Ode to my daughter

Remember her? You can read all about my child in the post from August of 2009. She's no longer that teenage girl-child, but a professional woman in a house a few miles away. In some ways life has changed, but in other ways it is just the same. She is still entrancing, and one of the most fun people I know.

But where she always had to have red shoes growing up, now they are gold. And she used to come to visit me at the library where I worked, but in recent years I paid a visit to the library where she worked instead. I've now retired, and she is starting out with a real live master's degree to make her undoubtedly unique mark on the world. 

I once heard an illustration of a duck in the water--it looks serene and calm gliding through the water, but underneath it's paddling like mad. That has always been true of me and I have a suspicion that it's true of her too. Unfortunately, that's the way life often is. May she experience extended periods of real calm, as unlikely as it is. 

I have been honored beyond measure that she often reaches out to me for conversation, consolation, confession, recipes, and shared delights. She is a woman of faith, and really tries to live a life according to it. She is an artist, a writer, a rescuer of cats, and an adventurous woman with so many friends. Rosie, I am prouder of you than you will ever know. Long way you wave.

Love, Spud

Beginnings

In other words, how I came to be. The truth is, I was a result of a failure of communication between my parents. Without going into uncomfortable detail, my mother took an action that made my father think that Mom was already expecting, so he ceased the use of preventive measures. My mother observed the lack of preventive measures and assumed that Dad had decided it was time for another baby. But did they discuss this with each other? No, they did not! Therefore, here I am. A happy accident, so to speak. 

Dad told me years later that he regarded me as someone whom God decided just needed to be. I've no objection to this, and try to avoid letting it give me the Big Head. 

On the night I was born, Mom woke Dad and informed him that it was time to go fetch the car out of the garage and bring it around to the front for the trip to the hospital. By the time he got himself clothed and the car fetched, it was too late. So he ran to wake up the lady next door who had already had five of her own, thinking that she'd know what to do. Well, that was a mixed success. This was in the days of Twilight Sleep birthing, and women didn't have to experience the nitty gritty of actually being aware of what was happening to them as they gave birth. Chris did successfully deliver me, but was so repulsed by the experience that she never had another one.

I was caught in a dish towel (I was not a large baby) and placed in a laundry basket to await the ambulance which was on its way. Dad always claimed that the ambulance staff initially picked up the wrong laundry basket, but I suspect that particular detail is apocryphal. Mom and I were hauled off the to the hospital, where I was deemed unsanitary, since I'd been born at home, and thus not allowed to stay in the nursery with the other babies. So Mom had to keep me with her, which I'm sure did not make her happy, but she was just accidentally ahead of her time.

An interesting side effect of emergency home birth is that nobody knows, really, what time I appeared. They were all busy, and nobody looked at a clock. 

My younger brother and I got to musing a few years ago about the timing of my conception, but as regards the calendar. It would have been just about the time of the OSU/Michigan game, which is still a landmark occasion in our family every year. My brother posited that I was a celebration baby. Thanks to the modern miracle of the interwebs, I was able to find out the score for the year before I was born. Alas, I appear to have been a consolation prize.

Love, Spud

Temporary

Job 14:1-2. I’ve been thinking lately about how everything is temporary. I drive by a spot where a house used to be, and now all that’s left is the sidewalk going to where the front door was, and the driveway stopping where the garage was. Otherwise the entire lot is covered with grass. Neighbors and OSU chop down lovely big old trees and I mourn every time. I love a good tree, and they’re supposed to last for a very long time, but in reality they are only temporary.

People, shockingly, are temporary too. My parents, three of my pregnancies, an old boyfriend, my senior prom date, Mark, Chuck--all gone, and many more to follow. If I die first, then I can pretend that Stu will go on forever, and it’s unbearable to think that he might have the nerve to die before I do. Thinking about this, I felt like I was stuck in Ecclesiastes. It was depressing. Something deep inside me feels like this is just wrong.

Many times I am able to get through bad situations with a semblance of sanity because I put them in the perspective of time. You can do, or put up with, just about anything if you know it’s temporary. So temporary can be a good thing too.

