This is really good. I'd felt this, but couldn't put it into words.
http://rachelheldevans.com/blessed-are-the-entitled
Love, Spud.
Monday, December 12, 2011
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Fussy Babies
In honor of Joshua Paul Micron Keebler
My dad was a short, round, jolly man who dearly loved to sing. We always claimed that he couldn't carry a tune, but that wasn't entirely accurate. He could carry his OWN tune, but he couldn't carry anybody else's. If anyone else was singing and he joined in (which of course he would), he would invariably sing a perfect fifth off from the rest. It gave family sing-alongs a kind of Gregorian flavor, but we were used to that.
Dad loved to sing--and his favorite audience was babies. Anybody's babies. Like me, he never met a baby he didn't fall instantly in love with, and neither of us could ever resist a flirtation with a small child, whether we knew them or not. But the song we all remember the best was the one he would always sing to babies who were offended! outraged! furious! and otherwise howling their heads off. And since one of my babies was earth-shakingly colicky, we heard it a lot. It went like this:
Aaaaand a bye oh bye and an oh bye oh and a bye oh bye oh bye,
aaaaand an oh bye oh and a bye oh bye and an oh bye oh bye oh!
Over and over and over. Five notes. If he'd managed to get his hands on a crying baby, he'd rock and pat and sing this at the top of his lungs. Without fail, every baby he did this too succumbed to sleep. I can't explain it. Was there some primitive part of their brains that actually found this soothing, or were they merely terrified into quietude lest he do something worse? We'll never know, but it worked. Before long, the baby would be in that snuffly sleep characteristic of the recently screaming.
Joshua, you'll never know what you've missed.
Aaaaand a bye oh bye and an oh bye oh and a bye oh bye oh bye,
aaaaand an oh bye oh and a bye oh bye and an oh bye oh bye oh!
Love, Spud
My dad was a short, round, jolly man who dearly loved to sing. We always claimed that he couldn't carry a tune, but that wasn't entirely accurate. He could carry his OWN tune, but he couldn't carry anybody else's. If anyone else was singing and he joined in (which of course he would), he would invariably sing a perfect fifth off from the rest. It gave family sing-alongs a kind of Gregorian flavor, but we were used to that.
Dad loved to sing--and his favorite audience was babies. Anybody's babies. Like me, he never met a baby he didn't fall instantly in love with, and neither of us could ever resist a flirtation with a small child, whether we knew them or not. But the song we all remember the best was the one he would always sing to babies who were offended! outraged! furious! and otherwise howling their heads off. And since one of my babies was earth-shakingly colicky, we heard it a lot. It went like this:
Aaaaand a bye oh bye and an oh bye oh and a bye oh bye oh bye,
aaaaand an oh bye oh and a bye oh bye and an oh bye oh bye oh!
Over and over and over. Five notes. If he'd managed to get his hands on a crying baby, he'd rock and pat and sing this at the top of his lungs. Without fail, every baby he did this too succumbed to sleep. I can't explain it. Was there some primitive part of their brains that actually found this soothing, or were they merely terrified into quietude lest he do something worse? We'll never know, but it worked. Before long, the baby would be in that snuffly sleep characteristic of the recently screaming.
Joshua, you'll never know what you've missed.
Aaaaand a bye oh bye and an oh bye oh and a bye oh bye oh bye,
aaaaand an oh bye oh and a bye oh bye and an oh bye oh bye oh!
Love, Spud
Friday, February 4, 2011
Requiem for a Stealth Van
(For the history, see 6/15/2010, and 6/27/2008)
It's true--the red behemoth is no more. She gets traded in Monday for something much less colorful and exciting and (we sincerely hope) unreliable. Poor Emily! She has been in tears over this. She loved that decrepit old thing with an odd passion, and as far as we can tell it was reciprocated.
We got it one summer at an auction, and I was thrilled that it was scarlet and gray like any proper Buckeye van. The love affair lasted only about a year, and then the long string of lemonny problems began, most of them severe, mysterious, and unsolvable. But we kept faith, and kept it running until a week ago, when it just had one expensive failure too many, stranding my daughter--although in a good neighborhood, which I call a considerate death.
But between those two dates was a lovely thick sandwich of adventure. Maxie took us to the beach, the cabin, grandparents' houses, and lower upstate New York. She took a full cargo to school for several years, an even fuller cargo of middle school girls to cell group events every other Friday for three years, and then an equally full cargo of high schoolers to Tuesday night Bible study. I used to refer to them as my 800 pounds of hair dye and hormones.
