April Foolishness

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This is what we put up with here in Wisconsin in the springtime:

 

Early in the week…..

 

 

…and a couple days later.

I remember a snowstorm on April 24th when I was a little girl.  I recall the date because it was my big sister’s birthday.  I also remember that particular storm because an elderly gentleman showed up at our door that night.  His car had gone into the ditch out in front of our house and he had trudged his way up our driveway in a blizzard.  I watched as my mother helped him into the living room and tenderly took off his wet shoes and socks.  I remember being fascinated by his socks; they had batteries built into them to keep his feet warm.  I’d never seen anything like that.  My mother warmed up some supper for our unexpected guest and made up a bed on the couch.  It was a bit unsettling going to bed that night, knowing that a stranger was sleeping in the house.  I don’t remember him leaving the next morning or getting his car pulled out of the ditch or ever hearing from him again.

 Mostly what sticks in my memory is how my mother made an old man feel so welcome and comfortable in our home during an April snowstorm.

Get Up!

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Then Jesus said to him, “Get up!  Pick up your mat and walk.”  John 5:8

Sometimes we need to be told to get up off our rears, clean up our messes and take a step in a new direction.  Jesus told people to “get up” all the time.  For instance, He said these words to a paralyzed man (Matt. 9:6), a dead 12-year-old girl (Mark 5:41), a boy in a coffin (Luke 7:14), and a man who had been crippled for 38 years (John 5:8), just to name a few.  How in the world were these people supposed to “get up”? 

It’s a good question for those of us who get stuck on our mats from time to time.  Like the man in John 5, I can get paralyzed by circumstances and lie around hoping for someone to come along who will lift me up into a place of healing.  It can be a long wait.  If I’m not careful, I can begin to get comfortable on my mat. 

I’ve been there the past two weeks.  Partly from the recent death of my dad, partly from reliving the loss of my mom (I was 13 when she died of cancer), partly because I’ve had a miserable head cold, and partly because it’s April and it’s snowing.  But this morning I heard a voice say, “Get up” and it didn’t matter if I felt paralyzed, crippled or even dead, there was enough power in the words themselves to get me on my feet and moving.

It helps knowing that the man who spoke to the cripple (and to me) is the same One who got Himself up out of the tomb.  As Keith Green wrote,

“Jesus rose from the dead. 

Come on, get out of your bed.”

“…so that you may know his incomparably great power for us who believe.  That power is like the working of his mighty strength, which he exerted in Christ when he raised him from the dead.” Ephesians 1:19-20

Congestion

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Congestion:  1) overcrowding; clogging  2) an excessive or abnormal accumulation of fluid in a body part.

I am congested.  Stuffy nose, sore throat, pounding head, aching sinuses, ringing ears.  I have an excessive and abnormal accumulation of fluid in every cavity of my head.  Ugh.  It is a fitting picture of what is in my heart today as well.  So many thoughts and memories, reflecting and remembering: my mind is clogged and overcrowded.  Words don’t come easy right now.  So I’ll rest my weary head and heart, let the healing do its work and wait for the day I can breath again.

Reading the Obits

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Last week, my dad’s obituary was in the State Journal.  I’ve never paid much attention to that part of the paper.  But when my loved one’s smiling face was on the newsprint followed by several paragraphs that summarized his life, it made me pause and soak up every word.  On that particular day, there were maybe fifteen other obituaries listed.  I read every word of every one, just out of respect.  They were real lives, after all; they were all people who had loved and worked and struggled and celebrated.  The few paragraphs allotted to them couldn’t contain their entire stories, but the words gave a glimpse into the lives they lived.  Everyone has a story.  Everyone’s story deserves recognition.

I am reading the obits every day now.  And at the end of each one I say, “Thanks, Lord, for this person you created.  Good job.”

The Lord Gave and The Lord Hath Taken Away

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“Naked came I out of my mother’s womb and naked shall I return: the Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”  Job 1:21

Never was this truth so poignantly displayed as in the wee hours of this morning.  Family members were gathered around the hospital bed of my father, who was struggling to take his final breaths on this earth.  As we watched the numbers on the monitor drop and the heartbeat become more sporadic, it was clear his 88 years were coming to completion.  Slowly and peacefully he drifted off, leaving us to wonder what he was experiencing and with whom he was reuniting. 

