We Shepherds

A Christmas Meditation

And in the same region there were shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.

Shepherds? Lord, such a strange, yet comforting choice to announce the birth of Your son to... Shepherds? Not the learned teachers of the law in town, not the holy priests that serve in your temple? Simple shepherds...third shift workers in the feedlot/textile industry of the day. Except these third shift workers are first and second shift workers as well. Exhausted and cold on their hillside, but faithful to their task. Faithful to the tedious work of caring for, protecting, looking after the the poor dumb creatures that, left to their own devices, would get into no end of trouble. Faithful shepherds, doing their jobs, unnoticed except by each other and maybe the sheep. Sound familiar? Sounds like us...

And an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were filled with great fear.

Fear? Lord, has anyone told you lately how scary You can be? Your angel is about to make the greatest announcement in the history of time, and Your glory surrounds and overwhelms, and we have no choice but to tremble at who You are. But wait...even as You make us fear You, You hold out promise that the fear will not consume...

And the angel said to them, “Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.

Good news...of great joy...for all the people...even shepherds? Even us? Unto us, born this day, a Savior. Talk about good news! The gospel in a nutshell! O.K., maybe we can start to let go of our fear. The angel does say “Fear not...” But there is still more the angel has to say...

And this will be a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger.”

Our hillside is cold and dark, Lord, but it is our hillside, our comfort zone. We know exactly where we are at at the moment, yet You nudge us toward another place tonight. You know we are a skeptical, practical people. We weren't born yesterday. Seeing is believing. A sign is good...

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying,“Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased!”

As if the angel of the Lord wasn't enough for us. Now the sky is filled with the heavenly host. “Glory to God in the highest...” We get that...we know about praising God. We are good religious people, even if our sheep don't allow us to get down to town to worship. But “on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased”? Us? Are You pleased with us? And peace? We see strife all around us; in the natural world...the wild animals threaten our sheep; in the political world...what have the Romans done to the nation of Israel?; in the spiritual world...the Pharisees, the Sadducees - no peace there! What kind of peace is this You promise, Lord? A different peace, a new peace, a peace that only the Savior you spoke about can supply?

When the angels went away from them into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go over to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has made known to us.” And they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby lying in a manger.

O.K. You've got our attention. You've quieted our shaking. You've lured us off our familiar hillside with the promise of this new peace. You've told us what to look for. Time to see if what You say is true. Time to check out the sign...and it's exactly how You said it would be!...a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger! The strangest Savior ever...!

And when they saw it, they made known the saying that had been told them concerning this child. And all who heard it wondered at what the shepherds told them. But Mary treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart. And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.

What do we say? We have to say something...this is too good to keep to ourselves. What a story we have to tell! And so we tell it to all we meet. And all who hear our story wonder at it...yes, some wonder at our sanity, saying we have been too long alone with our sheep on the barren hillsides...but many catch our joy and amazement, and we suspect that they will check out this sign for themselves, that we will not be the only visitors to that manger tonight. The young mother of that Savior child – oh, what stories she will have to tell of the night of his birth – the stable, the manger, the scruffy shepherds that came because on that dark night, the heavens exploded with the glory of God and the heavenly host. We return to our hillside, glorifying and praising God for all that we have seen and heard. We hardly recognize it as the place we have left. We hardly recognize ourselves. This night, we have gone from fear and trembling to receiving a new and different peace from a Savior child. There we were, one moment half asleep, minding our own business, and next we are hearing this good news. We listened, we checked it out, we believed, we told all we discovered, and we will never be the same...

(Scripture references from Luke 2:8-20, English Standard Version)

(Originally written for the Trinity Community Church's

Women's Christmas Breakfast 2011)

 

'Tis the Season(ing)...

I recently made a tomato-basil-mozzarella salad. I bought the fresh mozzarella at the grocery store. The fresh basil was picked from pots growing in our family room, sitting in the sun coming through the south-facing sliding glass door. The tomatoes were the last of my summer crop of small grape tomatoes.

Yes...garden grown tomatoes, the first week of December...

