Dixie Cups on the Counter
Sunday morning after Christmas I hunkered down under the blankets in the Murphy bed my dad built for the guest room. Instead of getting up for church, I buried my head in the pillow looking for a few more winks, but found none.
The Rev. Whitesheets preached a harsh sermon that morning, and I couldn’t will my eyes to stay closed.
Besides, I had a granddad to visit.
Best of 2010 at The High Calling
I’m rustling through the thesaurus trying to find a word for “speechless” that starts with an h.
There aren’t many.
But that’s how I have to do it sometimes, you know. I lean on a thesaurus and a dictionary like a crutch, the way some folks think we use our faith.
I found the h-word I was looking for.
I’m feeling humbled, and honored, and even a little hushed today.
For Eight Days a Nobody
And God roared and crooned and whispered His name, all of them at once.
He formed sounds and strung letters to make words wide enough and high enough and deep enough and long enough that to simply speak them brings Him unspeakable glory. Still, each is simple enough for even the smallest among us to wrap tiny hands around Him.
God with Us
“The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son,
and they will call him Immanuel”
— which means, “God with us.”
Isaiah 7:14
Matthew 1:23
May you experience His presence with you today.
Merry Christmas
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Photo: Baby in a Manger by Debbie Schiel
It Had to Be the Hunger
I am the Lord’s servant. May it be to me as you have said.
As though angel-meetings and world-upendings were commonplace, these words slipped from Mary’s young lips after Gabriel revealed God’s plan to pass Immanuel through her womb on His way to walk among us.
May it be to me as you have said.
Seems she could as easily have said May my reputation be destroyed as you have said.
May my fiancé abandon me and my family reject me as you have said.
May I be a single mother in a male-only world as you have said.
May I be responsible to safeguard the Savior of the world until He’s old enough to take care of Himself as you have said.
May I be ruined as you have said.
Never on Sunday
John 9:11-16
Ilya the prostitute, the one who never worked on Sunday, had her own way of doing things.
And her own way of doing things was putting wild ideas in the heads of her fellow workers, making them think they might do things their own way too. It threatened to upset the whole economy in a Greek port town, just about the time a ship full of sailors was due to dock.
She was a free-thinking, independent girl who just wasn’t going to follow the rules.
This would mess up business.
Guest Post: The War on Christmas
My Uncle David recently asked me to take a look at an article he’d written. I asked him if we couldn’t publish it here. He’s graciously consented, and just in time for me as I’m still feeling my way around John 9.
Known at family gatherings (and the comment box here) as Uncle Weird, he is a bi-vocational pastor, shepherding a flock in Wisconsin as well as providing leadership to the field of social work.
His voice might have a familiar ring. He’s the guy who gave us, in response to the Apostle Paul’s question, “Does this tunic make you look fat? I’m thinking you may need to buy a threenic next time!“ He is also my dad’s brother, my grandfather Al’s son, and my uncle. We’d never say he’s objectionable (unless we were alone or with somebody), but today he speaks out as a Conscientious Objector in the War on Christmas.
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Guest post by David Willingham
The “How to Celebrate the Birth of Christ” Committee
The word Christmas has a very specific meaning, and we know where that meaning comes from. So in fact does Holiday (Holy Day). When I say have a Happy or Blessed Holiday, I’m referring to a Holy Day.
Not all people who say Merry Christmas mean Christ’s Mass, or are honoring the Birth of Christ, while at the same time not all people who say Happy Holiday are not honoring the birth of Christ. It’s all between each one of us and who we are or are not honoring.
Has God appointed any of us to the “How to Celebrate the Birth of His Son” Committee?
When the Blind See, the Seeing . . . Don’t
John 9:8-9
We walked the seven blocks from campus to the house with her hand resting lightly on my forearm. We said little as the snow began to cover the sidewalk. Me, still young and so oppositional* and she, always provoking — we’d learned it was just better that we stay quiet on our walks home and save the spirited discussions for later when the coffee brewed and buttery popovers, well, popped over in the oven.
I spoke only when needed.
Curb.
Stopping.
Ice. Move right with me.
Crossing left.
On Being Made Whole
When our policyholder backed his milk truck out of the yard, he took a bit of the farmer’s fence with him. A post and split rail fence, hewn of cedar and weathered hard over twenty-five years of wind and rain and snow.
The same fence the kids all climbed and fell off and tore their jeans on. The same fence where they tied the horses and the dogs lifted their back legs. The same fence where they took the family Christmas picture in 1992, the year the eldest left home. And 1997, the year the baby came. And 2003, the year before Mom died.
Twenty-five feet of that twenty-five year fence now lay in splinters between the alfalfa and the gravel driveway.
We owed the farmer the fence we broke. But we didn’t have twenty-five years to weather a new set of rails and gird up the posts with the rich stories of his life.
So how would he be made whole? (more…)
He Came Home Seeing
John 9:6-7
The blind man left home blind that day.