Within minutes of the straight line on the monitor, a sound from down the hall:

a newborn baby cry. 

My dad: January 10, 1923 – March 29, 2011

Blessed be the name of the Lord.

Headache

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There’s been a lot of crud going around: sore throats, headaches, stomach flu.  Unfortunately, my office computer caught a virus, too.  This morning my screen flashed a big red warning that I was under attack.  I was a little suspicious when I saw “Your’re at great risk!!!”  Your’re?  I’m no computer wiz, but I am a pretty good speller. 

A kind soul came to my rescue and spent several hours trying to undo the damage.  The kind soul promised to come back again tomorrow to continue the battle against the demon in my pc.  I asked my friend where these virus’s come from.  Evidently my eyes glazed over as the explanation became technical, so he simply said, “There are people on the other side of the world sitting in dark rooms coming up with ways to infect your computer.” 

Huh.  People in some foreign country are sitting in windowless rooms driven by the goal to frustrate a 51-year-old Christian Education Director at a church in a small midwestern town?  I’m not that important, really. All I want to do is download the Sunday school curriculum and print out a sign up sheet for VBS.  Not exactly earth shattering stuff here. 

I feel a headache coming on…..must be the virus.

My Late Cousin

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Several years ago, PB and I took a long drive across the state and went to visit my cousin, Marjorie. (She was actually my second cousin once removed or something like that.)  The woman was the epitome of an elderly spinster relative.  She was an only child and never married, but took care of her mother and taught piano lessons in her little unincorporated town.  I was always a little scared of Marjorie when, as a child, I accompanied my mother on trips to visit all the old relations every summer.  I remembered her as being quick of tongue and blunt of opinion.  We never hugged Marjorie.  She never seemed all that happy to see us.

Now that I was older, I had a desire to reconnect with the last living relative of that generation.  I had heard bits and pieces about Marjorie’s younger days.  Something about being engaged to a mysterious man named Tony, whom I was told never to mention on our yearly visits.  And something about her entertaining audiences with her violin at the traveling Chautauqua shows and even in Europe.  Obviously, I didn’t really know my cousin and so I went to see her in hopes of changing that.  I wanted to hear her stories.

We went in early April to the nursing home where she was living.  But she wasn’t there.  She had died.  The previous August.  It took the lady at the front desk a few moments, but she located and opened the notebook entitled “Deceased” and there was Marjorie’s name.  Six lines up from the bottom of the list.  That was all.

Did she die alone?  No husband, no children, no family?  Did she want it to be so?  Did she choose that for her life?  Was there a service, a funeral?  Was anyone there to share a memory?  Is there no one left to tell me about Tony and the virtuoso violinist that traveled the world?  Her stories are lost, I fear. 

A tear rolled down my cheek as we left.  Not because I loved her, but because I missed hearing her story by eight months.  I was too late to meet my late cousin. 

Our stories need to be told, or written, or recorded, or blogged.  Otherwise, they are no more.

Craving Honey Nut Cheerios

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“They willfully put God to the test by demanding the food they craved.”  Psalm 78:18

When I was pregnant with our first child, I remember sending PB out in the middle of the night for Honey Nut Cheerios.  There was to be no peace, no sleep, no satisfaction until that bowl of sweet, crunchy goodness was in my hands and in my tummy.  I just had to have some.  

Occasionally, I still get a hankering for something sweet and find an excuse to drive down to the gas station for some licorice.  We live in a world where it’s fairly easy to satisfy our cravings.  In or out of season, we have an array of fruit and vegetables in our stores all year round.  Restaurants show off their revolving dessert cases and we are bombarded with tv ads that create an appetite for thick, gooey, cheesy pizza that’s just a phone call and 15 minutes away from our salivating mouths.

