I call to God; God will help me.
At dusk, dawn, and noon I sigh deep sighs —
he hears, he rescues.

   My life is well and whole, secure in the middle of danger
Even while thousands are lined up against me.

David, in Psalm 55
The Message

::

With Deidra in anticipation of Sunday:

and with Sandy for Still Saturday.

::

About Preparation Day

I’ve long forgotten the meal — the fruit and nuts of it, anyway. I know I savored every bite, and even cleaned my plate. It was that good.

But the company? It was even better.

Megan and I jostled through the serving line of Tim’s buffet at Laity Lodge together. We didn’t plan it that way. We just sort of wound up there at the same time. We’d seen each other around — online, and now off line, but for some reason our paths had not yet intersected.

She would change all that.

We reached the door to the dining room at about the same time, and Megan yielded. Being from South Dakota, I yielded back. That’s what we do at uncontrolled intersections — we keep waving the other on until someone gives in.

But she’s from Texas. She won’t play the perpetual yield game. She looked up at me and said, “Go sit down.” She can be matter-of-fact like that. “I don’t know you yet, so I’m going to sit with you today.”

And that was that.

I don’t know if I’ve ever loved anyone so quickly in all my life.

That may not have been the day that Tim served pho. But I remember it as the best meal I had all weekend.

Megan brings to every encounter the gift of her presence. Her attention. Her questions. Her careful listening. Her tender heart.

::

I may be in big trouble before the day is through. (I’ll take a couple of friends down with me.) But I’m a big believer that forgiveness is easier to ask than permission. So, Megan, forgive me for this. But word on the street is it’s your birthday this weekend.

Permit the rest of us to celebrate a bit over you.

(Find my friend Megan – writer, tea drinker, failed liturgical dancer – at MeganWillome.com.)

I know how she died.

Her family relayed the details. Witnesses gave me statements.

I’ve been to the scene, read the official report, browsed the news accounts.

And now, I’m reading the coroner’s report. The days these papers skid across my desk are the ones I’d rather not show up for work. I’d like to tuck the report between the manila folds without a glance and just say it contained no helpful information.

I know already it will say the cause of death was blunt force trauma. But this case is a puzzle, and hidden in the cold clinical detail of the autopsy is a tiny missing piece I cannot find without reading every sterile page. I shield my eyes as I read how the body was opened in the usual manner, note that various body parts were without abnormality. I stare at the wall, pretending not to look as I invade a private place, add indignity to injustice with the clumsy pencil pushing of my trade.

I find what I’m looking for. It’s what’s not there, really, that I needed to find. But I stumble on the way out, as though knocking stainless steel instruments to the floor in a clanging din that threatens to stop my own heart.

It’s the inventory that paralyzes me. A punch card of descriptors, itemizing the color of her hair and eyes, documenting her length and weight.

I know what she had in her purse. How many bills. How much change. The lipstick, the credit cards, the family photos.

I know how she was dressed. The sweatshirt, the t-shirt, the long sleeved shirt underneath. The socks. The undergarments. And the one brown slip-on shoe.

The brown shoe. Just one.

This woman I never knew, whose post mortem details are spread in black and white in front of me, who dressed in comfortable cotton layers as I am known to do, is missing a shoe.

Though it has nothing to do with the question I need to answer before I can stamp a bright red CLOSED on the outside of a file, the missing shoe haunts me. How did it come off? Where does it rest? Should I have seen it somewhere along the way? But what difference does it make?

Really. What difference does it make?

Mortality has shown her face too near my windows lately. Too close and too often, leaving me to hold a solitary brown shoe in want of a bigger story. The end of life does not come down to this — it is  not reduced to the sanitized accounting of pockets and the color of socks.

I know it isn’t. But all the same. For God’s sake, somebody, find that other brown shoe.