Just like every other morning.
As a newborn babe, he emerged from the womb to the world seeing nothing he hadn’t seen before. It was dark before. It was dark after.
He awoke every morning without the nudge of the rising sun to peel his eyelids apart.
And each morning he felt his way to the office, finding his work station there at the side of the road where he would rely on the generosity of passers-by to fill his cup and his stomach.
There had not yet been a moment in this man’s shadowed life, not a single blink of his milky eyes, in which he saw even a fragment of the world that surrounded him.
Neither
The psalter has no Saturday morning lauds.
Vespers, yes. Lauds, no. No morning lauds on Saturday.
I’m working my way into the rhythm of fixed-hours prayer.
Gradually. As in, I’m not sure I’ve made any progress. I switched up my normal morning time together with God to a prayer book to help me find my way into the practice. So to date, the morning continues on as before, just spent with the Psalms in the morning lauds instead of my usual reading to lead me into prayer.
Adding the intentional midday, vespers and compline? We’re getting there, though it’s admittedly a lot more like uneven than fixed.
But here’s the thing about Saturday: there are no morning lauds.
(more…)
Come and Hear
I saw the clock, but was still pretending it wasn’t morning when Lane leaned over to say goodbye. I smiled in the dark, partly because I wasn’t the first one up this time, but mostly just because of him.
But I couldn’t linger any more, there was a whole day waiting ahead once the sun would decide to get on board. So I slid out too. And soon enough it was me creeping through the dark to nudge slow heaving shoulders under the warm blankets that held my boys, telling them it was their turn to crawl out.
I smiled in the dark at them, too.
Just knowing, just having these three fellows, I warm.
I went on to turn pages in my office, and there in 66, got to smiling all over again.
Come and hear, all you who fear God;
let me tell you what he has done for me.
(Psalm 66:16)
I know what He’s done for me.
I just told you.
But now, I’ve come to hear. All you who fear God, what has He done for you?
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Photo: Old House by Timo Balk
But Dogs Like This, They Do
I pulled into the driveway and stopped the car, getting a sense of the place as I unbuckled my seatbelt. The Risk, as we call a property. Maybe we’ll say Dwelling if we’re feeling a little homier.
Holiday decorations hung askew on the wire fence around the front of the house. Festive.
I caught myself hoping that meant she had a soft side. But a few letters were missing from the season’s greeting. Last year’s decorations. I suspected that festive wore off a long time ago.
Gravel crunched under my soles as I leaned out of the driver’s seat to lace my boots and I let out breath from clear inside them.
She’s an angry one. Angrier than I’ve been dealt in a long time. (more…)
Reimagined
Her words, beautiful as they are, haunt me. Still.
Through grief that wanted to defy words, she found them. She heard them, His tender whisper rising just above mourning.
I know. I was there. I am here.
My eyes follow the letters, lined up between periods, now in my own editor.
And I freeze.
Unfailing
The wind pushed hard here for a few days. Stiff enough to peel roofs down to the paper and blow out window glass and and make a porch wall bulge like an old man’s belly after turkey dinner.
It gave me good reason to unshackle my ankles from the desk chair and get outside. Camera strapped on snug, I drove north. My gaze drifted out to the west and I wondered how a field, shaved to barren stubble, could make me smile. And then to the east, where the rust and amber leaves seemed to whisper I should pull over and nap under them.
I drove on, to the rhythm of my ladder rattling, folded and bouncing in the back.
Let the Morning Bring Me Word
Most mornings, God gets me pre-coffee. I haven’t decided yet if that’s a good thing.
More than once lately I’ve found myself face first in the prayer book, hoping that’s not drool on the pretty blue ribbon. Of course, my head dropped there in moment of complete contrition, falling on my face as it were as I sensed the hallow of his presence there with me in morning dim of my office.
But the deep spiritual moment lasted only that, I’m afraid, before a weary body discovered the true beauty of prostrate.
And I remember how much the morning and I don’t see eye to eye.
Dogs Like this Don’t Bark
The dark blue shop coat hangs to his knees, Elton emblazoned white across the left chest pocket. His name is not Elton. A thrift store find, no doubt. It’s a good match to the feed store cap that shadows his face, always pushed groundward by life-burdened shoulders bending low.
He’s scooping ash from his back entry into a pile of debris that changes every day. Seems it grows neither larger nor smaller. He shovels and pushes and rearranges.
But it’s the same black pile of once-was. Can matter, piled just right, become a void?
The Little Boy in My Bible
Watching miner after miner emerge from their tiny crawlspace in the belly of the earth under Chile, I was taken back briefly to my days nearby there. Particularly seeing the men sporting t-shirts given them by Campus Crusade for Christ – Chile, I wondered again about my young friend David, and imagined him sitting glued to his television with his family and neighbors last night as the first of his countrymen ascended. So I thought you might let me dig his story out from the depths of the archives, if I promised to rework it a little.