Notice I didn't use the word “fresh” to describe the tomatoes, though perhaps I accurately could have. I had picked all my garden-grown tomatoes the second week of October in anticipation of a heavy frost. The large ripe red tomatoes I washed, cored and froze, to be used over the coming months in sauces, soups and stews. But what to do with the gadzillion green grape tomatoes that were still on the large vining plants? I picked them all, put them in paper towel-lined baking pans and left them on the kitchen counter to slowly ripen over the next few weeks. As they turned red, I washed them, threw them into salads or just popped them in my mouth for a snack. By the time early December rolled around, a good month and a half after picking them in the garden, there were still enough edible red tomatoes left to make a post-Thanksgiving tomato-basil-mozzarella salad. They did not have the rich vine-ripened sun-kissed tomatoey taste of the same tomato picked in August, but they still tasted of summer - in December.

The Genovese basil plants had been started from seed indoors in the spring, put in large pots on the deck in June where they grew huge tasty leaves. I cut them back in September, moved the pots to a sunny place inside where they will continue to produce new leaves until I start new plants this coming spring and declare the old ones officially dead. Like the counter-ripened tomatoes, the indoor basil is not as lush and flavorful as it was sitting out on the deck in the summer, but it, too, still tastes of summer in December, as it will taste of summer in January's pesto and February's Margherita pizza.

There are pots of rosemary, parsley, marjoram and lemon verbena in the sunny bay window, tender perennial herbs that spend the summer in pots on the deck but are always glad to come in the house to survive the winter. These taste the same indoors in December as they did outdoors in July. But it's those summer tastes of tomato and of basil that provide a surprising and even disconcerting flavor in the midst of the Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday eating season. As the darkest days of winter approach, it's kind of nice to have the taste of the memories of the previous summer as well as the foreshadowing taste of the growing season to come...

Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit, wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.

                                                                            - Miles Kington

Finishing Strong

My son, in the early days of his middle school cross country running, would come up to me after a race and ask “Do you think I saved too much?” He was a good runner then, not a great one yet, and he had what some coaches would call a good “kick”, that is, the ability to pour on the speed at the end of the race when other runners would be dying out. He had seen runners go out fast, leading the pack at the beginning of the race, only to fade long before the finish. Determined not to be one of them, he came up with his own strategy. It made for an exciting last 100 meters, but it did not necessarily make for a good overall finish. He realized that saving himself so he could pass lots of runners at the end of a race was fun, but no guarantee of a finish that would please the coach and contribute to the team. “Do you think I saved too much? Yeah, I think I saved too much...”

Most of us are in a constant struggle to know how to expend our energies wisely. On our own, it's a tricky balance to figure out. In many areas of our lives - relationships, work projects, domestic tasks, church ministries – we start out strong, only to lose steam and finish poorly, half-heartedly, or not at all. Other times we start slowly, perhaps dragging our feet, but slowly gain momentum and finish our project, only to look back on it and see all the ways we could have done it differently, improved upon it, used our time and resources better. We “saved too much”...

I recently read an article* that bemoaned the fact that runners in the 25-34 age demographic are more content to just finish races, marathons specifically, than they are to finish races competitively. The generation that has grown up receiving trophies for participation in childhood sports, but not necessarily for excellence, has grown into a generation that is content to not expend much more energy than necessary to finish. “Saving too much” has become their racing strategy...

In the book of Hebrews, we are called to a life race strategy that encourages a strong finish:

“...throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith...so that you will not grow weary and lost heart.” **

In 1 Corinthians, Paul uses racing language to focus us on what we are running for:

“Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize. Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last, but we do it to get a crown that will last forever.”***

And so we are called to run with our lives a good race with a strong finish for a prize worth having. Our life running styles are all different, and our life races most likely are run on different routes and courses, but we share a common ultimate goal and a need for “strict training”. We also need to humbly realize we do not run this race alone. If we are to fix our eyes on Jesus, then we acknowledge that he is always present in our race, always available to coach us, to save us from burning out early or saving too much.

By his senior year in high school, my son had trained hard and had developed a successful racing strategy, good enough for a fourth place finish at the state meet. He still had a good kick and still passed a half dozen runners in the final mile of that race. But when asked by a reporter after the race to describe what was going on in his head during that last mile, he said:

Coming around that last time I was just asking God, “Keep me loose, keep me loose,”... Than at a point down here it was, “Make me want it.” He gave me enough strength to pick off some guys and have the race of my life.

And in our own life's running, as we strive to find balance between burning out and saving too much, we, too, long to stay loose and finish strong.  And we, too, can and should cry out - “Lord, make me want it. Give me the race of my life...”

