it using mother’s best sewing scissors to cut pink, red, and white hearts out of construction paper or snowflakes out of tissue? Was it carving jack-o-lanterns, stringing cranberries and popcorn, cutting bunny-shaped cookies out of fresh sugar dough, or sitting around a bonfire, giggling at wisecracks and singing songs, silly and serious, to the strum of a guitar?  What made home the place to which your heart needed to return?  What made Christmas or Easter or Thanksgiving?  Or maybe, for you, all the seasons and holidays are just a hungry longing for something you had only heard about in other people’s songs and other children’s stories.

Memories have to be made good and precious on purpose.  The holidays may be printed on the calendar but you have to make them meaningful and sacred by being truly reverent and actually present and intentionally joyful.  “Meaningful” can't be printed in calendar ink.  Treasured memories don’t necessarily result from declaring a national holiday and they can’t be abolished by eradicating them, either.

“Going on holiday” isn’t the same thing as celebrating Christmas.  Having “turkey day” is not the same as truly celebrating our national heritage and giving thanks.  Easter is not the same as spring break.  Symbols are symbolic of something.  Easter eggs, Christmas trees, Seder candles, the American “stars and stripes,” the Thanksgiving pilgrims and turkey are only meaningful if we parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles make them so and keep them so by never tiring of “telling the story.”  It’s all about the story and your special telling of it.  Without that, sacred moments will crumble into, well, merely trinkets and a day off.

To tell the story of both the history of our country and the faith that shaped it, I can’t think of a better way to spend Thanksgiving evening together as an extended family of all ages than to watch the DVD of Circuit Rider.  This historical musical pays tribute to the early carriers of the gospel across the rugged territories of what would become America’s states. Lyrics and narration were written by Suzanne Jennings to music mainly by Woody Wright, and acted and sung by many of the favorite Homecoming artists.

For our family, Thanksgiving is the holiday for everyone to come home. This gathering becomes dearer as our family grows and spreads to other parts of the country and even abroad. It is also the time to bring around our table those who may not have their families close. This often includes college students who can’t go home and those who have lost family through death or separation.

After the food is displayed on the big island in our farm kitchen, we all pull chairs into a big circle around the room. The youngest child is chosen to pass a small basket of Indian corn kernels around the circle. Someone tells once more the story of that first Thanksgiving and the winter that preceded it when many died and those who survived were given, finally, just a ration of a few kernels of corn and some water.  We tell of the natives who, when spring finally came, taught the immigrants to plant seeds that would survive in this adopted land and how that year at harvest, the pilgrims and the natives brought their crops and wild game like turkeys and venison to eat together and to give thanks for survival in this new land.  Often, we then read the Felicia Dorothea Hermons poem, “The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers” and Abraham Lincoln’s original declaration of Thanksgiving.

Still holding our kernel in our hand, the tiny basket is passed again, and returning our corn, now with new meaning, we each take our turn at telling what we are most thankful for since we were last in this special circle. Laughter and tears always punctuate this Thanksgiving ritual, which ends with a prayer of gratitude from one of the older generation—now, usually Bill or me, since our parents are all gone now.

I’m sure there have been times over the years when a teen-ager in the circle has thought, “Do we have to do this again?”  The answer is, of course, “Yes, we do, because the reason we do anything is as important as the doing of it in all of life.  Being certain of the “why” will take us through the hard times.”

We all need a ground zero, a true North, when the world seems to be shifting beneath our feet like sand sucked away by the receding tide. For us, here are some things we can hold to:

 --There is a God who is way bigger than we can comprehend whose love spoke everything into existence

 --You can always go home, home to God, home to family, home to your true identity

 --Always ask why before asking what and how.  What and how must always be in service to why.

--Guard your heart and keep your joy!

This Thanksgiving let’s tell the story—our national one and our personal ones.  This Christmas let’s tell the Story.  Be sure even the smallest child knows what every symbol stands for and every practice means. And let’s live the story together, for the telling of it brings us home—to each other, to God, and to our true selves.

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Waking a Tired Old Bedroom

Rooms get tired, too.  And habit keeps us from noticing.  Our house has seen many seasons come and go.  It has endured a lot of changes, too, poor thing!

The house used to have an attached garage, which we turned into a shipping room and sheet music warehouse (Remember sheet music?).  Well, that is until our little music company outgrew the garage, and we built what we called the A-frame (which we also soon outgrew).

Our three kids were by then in need of rooms of their own, so we knocked out the wall of the garage and turned the garage into a family room.  What was originally the family room and Bill’s old office with sheet music shelves along one side, became our bedroom with a small en suite bath.  We took out the shelves and put in clothes rods, and, voila!, we had a closet.