Thinking about all the things that are temporary naturally led me to thoughts of things that are permanent. Funny, there isn’t nearly as much on that list. There are two passages that come to mind--I Peter 1:23-25 and 2 Corinthians 4:17-18.

Everything we see is temporary. Everything. Even Planet Earth. Things we can’t see are forever. If the eternal things are evil, that’s a situation totally devoid of hope, and a perfectly valid reason for panic and despair. But if the eternal things, like God, are good, that’s wonderful. Actually, wonderful is much too mild a word, isn’t it? To be honest, I can’t think of a word in English that stands up to the task of describing permanent total goodness.

Did you ever look up the word “forever” in a big concordance? It takes up about four columns, and a lot of that is from Psalms and Revelation. Some of the Forever verses are about evil beings being tormented forever. Many more of them are about Good--Jesus having glory and dominion forever, God living forever, the two of them reigning forever. Permanent Good. And us, and those fellow believers that we have lost, being found by God, and never again having to say of a bad situation, “I can endure this, it’s only temporary”.

Love, Spud

Happy Easter!

Disciples: "Jesus?!? We thought you were dead!

Jesus: "April Fools!"

There are only so many places I can tell that joke, but I love it anyway.

To be honest, I'm largely posting today so that Blogspot doesn't decide I've gone and died or something, and take my blog away. I know that it's been a long time. But I will retire in roughly a year, and I really hope to get back to writing on a more (wouldn't take much!) regular basis.

My goodness life has changed. Give me a year, and I'll tell you all about it.

A Sigh of Relief

There are days when I have doubts. I just do. I read widely, and sometimes I just get influenced by the opinions of those who don't believe in inerrancy or verbal plenary inspiration or the historicity of most of the Old Testament. Lately I've been reading a scholarly tome that insists that there is no evidence whatsoever for enslavement in Egypt or the exodus or even the twelve tribes of Israel, much less the glories of Solomon's reign. The authors did say at the outset of the book that if you read it, your faith will be tested, but what good is a faith that doesn't stand up to a little testing? And they're right, of course. But still.

 And sometimes I read things by Bible experts whose words and lives I respect, but they seem to be blind in certain areas, and I wonder who is blinder, me or them? It has to be me, right? Because they do this for a living and have been interpreting the Bible for decades whereas I am a rank amateur.

And sometimes when I have been praying ardently for justice, or truth, or wisdom, and it just doesn't come, then doubt is right on my tail, because I know that these things are dear to the heart of God and surely if he was going to give us anything we ask for it would be justice and truth and wisdom. Right?

 So the darkness of doubting begins, and my soul grieves, and I feel as though someone has pulled up my anchor and I might drift away.

 But then a funny thing happens. I find myself telling God all about it. Wait! Why am I doing this? Don't I doubt that you exist?

 And in my times of deepest pain and loss, when reason tells me that God is either not there or clearly not on my side, I find myself screaming and shouting and shaking my fist at him. Oh, I give him a good earful, that God who might not be real. But when the doubts pass and the painful situations pass, I come to my senses and realize that he was there all along, waiting patiently for me to get it out of my system and stop throwing my pitiful little tantrum.

Because that's the thing, isn't it? Even when I'm in doubt and pain, I must know deep down that he IS there to hear, or I wouldn't bother to scream at him. Ipso facto, and all that.

 This morning's teaching was on the 14th chapter of the gospel of John. The teacher was discussing the Holy Spirit, and how he teaches us and reminds us all things. I suddenly got an image in my head that made me marvel and chuckle at the same time. People around my must think I'm loony--I often chuckle at the most inappropriate times when one thought leads to another and then where I end up delights and tickles me. That happened again this morning. I got a little picture in my brain of me wearing a leash, like a little dog, and the leash was the Holy Spirit. No matter where I wandered, where I tried to hide, how far I went in the wrong direction, that leash stayed attached. The other end of that leash was in the hand of God.  

And he never let go. 




Love, Spud

A link, for once

This is really good. I'd felt this, but couldn't put it into words.

http://rachelheldevans.com/blessed-are-the-entitled

Love, Spud.

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