...Yes, of course we should “burn out for God”; I want to, too – to live all my life for Him. But we don't need to burn out for Him like gasoline – explosively, burning everybody around us in the process. We can burn out like charcoal – slowly, steadily, over a long period of time, and good to the last golden marshmallow!             - Anne Ortlund

 

*http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324807704579085084130007974

**From Hebrew 12:1-3

***From 1 Corinthians 9:24-25

 States' (Road) Rites

rite /rīt/ noun- a social custom, practice, or conventional act.

Our family moved from New York to Illinois almost 25 years ago. Every year since, we have driven back East to visit relatives and friends. In the early years, with three young children, the 2000 mile plus trip in the minivan involved finding fast food restaurants with play places, hotels with indoor pools and rest stops with child-friendly play areas. Now the trip, though still being made in a minivan, usually consists of only my husband and myself. We stop for the night without a thought about finding the once-mandatory swimming pool. Without children, the dining is slightly more exotic, the trip slightly faster and much quieter, and the driving, overall, well, uneventfully boring...

I just returned from a drive back East and realized that one of the things I enjoy about the recent quieter and leisurely trips is I get to contemplate the “State” part of the “United States of America”. I know – we are only traveling across one third of the the eastern half of the country – six states at most - and only the northern part at that. But there is still a sense of that individuality that each state clings to, that identity that makes Ohio Ohio and New York New York. About 150 years ago this country fought a horrific war over states' rights. The Union – the “United” part of the “United States of America” was preserved, but that longing for individual state identity still comes out, sometimes in the most amusing and inscrutable ways. These little differences from state to state reflect not so much “rights” as “rites” - regional differences in speech patterns (“New Yawk”), food (Can't get a decent bagel outside of metropolitan New York City; New York pizza and Chicago-style deep dish barely resemble one another.), etc. But during this past trip, I was struck by the state identities reflected in just the areas that are car- and driving-related.

Speed limits have always varied from state to state. Illinois, Indiana and Ohio have the same speed limits on the interstate while Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey share a lower limit (in theory, though not in practice). Pennsylvania used to feel obligated to inform the incoming drivers, by way of a large threatening sign at the state line, as to how much it would cost them for every five miles over the speed limit they were going should drivers get caught speeding. In recent years, they seem to have just given up. Illinois and Indiana are more attached to their toll transponders than some states (I-PASS, i-Zoom), while Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York cut any pretense and just acknowledge they are sucking the money out of your bank account as painlessly as possible (E-ZPASS). Ohio has the most beautiful interstate rest areas (Panera, Starbucks). Indiana does not (McDonalds, random other). In Pennsylvania, I-80 is not a toll road, so there are only restroom areas on the highway, and you take your chances on food at any exit.

One of the most baffling state differences is in the pumping of gas. Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania allow drivers to pump their own gas, set an automatic shut off device, and come back to the tank when it's full. New Jersey does not allow drivers to pump their own gas. (Why not? Too dangerous?) An attendant comes out and pumps it for them. In New York drivers can pump their own gas, but are required to hold the pump handle the entire time – no automatic shut offs. (To avoid “Oops! I only have ten dollars and accidentally pumped $15...”?) There is a section of I-84 that goes from Pennsylvania, through a small section of New Jersey, and then into New York. Depending on which exit drivers choose to get off at during a few short miles, they can find any one of these three gas pumping options.

I can not leave this topic of state road identities without commenting on the wonderfully terrifying New York State Parkway System. Originally built in the mid-twentieth century as scenic roads for cars to move around the metropolitan New York area, they are unique to New York State. Growing up and learning to drive on Long Island, I was taught that the shortest distance between two points was always a parkway. These roads are often three lane highways with no commercial traffic – just cars – with a posted speed limit of 55 which is generally ignored by all. They are heavily treed, with beautiful stone overpasses and bridges, making for a scenic drive through one of the most heavily populated areas of this country. I personally believe these parkways are also responsible for the reputation New Yorkers have of being crazy and aggressive drivers. These are roads that allow drivers to get around the congested New York City area, at high speeds, with nary a semi or anything bigger than an SUV to put the fear of God into them. In such a driving culture, it is easy to think oneself as a invincible road warrior, someone beyond the usual road courtesies. It is perhaps why there are now lighted signs over these parkways every few miles that remind drivers it is a New York State law to signal when changing lanes. Seriously? What is assumed to be basic driving practice in any other state needs to be on multiple lighted signs in New York? I thought back to how friends in high school joked about how when you drive on the parkway, you get the impression that turn signals were optional equipment on cars, and apparently no one was purchasing that option on Long Island anymore. Yeah, those signs are necessary. As a driver on a New York parkway with Illinois plates on my car, I have a right to know what that car passing me at 75 mph is going to do next. But I also remember that I, too, was once a child of the New York parkway culture and had my own unique ways of navigating the Island, so I cut those crazy drivers some slack. After all, it's their rite.