Besides her really amazing collection of dents and dings, she was missing the right passenger cup holder--a victim of a very small girl dragging her very large backpack over it for a year. So we filled up a square tissue box with popcorn, and shoved cups down into it. All the popcorn got loose one night, and I'm not sure we ever did find it all. But it should have gone well with the full gallon of milk which spilled into the back one day. That was in high summer, and it wasn't very long before the Stealth Van was a smelly Stealth Van. It got stuck in snow twice one weekend on a middle school retreat in the hills, and all the crazy little ladies got out and pushed with everything they had--and she broke free. That was also about the time the hauntings began. The inside lights would randomly flash on and off at night, especially if it had been raining. Unfortunately she pulled that trick one Friday night when I was driving all those tweenaged girls back from a haunted house, and scared the bejeepers out of them. What a good time.
Once I got a new car and turned the van over to Emily, she promptly decorated it with magnets and decals and bumper stickers. She's now just as energetically decorating a hand-me-down Toyota Camry--stodgy, dull, and reliable. Em will make her mark on it, and it will be uniquely and obviously hers, and soon not nearly as dull. But oh, it will never be Madame Maxime, Stealth Van.
Rest in peace, baby.
Love, Spud.
It's true--the red behemoth is no more. She gets traded in Monday for something much less colorful and exciting and (we sincerely hope) unreliable. Poor Emily! She has been in tears over this. She loved that decrepit old thing with an odd passion, and as far as we can tell it was reciprocated.
We got it one summer at an auction, and I was thrilled that it was scarlet and gray like any proper Buckeye van. The love affair lasted only about a year, and then the long string of lemonny problems began, most of them severe, mysterious, and unsolvable. But we kept faith, and kept it running until a week ago, when it just had one expensive failure too many, stranding my daughter--although in a good neighborhood, which I call a considerate death.
But between those two dates was a lovely thick sandwich of adventure. Maxie took us to the beach, the cabin, grandparents' houses, and lower upstate New York. She took a full cargo to school for several years, an even fuller cargo of middle school girls to cell group events every other Friday for three years, and then an equally full cargo of high schoolers to Tuesday night Bible study. I used to refer to them as my 800 pounds of hair dye and hormones.
Besides her really amazing collection of dents and dings, she was missing the right passenger cup holder--a victim of a very small girl dragging her very large backpack over it for a year. So we filled up a square tissue box with popcorn, and shoved cups down into it. All the popcorn got loose one night, and I'm not sure we ever did find it all. But it should have gone well with the full gallon of milk which spilled into the back one day. That was in high summer, and it wasn't very long before the Stealth Van was a smelly Stealth Van. It got stuck in snow twice one weekend on a middle school retreat in the hills, and all the crazy little ladies got out and pushed with everything they had--and she broke free. That was also about the time the hauntings began. The inside lights would randomly flash on and off at night, especially if it had been raining. Unfortunately she pulled that trick one Friday night when I was driving all those tweenaged girls back from a haunted house, and scared the bejeepers out of them. What a good time.
Once I got a new car and turned the van over to Emily, she promptly decorated it with magnets and decals and bumper stickers. She's now just as energetically decorating a hand-me-down Toyota Camry--stodgy, dull, and reliable. Em will make her mark on it, and it will be uniquely and obviously hers, and soon not nearly as dull. But oh, it will never be Madame Maxime, Stealth Van.
Rest in peace, baby.
Love, Spud.
Sunday, January 23, 2011
A response to Tim
Is salvation easy? For a long time, my dear friend Yoko insisted that it was TOO easy, and that was why she could not accept it. It made no sense to her whatever. Surely so great a something required a much greater action than the simple humbling yourself before God and asking for it. But oh how hard it is to humble yourself and admit you need it. She found out, after a prolonged and noisy fight with God, that it was indeed that simple. And that hard. And so incredibly worth it! We won't any of us know exactly how worth it salvation really is until we are in the consummated kingdom, but we get some pretty good tastes of it here.
Following Jesus can also be difficult, but it isn't nearly as hard as I once thought it would be. As a new Christian I tried dutifully to read the Bible, only to find that I was horrified by what I found there. Turn the other cheek? Go two miles for each one asked? Love people as He loves them? It was too much! I couldn't possibly do any of those things, and some of what was asked just didn't seem reasonable at all. This is what Gary Delashmutt calls the backwards wisdom of God. God says all sorts of things and asks of us all sorts of things that just seem foolishly backwards to those of us who grew up in the "real" world, having our minds set like concrete by its standards. But a funny thing happens to those who walk with God for very long--they find their perspectives changing. I certainly did. I won't claim that I see things through God's eyes on a constant basis, but I do it more than I used to, and I hope that I continue to understand the world more and more like He does.
One problem is that the world is full of counterfeits. I understand that Tim Keller has written a book about this recently, and I'll have to get my hands on it some day, but Philip Yancey wrote one years ago called "Rumors of Another World" that expressed it very well. Yancey focused on a handful of big things in life that originally showed the hand of God clearly, but have become subtly and thoroughly corrupted by the world. God's design is still there, but it's hard to pick out, like you picked up the wrong pair of glasses and everything is blurry. But wear those glasses long enough and you begin to adjust so that things look right to you.
