O! Wonderful Night

Yesterday we all went off to the Christmas Eve service at our church. It was...interesting. The written program proclaimed it to be a German Christmas, and so it was. There were two strapping and cheerful gentlemen in lederhosen, who regaled us with polkas at odd moments, playing upon their accordion and tuba. I seriously wanted to go polka-ing up and down the aisle, but had no partner. My reticent British-ancestry husband was not willing. Too bad! There was a large clan who got up and sang Stille Nacht, and the evening's introduction was given in German. The really amazing thing is that I found myself understanding what she was saying, and I don't speak German. At least, I don't think I do. I could be wrong.

The highlight, however, came while the aforementioned large clan was singing "O Tannenbaum". They sang it in German first, then a verse in English, and then polished it off in German again. But whichever language you sing it in, every line begins with the word "O". Kevin sat beside me, and every time they sang the word "O", so did he. He doesn't know any of the other words though, so that's the ONLY word he sang. With every line, this happy bass voice beside me chimed in on the "O" and then hummed along until it came up again. It's a good thing that Emily and Yoko were sitting down, because they laughed so hard they would have fallen down otherwise. I had the "O" chorus on the right, and the helpless gigglers on the left. Surrounded by lunacy, that was me.

There is a Christmas song I've heard on the radio a few times about having a Christmas to remember, but I just roll my eyes at it. The ones I really remember are the ones that were really and truly horrible in some way. But thanks to the Germans, this year might be reversing the trend. My German Christmas Eve will be sticking with me for a while. May you and yours have a Christmas to remember also, and I mean that in a GOOD way!

Love, Spud.

About Christmas

Think of your current age. Now add 33 to it. Now imagine that you were suddenly shipped off to Mugabe's Zimbabwe, or a refugee camp in Somalia, and you couldn't get back until you reached that age 33 years in the future. It's a fearsome prospect, as those are truly dreadful places. 33 years of danger, filth, suffering of every kind, and the utter despair of knowing that you weren't going to get away from it any time soon. How horrible. You'd almost wish you could contract something fatal. But you can't.

We really aren't able to imagine heaven, never having seen anything like it to compare it to, but there are some details available for us. For one thing, because it's where God has his throne, we know it's absolutely perfect, just because He's there and He wouldn't have it any other way. It's full of light, and glory, and creatures beyond even the imagination of Spielberg. Every tear will be wiped away, provided you can find anything to mourn, and there is no need of money. We are told to come buy milk and wine without cost, and gold is so ordinary it's used to make paving stones. For those of us in a nation diving headfirst into financial catastrophe, that sounds pretty good! Every need will be met. Sin will be gone, and we'll be surprised, once it's no longer around, just how steeped in it we were without even recognizing most of it. The broken, fallen world will be healed, and disease and distress and dysfunction will be things of the past. But the best part is that God and Jesus and all His people will be home there--together forever. It's like a fairy tale, except better, because it's real.

The most miraculous thing about the account of the first Christmas is the back-story which we generally fail to consider. Jesus was in heaven--it was His rightful home, and He agreed, as per the plan from ages past, to leave it for those 33 years. He left perfection, power, and glory, and voluntarily came down here to experience the life that all of us pathetic humans live. Jesus willingly "emptied Himself" of His Godly attributes--no more omniscience, omnipresence, or the other incomprehensible omnis. God became, in other words, one of us.

Jesus left paradise and, after what may have been the first recorded case of artificial insemination, entered this mortal coil as an infant. He went through the trauma of birth. He cried, He pooped, He may even (poor Mary!) have had colic. He probably experienced all the usual childhood ailments, growing pains, and skinned knees. After infinity past in the perfection of heaven, Jesus endured this place full of thorns, droughts, famines, splinters, and rocks in the fields, fleas, flatulence, smelly feet, and zits. What a horror show this is, this cesspool of humanity.

It begs the question: why would God come to earth under those conditions? The answer is provided by Jesus Himself--because He loves us. Which also leads to the next logical question: why does He love us? We're hopelessly screwed up, every last one of us. But love us God does, for His own doubtlessly good reasons, even though it makes no sense at all to us. He loves us with an enduring, consistent, and undeserved love that is beyond our ability to understand, but not, with His help, beyond our ability to accept. And apparently the best way to get us out of this mess was to become a human, so God did.

And human He was. Jesus was accused of being a glutton and a wine-bibber. He hung out with the scum of society and His own clueless band of homeys. We know He wept, and I'll betcha He laughed. He was a man of deep compassion and inevitable truthfulness, and folks of every station were irresistibly attracted to Him, although of course far more of them were not. In one form or another, He went through every disaster we do, or at least its first century equivalent, but unlike us, he did it without sinning against God or Man. Jesus had to be human. Only then could He plumb the depths of the human experience, and only then could He rightly represent us in both life and death. Only then could He die.

Every December the television schedule is crowded with holiday specials, each of them claiming to be about someone who discovers the True Meaning of Christmas. Frankly, they make me want to gag. They're all very good entertainment, and full of problematic events where people learn lessons about sharing and sacrificing, that yes there really is a Santa Claus, the most important thing in life is love, and miracles happen at the rate of about one every thirty minutes. We all get melty and sentimental. This is not a bad thing. It's just incorrect.

Because the True Meaning of Christmas...is Easter. The baby we adore on Christmas went to His death 33 years later, and He did it for us. He did it knowing the torture and physical agony that was involved, because He knew it was the only way to restore His beloved human race to Himself. It wasn't pretty. In fact, it was nauseatingly ugly--as far from a Christmas card as you can get. But it was all for us, and if we believe that Jesus was who He said He was and ask for His death to pay for our sins, then they are wiped away. Our record is clean, and we get to experience heaven after we too go through death. Just because He loves us. He shall see the results of His agony, and be satisfied.

And do you know what I think? I think that calls for a party!!! Ring bells! Sing songs! Give presents! Give them to those we know and love, and to those we will never even meet, through wonderful agencies like World Relief and Compassion and Samaritan's Purse. They will be happy to turn your hard-earned dollars into goats, chickens, seeds, and other life-giving gifts, to make things just a little bit (or maybe a big bit) easier for some other sufferer in the world. Joy to the world! Because God loves us, and wants us, and did what it took to bring us to Himself. Hallelujah.

Love, Spud.

Fancy Meeting You Here!

There is a small number of blogs which I read faithfully, either for information or just plain old fun, and I hardly ever skip a day because, well, just because I like it that way. Something interesting happened yesterday with two of the blogs to which you can link from this one. They met.

Thepioneerwoman.com is one of my all-time favorite fun sites. The woman is just wild, but in a very good way. She's married to a guy she refers to as Marlboro Man, and they have two daughters and two sons. PW announced a few days ago that Marlboro Man and the two girls were going on a trip to the Dominican Republic with Compassion International with some other bloggers, to see what Compassion does down there. I have sponsored kids through Compassion since about 1985, and so I found this interesting, and it has been fun to read MM's reactions to what he sees. PW has apparently stayed at home to arrange the blog posts as he sends them in, and the considerate guy keeps sending photos of laundry to prove to his wife that it's a universal problem--not just hers. With six people on a cattle ranch, PW does a LOT of laundry, much of it stinky. I'm sure all those photos are making her feel better.

Another blog I visit daily is www.challies.com. Tim Challies is a man in Canada of Calvinistic persuasion (I don't hold that against him) and his posts and links are always worth reading. I even bought a copy of his book, although it's packed in a box in the garage because it lived in that room which just got the new floor, so it may be some time before I can get my hands on it to actually read it. But I will. Honest. Tim Challies also announced a few days ago that he was going to...the Dominican Republic. With Compassion. Talk about a small world! I laughed about the coincidence.

So yesterday I read Pioneerwoman, and then scootted over to challies.com. Mr. Challies had a slide show up of photos he had taken, and as the pictures slide-showed by I noticed something. I saw pictures of Marlboro Man and the girls. Wait! Wrong website! You don't belong here! It was a very strange reaction. I knew intellectually that they were in the same place, but it was a little surreal all the same, kind of like if Harry Potter were to walk in through my office door. I never thought that any of these people were fictional, but I never expected them to appear together either. It's not clear to me why this startles me so.

Marlboro Man's post today has made my heart a little sad. It's not the poverty or anything, even though that's obviously a bad thing too. It's that when he talked about faith (a subject with which he is clearly uncomfortable) he seemed to be attributing the faith of a woman he met there to the wrong cause. MM kept talking about the importance of sponsors connecting with their sponsored children, and I got the feeling he thought that was where this woman's amazing faith and hope came from. Wrong anchor, dude. Way wrong. It made me very sad, and so if you read this, help me pray for this guy. He's a sweetie, and I'd love to see him in the kingdom if he isn't in it already, but at the very least he needs a stronger grasp of the source of our faith and our hope. Yikes. But for the record, I do think he is absolutely correct. It is the combination of the gospel, education, food, clothing, and connection with someone who cares that makes the most difference. For biblical backing, see James, chapter 3.

But the REALLY extraordinary thing is that my spell-checker had no problem with the term "slide-showed".

Love, Spud.

Random Things

I find myself with a list of random thoughts that have been sort of wandering around in my head, and none of them are thought through enough for an actual posting. They are not likely to get to that point either, as frantically busy as things have been, so I'm going to set them out before they get away entirely, in the probably doomed hope that I'll ever get around to pondering them some more.