A few years later, when we got three kids through college, we decided it was time build on a real bathroom with walk-in closets.  We took out the sheet music/closet and had beautiful bookcases built in instead; we tore out the small bath room from the bedroom corner, and had room for a real chest of drawers. 

Now, fast forward another twenty years.  The carpet was tired (or maybe I was just tired of it); the chaise lounge that once belonged to my mother needed to be recovered.  Our new bathroom mirrors told us that we had aged, too, with a few new wrinkles, dryer skin, and less hair. This revelation reminded us that we had gradually gotten used to our faces and the bedroom, too.  We couldn’t reverse the changes we saw in the mirror, but we could do something about our tired bedroom.

We decided to take up the carpet that had refused to wear out, and replace it with a vinyl wood floor and area rugs.  We called Ron Whitlow who has been our painter for thirty years (and his brother and father before him), and held a time in his schedule for new wallpaper and paint. 

I ordered a big oriental rug for the middle of the room and went shopping for new upholstery fabric for the chaise.  I ordered new shades to replace the broken one at the patio door and found a great deal on a velvet quilted bedspread and new set of sheets.

My mother was an artist who loved Japanese art and floral arrangements and passed that love on to me. Added to that was the bucket-list trip I was able to take a few years back with our daughter and her little son and our dear friend and mentor Ann Smith who was a missionary to Japan for twenty years.  These influences drew me to a wallpaper with stems of Japanese cherry blossoms on a mint green background.  Mother had given me years ago her trio of jade green iron geisha women which would sit beautifully on our antiqued bronze Ionic column shelf.  

The hydrangeas around the yard were by now drying as the leaves fell, so I spray-painted them on the stem in shades of greyish mint, pale pink, and copper.  When the paint was dry, I arranged them in a big silver urn with stems of silk cherry blossoms.

Finally, with everything done and the furniture back in place, the bedroom feels like a breath of fresh air every time we walk through.  I, too, may be feeling weary on a given day, but I refuse to be anything but alive and wide awake as long as I live!

I remember a poem my artist-writer mother wrote in the inside of a great Webster’s Dictionary she gave me for my high school graduation.  I carry this poem in my mind and now share it with you.

     The Shepherd Friend

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.

Dorthy Sickal
©1988 Gloria Gaither
Hands Across the Seasons
Abington Press

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Bibliophile

Okay, I admit it! I am a bibliophile.  If you remember the “root words” you learned in junior high school you know that bibliophile means “lover of books.”  And I love books!  I love the smell of bookstores.  I love the way well-loved antique books feel in my hand with their use-worn leather covers fraying at the edges from all the hands that have eagerly opened their pages.  I love brand new hot-off-the-press books that promise me a story, an insight, or even an argument to test my assumptions.

I love children’s books, too, all the way from classics no child should miss like Wind in the Willows, Treasure Island, and Gulliver’s Travels to books that have captured this generation of kids and enticed them to leave their I-Boxes and computers to enter the more exciting universe of imagination like Lord of the Rings, Lemony Snicket, and A Wrinkle in Time. 

I love deep books of theology and philosophy that make my brain itch trying to wrap my mind around their concepts, and I love dense, engaging stories like the regime change bestseller A Gentleman in Moscow.

And then there are the golden moments spent with collections of poetry, poetry that distills our lives into sharp unforgettable phrases that carve our very identities on the oak trees of our souls.

I never leave home without a book.  (Even in church, I usually have a book in my purse, just in case.)  One of my phobias is the fear of getting stuck on a plane, in the check-out line, in the hospital waiting room, or at Starbucks without a book.  And when I have come the closest to losing my faith in God and mankind, it has been a book that has come to my rescue. 

Thank you to all those men and women who have walked the lonely writer’s life.  Thank you to Shakespeare, Frost, Steinbeck, Sandberg, Dickinson, L’Engle, Merton, Buechner, Dillard, Yancey, Colson, O’Conner, Faulkner, Wolfe, C. S. Lewis, Ken Gire, Calvin Miller, Millay, Silverstein, Robert Lewis Stevenson, Dickens, Molière—writers of so many enriching books that have challenged our minds, schooled our wit, inspired our hearts and, yes, saved our faith.  We are indebted to you.  May we show our gratitude by reading to our babies, telling stories that teach principles of truth to our children, discuss concepts with our young people and share ideas with our peers by passing around and discussing great books. 

And when it comes to the Book of all books, may we never get so focused on arguing about the words that we miss the Word that came to walk among us to lead us into all truth.

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