The thing I find hardest in the Christian life is spending time with people outside my own household. When I am in a group situation, the biggest thing on my mind is when I can go home again, which is possibly a minor form of agoraphobia, but is much more likely just sin. I want to go and surround myself with books and papers and my own loved ones. I just want to read and research and write and periodically teach, and while these things are undoubtedly useful, they probably aren't enough. They have nothing to do with loving others, and everything to do with what interests me me ME. I do go to gatherings, and meet with other believers, because I know I should, and I have to admit that I do frequently enjoy people--at least for a while. Mea culpa.
The older I get, the lighter I find the yoke. Some days I find it heavier, when I realize how little of it I am bothering to bear and suddenly take the full weight upon myself. That can be fatal, and is thoroughly unnecessary, but I do it anyway. But things that I once considered impossible are now comparatively natural and easy a lot of the time. Brother Lawrence has helped, with the little book "The Practice of the Presence of God". He had such a simple way of looking at things. Just fix your eyes on God and do everything you do out of love for Him, and all the worries melt away. I wish I could say it's that easy for me, but there have been days when I have been able to function this way, and then the yoke is light as air.
A lot of it boils down to trust. When the yoke starts to chafe and feel unbearable and circumstances threaten to choke me, I fall back on the trinity prayer. I realize I'm dragging in yet a fourth author, but I have to do it. I encountered the trinity prayer in a fiction book by Elizabeth Goudge. It consists of three sentences of three words each: "Into Your hands, Lord have mercy, You I adore". While I have little use for formulaic prayers as a general rule, I have yet to find the circumstance that this prayer does not apply to, and when I pray it from the heart, that yoke gets so light it almost floats away.
The road is narrow, and I know I need good company to walk along with me. And the more I make sure that I have asked God to be the one closest to my side the more He polishes those glasses for me so I can see the way.
Love, Spud.
Following Jesus can also be difficult, but it isn't nearly as hard as I once thought it would be. As a new Christian I tried dutifully to read the Bible, only to find that I was horrified by what I found there. Turn the other cheek? Go two miles for each one asked? Love people as He loves them? It was too much! I couldn't possibly do any of those things, and some of what was asked just didn't seem reasonable at all. This is what Gary Delashmutt calls the backwards wisdom of God. God says all sorts of things and asks of us all sorts of things that just seem foolishly backwards to those of us who grew up in the "real" world, having our minds set like concrete by its standards. But a funny thing happens to those who walk with God for very long--they find their perspectives changing. I certainly did. I won't claim that I see things through God's eyes on a constant basis, but I do it more than I used to, and I hope that I continue to understand the world more and more like He does.
One problem is that the world is full of counterfeits. I understand that Tim Keller has written a book about this recently, and I'll have to get my hands on it some day, but Philip Yancey wrote one years ago called "Rumors of Another World" that expressed it very well. Yancey focused on a handful of big things in life that originally showed the hand of God clearly, but have become subtly and thoroughly corrupted by the world. God's design is still there, but it's hard to pick out, like you picked up the wrong pair of glasses and everything is blurry. But wear those glasses long enough and you begin to adjust so that things look right to you.
The thing I find hardest in the Christian life is spending time with people outside my own household. When I am in a group situation, the biggest thing on my mind is when I can go home again, which is possibly a minor form of agoraphobia, but is much more likely just sin. I want to go and surround myself with books and papers and my own loved ones. I just want to read and research and write and periodically teach, and while these things are undoubtedly useful, they probably aren't enough. They have nothing to do with loving others, and everything to do with what interests me me ME. I do go to gatherings, and meet with other believers, because I know I should, and I have to admit that I do frequently enjoy people--at least for a while. Mea culpa.
The older I get, the lighter I find the yoke. Some days I find it heavier, when I realize how little of it I am bothering to bear and suddenly take the full weight upon myself. That can be fatal, and is thoroughly unnecessary, but I do it anyway. But things that I once considered impossible are now comparatively natural and easy a lot of the time. Brother Lawrence has helped, with the little book "The Practice of the Presence of God". He had such a simple way of looking at things. Just fix your eyes on God and do everything you do out of love for Him, and all the worries melt away. I wish I could say it's that easy for me, but there have been days when I have been able to function this way, and then the yoke is light as air.
A lot of it boils down to trust. When the yoke starts to chafe and feel unbearable and circumstances threaten to choke me, I fall back on the trinity prayer. I realize I'm dragging in yet a fourth author, but I have to do it. I encountered the trinity prayer in a fiction book by Elizabeth Goudge. It consists of three sentences of three words each: "Into Your hands, Lord have mercy, You I adore". While I have little use for formulaic prayers as a general rule, I have yet to find the circumstance that this prayer does not apply to, and when I pray it from the heart, that yoke gets so light it almost floats away.
The road is narrow, and I know I need good company to walk along with me. And the more I make sure that I have asked God to be the one closest to my side the more He polishes those glasses for me so I can see the way.
Love, Spud.
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