For many years, I have struggled with the idea of "the fear of the Lord". Why on earth would I fear the Lord? He's MY Lord and I am His, I can't wait to meet Him, I get homesick for heaven. So then why is it that the *fear* of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom? Why should I be afraid? I'm finally starting to get a handle on this, at long last, as a series of teachings in the last year have made me realize just how deeply sinful I am and always will be. I have plumbed partway down the depths, and it ain't pretty down there. I have a sneaking suspicion that at the very bottom I'm about as horrible as they come. When I realize this, I also realize that God would have every right, and nearly an obligation, to squash me like a bug and throw me on the trash heap. While I dearly love Him and know that He loves me more than I can imagine, I also know that I stink. So lately I've become aware that I can't decide what I'll do when we finally meet face to face. Will I grovel at His feet in despair or throw my arms around His (figurative) neck with joy? Is it even possible to do both at once? Am I finally becoming wise?

A friend brought up an interesting point a few weeks ago, when we were discussing the age-old fact that bad things happen to good people. I don't remember exactly what was said, but the train of thought it set off in my head led me to the idea that sometimes life-altering tragedies happen because we have so many things that come between us and devotion to God.Those things are powerfully big in our lives, and we let God be very small. When those things are taken away, God is suddenly our One Big Thing, and we hopefully get some kind of perspective on the things that used to be big and now are very small.

I used to be in a small group Bible study with some people who were very well off financially. They led the group, and some other members were quite endowed with worldly goods also. At last, both the families with lots of money failed miserably in ministry and it was because of the temptations they failed to resist regarding money. Looking back, I used to roll my eyes at how frequently the teachings were about materialism. Now I can see that it was probably a case of God having a very large finger poking them in the ribs (among other places), trying to get their attentions before it was too late. So they taught about materialism because it was the subject they just couldn't get out of their heads and hearts. And for a good reason. This equates, I think, with all the powerful Christian leaders who speak for years about sexual sins and then find that their own hidden sexual sins are the ones that topple them. Maybe I should start paying closer attention to the things I feel compelled to teach about...

This last Sunday, I had an unplanned and unexpected DAY OFF. By golly, it was just really and truly a Saabbath rest. I made a conscious decision to absent myself from a regular and very worthy Sunday afternoon activity, and I am so glad. Frankly, I needed the down time very badly, and I ended up making my daughter feel better too just by my presence at home. I may do this again some time, although I'll have to resist being tempted to do it often. It was remarkably refreshing.

There is a journal in the holdings at OSU entitled "Nursing Made Incredibly Easy!". I am amused. I am also appalled, and hope to goodness that I never find myself the end user of that particular pedagogy. Oh my.

Love, Spud.

On Being a PIA

Back when Columbus had two newspapers, I got them both. The Citizen-Journal came in the wee dark hours of the early morning, and the Dispatch arrived in time for after work reading. The CJ folded in the eighties, and I mourned for it, and the Dispatch changed to a morning paper. I dearly love newspapers. When we travel, Stu knows to humor me in my daily search for a local paper. I'll even read USA Today if there just isn't anything else. When we were newly married and even poorer than churchmice, we got $5 each pocket money every week, and mine went for the daily paper until I decided it wasn't realistic to pretend any longer that it was a luxury that didn't fit the budget. For me, the paper is a necessity, and I prefer it in paper form. Of course, in order to justify it I had to give Stu a raise to $10 pocket money a week, but I kept mine at five to be fair.

But I'm a picky old lady, and I like my morning paper in the morning, particularly in time to read it with my morning tea and breakfast before I go to work. The individual who currently delivers my paper doesn't grasp this at all. Despite a Dispatch-imposed deadline of 6:30 on weekdays and 8am on weekends, my paper shows up some time after I leave for work at 6:50, and has gotten here late enough on a Sunday that I had to finish it at four in the afternoon. Well, as a picky old lady, let me just say that this isn't sitting very well. I've had to buy one on the way to work lately (and let me just point out that I'm really not supposed to read the newspaper at work--I'm supposed to be working) thereby paying for it twice. If I wait until evening, not only is the News very Old, but I don't have time for it anyway.

So I called a couple of weeks ago and complained, but it didn't do any good. I got a woman on the phone who was deeply weary of her job, and responded like an automaton reading from a script, which she doubtless was. Reading from a script, I mean, not an automaton. Although it was hard to tell. In any case, it failed to have an effect on the paper delivery person, who continues to show up at some unknown time.

I did have this problem once before. When we moved into this neighborhood a little over ten years ago the newspaper had been carried by the same family for many years--kind of a delivery mafia. They had many children, all blonde and charming, and when one grew up and left home the route was just passed on to the next oldest in line. That's all well and good, but until it got to the very youngest a few years ago, none of them were capable of delivering on time. Some people would get offended by this comment, but I'll make it anyway--the problem seemed to be rooted in the fact that this enormous family was home-schooled, and they really had no concept of "schedule". Or at least, no concept that anybody else might have one. So I had years of late newspapers, and no amount of complaining, cajoling, or anything else did any good. I just had to wait it out until the last yellow-headed youngster left the nest a couple of years ago and an adult took over.

So this latest guy took over in July, and he appears to be an adult too (it's very dark out there, but he's a pretty good size and drives, which may or may not be an indication, and he's clearly past high school because when he does arrive it's after the bus goes). My question is: Just how much of a pain in the arse should I be over this? Granted, I shouldn't have to pay for two papers daily when I only read one, but it's my choice to do this. I could just suck it up and accept going through withdrawal like a grown-up. And it's not like I actually pay for service. The paper is the same price delivered or picked up. On the other hand, he is getting paid for providing the service, and he's not providing it in a timely manner. And on still another hand, he may have extenuating circumstances out the whazoo, in which case I would be willing to just cancel my subscription since I'm fetching it myself anyway. Or he may just be a slacker and needs a fire to be lit in an appropriate place. But I can't tell that from here, and the automaton was no help at all. And is it fair to keep calling and complaining when I didn't do that to the Blonde Mafia? I did see them in person, however, and let my feelings be known, probably a little too gently, when they came to collect. Nobody collects in person any more though, it's all done by mail.

I am well aware of my propensity to be anal about some things which are doubtless trivial, and to fail to be anal about things that probably need attention, so I'm really waffling over this. How much fuss should I make over what is actually a luxury item, even though it happens to be my personal favorite luxury item ever? I need a sense of perspective on this, and I don't have it. All I have is irritation and fewer quarters. Any advice, people?

Love and Bruxism, Spud.

Oh, My Head!

I may be alone in this experience, but somehow I don't think so.

Have you ever found your head wandering away, with you or without you? I don't mean the usual gentle wool-gathering, I mean speeding down a highway where you really don't want to go. Yikes. This happened to me yesterday, and I'm still getting over it. I'd received an interesting/disturbing message from someone in the morning, and then in the afternoon I got into a small wrangle with a co-worker. Well, the morning message brought up a lot of old grievances, dating back as far as elementary school. That's ridiculous, isn't it? You're right, it is! But I went there anyway, and stayed there even as late as my morning commute. The work issue is still somewhat with me, because it really isn't resolved and I'll have to deal with it again. But this time, I'll be ready, boy! I've been thinking about it for a whole day, and I've got all my arguments lined up!

Okay, now that's just sinful. Let's face it. While I do need to be able to approach my work with logic and intelligence, there's just no excuse for the vehemence with which I've prepared my reasoning. And while the episodes of my youth are graven-in-stone history, there's absolutely no excuse for the way I have wallowed in the hurts caused by past actions of others. Get that? I may have plenty of fine REASONS, but in the end I have no EXCUSES. But my wretched head goes there anyway. Oh, what to do?

What to do is...first, talk to myself. David Martyn Lloyd-Jones wrote a book about spiritual depression, and the introduction to the book ends with a marvelously insightful few paragraphs about talking to yourself. I don't remember it well enough to quote it, but the basic idea is that from the moment we wake up in the morning there are thoughts in our heads. Many of those thoughts are not God-honoring, and in fact are just downright false, and so you know where they come from--Satan and our own sinful selves. Well, as a man (or woman!) thinks, so he is. So you've just got to get your thoughts under control, and take them captive to Christ. So DML-J says that we should address ourselves most sternly, and say "Self! Get a grip!" or words to that effect. (I warned you that it would not be a direct quote!) After you've gotten the attention of your sinful old self, then talk to it! And tell it the truth. Fill your old head up with the things of God, and squash the other junk out for lack of room. Refute the falsehoods. Ha! Take that!

Secondly, is prayer. Once you've cleaned out your head, it's time to address your heart. I so often ascribe really horrible motivations to other people, and while I may be correct, I may not! Only God knows for sure, and He doesn't often let me in on the secret. So I am just wrong in assuming I know why the other person said what they said or did what they did. It may be that they were in the midst of some ancient or modern hurt of their own, and spoke and acted from their own pain. So frequently, we all just respond on auto-pilot from the grid of our own past experiences, and hurt others without intention or even knowledge that we have done so. Or maybe I have radically misinterpreted! I suspect this is the case as often as not.

Grace means that I give others the benefit of the doubt. Forgiveness from God for all my blunders means that I must pass that on to others. As freely as I have received, I have to freely give, or I become some horrible, stingy, dried-up-spiritually thing. Nobody wants that!