::

Praise God from earth,
you sea dragons, you fathomless ocean deeps;
Fire and hail, snow and ice,
hurricanes obeying his orders;
Mountains and all hills,
apple orchards and cedar forests;
Wild beasts and herds of cattle,
snakes, and birds in flight;
Earth’s kings and all races,
leaders and important people,
Robust men and women in their prime,
and yes, graybeards and little children.

Let them praise the name of God—
it’s the only Name worth praising.
His radiance exceeds anything in earth and sky;
he’s built a monument—his very own people!

Praise from all who love God!
Israel’s children, intimate friends of God.
Hallelujah!

(words of the psalmist from #148, The Message)

::

About Preparation Day
Photo: Popsicle, more finds from a 4-below day in the ditch
Linking with Deidra today:
  

I don’t realize that I stopped thinking during my time there alone in my seat. I listened, I watched, I recited when it was time. And when it grew silent I bowed. I don’t remember that God was saying anything. I don’t remember that I was saying anything. I think we were just there, together, enjoying each other’s company.

As I sat, bent over toward the front of the pew with my face in my hands, I felt the priest’s hand on my head and heard him murmur a blessing.

I hadn’t heard him approach. And I was not startled.

– Making Headroom, Week 13

He greeted me at the door, cell phone to his ear, and motioned me in before walking off to finish his business. I wound my way around boxes that crammed the entry, layers of dust telling me they’d been there for years, untouched.

I squeezed past the kneeler, thinking it awkward there in a room meant for storage. A cloud swirled up from the floor as I slipped through to the dining room, and I wondered  if I looked like that Peanuts character.

Clutter, dirt and debris filled every open surface. It was slow growing, this deterioration of a place. Not from a sudden loss, no rush of fire or water, but instead a gradual letting go of order.

The burning started early in my throat, the air in these rooms shared with piles and pets much more pungent than the fresh February thaw outside.

I’d reached for my gloves in my back pocket about the time he finished his phone call. But I left them be, resting my bare hand on the old Hammond organ instead. Its black and white keys were littered with tiny brown fish shapes spilled from the cat dish resting on top.

I’d wondered not long in the door when was the last time another was in this house. That dawning made my steps seem privileged somehow, as though my soles disturbed a sacred dust.

It suddenly became important  for me, with the always-clean hands, to touch something.

ii.

Some find the beautiful in the ordinary places. They stretch eyes wide and walk through life seeing meaning in the meaningless, the point of the pointless. They fix a microscope on tiny moments and find the richest depths of grace and goodness in the fibers that weave their way through what we do not often notice.

My life calls me to places beneath the ordinary. I tiptoe into rooms where guests are not invited to find the ugly, the dirty, the broken.

I enter into the ashes, the missing, the soggy and the black mold of material life.

iii.

“I’m just glad the water didn’t get in here,” he said.

He brushed away cobwebs and opened the cabinet below his television, pulling out a stack of dusty books to reach an old black case. He rubbed his hands over the top, a finger across the latch.

“I have six of these. But this one . . .  This one’s 110 years old.”

He opened the case and his rough firefighter hands coaxed the instrument out of its velveteen bed.

“I haven’t played her in ten years.”

He settled into a threadbare recliner and began to play his century-old German concertina. When he leaned back and closed his eyes, swaying in the chair to his own melody, I looked over my shoulder for polka dancers to twirl in from the kitchen.

“You know the old carousels?” he asked.

“I do.”

“Then listen.”

He began to play the tune to which painted ponies rise and fall in their elegant gallop ’round and ’round the carnival ride.

“I don’t read music, you know,” he said as his fingers two-stepped from one button on the squeeze box to another.

“What, then? You just feel it?”

He closed his eyes again. The instrument wailed with each inhale of the bellows, mourned with every exhale.

“Something like that.”

iv.

A tension bubbles up as we live eternally amidst the temporal. We crave the spiritual, but satisfy ourselves with the material. “Just things,” we tap against our ever frustrated heads. “Just things.”

