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