So I found myself in the car this morning, once again working through the process of forgiving the probably clueless person who hurt me so in the past, and giving my heart to God for yet another dose of cleaning up. I'll have to do this on a regular basis for as long as I live, I imagine, because I don't see my sinful Self going away this side of glory. But, my goodness, God really does do a terrific job of heart-cleaning once I get around to asking for it, and then I find that "time of refreshing" that was promised. Just like the clothes I wear, I find that my soul needs frequent trips through the wash. Happy am I for a God who does most excellent laundry!

Love, Spud.

Just Turn At The Bink

There are two groceries I frequent. One of them is clean and pleasant and has quick and friendly customer service and relatively short lines and donates to charities with which I am involved, like Special Olympics and the MDA. It also has higher prices. The other one is pretty run down and has very long lines, but the prices are better, so I go there for many things. But you know how it goes, each store has things the other one doesn't carry, and I like the produce and the meat better at one but the milk better at the other. I go to both of them every week in order to get everything on my list.

I wondered for a while last year if I wasn't going to have to stop going to the store with the cheaper prices, because whenever I went there, I saw my stalker. Having a stalker in itself was a little surprising, and very, very creepy. The first time I saw him I was totally unnerved, and I was at the very back of the store where he had followed me, and as I went in and out of aisles I saw him peek his head around them. A few times I would go very quickly down the ends and race into a random aisle in the hopes of throwing him off, (which didn't work) and at the end I headed straight for the back again and nearly ran down a narrow aisle in the middle of the store and straight into a check-out lane. Darned if I didn't see him sticking his head up from another lane looking for me, so I ducked down and stayed that way, and practically ran to my car and locked all the doors behind me. I was seriously frightened, and wondered if it was safe to ever go back.

I did see him again, in the same store, on a couple of future occasions, but I was ready with cell phone in had to call 911 if he approached me. He never did, but I would sometimes see him looking. About this time, we befriended an employee of this store, and I confessed that I thought I was going to have to abandon that grocery. He asked what the stalker looked like, and when I told him he laughed and told me that my stalker was a plain-clothes security man, watching for shop lifters. I was shocked and a little insulted, but we soon figured out why he had pegged me as a likely suspect.

You see, I'm very organized about some things. As all my friends and family know, I live on lists. I make lists for everything, and as the holidays approach I even make a list of the lists I'll need to make. This lifestyle happens to extend to grocery shopping. Naturally, I keep a running grocery list like most people, but I have a two-column list with things I get at the cheaper store on the left and things I get at the nicer store on the right. When I write something on the list I put it in the appropriate column, and my family has learned to ask what side to write something on. Then when I get ready to go to a store, I recopy in the list on another piece of paper in aisle order. So when I enter a store, I am ready to go exactly to where I need to in order to get things in the quickest and most thorough way possible.

Well, I guess the poor security department had never seen anything quite like me. I'd go in the store, pick up a cart, and proceed briskly to the very back of the store and make my way quickly to the front, methodically plucking things off the shelves as I went. They assumed that this was the behavior of a shoplifter, because surely nobody else would be that quick and prepared. Once I had this straightened out with our new friend, I never had another problem, and never again saw my "stalker".

I just returned from that store not half an hour ago, and I had a wonderful time tonight. There was a charming young man at the door acting as greeter, and I asked him where to find the twine. He looked a little puzzled, so I changed it to "string" and light dawned.

"First," he said, "you go right down this aisle to the bink"

"The bink?" I repeated, startled.

"Yes, the bink! You know, where the money is?"

"Oh, the bank!"

"Yes, the bink! That is what I say! Then you turn up the mine aisle,"(I decided against asking) "and go to where the lawn begs and garden things are."

We struggled on for a minute, both laughing hysterically at our attempts at communication. He finally said "You got that?" I agreed that I got that, and he punched me companionably in the arm and exclaimed "You rock, seestaire!"

I never did find the twine, although I did recognize the MAIN aisle when I got there, but I grinned and chuckled the whole time, even through the dreaded check-out line. Life is good, when you can have that much fun at a grocery store.

Love, Spud.

Clowns of God

Little Trig Palin has caused a cascade of thoughts in my head, and it's not clear where they'll end--so let's just take a peek in my gray cells and see what's cooking. A stream-of-consciousness blogging! First off, no matter where Sarah Palin ends up going (or not going) politically, she will always have my personal approval for deciding to give live birth to her Down's Syndrome son--as if my personal approval mattered! It's a brave and proper thing to take what you're given and see what good you can make of it, and an even braver and more proper thing to willingly--with advance notice-- take on the challenge of a child who will, in many ways, never really grow up.

Is it possible that our sons (Mrs. Palin's and my own) are part of a vanishing society? I read that most Down's babies are now aborted, and that there will be fewer and fewer of them in the years to come. Of course, there were no signs before birth that there was anything amiss with Kevin, and I suspect there will always be a goodly number of children whose problems become evident only over time. Pete Singer would have us kill them off too, as a mercy to society if not to his own clueless self.

I once read that in Italy the mentally handicapped are referred to as the clowns of God. That name fits! There's no one cheerier of all my acquaintance than my son, who more often than not wakes up in the morning and bursts into song, or looks outside and exclaims "What a beautiful day!". It's beyond my comprehension that someone else might have decided that his happy life was not worth living. I remember when I was pregnant with our second (and perfectly normal, as it turns out) baby, discussing the value of pre-natal testing for birth defects. I said that it didn't matter, we'd take what we were given. The relief on my doctor's face was palpable. He's had an enormous soft spot in my heart ever since.

That being said, I have seen the other side. I worked in a large state-supported teaching hospital for several years, and for a short time I found myself working on the unit where, among other things, women came to have their pregnancies terminated. That was a difficult assignment. But I learned something very valuable there, because up until that point I naively and probably arrogantly assumed that all abortions were because the mother just didn't want her baby. That was wrong. Most of the pregnancies were being terminated for entirely reasonable reasons--the baby lacked lungs, or lacked a brain, or--in the case of a nurse I knew personally--because the baby was so terribly deformed that he had no functioning systems in his body. None of these children had any chance at all of surviving outside of the womb, and in many cases the baby had already perished, and it was a great mercy to deliver the baby early. I'll never forget witnessing the silent grief of a mother holding her child who had died in the womb--tiny and perfect, but not ever capable of drawing its first breath.

I still just want to have a gigantic tantrum and throw things at a world where these things happen. Pregnancy is supposed to be one of the most joyous times in the life of a family, but sometimes it just isn't. It's such an in-your-face piece of evidence that we live in a broken world full of broken hearts, and makes me long for heaven all the more. I am furious that miscarriages and other fetal deaths happen, and sad beyond measure. And I also get furious that there are women who for whatever reason decide that they don't want their babies, and extinguish them instead of giving them to any one of the hundreds of families who long for babies and can't have their own. I learned early on at the hospital to avoid reading that line of the chart--I didn't want to know which mothers were grieving and which ones were relieved that their inconvenience was gone. It was not my place, and my heart couldn't take the dreadful knowledge. I decided to give each woman the benefit of the doubt, knowing that her life was open before God, and didn't have to be open before mine. Fortunately, I didn't have to stay on that unit long before I was able to move to a different one.

So where have I ended up? With a heart newly broken, because I haven't relived that experience for some time. And with a great appreciation, no matter how I end up voting, for Sarah Palin. Bless you, my dear. God bless Trig, and grant him a happy life. And God bless any family who looks upon a baby with medical or physical problems and says "I'll keep it" and gives it a life of love and care. Your reward shall be great.

Love, Spud.

A Product of My Time

There is an issue which has been distinctly troubling me for some time, and that is the whole debate over the roles of women in the church. I had laid this topic to rest some time ago, and now it's rearing its head again, and I find it's been taking up my thoughts. I've been doing a great deal of reading in the last few months (no surprise there) on Biblical topics (perhaps a little more surprising), and this one comes up more than you might think. Several writers for whom I have great respect are firm in their belief that women must not teach groups in which there are men, and may not be in leadership roles. I know the passages that this comes from, of course, but I also know that I still struggle with it! I suspect it has something to do with my being female...

Let me be clear--I have no taste for leadership myself, which is just as well because I'm not convinced anybody would follow me. I'm happy in my current roles and don't wish to change them. However, I am a teacher. Not to the large assembly in our church (which is very large indeed) but to other women and periodically to our small group, which contains both men and women. And I think that I'm not half bad at it. But I'd done so much reading on the subject that I was actually kind of unnerved--and certainly unfocused--this last week when I was leading the discussion, and fairly flubbed it. So you can tell this bothers me, and this may end up being a record-length post as a result. Sorry.

Things that make me think I should NOT be teaching: Paul said it, quite clearly, twice. There really isn't any other way to read those words except that women are to keep their traps shut in church. End of story. And no, I don't think that Paul was a misogynist, not at all, but his opinion on this is unmistakable. It's so easy to say that he was just a product of his time, and this is a cultural thing, and therefore we can ignore it. Up to a point, I do think that's true! On the other hand, it does open up a real slick path down some other slippery slopes. If you go with that, how do you draw the line and say this thing was just cultural but that thing is not? How do we know for a certainty which things were Paul's first century opinions and which things are actually from God? I'm not always comfortable making that distinction, especially over something which has such implications for what I personally do--I could be biased!

