Feeling Kist

It was a Wednesday afternoon, and the week still hadn't decided if it would be sour or sweet.
Spring played hard to get;
N wanted her lunch,
except when she didn't want it,
until she wanted it again,
at which point she only wanted it if I would feed it to her while she danced around the kitchen table between bites.

And then two piano students came in for their 100th lesson. And they had flowers.
For me.
For our 100th lesson.

But even that paled in comparison to their old-fashioned thank-you note.

I think this week is going to turn out quite pleasant after all.

Go Do Your Job

This post could be part 2 to the one I wrote last Saturday. Not in that this comes after it, but in the sense that this is the bigger picture, the other side of the topical coin, the driving force, or whatever other similar cliché you'd like to insert here.

Our pastor challenged us a while back with a thought which I'll paraphrase, since I didn't note his exact phrasing. The idea was this: If your church suddenly disappeared, would the surrounding, secular community notice? Would they care? Would your church be missed?

Now, I can't control everything my church does or doesn't do, but I certainly have a significant role in determining my own actions and pursuits. After all, as the people go, so goes the church, right? A church of inert believers isn't going to do much moving and shaking outside its own walls.

So, my question for you today is this: What sort of skin does your faith have?

Does it have bones and muscles?

Is it the type of faith that scrubs toilets, waits tables, and washes feet?

Is it practical?

Does it change those around you?

Does it change you?

Wait a minute, you might say to me, my faith is a private matter! It's an inward relationship. This isn't your business and I certainly don't have to prove myself to you to be a valid Christian!

You're right; I'm not the judge of authentic faith for believers. But you do have to reckon with a couple very persuasive, first-century teachers. One, for example, says that a faith that does not show itself by outward works is useless. Another seems to think that we've all received special abilities to serve, and so we should use them, and he even includes a list of ways to do just that! They're persuasive, and they're right, because they were divinely inspired to write those sections of Scripture.

So, stop and think.

On Monday morning, when your alarm rings, do you check your faith into "daycare" and make a mental note to pick it up again in time for church next week?

Is church just something you do because it's what you've always done?

Is it a place to be seen, like a club?

If your pew neighbor had never come to your church but ran into you on the street or met you at work, would they still assume that you're a Christ-follower?

Do you look like, sound like, act like Jesus, and more and more as the years tick by?

We're good at the head part of the Gospel, but let's not lose the heart. It's the heart that moves us with pity; it's the heart that cares for our neighbor; it's the heart that reaches out to the lost.

But - 

Maybe you're more on the social justice side of the Gospel. You advocate for the trafficked. You donate to the shelters. You volunteer. You give to the Christian radio station. You have people into your home for meals and conversation. You might even pray out loud in church.

Where's your head?

Remember, faith is not simply actions, it is conviction, attitude, a grasp of a belief. Don't think that you can busywork yourself into God's good graces. Matthew 7 records Jesus' own thoughts on the matter, and they're frightening.

Ephesians 2:8-10 may be one of the most famous Scriptural explanations of salvation. It reads,

"For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them." ESV

Do you notice that faith comes first? We have salvation through faith [by grace], with no merit through or from or by our doing.

But - 

Because of that salvation, we have good works to do, works God made us to do, which we can now do because of what Jesus did.

So, in other words, I could have just quoted those three verses and left out the rest of the blog post.

As you celebrate the death and resurrection of our Savior this weekend, remember that we celebrate the finished work of Jesus Christ. You can't add to it or take from it by what you do or do not do.

But - 

If it is truly a part of your life, shouldn't that flow out in gratitude through your good works? "Walk in them." Get off your duff and go do what God made you to do.

Letting God Do His Job

HELLO . . . hello . . . hello . . .

Ahh, the echoes of a long-neglected blog!

Usually, my posts grow out of a thought or impression that follows me over the course of several days until it has developed into a full-blown post. Lately, I've been running so fast trying to keep up with our 20-month-old that a thought flies out of my head before it has a chance to root, much less grow into anything worthwhile. Besides - blog or sleep? No contest, lately!

But, for you kind souls who like to amuse yourselves while humoring my vanity by reading these posts, I'll let you in on something that has managed to keep pace with my life lately. It's been much longer in the making than my typical posts, actually.

Go back with me several summers. We had only owned our small-town home a short while but were rapidly falling in love with the idea of raising a family here. We felt we lived in a real-life Mayberry, in the best sense of the expression. The people were kind, the town was clean, and the opportunities were just perfect for our purposes.