We’re anxious that we don’t find ourselves in the end naked and charred, clothes and hair burned away with the wood, hay and stubble to which we clung so tightly. This is how He warned us, the One who Himself crossed the chasm to touch our mortality.

We sigh at the knowledge that we have far too many already. And we wonder at how these “just things” can contain fragments of our souls. Yet we know they do.

v.

I stood in the stairwell amidst soggy and mildew-covered drywall, wishing he’d reported the mess sooner, before the months had passed. He, unfazed by the muck, spoke of Rebroff.

“Ivan Rebroff. You know him? R-e-b-r-o-f-f. Write it down. You’ll want to look him up later. “

I looked up the stairs and his eyes danced again, the same as when he’d pushed and pulled the bellows. I couldn’t keep back a smile.

“He sings, I take it?”

“He sings? Oh, he sings. He sings in a five-octave range. If you’re done down there, we’ll go listen.”

I followed him back to the living room. He reached into a stack of 50 or so CDs, pulled out just the one he was looking for, and pushed the disk into his player.

Rebroff’s bass reverberated off the dingy walls while I measured, my host going on about the singer’s history and his plans to remodel the house to accommodate his 5,000-volume library. As the song reached the end, he put a finger to his lips to hush himself mid-sentence and pointed the other hand to the source of Rebroff’s aria. He tipped back his head, stretched out his arms, and directed the final measures.

vi.

We say it’s not our treasure, this matter, the stuff of life we can hold in our hands. No, our treasure is something harder to hang on to; our treasure is tied up in the Kingdom, we say.

But this treasure we hold and pretend to let go, doesn’t it hold us too?

Aren’t our lives, the good and bad, stored in these papers, these photos, these objects we touched with our fingers while we held our babies or painted rosy sunsets or plucked out notes on a cheap guitar? We fed our family on that table, made love in that bed, tinkered with the ’63 Chevy in that garage. She wrote letters home at that desk, wept next to that phone after the banker called.

He bought that cap at the state tournament, cut that cord from the net after the region championship. We gave that bear to Grandma and Grandpa with the stick that had the pink “plus” sign. That fuzzy bear that still makes throats catch because the first grandbaby didn’t come home.

And that book there — it’s the one I read while Debbie died.

vii.

Books, traces of his massive library, wedged themselves within the piles, poking out from boxes. I couldn’t read titles masked by gray powder.

“I’m reading Summa Theologiæ by Thomas Aquinas. For the sixth time,” he said.

“You read Latin?” I asked.

“Oh, no. I have an English translation. Say, how’s your Hebrew?”

“Well, about as good as my Greek, I suppose,” I said. “I trust Strong’s and a lexicon.”

“Wait here.”

He disappeared behind a door and came out to thrust a thick brown book into my hands. I started to lift the cover.

“No, no. You’ve got it upside down.” He turned the book so I could see it for what it was: an inter-linear Old Testament.

Hebrew flowed alongside the English.

“I had this book on my Christmas list 25 years ago,” I said. “I didn’t get it.”

Tracing my finger over the lines of Hebrew on a page of Deuteronomy, I complained as though the old man had the power to uproot an entire language.

“Look at these — so much meaning in a single stroke. English can’t do it justice. Her lines are too weak, words not quite precise.”

He reached for the book and said, “You’ll know this then: שְׁמַע יִשְׂרָאֵל יְהוָה אֱלֹהֵינוּ יְהוָה אֶחָד”

I hesitated, lips moving as I replayed the sound in my head. “Shema Yisra’el YHWH Eloheinu YHWH Eḥad.”

He smiled at my recognition and said the words aloud with me.

Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.

His eyes twinkled again and he said, “Let me show you one more thing before you go.”

Shuffling back over to the cabinet, he leaned in deep. I worried that he might collapse there behind the chair. Amidst a cloud of dust, he emerged with his prize.