Things that make me think it's okay for me to be teaching: This list is, predictably, somewhat longer. For one, I do agree with Catherine Booth (of Salvation Army fame) that God gives gifts--even to women--to be used. I have been in leadership before, and been teaching for some time, and always get put in these positions because there is a need, and I'm able to fill it. I can see making a strong case for meeting the needs that arise if I have the skills and am asked to do so. So I have. And our small groups would suffer greatly if the women's voices were not heard. We have a fair amount of wisdom among the ladies, and I personally think God put it there.

From the cultural standpoint, Paul's prohibition in I Corinthians comes in the same letter as instructions about head coverings, or lack thereof. I don't think you could argue that those are not cultural issues, and largely passed by in non-muslim societies at this time. I have memories of seeing the Catholic neighbors wearing little tiny doilies on their heads as they went off to mass, and I somehow think that it's not exactly what Paul had in mind. It's not clear that anyone really knows what he meant with the comment about it being because of the angels, but I understand that women wore veils as a mark of their status of being married, showing their submission to one man in that relationship, and that makes sense. I guess my wedding ring serves the same function today perhaps. I do understand that the bulk of that portion of his letter to the Corinthians had to do with chaos in worship, but these days the chaos can come just as readily from the men!

And I just can't ignore Deborah. No matter how I vacillate in either direction, I keep coming back to Deborah, one of the judges of Israel. She won't be ignored! Deborah was a leader, even militarily, and was appointed by God for the task. We don't know what His justification for that outrageous appointment was, because He didn't say, but apparently Deb was the "best man for the job". There's also Aquila and his wife Priscilla pulling Apollos aside to teach him the way more accurately. Not just Aquila. Priscilla too. Is it possible that God still appoints women as He sees fit, giving them gifts and abilities to be used even in the instruction of men? I wouldn't want to be the one to tell God that He can't, that's for sure.

So I'm still pondering. I'm not willing to say that Paul was only speaking for that time in history when it came to this issue (it is included in Scripture, after all), although he most assuredly was correct about what was needed for that time and those circumstances, but at the same time I'm not willing to limit God on what He might decide to be doing in this day and age. I worry about starting down slippery slopes, because a great many people have proceeded me and made disasters that way in many areas. So what to do? I guess I'll keep reading, keep thinking, keep praying, and likely keep teaching until/unless I'm convinced otherwise, because there is a need, and I am able and have been requested to fill it for now. But I'm still troubled, because the one desire of my heart is to not be outside what God wants for me, as a wife and mother, but also as a teacher who desperately wants to handle accurately the Word of truth.

Love, Spud.

The Cherrybomb

Is there anyone who doesn't love to wax nostalgic about their first car? I certainly do--she was a real character. The Cherrybomb (Cherry for short) was a 1963 push-button transmission Plymouth Valiant which had once been bright red but was pretty faded by the time I took possession. Cherry had a wonderfully simple slant-6 engine, and even I could deal adequately with some basics, like popping the hood and manually opening the choke when she didn't want to start. She often did not want to start.

Cherry developed a strange habit of beeping all by herself at one point, sitting alone in the driveway, so my dad disconnected the horn. Poor lonely Cherry! But she got her revenge, and succeeded in getting our attention too.

My parents' house was at the top of a hill, and the town was at the bottom. Once summer day I was coasting down the hill and when I got to the bottom I put on the brakes as I approached the upcoming intersection. Or at least I tried to. Cherry had lost her master cylinder, and my foot went straight to the floor and there was no stopping to be had. It was clear that I was going to sail right through that intersection with the red light hanging over it, and I realized that I couldn't even honk to warn people that I was coming. There was no horn any more. So I did the only thing I could think of, and turned right.

That slowed her down a little, but not enough, and after a couple more blocks I got to another intersection with a light, and so I again turned right. Cherry was going much slower at this point, but obviously was not going to stop all the way on her own, so I opened the door, jumped out, ran to the front, and stopped the car with my own body. People have fits when they hear this part, but I didn't think I was in any real danger, and apparently I was right, because Cherry came to a stop and I live to tell about it.

Dad got the master cylinder replaced, and decided that it would be a very good idea if I once again had a horn. So he installed one, but you didn't honk it by pressing on the steering wheel like you would with normal horns. Oh no, instead you pressed down on a big black button in the middle of the dashboard. It was unique, but entirely serviceable. So at the end of the summer I drove back to college, where all my friends were delighted with the big black horn button, and would honk it indiscriminately just for the fun of it. Between the horn and the push-button transmission, Cherry and I were celebrities, in our own minor way.

Cherry developed severe indigestion of the carburetor during my senior year, and I finally replaced her and let her go back to my home town with my dad before my final quarter in college. He sold her, and I have always wondered how long she lasted before she pooped out for good. But I needed something more reliable for my student teaching experience, so with great sadness I let her go. (The replacement had his own interesting personality, by the way, but that's for another day.)

It's tempting, as my daughter approaches driving, to supply her with something relatively new and safe and boring and trustworthy, but where would be the adventure in that? Nope, she needs my battered old van instead. Everybody needs to start out life with a junker. You need the character-building experiences that come with a doubtful old car, and the harrowing thrills that just compel you to prayer. Besides, how else would she collect the stories to tell her children? I couldn't possibly deprive her of that!

Love, Spud.

One Thing Led to Another...

It is impossible to describe the chain of thoughts that led to this post, because I have no clear remembrance of the path they took, but here we are. And just a warning, this gets a smidgen PG-13 at the end. Not that I expect Sammy is reading this or anything, but you never know. He's awfully smart.

Back when I did a study of Hebrews with some ladies last winter, I was tremendously helped along by a post by Ben Witherington on covenants. You can find it at http://benwitherington.blogspot.com, and the post is called Cutting a Covenant When The People Can't Cut It, from 10/27/2007. The extremely simplified version is that God's OT covenant with His people was typical of other covenants of the time between a suzerain and his subjects, which involved a blood sacrifice to open the covenant and both blessings if the terms are kept and curses if the terms are not. If you look at the last few chapters of Deuteronomy, this is exactly what it looks like. Well, needless to say, Israel spent many centuries of history not keeping the terms and therefore reaping the curses.

The bit that sends cold chills of "WOW!" up and down my spine is the part about Jesus exhausting that covenant by taking all the curses upon Himself, so is it no longer in force, and simultaneously, by being the blood sacrifice, inaugurating the new covenant in which we live today. Let me just say again--wow. It certainly shed new light on the book of Hebrews, let me tell you.

So where's that PG-13 part?!?!? Okay, here it is. Somehow, my thoughts wandered over to marriage. Maybe because I have one, maybe because my daughter is 15 and she may have one in the next decade also; who knows? But the fact is that Christian marriage is indeed a covenant relationship. All you have to do is to read the vows to see that this is true. And Dan Phillips makes the valid point that many marriages could be rehabilitated by people simply reading through those vows they made in front of God and their spouse and repenting of where they have failed and beginning to keep them. A wise man, Dan.

It occurred to me that one reason (among hundreds) that you marry as a virgin is that breaking the hymen is the blood that inaugurates that covenant. See? How often are you going to read THAT in a blog?! But it makes a lot of sense. And then you have sex with only that one person for the rest of your biological lives because that's in the covenant, and the curse sanctions are coming your way if you don't. If you have pre-marital sex, as most young adults do in our current hook-up culture, then you have already made that blood sacrifice with somebody else--not your spouse. I think the ancients knew this, and the knowledge was passed down through the centuries without the reasoning behind it. There are still come cultures today which require display of the wedding-night sheets to prove virginity, and if there is no blood then the marriage is invalid--the covenant is not in effect. It may still even be true here in America that non-consummation is a reason for annulment of a marriage. Can't say I've needed to look into that one!

Marriage is designed to be a reflection of our relationship with God, and to that effect we Christians are corporately called the bride of Christ. God is ever faithful, and we are called to imitate Him in this. There are probably lots of ways to continue this thinking, not only being faithful to our earthly spouses but faithful to God in opposition to all the things that try to pull us away from Him like full schedules, technology, cool new "spiritual" paths, whatever. But that's for another day, and for all His people to contemplate.

Love, Spud.

For the Big Red Dude

Eighteen years ago today, at 23 minutes past midnight, I gave birth. It had been a textbook pregnancy, resulting in Kevin appearing on his due date, and the first indication I had that he had arrived was the nurses exclaiming "Look at that red hair!". It was a little while before anyone thought to mention that he was a boy-- that glorious hair took all the attention.

Should I have caught on at the hospital? He had an unusual cry--like a tiny sheep's bahhhh, and I could always tell when his bassinet was being wheeled down the hall towards me. He had ear tags, a glioma, and a lack of ability to suck--not a good thing in a newborn who really can't take nutrition any other way. After we went home, it wasn't long before Kevin developed his very first infection and raging colic. Oh boy. Colic. Six months of screaming, four months of going in to work with very little sleep in my history.

Then one morning, I awoke in the morning to the sound of silence and the realization that I had not been up in the night. Horrified, I ran into the nursery, convinced that my baby had perished in the night, for what other possible explanation could there be? No, Kevin had just been sleeping, and he woke up then and smiled at me. Glory be!