These happy thoughts were percolating while I was out for an early-morning jog, trying to beat the heat that July day. My usual route took me past the town park where the carnival was setting up in anticipation of our town festival that weekend.

Now, I've never spent much time thinking about carnival workers and their lives. Of course, I've seen some flicks and heard some stories about the rough life they lead or the shady character that can be a carnie, but that was about all the time I'd ever bothered about them. So, when I say, "the thought crossed my mind," I really don't mean to imply that it came from me. But, it was in my mind, suddenly, and I didn't know what to do with it:

"I wonder what they think of our town?"

The thought stopped me in my tracks. What? Of course they know what a lovely town this is, what nice people we are.

How would they know? What if your town is just another stop to them? Another weekend, to make another check, to pack up and do it again for another town just looking to have a good time?

Did they think we were snobs? Did we ignore them? Treat them as less-than?

What if they didn't even like being here in my town?

Well, I didn't like bothering with such uncomfortable thoughts. After all, I was still a new-comer. What could I do?

So, I finished my jog and conveniently forgot all about the whole thing.

Until last summer.

When the same thing happened all over again.

I can be dense, but I listened better the second time.

But, how does one reach out to a carnie? What do they need? What would they be open to having someone do for them? What have others done?

Enter the all-knowing Google!

Except, Google didn't really know, either.

I searched "carnival worker ministry," and I maybe got a handful of articles, written 10 years ago or more.

Except there was one hit from a Facebook page, dated earlier that summer, and titled (drumroll, please!), "Carnival Worker Ministry"!

Eureka!

I backtracked to the hosting church's website - for a church in Kentucky - and shortly had a phone number.

Gathering my courage about me, I put N down for a nap, tucked into my easy chair with a pen and a sticky note, and dialed the number into my cell.

A couple of rings later, I was speaking with a kind woman with a Southern lilt to her words - not so much that I couldn't understand her, but enough that I made sure to listen closely!

Wouldn't you know it, she just happened to be part of the women's group that headed that particular ministry. I told her my reason for calling, explained Google's lack of assistance, how I had found their page, and asked, "What do I need to know?"

She was positively tickled that I had called and gladly walked me through their yearly potluck dinner with the carnival workers, explained how they prepared, what sort of gifts they collected via donations to send with them, and much more.

At the end of our conversation, I thanked her, and she left me with the church's email address, requesting photos should anything come of our conversation.

Earlier this year, I contacted our festival board, and they were thrilled to have new ideas and new blood - especially, I think, since I was willing to head up the project!

The library is willing to be the collection site of donations.

Now, I am in the stage of contacting area churches. I sent out emails late Thursday afternoon and nervously check my inbox every time my phone chimes.

I would like this to be a community effort, but I want to have a devotion during the meal and give Bibles and devotional materials along with the other gifts, so I need it to clearly be an interchurch and community event. In order to have an interchurch event, I need churches involved.

So, I wait. And pray.

It's scary not knowing what will happen.

Maybe no one will want to come to the potluck. Then I will be doing a lot of cooking.

Maybe a lot of community members will show at the potluck, but none of the carnival workers will bother. That would be awkward.

But, I can't control that.

I can only step out, one foot after the other, in what I believe to be the path I've been asked to follow.

It seems God has been asking me to do that sort of thing more often lately - do what I am supposed to do and leave the rest to Him.

It's tough letting God do His job.

But it's much less work than doing it for Him.

A Christmas Miracle

It's snowing. Cinnamon raisin bread bakes in the oven behind me. N is upstairs in her crib - not sleeping, but content.

It's a rare moment to sit and reflect in the middle of holiday preparations.

When did Christmas start to mean making so many plans you meet yourself coming and going? We've got parties and presents, gatherings and goodies, cards and church. Preparation consumes days, evenings, lists, budgets.

Historically, Christmas was a mass, maybe with stockings stuffed with oranges and chocolate coins wrapped in gold foil. People didn't plan holiday schedules months in advance. Sometimes, there weren't any gifts at all. Did they not know that Christmas is about the joy of giving and family togetherness? I guess Hallmark hadn't gotten that message to them yet.

Of course, if you want a party, you could go back to that first Christmas: the actual evening Jesus was born. There weren't shiny baby announcements printed by an online printer; but there were angels announcing his birth. There wasn't a baby shower; but there were those really rich guys who came months late with a fortune - not an exaggeration - in gifts.

Something big happened. Something to trigger heaven's hosts to sing. Something that would cause people - even people who don't actually profess faith - millennia later to pause their usual lives and acknowledge a peculiarity in the day.

It wasn't family togetherness. Joseph and Mary don't seem to have been welcome with their families back in Nazareth.

