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)