Colic had fled, but within a few days the constant illnesses began. My dad had videotaped Kevin on a regular basis, and it breaks my heart to watch them now because you can almost see Kevin go downhill as infection followed infection. At nine months I began to say to the pediatrician "There's something wrong here", but it wasn't until his second birthday that anyone else agreed with me. Every weekday off for years was spent in the office of one doctor or another-- the pediatrician, specialists, hospital clinics-- and there were times when I didn't think we'd get to keep him; surely one of these infections, one of these seizures, one of these weeks of fever would take him away, surely more than seven years of intestinal issues would take their toll and his body would give up.

Kevin is a little over six feet in height now. He's goofy, happy, sunshiny, and (except for the whole progressive neurological disease thing) quite healthy. The bright red hair still shines, his eyes twinkle, and he has friends wherever he goes. I am frequently astonished at the number of people who really deeply care about Kevin and what happens to him, and profoundly grateful too. He will never drive, never get married, never have that independence which we all wish for our children. There will always be caretakers, appointments, and "durable medical equipment".

So to all the therapists, audiologists, doctors, nurses, case managers, social workers, special teachers, teachers aides, Sunday school teachers, camp counsellors, friends, relatives and even perfect strangers who have given time, help, and love to Kevin, we give our deepest thanks. You'll never know what a difference you've made.

And to Kevin--Happy Birthday, sweetie. You are my sunshine indeed.

Love, Spud.

Daddeeeeee!

Well, all right, that was a little more than a week. But after it was over I had to get ready to leave town, and then we went out of town, and then we came back and I had to deal with all the mess which results from having been out of town, and so here it is ten days later. Such is life.

My son has made a recording on his cell phone of my home-coming from work one day lately. First you hear his voice:

"Mommeeeeee!" and then you hear mine:

"Kevinnnnnn!" And all sorts of good cheer breaks loose, because Mommy and Kevin are both home.

I've heard this recording a lot, because it makes my son very happy, so he plays it for me a great deal. So it has become this curious combination of tedious and heartwarming, but I do understand why he plays it again and again. This is love and joy and security to him, and I am so pleased I can give him that. There are so many things that I can't give him; I'm grateful for this one.

This last Thursday, our Bible study group had a discussion about the fact that we bring God pleasure. Personally, thinking about myself, I tend to find this unlikely! What on earth about me could bring God pleasure? The Bible says that I do, and that I am his workmanship, but it really doesn't seem reasonable to me most days. I know myself too well, and all my little dark parts.

But then I got to thinking about my kids. You know, don't tell them, but they are just chock full of faults. They are imperfect in multitudinous ways, just as I am. In a sense, they got that from me! There are times when they drive me just straight up the wall. But I have to admit, even on their very worst days I still love them to pieces. Why? I guess because they are mine, and my husband's, and I am committed to them, come what may. But mostly because they are mine.

Tomorrow, I will study John 20 with a couple of friends. Reading this passage to get ready for the study, I came across the part that always always brings me to tears. It's when Mary of Magdala, her eyes full of tears and her heart full of deepest sorrow, is looking for the body of Jesus. She pours out her sadness to He whom she supposes to be the gardener, and then a very sweet thing happens. He says her name. And she instantly knows it is her Lord. Oh goodness, I can't even imagine the joy she felt, in extreme contrast to the sorrow of the moment before. Jesus must have put a wealth of love and all the joy of heaven in that word "Mary", and sometimes, when I read it, I can hear a little chuckle too, because He knew how it would affect her, and how radically her life would change. In fact, how radically everything had changed, for everybody, Jesus' death and resurrection altered history on so many levels that I can't even comprehend it; it certainly altered my history!

That one word moves me, every time I read it. It's just a name, and a common one at that, but I think I may finally have a handle on why I get so emotional about it. It's related to that phone recording--it sounds like love to me. Jesus must have called me by name, because at one point I heard Him and recognized His voice, and I follow Him. When I read about Him saying "Mary" in that chapter, I can hear Him say my name too, and I rejoice, just like that faithful woman long ago, because my Lord lives and loves me. So I go where He leads me, like a good little sheep.

And that's how I think I bring God pleasure, just by answering His call. I am His!

Love, Spud.

Could I Be Related to Typhoid Mary?

If there's anyone actually reading this thing, it will be silent a little bit longer. Due to an interesting little variety of illnesses, I am the only one of four staff people in my office this week, and for once I am busy! I love it! But it means I don't have a lot of time for other things, like making postings. So come back in about a week, and I'll see what I can do.

Love, Spud.

I Drive a Stealth Van

Seriously. It's invisible to mortal eyes. It's bright red and big as a barn, but when you look, it just isn't there.

That's the only explanation I can come up with for the state of this poor minivan which I drive. It has numerous dents, dings, divots, scrapes, and a few growing rust spots. There are a lot of little dimples from the hail storms back in 2002, and missing paint all over the place. It looks really disreputable, and at some point my much-tried husband probably won't let me park it in front of the house any more. It's that bad.

I park it every day in a parking garage at work, and that's where the vast majority of the damage has occurred. There's always a big dent in the rear lift-gate where someone has backed into it. I'll come out of my office at the end of the day to discover a new one. I used to get these fixed, at great personal expense, but I gave it up as a bad job, because every time I paid to get that dent removed, some other klutzy driver would come along and replace it. I never see this happen, of course, because I'm at work. I just see the results. There's another big bowl-shaped dent in the passenger side now, but I did that myself. When my parking garage was closed last summer I had to use another one down the street which has strange traffic patterns and some very tight turns. I misjudged the tightest turn on my second day parking there, and got a wall with the side, and now there is a huge dent there to commemorate the occasion forever. But most of the damage has been caused by others. I can only assume it's because the van is invisible.

For instance--I have been rear-ended twice at stoplights. Why? I'm bright red and big as a barn! You'd think that would help, but it doesn't. People just don't see me. I've also been backed into at stoplights this calendar year--twice--the latest episode being just yesterday. I was waiting in line to exit the gas station (gas was only $3.83!) and the woman in front of me suddenly started going backwards at a fairly good rate of speed. In other words, it was on purpose, not just an accidental roll. I did the only thing I could--I applied myself with vigor to my horn. She slammed on her brakes, but too late. WHACK! Into my front bumper. The woman got out of her car to check damage (maybe a small scratch to her car, a much larger one to mine of course) and screamed "I thought you could SEE me!" and got back into her car and drove away.

This was deeply puzzling. Of course I could see her coming, but there wasn't a single thing in the world I could do about it. I can only imagine that, per usual, she couldn't see ME. Or I appeared so small and insignificant that perhaps my presence wouldn't actually matter in any way. My barn on wheels has gone stealth again, apparently.

Next year, when my daughter gets her driver's license, the van will be hers. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it's magnificently pre-disastered, and since she has the shortest commute it makes sense that she'll drive the car with the lowest gas mileage. And since it's a big van just loaded with airbags, if anything hits her (or, let's be realistic, if she hits anything) the chances for personal bodily damage are low. So it makes sense. On the other hand, with that thing being invisible the way that it is, the chances are more than good that at some point she will indeed have a collision of some kind with someone who just didn't know she was there. Good luck kiddo, you're going to need it.

Love, Spud.

Fairwell Bathroom

We have a lovely house, with lots of old-fashioned wallpapers and mature trees. The selling point for me was the pantry, and the counter-top that was big enough to roll out pie crust on. The real draw-back is the kids' bathroom. It works just fine, but it is just plain ugly. It has dark mauve paint, a yellow and tan floor, deep peach (like bad makeup) sinks and tub that are full of pits and rust spots, yellow-gray tiles behind the tub, and a deep peach toilet with forty-some years of hard water stains in it. All in all, a very depressing sight. But it's a nice big bathroom, and a couple of years ago I invested in navy rugs and towels, and ocean-themed accessories and shower curtain, and it looked much better. The ugliness is still there, but when you look in there now you're distracted from the "what were they thinking" original colors by all the navy. Seriously--what were they thinking? I cannot imagine.

Yesterday, Phil, our cheerful remodeler, began demolition on the room. The noxious tiles came down, the sinks are gone, the tub goes out today. But before that happened, of course, I went in and removed all traces of rugs and towels and accessories. So now when you look in, you see the original room in all it's hideous glory, plus gaping holes in the walls and the inevitable construction dust. I found myself suffering a momentary fear that it would stay that way. But within the next few weeks it is supposed to be transformed into a white and gray masterpiece of bathroomness, and all my lovely blue things will move back in.

Lately I've been thinking that I resemble that bathroom. In the last few weeks it's become clear to me that there is a lot more phariseeism left inside me than I ever thought, too much rigidness, too much actual disdain for others (not everybody, mostly annoying drivers!) which is just judgmentalism. I'm puzzled by this. I've always tried very hard to give everybody the benefit of the doubt in every situation. Most people regard me as an optimist, especially when it comes to matters of faith. It's long been a goal of mine to extend the grace I have received to those who (probably unintentionally) offend or slight me. I'm a nice person, darn it! So where on earth is all this coming from? How could I not know it was all in there? How could I possibly be a nice person with all that deep down inside? Am I all just navy blue camouflage?

Lately I've felt that I have the makings of an iceberg--nice clean ice showing, with a massive dark blob underneath, hidden from view and potentially dangerous. It's dismaying to realize that my sin tendencies are thriving, despite all of my wishes to the contrary. This is such a classic Romans 6-8 scenario. Between what I've read and what I've seen in recent weeks, these things happen to be at the forefront of my mind--but I'll bet they exist all the time.