It wasn't the joy of giving. Those smelly shepherds who showed up that night probably didn't leave anything behind them other than a pungent odor.

It was Emmanuel. "God with us."

What's the big deal about that?

Do you realize that every other religion on the face of the earth is an attempt by man to reach god(s)? Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam . . . even some that borrow language from Christianity and encourage their people to read the Bible, they're all a story of men striving to make themselves right. People trying to approach God through working, praying, fasting, denying themselves, traveling to holy places. They know something stands between man and God, and they do everything humanly possible to get past that or to outweigh it with "good" things so God will approve of them.

Christmas is a big deal because that is when God gave us the gift we never saw coming: He came to us.

Emmanuel.

God with us.

No more striving. No more analyzing whether we've done more good than bad. No more comparing and wondering and worrying. God reached down, became a man, so he could die. So he could rise. So he could obliterate death and sin.

Not so the good works would outweigh the bad, but so that the bad would die - poof - gone.
Not so we could get to God, but so that God could live in us.
Not so we could do good things, but so that God could act through us.
Not so we could have a good life, but so that we could live eternally.

If that's not a Christmas miracle, I don't know what is.

The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.

John 1:9-13 ESV

My Recent Reads

I love to read books.

Fiction, non-fiction. Historic, current. Local, foreign. Give me a book with a decent storyline and an eloquent author and I can get lost for hours. Am I crabby? Let me read for a while and I'll be better. Am I bored? Usually a book can get me through. Am I happy? I'll celebrate by curling up in an easy chair with my paper-and-ink companion.

I'm not a snob about genre, but I do perhaps achieve a measure of snobbery when it comes to content. (1) I don't want cookie-cutter plotlines. If I can guess the ending in the first chapter, it's not going to hold a ton of appeal for me. (2) The characters have to be relatable: not stunningly gorgeous, impeccably witty, or astonishingly wealthy. (3) The author must, must, MUST display a reasonable command of the English language. No matter how good the story or characters, misspelled words and glaring grammatical errors are fingernails on the chalkboard of my - well, you get the idea.

So, with all that out in the open, you may better understand my delight to come across not one but two excellent reads in the last few weeks.

The first was "The Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Found the Hidden Gospels" by Janet Soskice (Chatto & Windus, 2009). Here lives the tale of two middle-aged women in Victoria's Great Britain, a time when women didn't generally hold their own property or get degrees at universities, and a time when rationalism and Darwinism were eroding confidence in the reliability of Scripture. Agnes and Margaret, devout Presbyterians, inherit their father's entire estate (yes, making them fabulously wealthy, yet they're still human, sibling squabbles and social blunders remain unvarnished). Because they believe that their wealth is a gift from God for a specific purpose, and because they've also been gifted with a penchant for learning languages, they head to the Middle East in search of ancient biblical manuscripts. Their journey leads them to the recovery of the oldest copy of the four gospels found to that point in time. The discovery reestablished the perseverance of the integrity of the Scriptures through time and laid to rest the concern that the gospels were a collection of oral traditions compiled hundreds of years after the life of Christ.

This story drew me in and held me. My lasting impression was that of awe; God will preserve His word, keeping the secret things hidden and preserved (sometimes for centuries) until the day they are required to once again assure His faithful that, yes, His word is truth. If non-fiction as a genre tends to turn you away, please try again with this one. It reads like a novel, yet it is all delightfully true.

The second book also happened to be non-fiction. "Juniper: The Girl Who was Born Too Soon" by Kelley and Thomas French (Back Bay Books, 2017) relates the story of a woman who has always believed she would have a daughter. Though she didn't play with dolls or set up a make-believe house when she was little, she has never wavered in this conviction. When she eventually marries Thomas and they experience infertility, she pursues treatment as if her daughter is waiting for her to simply get it right so she can join their family. Through IVF, they do finally conceive, but when their daughter is born at 23 weeks gestation, they have to make some heart-rending decisions. (23 weeks is perilously close to the age of viability as accepted by many medical practitioners. Many doctors would not feel morally obligated to intervene to save a child born at this age.) They decide to let their daughter decide: as she displays a tenacious hold on life, they pursue treatment for her, spending months in the NICU at the side of her bassinet. As one thing after another goes wrong, they face the reality that they may lose her before she sees their faces (she was born before the eyelids are slit to enable them to open), before they ever hear her voice (she breathes with a ventilator because her lungs aren't fully developed), before she feels the sun on her skin.