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Update 10/15/10: A little more of the back story on the very big t-shirt deal at CNN Belief Blog.
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Buenos Aires, 1984. That’s where I met David.
Nothing worked quite the same after that.
One day David looked me hard in the eye and asked, “Do you know what you will do? Do you?”
I turned away, but it didn’t matter. He didn’t need my eyes for his own jet black lasers to scan my soul.
But I couldn’t return his gaze. His eyes, they had seen God. They’d seen the world. They overflowed with full and hollowed out with empty. And every time he looked at me, I knew he saw my vacant heart.
Right of Way
She twisted around on the bleacher seat and I leaned in close to hear her over the electric-charged din of a homecoming crowd.
She told of the uncertainty, how it can gnaw away if left to its own. Not the if, but the how, and the when, and the where, and for how long.
Fiddling with her boy’s hair, she told of the burden on the kids, of wanting life to go according to plan for their sake if nothing else.
And with a certain shadow of grief at the edge of otherwise bright eyes, one with which I’m all too familiar, we spoke of the rubble that fills the places once so full of life when the Family breaks itself apart.
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Teach Us to Pray
A guest post by Paul Willingham
Praying with a Limp
A few months ago I was enjoying a late breakfast with my dad at the local Perkins. Our table was near the front entrance so I was in a position to observe as diners entered and departed. Several middle-aged African-American women were leaving. As they passed, one of the women asked her companion if she had injured her leg. She seemed to favor it as she walked.
“No”, she replied. “I always limp after I’ve been to prayer meeting.”
The uninitiated, overhearing her comment, probably would not have caught that her prayer life included being on her knees. But what a testimony for the initiated that this woman and her prayer partners spent part of their prayer time on their knees, not seated around a table.
I suspect that in this day of compartmentalized Church Life/Christianity and a desire for comfort (air conditioned buildings, heated baptistries and padded pews) that there is not as much prayer that takes place on the knees of the supplicants. I’m neither denigrating the prayers of the sincere today (the effective fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much), regardless of the position of their physical bodies. Nor am I suggesting that prayer is more effective when offered up while kneeling.
Prayer is a “Thing”
It’s one of those times.
I stand at the shadow’s edge, knowing but not knowing. Perceiving but not drawing close.
Sometimes personal and professional collide with the shattering of glass like a boulder through a picture window. And while I stand safely behind the yellow caution tape of self-recusal, some of the whetted shards carry.
They slice open my hands, drive through my heart.
Though I can’t know why, I see that I am bleeding.
More Forgiving
The whoosh of still air sliced in two caught me and I flinched.
He laughed, and rolled his eyes.
I always flinch a little when he swings the club indoors. I suppose that time, I did so doubly with the glint of a silver shaft flying wild in a hotel room, where folks stand single file and the space between the walls runs a close second to his wing span.
I stepped around the golf balls now littering the his makeshift fairway between the beds while he avoided the hazards of scattered luggage. “Tell me again why you needed that club?”
He’d just been given a new set of clubs, finally the right size, and hopefully good to last through the rest of school. But at the secondhand sporting goods store, the 60o wedge begged him for a ride home, not to be confused with the 56o wedge already in his bag. “They’re totally different, Mom. This is the one I’ve been looking for!”
And the new iron? Well, who can pass up a $5 3-iron, top-of-the-line-but-it-was-a-demo, even if you already have one?
“It’s the best kind out there, a cavity-back. They’re way more forgiving.”
More forgiving?
I leaned back on the television stand and settled in.
“Tell me about that,” I said. “What does it mean for a golf club to be forgiving?”
Passing the Sinatra Test
As the chapter wore on, my confidence puffed that this would be an easy post to write. My biggest challenge would be to write it in a way that didn’t sound so smug and obvious.
If one way we derive credibility from the endorsement of an authority, how much further would we have to look than the Jordan River? As Jesus approached a crowd gathered around His cousin John at the water’s edge, John saw Him and called out, Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world! (John 1:29)
And when John dipped Him under, He came glistening wet out of the water to have the Holy Spirit Himself take the form of a dove and land on Him. And if that weren’t enough, the voice of God floated out of the sky behind the dove announcing that You are my son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased. (Luke 3:21-22)
Talk about your authority: A local celebrity and two-thirds of the Trinity.
A big moment on the credibility scale.
How Samuel Became Samuel
I’ve been, these past weeks, getting to know the boy Samuel. I’ve hovered over and dipped into the early chapters of the first book of Samuel for a very long time now.
Once in a while I read the whole thing. And another day just a little bit seems to rise off the page to meet me.
Now and again I’ll even pull a commentary or read an article.
But I always end up back just chewing the text. None of the learned ones have managed to explain, at least to my satisfaction, what puzzles me most about the boy Samuel.
The Conversation