So how to think rationally about this? How to get back my spiritual sanity? How to remodel? Well, the bottom line is that I can't remodel. Just like I had to hire Phil to transform the bathroom, I have to "hire" God to transform me. I just can't do it myself. And much as I'd like to have that nice new bathroom today we have to endure the process--there are no good shortcuts. It'll be done when it's done, and to be done correctly it will have to take some time and inconvenience and dust. Much as I'd like to be a paragon of Christian womanhood, there are no shortcuts--I have to endure the process, and even then the results might not be what I expect. I may have seen the plans for the finished bathroom, but I haven't seen the plans for the finished me. And the honest truth is that I'll go to my deathbed with a good chunk of dark ice still there. It's not that God is not an excellent remodeler, it's that I get in His way all the time. My deeply ingrained habits and thought patterns persist. God works on them faithfully, and I help when I can figure out what He's working on now, but it's going to be a very long haul, and I understand that the job won't be done in this lifetime. That's painful to admit, but it's true.

This is the kind of issue that makes me long so for heaven. When I get there, the dark blob of underwater ice will be gone. I'll appear as the brand-new-shiny-clean person who will finally be a finished work, based on Someone Else's finished work. It's not even possible in this life to imagine how very wonderful that will be, because we aren't capable of realizing how very horrible we are now. Even at my best I fall so far short of what I will be when I am in the presence of my Lord and Savior at last and forever. Fireworks! Feasts! Giddy celebrations! Praise and thanksgivings! All these things come to mind when I try to grasp the reality that will surely come. And I'll take one good long look at where I came from, and wonder "What was I thinking?".

"Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus."

Thanks be to God.

Love, Spud.

How Do I Love Thee?

My husband and I have been doing a study of John's gospel for the last several months, and one thing that has come up repeatedly has been the Big Two commandments. Well, I'm here to say that I fail utterly at both of them! But it got me to thinking--*do* I love God? I have always assumed that I did, but how do I know? Considering it's one of the Big Two (I'll bet you think you know what number two is, but you might be wrong) it's worth thinking about. So here is Number One: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. A tall order, to say the least.

So how do we know that we love anybody? It's somewhat easier with other humans, although still a bit nebulous. The clearest example for me is my own little family. I do love my tribe. There are four humans and two cats, and nothing makes me happier then when we are all in the same place together. If one of them is out, my ears stayed tuned to cell phones ringing for me, and door hinges squeaking. (I was really perturbed when a well-meaning friend oiled the front door hinges without asking, because then I could no longer hear my family coming in!) On long trips we have long conversations, an activity that fills my tank. We do things with each other and for each other. I miss them like crazy when they're gone, worry about them when they're ill, spread the news far and wide when one of them does something laudable or just plain amusing. If it would do any good, I'd throw myself in front of a speeding car to save them, but fortunately that particular need has not arisen. I like to think that they actually need me. Like many females, my nurturing instinct is fairly high, and feeling needed also makes me feel loved. It's probably perverse in some way, and I'm sure a psychologist would be happy to tell me how, but it's true.

So those things make me believe that I love my family--they are pieces of evidence that lead to a conclusion. I love them, they love me. Goodness prevails. But can any of this translate? You know, with my family or my friends, no matter how far flung, I can always pick up a phone, tap out an email, even hop in the car and go behold them in person--have some two-way communication, some face-to-face time. This is harder with God. For the most part He is neither visible nor audible in the ways that we are accustomed to. This is why I struggle some days with this question. It's possible I'm just over-thinking again, but considering the fact that it's one of two commandments, maybe it's important! I should keep thinking!

Do I enjoy our time together? Yes, but I'm sometimes a very poor initiator. God does not have skin on, and as the saying goes, out of sight out of mind. Not an excuse, just a reason. But there have been some times of prayer, particularly in times of stress or sorrow, that have been both painful and sweet, bringing an unexpected joy to my soul. You'd think that would bring me to prayer more often, wouldn't you? But like dinner-time conversations, not every one is sweet and affirming, and so in my wretched human state I often neglect Him. So if I love, I love poorly.

Do I do things for God and with God? Sometimes! As a parent, there are times when I need to push my daughter to do things that she would rather not do either because of laziness or fear. I could just let these things go, but I really do try to be a good parent, and I know it's a healthy thing for her to overcome laziness and fears. She'll grow and thrive and become a more mature and happy person for the experience. I love her, so I make her do these things for her own good. God doesn't make me do things, but I sure know that He WANTS me to do things. In recent years I've become a little more willing to stretch myself and go beyond my own comfort zone (which is pitifully small) because I know that I'll grow and thrive and become more mature and happy. And because I know God wants me to. I still love poorly, but I'm trying to get better.

Do I worry about God, and miss Him when He's gone? Of course not! I do sometimes worry greatly about the state of Christianity, and how God is being represented in the world. And thank the Lord, I'll never have to miss Him. The most horrifying thing in the Bible is Ezekiel's vision of God removing His presence from Israel. I can't think of anything more desperately awful than God not being there. I am so deeply grateful I will never experience that. Maybe I'm not loving quite so poorly after all. But do I spread the word when He does something extraordinary? Well, sure! But only to those whom I know already know Him and will be interested. And do I sacrifice for Him? More than I used to, but not enough. Okay, back to loving poorly again. Golly, I think I'm down to about a D+ at this point.

Does God need me? No, He doesn't. Not a bit. Ouch. But He wants me. In John 17, there is a bit where Jesus is expressing the fact that now He gets to go home, a desire that resonated with me, and then later He also says that those who are His will get to go there too. Jesus wants us to go be with Him, in His home. We are wanted. We are in His tribe. The joy and relief that comes with that knowledge is inexpressible. Even though I have no idea what is there, heaven is where my heart wants to be, and sometimes I just cry with tears because of the longing to go. Where did this come from? How can I miss a place I have never been? The Bible says that this world is not our home, that God's children have a true home somewhere else, and I think I must really love Him after all if I have such a deep desire to go there and be with Him.

The last thing, and the one that tipped the balance for me: I love the Bible. The more I read it, the more I study it, the more excited about it I get. God does not have skin on, and He does not speak audibly to me, but He does speak, and I get both puzzled and thrilled by what He says. The more I read, the more I learn about God, and the more I want to know more. This is what calms my heart regarding the whole issue of loving God. Even better than an email from friends, I value the fact that I have an enormous book of communication from Him. If I love His words, then surely it must mean that I love Him too. If we love Him, we are to feed His sheep, and do His commands, and love each other as HE loves us. I try. Oh, I do try.

Maybe I pass the test after all. God deserves better than He gets from me, much better, and I am acutely aware of this. And the fact that this bothers me is a good sign! With all my heart, soul, mind, and strength? Alas, no. Paul was correct in that a married woman is concerned with how she may please her husband (and children, and cats) and so my heart is dreadfully divided. This is the tribe that God gave me, and I'm trying to take care of them and love them well. Would I give them up if I ever had a choice between God and my family? You know, I don't know. Quite possibly I would. That is the definition of death, after all. But thanks be to God, even that won't be permanent. I get to have my cake and eat it too in heaven, where both my tribes will be together. Whew. I think I love God after all. I suspected I did. Some day, we'll all be home.

Love to you too,

Spud.

Lack of Vision

I suffer from a lack of vision. It has nothing to do with my eyes, although they haven't always been that useful either, but more my ability to consider what could be. We live in a house, instead of an apartment or a trailer court, but it's not because of me. It didn't occur to me that we could afford a house, and I was resigned to apartment life, but my husband was not content with bug-infested places that had either too little heat or too much heat and landlords that had bad bookkeeping and a lack of concern. Why was I content? Who knows. Cowardice, I expect. But my husband took the figurative bull by the horns, and we moved into an itty-bitty house that we could actually afford.

I loved that first house. At first I dreaded going home to it because it was just ugly, but we took care of that problem and I was happy there. But we added to our family, and at some point our daughter put her foot down and announced that we just had to get another bathroom. Stu was okay with moving, because he was getting pretty claustrophobic in there. It didn't bother me at all, and I never really noticed because I was the one person who could actually stand all the way up in the basement, but apparently that house was a little short. So we started the process again, with me fretting that we couldn't afford a bigger house, and now here we are, where I never imagined we could be. But Stu imagined it, and it came to pass.

See, here's the thing. I hate taking risks. Although an optimist in many ways, when it comes to taking any kind of risk I become something beyond reluctant. I'm all too aware of how things can suddenly come unraveled at any time and I really fear dealing with the consequences when they do. This, not surprisingly, has big implications for my spiritual life as well. We're in a home church now because Stu said that it was high time, and despite my desire to stay put in my comfort zone, that too came to pass. And there are doubtless many ways in which God would really like me to change and progress, but with my lack of vision of where I could go, and my reluctance to go there anyway, I tend to stay put.

Thanks be to God, He sometimes grows me without my knowledge and consent. It's a good thing, too. Unlike me, God does have a vision for where He wants me to go and what He wants me to become. I just sit here and look at where I am and say "Ick". God gently sends people who will point me where I need to go. Some of them, of course, are gentler than others!