...The Real-World was a sprawling mess of a book in need of a good editor. I thought then of the narrative order here in the Book-World, our resolved plot lines and the observance of natural justice we took for granted.

“Literature is claimed to be a mirror of the world,” I said, “but the Outlanders are fooling themselves. The Book-World is as orderly as people in the Real-World hope their own world to be – it isn't a mirror, it's an aspiration.”

“Humans,” said Sprockett, “are the most glorious bizarre creatures.”

“Yes,” I said with a smile. “They certainly are.”

               - the “read” Thursday Next, One of Our Thursdays is Missing, Jasper Fforde

What Lies Beneath

(Where faith and fishing meet...)

The rumored great fall fishing season was turning apocryphal. The catching of fish slowed down in the heat of the end of summer, but just wait, I was told, the weather and the water will turn cool, and the fish will be back.

Just wait...

I'd been spending several evenings a week by the backyard pond, waiting, casting the most succulent of rubber worms that had bass jumping out of the water just weeks before. Nothing. I switched to the no-fail black woolybugger and a fly rod. Still nothing. I down-sized my expectations. If I wasn't able to catch bass, I'd go for the bluegill and crappie. I casted small foam spiders, tiny nymphs, and something called a gurgler that never fails to bring a bluegill to the surface. Nothing, nothing, nothing... It was as though someone removed all the fish from the pond.

It was time for desperate measures.

I mixed a small amount of flour, salt and water and kneaded it into a stretchy dough, dense enough to wrap around a small hook and not fall off on the first cast. I then rigged my spinning rod with a light weight and a slip bobber, setting the hook to drop about two feet below the surface of the water when it landed. I had resorted to the fishing style that I had first experienced as a child, one that I had used with my own children in the days when they actually thought that maybe fishing with their mother might be fun.

Casting the dough, watching the bobber for any signs of motion, I was reflecting on why I felt the need to prove to myself that there were actually fish in the pond. Of course there were - hundreds, probably thousands of them, just none that were particularly interested in what I had been offering them. They would be jumping out of the water, and hitting anything I threw at them, if not later this fall, then certainly next spring. Still, I wanted to see that something was happening and I wanted to see it now. The bobber, with its dough bait below, started to move sideways and pull under. I pulled it in to find the dough gone. I put more on and watched the same bobbing motions and corresponding ripples play out again and again. I did catch a few small bluegill, but the real satisfaction came from seeing the bobber move about, seeing those ripples, indicating that, yes, there was still an active fish community thriving under the weedy dark water of early fall.

All this gets me thinking about the unseen results of prayer, and how it can sometimes be a lot like fall fishing. I know prayer stirs things up, causes movement in the spiritual realm. Often, God graciously allows me to see the movement, the lives being changed, the growth taking place, the holy activity that occurs when God acts in response to my prayer. Other times...nothing. I wait and pray more, sometimes differently, sometimes desperately, waiting to see Him respond to whatever it is I am praying for. My faith tells me God is always moving, acting on behalf of His people even if I don't see a thing happening. I know I have seen Him move and act in the past and I know I will see Him do it again in the future. But sometimes, I just need to get a glimpse of movement now, the action of some spiritual bobber, letting me know that, yes, there is life taking place in that great unseen spiritual realm where God sees all. So I throw out a dough-bait-bobber prayer that acknowledges God's faithfulness, His sovereignty over all things, but could He maybe let me see just a small sign of movement? Then I fix my eyes on Him and wait for the ripples to appear...

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. - Hebrews 11:1

The Quick, Microwaved (Well, Almost) Apple Pie

It's that time of year when my refrigerator is full of freshly picked McIntosh apples from a local orchard. All the produce bins and some large plastic storage containers hold the apples that will last until early next year. They get eaten for lunches, made into crisps, and – way too often for my waistline – get made into pies. I felt it was a good season of the year to share the secrets of our frequent fall and winter pie consumption.