“Ah, yes. Copyright: 1826.”

I gazed on it a good while, the whole eight-inches worth. All those Words, God-breathed and harvested into this elegant gold-edged shock.

Hushed, I asked if he’d allow me to photograph it. Though I’d been clicking the shutter all over his home, this somehow required a certain permission. He spread the pages, allowing me a view of the inside before I had to leave.

My stay long outlasted my work there but I held out this little bit longer.

viii.

These things, the ones rust and moth destroy, we long to be free of their hold on us, our hold on them. But when we dig back through ruins to find them, we blow away the silt and see our lives in the dusty reflection.

We find the real treasure not in the gilt edge of the page but in the moment spent reading. The joy is not in the smooth mahogany but the hours we loved at the table. The beauty of an ancient squeeze box was not its age or preservation but the wonder of an old man’s heart singing through it to a stranger.

We’ll no sooner be free of these things than we will our very souls.

ix.

Joe called me at my office a few days later.

“Hey, that old Bible of mine? I know you really liked it.”

“I did, Joe. It’s beautiful,” I said.

“Listen. If anything, you know, would happen to me. Well, I’d want you to have it.”

No. No sooner free of these things than our very own souls.

::

Pondering the nature of my work today, and reposting from the archives.

Photos: Upper and lower, 1826 Bible;
center, Hengel concertina, via Flickr

Peter reached deep into the pocket of his tunic and turned up a wad of lint where a coin should be.

That’s what I like to think, anyway.

The man whose feet and ankles would not support him — leaving him to the limited care of others who would carry him to sit by the gate and beg the equally limited mercy of yet others who would pass by him — he asked Peter and John for alms and I like to think Peter first dug deep into his pocket in search of something substantive to give him.

The text doesn’t say so. I just like to think it sits there between the lines the Spirit found fit to put into print.

It does say his pockets were empty though — Peter had to confess he had no silver or gold to give to the man.

And I wonder if Peter had slid the loose change off his dresser that morning and dropped the coins into his hip pocket, would he have flipped a silver medallion over to the man curled there on his tattered mat in the roadside dust? Would he have met him at his immediate need, giving him enough for a chunk of bread and flask of wine and then hurried along with John into the temple for prayer?

He couldn’t order lunch for the man from the temple bistro and tell the waiter to put it on his tab. So he ordered him to his feet in the name of Jesus of Nazareth instead.

If Peter’s pockets bulged with his own resources, would the miracle have crossed his mind?

When was the last time you left home without your stuff, and a better thing happened because you had none?

::

Related: Look at Us

Hanging out with Michelle and her wise friends today:

Write this down for the next generation
so people not yet born will praise God:

“God looked out from his high holy place;
from heaven he surveyed the earth.
He listened to the groans of the doomed,
he opened the doors of their death cells.”

Write it so the story can be told in Zion,
so God’s praise will be sung in Jerusalem’s streets
And wherever people gather together
along with their rulers to worship him.

(from Psalm 102, The Message)

(About Preparation Day)

::

Linking with Deidra because Jumping Tandem
is the only place I know that can have a disco ball
and be a quiet place. At the same time.

::

Photo: It was 4 degrees below zero
the other day. But well worth the
roadside stop and crawling in the
ditch for  closer look.

Listen, God! Please, pay attention!
Can you make sense of these ramblings,
my groans and cries?
King-God, I need your help.
Every morning
you’ll hear me at it again.
Every morning
I lay out the pieces of my life
on your altar
and watch for fire to descend.

David, Psalm 5

::

Joining the Sunday QuietParty at Deidra’s:

“Learning to sit in silence means pushing into discomfort. Just like breaking in a new pair of Levis means wearing them when they’re still a little crunchy and chafe against the skin. Breaking in the mind and body to be still means letting it be uncomfortable — staying still past those moments where it feels natural and pushing the boundary out a little farther each time.”

– Making Headroom, Week Ten