I've learned the value, in the last half-decade, of mentors. Some ladies have known they were mentoring me, some have not. Wouldn't they be surprised? There's a lot to be said for recognizing that someone is where you would like to be, and praying that God will help you get there. There's an elderly second cousin whom I admire more than I can say, and I would like even a portion of her wisdom and serenity. There's a woman who was consciously in a mentoring position with me, and although she might not see that I learned from her, I really did. She tells it like it is, and I'm learning to do that more, with less fear of the reactions I might get. Truth matters. There's another lovely lady I have met in the last couple of years who is warm and gracious to everyone, and full of good humor and honesty, and I pray that God will change me so that these things are reflected in me too, because she is the type of person who is just appealing to be around, and therefore likely to be able to influence others for God. It's more than just good manners, it's a way of looking at life and others. I've never had what you could call manners, but I'd rather have this.

So I'd really like to become a person who has genuine concern for other people, and remembers to pray for them on a more consistent basis, and ignores her own schedule more for the sake of others, and isn't afraid to be truthful. It wouldn't surprise me one bit to find out this is part of God's vision for me too, and if He wants it then it's more likely to happen. Guess we'll have to wait and see.

Love, Spud.

Everything Old is New Again

Hymns--boy, talk about old. Some of the ones we know are centuries old, literally, and growing up in the church of my youth I was resigned to the weekly plowing through of these songs. I liked listening to my mom sing. She had a light and airy voice, but it was in tune, and I enjoyed standing beside her at hymn time in church, and strove to sing like she did. My dad tells me that his mother, who died when he was twelve, so I never met her, used to sing hymns all day long as she worked doing laundry or baking or whatever. I would have liked to have heard that, and some day I will, but there was a time when I couldn't understand why anyone would voluntarily sing hymns. They were dry, ancient, obligatory things--good for studying music theory with, but that was about it.

They also made good piano-lesson fodder. I had two piano teachers, one in my elementary years and one during junior and senior high school, and they were both fine Christian ladies. That meant that (once I had acquired the necessary skills) hymnals were fair game for lesson books. So I learned to play a lot of hymns. Do you know what that entails? It means that you play them every day, over and over and over. And that can get pretty mind-numbing, because it's actually the kinesthetic memory in your fingers that is doing the learning, not your "thinking" center. So I had a lot of time to think. What I chose to do (being the rabid reader that I am) was to read the verses of the hymns as I practiced. You know, a lot of people can sing one verse of a lot of hymns, but after the endless repetitions of the years of my youth, I could sing a LOT of verses from memory of an awful lot of hymns. And Christmas carols. Oh my yes; I still know many many verses of the Christmas carols, and I'm a formidable person to have along if you're caroling because I can keep going indefinitely.

Rabbit trail number one--It shocked me the first time I attended a Christmas-season service at an Episcopalian church. I thought I knew a lot of verses to carols. But the Episcopalian hymnal has at least twice as many verses as anyone else ever knew existed for each carol. These people were inexhaustible soldiers of hymn-singing. It was amazing.

Rabbit trail number two--As you may have guessed, although I was intimately familiar with the hymnal, I can't say I got any enjoyment out of it. There was one exception. There is a hymn in the Methodist hymnal written by John T. Grape. I can't even tell you what it's called, but I got a really unreasonable amount of happiness out of knowing that there was a hymn written by a guy named Grape. It's a dreadful hymn to sing, and goes up into the stratosphere at one point where very few people go with any kind of grace. Our church had a soprano who sailed on up there with glee, but she shouldn't have. Screechy would be a nice way of putting it. I remember her at one point saying that singing was the gift that God had given her, and she was happy to exercise it in His service for as long as she could. I would think "Oh please no, don't bother, really", but I never said this out loud. This is the one solitary example of tact from my entire misbegotten youth, and I'm very proud of it.

Why am I telling you this? Because of something I discovered. Once I got into a church that really taught the Bible, chapter by chapter every week of the year, something odd happened. After a few months of this extensive Bible-learning, I went back to my home town and visited my old church with my parents. Much to my astonishment, those moldy, dreary old hymns were suddenly packed full of meaning. I nearly wept (and sometimes I do) singing those songs written by people from years past who had obviously had a spiritual life rich with knowledge, and experience of God and His grace. What a difference! There wasn't anything wrong with the hymns, there had been something wrong with me! Once I really knew the God of which they had written, hymns became beloved things. I have a couple of wonderful CDs full of hymns that I listen to on purpose in the car as I drive to work. A good way to alleviate the miseries of a long commute, let me tell you.

One last rabbit trail--Since I was a violin major in college, I always played in the orchestra that accompanied the singing of Handel's The Messiah. It didn't matter that I was also in one of the choirs and had rehearsed my brains out singing it; since violin was my major area of study that's where I had to be--in the orchestra pit. It had long been a heart's desire of mine to sing the Hallelujah Chorus. Seriously, how full of meaning can you get? That's the epitome of Christian choral music. After I had graduated, a friend of mine in a more traditional church than mine invited me to come sing the Hallelujah Chorus with his church choir. Oh, that was so exciting. Finally, at last, I was going to get to express my joy vocally--the end of many years of yearning. So the great and sunny morning finally arrived, and I stood there in Eddie's church choir and the music swelled up and I opened my mouth--and burst into tears. I was so overwhelmed by the experience that I never managed to get out a single note.

But Hallelujah anyway.

Love, Spud.

Possible Worlds

I see at the Holy Huddle that you're having your discussion on possible worlds tomorrow, and I realize that time is running out for me to state my opinion! Heaven forbid that I should not state my opinion! Well, heaven may actually be fairly neutral on the subject, to be honest. Some time ago I promised you a paper called God's Sovereignty and Doctor Who's Big Ball of Time. I still intend to write that some day, when my weekends clear up enough that I can, but for now I'll give you the bare bones of the beginning so you can take it with you tomorrow night and say "Here's the view of some crazy woman down in Ohio". Unfortunately I haven't spent a great deal of time thinking about it lately, so this may or may not be coherent in any way. We'll see!

Traditional 5-point Calvinism and current Reformed theology seem to hinge on one major point regarding the election of Christians--What did God know, and when did He know it? Doctor Who, strangely enough (I don't generally recommend him for theological input, but every once in a while he gets something right), made a statement that I think summed it up nicely. It was in an episode from last year, possibly Blink (which was the Best. Episode. Ever.) and he was talking about time. Now, this is not an exact quote, but it's pretty close:

"People always think that time moves in a straight line, because that's how they see it, but in reality it's a great big ball of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey STUFF".

Time is a fairly fluid concept when you're talking about God, because there's evidence that He functions outside of time as we know it. As the good doctor rightly points out, we do see time in a linear fashion, because that's how we live it. We have no choice in the matter--time proceeds on from beginning to end in our lives, and what's past is past and what's future is anybody's guess. Much as we might like to, we can't see the future, only make educated guesses about it, and that's a good thing. But God is not limited in this way. He certainly sees the future as well as the past, and arranges the present to meet His purposes. A good study of fulfilled prophecy will demonstrate this pretty well. So if time really is a big ball to God, and that's as good a way of looking at it as anything since we don't have words for what we can't fathom, then the whole issue of election becomes a non-issue.

The Bible states that God does choose us--based on His foreknowledge. Don't neglect that last part--it's absolutely crucial. God sees all of time at once, and knows, because He can see that future with clarity, what we will have decided in regards to Him. Open theism is the theory, basically, that we change the future based on our decisions, and God then changes what He knows about the future accordingly. What rot. Is God in charge, or not? Certainly I do believe that we have free will to choose God or not (Ha! Now you know! Not dealing with a Calvinist!) but that He knew from eternity past what we will have decided--not because He determines that decision for us (although I do agree that there are some people He hunts down with extreme fervor) but because He can see all of time at once, and knows what decisions we will have made.

This is really hard to wrap our linear little brains around, because it breaks all the rules as we know them. But the bottom line is--is God sovereign, or not? Do we change the future, to which then HE must adapt, or does He know without error what the future IS? If He can see all of time at once without error (and if He can't then we are in big trouble as regards prophecies still to be fulfilled) then we can trust Him with our futures. If He can't, then the implications are staggeringly awful. Only a God who is truly sovereign can give us free will choices, because His hand is firmly on the helm regardless of how stupidly we mess things up, and His will is going to be done.

When I write this up in its complete form, it will have all sorts of Biblical backing, including a verse from Esther and a nice quote from Spurgeon, but that will have to do for now. Douglas Adams, of Hitchhiker's Guide fame, another unlikely and accidental theologian, actually had a pretty good handle on this, with his convoluted future tenses, and I may drag him into it too! Have fun with your discussion, and give me the low-down when it's over. Should be interesting!

Love, Spud.

That Crazy Baptism

All right, Timotheus, here it is: the story of my crazy baptism.

While I was attending that Charismatic church, I became convinced (and rightly so) that I needed to become baptized. Yes, I had gone through a christening as an infant (I refuse to call that a baptism, but we can get into credo- vs. paedo-baptism some other day...) but I had absorbed enough basic doctrine to understand that I needed to do this as an adult. So I hopped onto the schedule one January evening and drove down to Ebenezer Apostolic Church with the others. We didn't have our own facility, but someone found out that they had an indoor baptismal pool, and they agreed to let us use it. So thus I was baptized in an African-American church on the questionable side of town.

I seriously don't remember how many other people were baptized the same evening, or even a great deal about it. This was even farther back in the mists of time than the Spudwoman sweatshirt, so things are a little hazy. But two things I remember very clearly.