I had been the last person in western civilization to acquire a microwave oven, so I had missed out on the early days of manuals and cookbooks that would tell you how to use the oven and what you could actually cook with it. I hit the library and eventually found an old microwave oven cookbook in the used book room. In addition to learning how to use a microwave to bake a potato, raise yeast dough, and melt chocolate, I made the good news/bad news discovery that apple pies can be made in the microwave. The good news: perfect apple pies, with perfectly browned crusts, can be made, from start to finish, in less than an hour if you use a microwave oven to speed up the baking process. The bad news: perfect apple pies, with perfectly browned crusts, can be made, from start to finish, in less than an hour if you use a microwave oven to speed up the baking process...In other words, the time restraints for baking apple pies had been removed. There was now no excuse not to whip one up while making dinner.

The following instructions can be used with any standard two-crust apple pie recipe you may have. It can also be used for most two-crust fruit pie recipes and combinations – cherry, blueberry, pear, cranberry-apple, etc. It will also work with crumble-top recipes, though I would wait to add the crumble topping until the pie goes into the conventional oven. What I love about this way of baking a pie, besides the quick cooking time, is that the crust is always perfect, never dried out or too dark around the edges.

The Quick, Microwaved (Well, Almost) Fruit Pie

Prepare pie the same as for regular oven baking, using a Pyrex or CorningWare pie plate (no metal!). Make sure to slit the crust in several places to prevent crust from exploding. Preheat conventional oven to 425°. Put pie in microwave and heat on high 10 to 12 minutes, or until juices start bubbling through slits in crust. Stick knife through slit to make sure the fruit (such as apple) is tender. (Microwave another minute or two if you think the fruit is not quite soft. Twelve minutes is long enough for most fruits.) Transfer the pie to preheated conventional oven and bake for 10 to 12 minutes or until golden brown.

If preparing an unbaked, frozen pie, microwave 13 to 15 minutes on high before finishing off in a conventional oven.

(If you need a crust or apple pie recipe, let me know and I'll post that as well...)

A Matter of Perspective

Turco and Caspian are cute. No doubt about it. Warm, smooth fur, one soft gray, the other brown, little rounded ears, inquisitive pink noses. When I first take them out of their cage and put them on the floor of the hallway, they run off to hide behind the cabinet in the corner. I'm a stranger, and though sociable by nature, they are shy at first. Then I sit on the floor and talk to them, and soon they stick their little heads out from behind the cabinet and come over to me. Since I'm no longer a towering figure, they perceive me as safe and are soon climbing all over me. Turco, the active adventurous one, climbs up my arm to my shoulder and nestles in the hood of my sweatshirt briefly before running back and forth across my shoulders. He tickles my neck in doing so, and I laugh out loud. Caspian, more of a cuddler, climbs up into the crook of my arm and lets me stroke his head before he scampers off down my leg. This day I made the mistake of wearing yoga pants, and Caspian finds the wide bottom and starts to tunnel up my pants' leg. It tickles, and, again, I laugh out loud before gently nudging Caspian back down my leg. He runs off to look for hidden food from his last outing.

I now pick Turco up off my shoulder and examine him closely. Perfect tiny little pink paws with minute nails. Silky smooth gray fur. I see tiny teeth beneath the pink nose. I am struck by the beautiful detail that God has put into the forming of these little animals, more evidence of His craftsmanship in the making of His creation. I let Turco go, and he runs to the end of the hallway where a large sheet of cardboard has been put to keep him from escaping into the rest of the house. He raises himself on his hind legs and sniffs and explores the edge of the cardboard, looking for any small space in hope of making his escape. Just for a moment, I see him from a slightly different perspective and I remember why some of my friends were horrified when I told them what I would be doing on this particular weekend. Turco and Caspian are rats...

Rats...not hamsters, not Guinea pigs, not even mice...rats...and not even white ones – a gray one and a brown one, complete with rat faces and rat tails that stick out from behind the cabinet and let me know that they are there even when I can't see all of them. When I had been asked by my neighbor if I could watch her two sons' pet rats when the family went away for a weekend, I said sure. I think she was surprised. It was only after my conversations with people in the days following that I realized that I was in the minority of people who would say “yes” to rat-sitting. Where I saw cute little furry creatures that has been perfectly formed in great detail by their Creator, complete with individual personalities, other people saw, well..., rats...