After almost a year of a steady diet of manna (that heavenly food that showed up outside their tents every morning) the Israelites out in the desert began to complain.  Again.  Only this time they took it up a notch.  “Moses heard the people of every family wailing, each at the entrance to his tent.”  (Numbers 11:10)  The folks were wailing, and why?  Their mouths were watering for a taste of home: “We remember the fish we ate in Egypt at no cost – also the cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic.” (Numbers 11:5)

They seemed to be forgetting that along with those yummy leeks and onions came slavery, bitter hardship and beatings from the hands of ruthless slave masters.  It’s odd what we remember when looking back at the “good old days”.  The Bible says that God caused the people to hunger and then fed them bread from heaven.  He had to drive out the old cravings in order for the people to develop a taste for divine food.  I think God’s still in the business of training our taste buds.  My desires for security and significance can only be satisfied by Him, not a person, or a career, or a new toy.  Or Honey Nut Cheerios.

Bad Dog

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A few months ago I wrote about Bo, our Boggle (Boston Terrier/Beagle mix). (See July 20, 2010 post)  But there’s something I didn’t tell you about Bo.  As Sam observed this week, Bo is a really good pet, but she’s a really bad dog.

It’s like this: Bo is always sweet around us, her family.  She likes to play and fetch and curl up next to whoever is lying on the couch.  She sits and shakes paws and greets us at the door with tail wags.  She rarely barks and a doo-doo mistake in the house is highly unlikely.  Bo has never bitten anyone and only showed me her teeth once, when I tried to take away her food.  Understandable.  She’s a really good pet.

But when Bo gets anywhere near another dog, she turns into a bloodthirsty maniac.  The hair along her spine rises up and she begins to schnuffle (a barking/snorting thing).  Bo must give off some kind of offensive aura because other dogs also turn into bloodthirsty maniacs in her presence.  In our one attempt to go to the city’s dog park, we cleared it out in a matter of minutes.  Nobody likes to play with Bo.

When we go out for walks, she prances right beside me and smiles up at me….until another dog approaches.  Then she goes into attack mode and I can barely control the ferocious beast.  Quite often, I will turn around and go the other way when I see a probable confrontation converging.  Her reputation in the neighborhood isn’t good.  Nobody knows she’s really a sweet thing, except those of us who live in the house with her.

 Bo looking out the window.

      Bo looking out the window as a dog walks by.

Is this behavior limited to canines?  Do human beings have similar issues?  I mean, do people sometimes act sweet and loving in the house of God and then snarl and schnuffle at others on the street?  Are there some folks who just give off bad vibes and seem to bring out the worst in others?  I’m not pointing any fingers; I’m just asking: are there some really good church-goers who turn into something else outside those walls?

If anyone boasts, “I love God,” and goes right on hating his brother or sister, thinking nothing of it, he is a liar. If he won’t love the person he can see, how can he love the God he can’t see? The command we have from Christ is blunt: Loving God includes loving people. You’ve got to love both.  1 John 4:20-21  (Message)

The Loss of an Hour

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“There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven.” Ecclesiastes 3:1

Last November, I wrote about the gift of an hour.  Now we have to give it back.  You’d think losing an hour would be a real downer, but Daylight Savings Time has a redeeming quality: it’s a sign that spring is coming.  In light of that good news, it’s hard to get too worked up about moving the clock ahead.  Time is fleeting, after all.

Back in the day, when the kids were little and we homeschooled, we had a really long timeline up on the wall, covering 1400 A.D. to 2000 A.D.   It wrapped around the dining room and continued down the hallway and back entryway.  When we moved to a different house, the timeline went all the way around our big open basement.  The kids added all kinds of visual reminders to the one-of-a-kind border depending on what they were studying, whether it was history, science or literature.  As the years went on, the timeline filled up and became a real work of art that summarized twelve years of educating four kids.  I found it ironic that our last kiddo joined the ranks in public school in 2000, the year our timeline stopped.  The day my baby walked down the street to his new school with his new backpack, I took down the timeline.  It was a very emotional day for me.  This is what I wrote:

“It’s the end of the line.  The end of the timeline, that is.  Six hundred years wrapped around our family room.  Four children’s educations wrapped around my heart.  K’s renaissance people and famous Americans….  S’s world wars and sports heroes….  A’s presidents and favorite authors….  J’s inventions and discoveries…  It’s all rolled up (I feel it in my stomach).  The wall is so bare (I feel it in my heart).  It’s the end of our line of time.”

Time is fleeting.  So losing one hour?  Not such a big deal!