The first thing is--it was cold. Not just cold, but C-O-L-D COLD. It was January, and I was in a bathing suit, going into water in an ostensibly-but-not-very heated church. You never saw anybody come up out of the water as fast as I did. Hint: If you have any choice in the matter, do not voluntarily get baptized by immersion in January. It's cold. Trust me.

The other thing is--what happened immediately afterwards. You see, I expected that I would be allowed to go get dressed and get warmed up, but that didn't occur right away. The others gathered around and laid their hands on me and prayed over me. Well, that was kind of pleasant, and nice of them, and generally I wouldn't have had a problem with it, but I was COLD! I wanted nothing in the world so much as to get warmer. But one must be polite, so I stayed there while they prayed. And prayed. And prayed. And prayed some more. And gradually, and to my horror, it dawned on me that they were waiting for something. They were waiting for me to speak in tongues, to prove that the baptism "took" and I was indeed a child of God. This I had not anticipated.

So after a suitable period of waiting, and with the realization that no strange languages were coming to the surface, nor were they going to, I did a dreadful thing. I faked it. And they all cheered, and let me go.

I can't even express what this experience did to me spiritually. For months I was sure that I was utterly under condemnation, and that God was disgusted with me. Surely that was the equivalent of blaspheming against the Holy Spirit, and there was no hope of heaven in my future. This faded after a while, as no lightening bolts came down to claim me and God did not seem to have rejected me the way I felt I deserved. What should have been a joyous occasion in my life turned into emotional disaster.

In the years since, I have discovered that I'm not the only one to have done this. A friend (and my dentist!) who went to a Christian college did the exact same thing, and for similar reasons, and there have been others. And this brings me to my point--the dangers of sloppy theology. Make sure you're looking at the whole of the Bible, not just isolated verses. When Paul says "All do not speak in tongues, do they?", he means it! The obvious answer is "no"! God does indeed dispense spiritual gifts to all Christians, but as He sees fit, not as *we* have decided He should, and not everyone gets the same ones. This is fairly plain from scripture, but only if you read the whole thing. Every verse must be studied in its context. No exceptions.

I'm still glad that I underwent baptism as an adult, and I joyously participate in the baptisms of others. I yearn for the day that my own daughter undergoes this wonderful ritual, and I'll be there, God willing. Wild horses could not keep me away. But there won't be anybody there insisting that she perform by exercising a gift that God has not given her--I'll make sure of that. What else are mothers for?

Love, Spud.

Why I Left

In reading blogs of other Christians over the last few months, one topic which I have seen covered with astonishing regularity is the question "Is it okay to leave my church?". The answer given is always "no". I do understand the rationale--I understand it completely, and even teach it--that you need to stay there an enact change from within. If you see (hear?) that the powers that be are playing fast and loose with essential doctrines, then by golly YES you need to say something and say it again. I agree! Do I ever think there's a time to admit that there will be no change and your church is going in a strange direction and nothing you say or do will prevent it and it's time to get out? Yup. This is where I differ from everything else I have read.

I myself have left a couple of churches. One leaving was for geographical reasons, and of course nobody could fault me for that. It was when I went away to college. I left the United Brethren/United Methodist church of my childhood, never to return except as a visitor. In fact, I spent my freshman year at college not attending any church at all. It was my own wimpy little version of teenaged rebellion. But in the summer between my freshman and sophomore years something interesting happened to me--I encountered God one Sunday in a friend's church (the friend had skipped out that morning, and maybe that's why I finally had time to pay attention to Someone Else) and discovered within myself a deep yearning to be part of a Body, to be with God's people. So when I went back to college that fall, I attended the nearest church on campus, and was happy with that for a while.

Then my Very Best Friend Ever invited me to go to her church with her, and I went once and was hooked. It was a small Charismatic church, with small group meetings, and for the first time I was more than just an audience member. I was a participant! And boy did I ever participate. These people were wonderful, and down to earth, and near my age, and I had a blast. The large meetings involved lots of singing and dancing and people speaking out whatever they felt was needed, and I enjoyed myself hugely. I stayed there for maybe three years, and then WHAM! I got hit between the eyes with something that was clearly something else.

A good friend of my Best Friend invited me to his church. The first event I attended was a retreat weekend, and it was a fun, refreshing time with lots of Bible studies and times of solitude and times of hanging out. I really liked it, but the weekend was marred by twenty dollars disappearing out of my purse. I also spent some time arguing Charismatic theology (such as it was) with one of the older females, and it was pretty clear she had no idea what to do with me or why I had shown up to torture her in this way. Poor Judy. I still feel bad about that.

But I went again about a week later, to the large group meeting on Sunday night. There was very little singing, and no dancing at all, and absolutely no words of prophecy. But what there was, was an in-depth Bible teaching. I'd never heard anything like it before. Certainly the Methodists were never like this. I recognized that a very deep need which I'd never before realized existed was being met. Who knew all that was in the Bible? Who knew that regular people could read it and figure it out? Who knew that it could actually direct my life and make a difference in how I thought and acted? Who knew it was alive? I knew I couldn't live without it.

Well, this church did, and despite the fact that more money went missing from my purse, I knew I was on to something. To this day I remain convinced that the petty robberies were Satan's way of trying to keep away from the Bible, but the pull of Truth was too strong for him. He lost. By Christmas of that year I was attending a small home church meeting too, and eventually dragged my Best Friend there to join me, and abandoned the Charismatics.

So that's why I left, and I'm still at that church. It would take quite a shoehorn to get me out of there now. But do I feel I was justified in leaving my old church? Certainly I do. For one thing, I was a spiritual baby. I hadn't the first clue in the world what was really necessary for a good solid Christian walk, and it would never have occurred to me that I wasn't getting it. I had no idea what was missing, and no chance therefore of ever correcting it. It was years before I had that kind of foundation, and of course by then I was long gone. It's probably been a decade since I've seen the guy who got me to my church, but I haven't forgotten. He was a gift from God, and led me to where I needed to be.

If my church started to go in weird directions would I say anything? You betcha. Now I'm old enough that I would know what to do. Fortunately this hasn't been needed. Our elders are very perceptive, and very open to the leading of the Holy Spirit, and an intelligent bunch who notice for themselves when something just isn't right. We have an enormous meeting once a year to which the entire church is invited where we hear what's going well, what's going poorly, and what we should probably do about it. The leaders are unusually open to input, and averse to fads. Bless them. Long may they wave.

Next up--do I talk about my crazy baptism, or hymns? Your call.

Love, Spud.

Why I love my veggies

I pack my lunch, nearly every day. It's cheaper, and I can more or less control my calorie intake that way provided I have any self-discipline at all, which sometimes I don't.

One of the things I like to pack are these little vegetable-for-one dishes that you can buy in the frozen-foods section. They're probably over-priced, but they make me feel all virtuous and they're actually very yummy.

There's a little film on the top that you have to peel back slightly, to vent the package while it microwaves, and on the film in small black letters you see "Microwave 2 to2 1/2 min or until hot." And then right below this, it advises you "Caution: Hot!".

I love it. It makes me chortle every time.

Love, Spud.

Why Spudwoman?

No, I'm not from Idaho, but thanks for asking. I'm sure it's a lovely place from which to be. I don't think I've ever been there, but it's hard to say. Filled with Dramamine because of my tendency toward car-sickness, I got tucked into the back seat and then slept through several states in the union during my childhood and youth. So you never know.

And it's not because I love potatoes, which I do. Baked, mashed, roasted, boiled, fried--they're all good. Which is why, during several years of my life, I have somewhat resembled the tuber of which we speak. Yum. A good baked potato is one my favorite dinners.

Spudwoman is a relic of my pre-marital days, back in the mists of time. I was living in an apartment with a handful of other unmarried Christian women and we heard a Bible teaching which featured the Greek word "spoudazo". Spoudazo, in ancient Greek, is roughly translated "zeal". There are undertones of eagerness, diligence, and a little fear. I loved that word. Loved it from the first hearing. I embraced that word as how I saw the Christian life. My housemates thought I exemplified the word, and so Spudwoman was born. We pronounced it spood-woman, but none of us had ever seen it written, only heard it said, and assumed it was spelled spudatzo. Somehow I think we confused Greek and Italian. We were young.

For Christmas, my lovely housemates decided that I needed a Spudwoman sweatshirt. Well, naturally, you can't buy those, so they set about to make one. I can't remember any more exactly what happened (remember, this was in the mists of time!) but it never quite materialized. It's possible they ran out of time, or ran out of iron-on letters, or just realized they couldn't fit the whole thing across the front (I wore a size small back then--potato sizes came later), but for Christmas I received the plain sweatshirt and a pile of iron-on letters. I never got around to ironing them on either, but it was the thought that counted.

Spoudazo--it's still the watchword of my life. Although there have been years when the light dimmed a little due to life situations and the usual human sins, it has never gone out entirely, and these days I find myself more full of eagerness and zeal than ever. Spudwoman lives. I've had occasion this last year to do some really in-depth Bible studies, and the more I study, the more real and exciting the Word gets. This is a good thing--I pray my spudliness only increases.

This blog is primarily a way for me to keep in touch with some dear relatives waaaaaaay out of town, but I am happy for other friends and relatives to join in the fun and conversation. Comments are wonderful things. Let the wild rumpus start!

Love, Spud.