I got to feeling a little superior about my attitude toward rat-sitting. I don't know why it made me feel important to make it onto some list of “cool” people who were not afraid to play with rats. As my mind was headed in the direction of judging all those who couldn't see rats the way I did, I was brought back down to earth from my lofty pinnacle of rat-coolness by the still, small voice of their Creator. His question to me - how was my own perspective toward His other creatures? Do I always see the Creator's craftsmanship in His other creations, animal or human, the uniqueness of their individual personalities, the details of how they were made? Or do I see...rats? How delighted, or even willing, am I to just sit and let someone run all over me because that's what that person needs to do right now? Am I able to laugh out loud when my personal space is invaded by scampering people, or do I cringe and seek to avoid them? Am I consistently able to over look those little flaws and negative associations we all have attached to ourselves in some way and see the marvel of creation we are to each other? Lord, let my rat-loving ways spill over into all my relationships...

Most of all, love each other steadily and unselfishly, because love makes up for many faults.

- 1 Peter 4:8 The Voice

History that Grows on You

(Big Yellow Taxi Redux)

As I sit writing this, I have in my possession a small green leaf from an oak tree I visited this morning in a lakeside park in a small town in northwest Iowa. Under the oak tree where I picked up this leaf was a plaque with the following inscription:

Charter Oak

In l687 King James II, King of England, demanded the Colonial Assembly of the New England Colonies return their charter. Captain Joseph Wadsworth allegedly hid it in the cavity of an oak tree which acquired the name Charter Oak. The Charter Oak was blown down in a windstorm on August 21, 1856. An acorn from that tree was planted in Hartford, Connecticut, and this tree is a descendant of the original Charter Oak.

Welcome to the Storm Lake Living Heritage Tree Museum...

The small park along the shore of the lake is home to about forty mature trees, all descended from trees connected to some part in history. Each tree is accompanied by an explanatory plaque which tells more about a snippet of history than it does about the tree, but each bit of history is connected to a tree growing in the park. Each tree has been grown from a seed, a graft or a cutting of some significant tree or its descendant. The two men responsible for this project, Stan Lemaster and Theodore Klein, started the project over forty years ago and were responsible for similar plantings in other parts of the country, though the Storm Lake project is considered the largest. Some of the tree choices are obscure, but interesting. Some of my favorites include:

The Versailles Chestnut – grown from a seed from a tree at the site of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles to end World War I.

The American Sycamore Moon – grown from a seed that was carried to the moon by the Apollo 14 flight.

The Lewis and Clark Cottonwood – from a tree that the explorers camped under in 1806 in Cut Bank, Montana.

The Delicious Apple Tree – grown from the cutting of the original Delicious Apple tree.

The Isaac Newton Apple Tree – grown from a graft of the tree Isaac Newton supposedly sat under while contemplating the laws of gravity. (I now possess a leaf from this tree as well. Most of the trees were just beginning to loose their leaves...)

The following inscriptions give a feel for the obscure, but interesting ties to history:

The Ann Rutledge Maple

The parent of this tree shades the grave of Ann Rutledge in the cemetery in Petersburg, Illinois. Ann Rutledge died at an early age and was the sweetheart of Abraham Lincoln. Her death is considered to be responsible for Lincoln's melancholy disposition.

Little House Cottonwood

The tree is grown from a cutting of a cottonwood planted at their homestead by Charles Ingalls in De Smet, South Dakota. The planting of the original tree is described in Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House Book, “By the Shores of the Silver Lake”

Having visited a wide variety of museums over the years, and seeing different strategies for making history come alive, I really enjoyed the simple, hands-on, approach to connecting events and people to a living tree. To sit under an apple tree descended from the same tree Isaac Newton sat under...to touch the bark of a sycamore grown from a seed that had been to the moon and back...to stand under an oak from an oak that was growing in America when Columbus first visited this hemisphere...seems to simultaneously expand and shrink one's concept of time and history. And an added plus, it was all free. I didn't even have to pay a dollar and a half to see 'em...

They took all the trees and put 'em in a tree museum

And they charged the people a dollar and a half to see them

- Joni Mitchell, Big Yellow Taxi

Getting God Stuck in Our Heads

I've had some songs stuck in my head. A whole record album's worth. For forty years.