While I was reduced to a sobbing mess at several points, the authors, who are themselves journalists, achieve a balance of hope in their retelling. Thomas begins reading the Harry Potter series to little Juniper, providing a number of heart-warming - even funny - passages. Their primary nurse begins providing little, light-hearted outfits (XXS pet costumes!) once Juniper makes it past the initial critical days.

I was awed once more by the intricacies of the creation of life. The authors, one admittedly without a faith and the other a lapsed Catholic, reflect several times on divine matters and, while blatantly liberal, a decidedly pro-life message emerges. There were even snippets that approached a devotional tone, in the Kuyperian Reformed tradition of "All truth is God's truth." Kelley writes, "On matters of faith, Tom and I had little clarity. But we were forced to ask ourselves if we had been part of a miracle. If, beyond all expectation, a God that neither of us had served well had given us a gift we did not deserve" (p. 301).

Not that this volume is squeaky clean. There's some language. The story of their relationship naturally models itself along cultural norms. Their experiences with IVF, an understandably delicate topic, are discussed frankly. Yet, for the more mature reader, I recommend "Juniper." And if you just can't bring yourself to crack open the cover of a book, you can check out a greatly abbreviated version (recorded before they decided to write their book) on RadioLab.

A Letter to a Dreamer

Dear Aspiring Home-Maker:

You're brave. Not many women today think staying at the house and making a home for your family is a big enough deal to be a dream.

Some do, but they're a little shy about declaring it.

I don't know why. Maybe they think it's a waste of a college education (as if it doesn't take a whole lot of intelligence to shape the next generation). Maybe they think others will think they're lazy (but if they were lazy, it would be smarter to hire a maid). Maybe it's a hold-over from the feminist "liberation" of women that gave women the option to be anything they want to be (as long as they don't want to be a home-maker).

You'll get called a number of different things.

"Stay-at-home mom" (as if you're never going to leave the four walls).
"House wife" (who wants to be married to a house?).
"Home-maker" (lofty, but I prefer "domestic engineer"!).

You'll get a number of different responses when you answer the question, "So, what do you do?"

Thankfully, I've never encountered outright derision. I'm hoping that was left back in the 1990's. Maybe it wasn't. Not sure what I'll do if I come across it.
I have, however, gotten the ambiguous, "It's nice your husband makes enough that you can stay home." I'm not sure what to do with that, exactly. I mean, it sounds like they're implying we're wealthy; compared to Africa, most of Asia, and South America, we are, but then, so are they; compared to the average American's idea of wealthy . . . ? I've seen people with much larger houses and newer cars complain about not being able to live on one income. You can't wait until you have enough to stay at home - you have to learn to make what you have be enough. I usually end up just saying, "Yes, I'm very thankful he does."
And then there are the congratulators, the ones who give me kudos and make me feel strong and counter-cultural. But then I feel like I'm misleading them. I'm not giving up a dream and putting a career on hold for the sake of my child(ren): this is my dream. This is what I've always wanted to do. I went to college and headed for a career, and, yes, if God hadn't given me a husband just then, I would probably have my master's by now.

But that wasn't my dream. This is.

Be brave, my sisters who share this dream. Let it be your dream. Be the shining light for someone else who wishes they could dream of making a home for their family.

It's so worth it.

Sincerely,
Me
Domestic Engineer

A Death

We had a tragedy recently in our small hometown. During a thick fog, a pedestrian was struck and killed by a motorist.

What shock for the family.

I know the breath-grabbing numbness I felt when my grandma passed away suddenly on April 21st, and she a far cry from healthy. But this was a grandmother, quite healthy, who never came back from a walk around town.

But I think I really feel for that motorist.
Imagine being the cause of such tragedy.
What agonizing heartbreak.

And in such a small town, only a few thousand people, what would it mean to rebuild a life? I don't know the legal repercussions which may yet play out, but wouldn't it be nearly impossible to start again when everyone in town knows that you are that person that hit and killed so-and-so? Even if they weren't angry, even if they viewed you with pity, wouldn't you feel forever defined by that one moment of obscured vision, of inattention?

So would you move away? Would you leave town and try to start again amongst the anonymity of the crowds of a larger city? But then, wouldn't there be that looming thought over every friendship, that once it reached a certain depth, you would need to tell them about that part of your past?

I was walking along our city sidewalks and pondering this shortly after Easter. What if, I thought, the people of this lovely city were able to reach out, not in pity or in sidelong glances, but in a realization of our own sin - both of omission and commission.

What if we all realized that our sin has caused a death, too?

That little white lie? killed someone.
That snide remark? murder.
That vengeful thought? a direct cause of a death.

Whose?

The very Son of God.