My first two months of my freshman year of college was spent listening to Carole King's Tapestry album, though not by choice. My roommate's boyfriend back home had given it to her as a going away gift, and she played it incessantly. Every day, multiple times. For weeks... The music, the lyrics became imbedded in my brain. To this day, I can be in a store with background music, or listening to a classic rock radio station, and hear the opening notes of any of the songs on that record and I find myself immediately transported back to that dorm room freshman year. Even before I consciously identify the song and the artist, my whole being knows it, knows the music, the lyrics and all its associations. Why? Because of all the time I had spent immersed in listening to that album.

Our minds are amazing things. What they are exposed to, listen to, are immersed in, tends to stick around for a very long time and pops up in random places in our lives. I can't say that any great or marvelous things other than pleasant memories of my college years have sprung up in my life because of my immersion in Carole King. However, in any way that I have chosen to immerse myself in God, I have experienced great blessing in the ways that His Word, His wisdom, His presence pops up in random places in my life.

How do we immerse ourselves in God in such a way that we recognize Him in those places? Like in my exposure to Carole King, time is a crucial element. Do we take the time to be in His presence? Are we sitting with Him, in prayer, in listening for His voice, in pouring out our hearts to Him, on a daily basis? 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18 says to “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” Why is this God's will for us? He knows that if we rejoice always, pray without ceasing and continually give thanks, we are connecting with Him, in relationship with Him. When we are in relationship with Him, we come to know Him, His nature, His purposes for us, His love for us. When we invest time in God, letting Him into our day on a continual basis, it becomes easier to hear His voice in the din of our everyday lives, to trust Him in the good times and in the crises.

Are we investing time in God's Word? Do we sit down and read it – with Him? Have we taken the time to be in God's Word in such a way that He can fix it into our brains so it is there to pop up in the times that the living word can minister to us in our living life? Again, time is the important element here. “Being in the Word” is just that – being in the Word. Sometimes it's reading large portions of scripture to see God's big picture. Sometimes it is delving deep into a single verse, letting the truth of that Word go deep into our minds and hearts. In either case, we spend the time and allow God to make Himself real to us through His Word.

God knows the seasons and situations of each of our lives. He knows how much time each of us has for Him. He knows that time spent with Him may take the form of singing worship songs in the shower in the morning, praying in the car driving to work, talking to Him over a basket of laundry to be folded. We may or may not have leisurely, sit-down-in-a-comfy-chair quiet times. But we do have time, all over our days, to spend on God, to be immersed in Him. And when we do choose to spend it on Him, we can experience the comfort and joy of being able to recognize the notes of His voice, His Word coming through into the random moments of our lives. We can look forward to the pleasure of having God stuck in our heads...

Unless there is within us that which is above us, we shall soon yield to that which is about us.

- Amish Proverb

(If the above post seems familiar, I've previously published it awhile back at http://trinitylink.com/blog/?p=321)

 Signature of the Maker

Grandpa's diploma from trade school

My grandfather was a carpenter, and, as he proudly would add, a cabinet maker. He had been an apprentice to a craftsman in Vienna, Austria, at the turn of the century, two centuries back now. For most of my growing up years, Grandpa, then semi-retired, had his carpentry shop in the basement of my mother's house where he continued to work until he was 92. As he got older, the size of the individual pieces of his work would get smaller, but he never stopped working, often generating multiple pieces of the the same item – footstools, jewelry boxes, Christmas creches – as gifts for his many grandchildren. 

My jewelry box

 

Inscription from my jewelry box

My own house is scattered with furniture that has been made by my grandfather. Some of these pieces were made new, entirely by him, other pieces were made around existing parts of furniture that he picked up at the side of the road on garbage night. The one common factor in all these pieces is that they are signed. Somewhere on each piece Grandpa had scrawled in pencil his name, the date, often the town where he lived when he had made the piece and sometimes who he had made it for. Later in his life, he took to writing on furniture that he had not made, but had refinished or reclaimed in some way.

Why write on a piece of furniture? I remember hearing a story as a child of a young Michelangelo, who, shortly after finishing the Pieta, overheard some men debating who they thought had actually made the piece. Michelangelo was angered that the men named other noted sculptors, but not himself. That night, he went back to the statue and carved his name boldly and very visibly across the front of the piece. It was his work. He wanted it identified as his.

Jewelry box Grandpa made for Grandma as an engagement gift

My grandfather was not quite as bold, but like an artist, he felt the need to identify his work as his own. His writing can be found on the bottom of a cabinet, under the seat of a chair, on the back of a drawer. Some of those pencil marks are now well over sixty years old. Unless someone takes the time to search for them, they might not even know that they are there. But they are present, ready to identify the object as something that was made, not manufactured, something that was, in most cases, made specifically for someone. Look for the writing. Turn the chair upside down, pull out the drawers, turn them over. The mark of the maker is there.

Inscription from heart-shaped chair

 
For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. - Romans 1:20

Field Hockey Serendipity

Serendipity - the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for.

I recently found myself kneeling in the garage with a cutting board and a butcher knife, doing surgery on a garden hose. The duct tape I had used to repair multiple leaks in a large section of it no longer held back the flow of water. I was planning on cutting away the leaky section, reinstalling the nifty replacement ends, and joining it to a newer hose that I had recently adopted from a friend who was moving out of state. The old hose, probably the Cadillac of hoses when new, was left behind by the previous owners of our first house...which we bought in 1983...

You might be wondering how I had gotten to this place, of salvaging a thirty-year-old hose, when I live in such a disposable society. I asked myself the same question. How did I get here? The answer: field hockey serendipity.

My youngest daughter got it into her head at an early age that she wanted to play field hockey. She went to the middle school camps for the sport and played all four years in high school. She became a good, solid field hockey player, with both skill and enthusiasm for the game. When it came to applying to colleges, she thought she might like to play at the college level. There were only a few colleges in the midwest that had field hockey teams – it's really an east coast sport – so there were only a few schools to look at if she wanted to be part of a team. One was a small Quaker college in Indiana. We went for a visit, and as I was listening to the campus tour guide, I realized that I knew very little about Quakers. If there was a chance my baby might end up in a Quaker school, I thought I had better find out about the spiritual climate I was sending her into. I went home, hit the library, and read up on everything Quaker. Well, daughter opted for Big Ten and big city over small town and field hockey in her final college choice, but I had been started on a journey to repairing thirty-year-old garden hoses...

After I read parts of the more doctrine-oriented texts in the Quaker section of the library bookshelf, I picked up a near-by book by Scott Savage - A Plain Life: Walking My Belief. This was an interesting account of a contemporary Quaker, living a “plain” life with his wife and children, and walking across the state of Ohio to turn in his driver's license as a symbol of stepping back from the world of technology. I looked to see if he had written any other books and found he had edited The Plain Reader: Essays on Making a Simple Life. This was a compilation of essays by a variety of people who had spoken at the Second Luddite Congress in Barnesville, Ohio in 1996. (The closest thing to a “first” Luddite Congress took place in 1812 as a reaction of traditional craftsmen against the coming industrial revolution.)

The Plain Reader changed my life. Well, not really changed it as much as brought out in me a somewhat dormant hereditary tendency to live more simply. The book introduced me to Bill McKibben and his wonderful writings encouraging a less consumer-based economy. (Hundred Dollar Holiday is a great book on simplifying Christmas. Deep Economy challenges one to imagine a gentler way of living in the material world.) The Plain Reader also introduced me to Wendell Berry, and led me to his non-fiction writings examining the spiritual and relational joys of living a simpler life, close to the land, surrounded by “family”. His novels took these same themes and wove beautiful stories of families and neighbors in a small farming town in the south. (Great reading!) Words like “green” and “simple” now attracted me to other reading, causing me to examine my life and my possessions and how I viewed “my stuff”. Already a composter and a recycler, I looked for more ways to reuse and not acquire additional things that I really didn't need. I came to appreciate more the things I do have.

I've always loved acquiring new knowledge and I'm particularly intrigued by the sometimes circuitous and unexpected pathways to that new knowledge. I did enjoy my years as a field hockey mom, watching my daughter play that fast-paced game with the ambiguous rules. But I am most grateful for the serendipitous way that field hockey lead me to a better way of seeing life. And I now have a thirty-year-old garden hose that no longer leaks...

A society in which consumption has to be artificially stimulated in order to keep production going is a society founded on trash and waste, and such a society is a house built upon sand. - Dorothy Sayers