Why I Go to Church...

Last week, Donald Miller posted a blog entitled “I Don’t Worship God by Singing. I Connect With Him Elsewhere”, in which he explained why he doesn't attend church very often. As a widely-read blogger and Christian author (Blue Like Jazz, Searching for God Knows What, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years), he received the expected amount of backlash from such a revelation, and followed up with a second post “Why I Don’t Go to Church Very Often, a Follow Up Blog”.

http://storylineblog.com/2014/02/03/i-dont-worship-god-by-singing-i-connect-with-him-elsewhere/

http://storylineblog.com/2014/02/05/why-i-dont-go-to-church-very-often-a-follow-up-blog/

I had already read both articles when my daughter e-mailed me to ask my take on the subject. (She knows I'm a big Donald Miller fan.) As much as I understood where he was coming from and agreed with some of what he had to say in his defense, I told my daughter that, for the most part, I wholeheartedly disagreed with him.

Don confesses he doesn't go to church because he is not an auditory learner, doesn't learn much about God hearing a sermon and doesn't connect with God by singing songs to him. Ironically, I do go to church despite, and in some ways, because of, the same reasons that he doesn't. I don't connect with God through music and I'm not an auditory learner. I'd rather read a sermon than listen to one. I wish we had written transcripts rather than sermon CDs and downloads. I'm tone deaf, and it takes really good lyrics and hearing a worship song about twenty times before I can begin to make it my own. Yet there I am, every Sunday... (My husband teases that it's the remnants of my Catholic upbringing - "Not going to mass on Sunday is a mortal sin!" that makes me show up every week.  No, it's not that...)

The bottom line for me has always been relationship/connection with God/Jesus. If I'm not connecting to God on my own on a daily basis (well, at least intent on a daily basis), then what's the point of any of it? I never go to church with the attitude of "Now I get to connect with God, finally! Now I get to learn!" Daily prayer (as in "talking to God" about whatever) and informal scripture study ("What's in this passage for me, Lord?") is where I connect. So why do I go to church? Partly obedience – God wants me there. I'm an off-the-scale introvert who, in another era, would be quite content living out my relationship with God in a silent monastic experience. People? To paraphrase Basil Fawlty - "This would be a perfectly fine hotel (church) if it wasn't for all these guests (people)!" The Lord has been busy breaking me of that attitude most of my Christian life. I feel God's hands on my shoulders directing me, sometimes pushing me, into church every Sunday morning. It's where I go to understand what "the body of Christ" means. There is something about being together with others in corporate worship that makes me see God's big picture. Sitting before God with “believers” in all stages of belief – babies, children, young singles, mature couples, precious friends and total strangers – gives me an understanding beyond words of what “church”, “Church”, or “CHURCH!!!” is about.

Just because I don't naturally connect with God through music doesn't mean I can't get drawn into His presence through good (or even bad) worship. I've had the experience (in small prayer groups in my past) of being in God's presence during worship that was amazingly bad musically, but incredibly rich with people wanting to be in God's presence. A paradox, I know, but it helped me separate musical ability from true worship. This was something I really needed to understand rather than just mentally check out of worship because my musical skills were nil. I see a good worship leader as someone who can step aside and let the music connect people with God's presence whether or not people, like me, are "into" the music. Fortunately, I am blessed to go to a church where those who lead worship know how to do this on a regular basis.

I'm a visual learner, a reader, not a listener. It takes a lot of concentration for me to focus on listening to a sermon. Yet, I am always glad I did. The bits that stay with me are definitely worth the effort. I sometimes later re-listen to the sermon on CD or on-line for added reinforcement. I also believe that God is present in a special way when His Word is preached and I often experience His presence during a good Biblical sermon. Why would I not want to be there for that freebie?

Lastly, I'm a big fan of spiritual disciplines (read "doing things whether you feel like it or not"). I see relationship with God as a marriage, something to be worked on and worked at and taken care of with little habits and routines that ensure the relationship is strong even when you may not "feel" the magic at the moment. Going to church is one of those routines. It's a public acknowledgment of commitment to both God and His people. It is a witness to the spiritual realm that, yeah, this is important to me, vital to my life. My daughter reminded me that in our good expectation of what God and His Holy Spirit will do for us during a church service, we have a tendency to lose sight of the Cross. We sometimes forget what God has already done for us. We forget Jesus came and died for our sins so we could have an eternal relationship with Him. When we remember this, the routine of going to church, rather than coming out of a sense of obligation, instead flows out of a sense of profound gratitude. I'm really grateful to be there...

The irony is that while God doesn't need us but still wants us, we desperately need God but don't really want Him most of the time. He treasures us and anticipates our departure from this earth to be with Him – and we wonder, indifferently, how much we have to do for Him to get by.

- From Crazy Love by Francis Chan

Pothole Evangelism

The first year of our marriage my husband and I lived in Ithaca, New York. Our families were five hours away in the New York City area, and because Jim was deep into his graduate studies, I often made the trip to visit family without him. I worked for the university, so it was easy to find company for my ride, one or more students who would gladly pay toward gas money to avoid having to take the bus home for a weekend visit. It was in the late winter of that year that I found myself driving a student to New York City.

John was a personable, talkative undergraduate. I had not known him before this trip, and we had a pleasant ride down to the city where I dropped him off. Two days later, I picked him up for the return trip upstate. Several hours into the trip, I heard this gentle voice in my head, one that I've learned to recognize over the years as a prompting from God. I usually know it's God and not me talking to myself because the sense of urging I have is to do something that I wouldn't think of doing on my own and often something I'd rather not do at all. What I was hearing this time was, “Talk to him about Me...”

Steering conversations into a particular direction is not my strong suit. My introverted self was rather enjoying John's talkative nature on the long drive, letting him carry the bulk of the conversational responsibilities. But I did sense a certain urgency that I was to engage John in a spiritual conversation. I spent the next hour unsuccessfully attempting to turn our chatter toward anything that I could introduce the word “God” into. Finally, I said, “Lord, if You want me to talk to John about You, You are going to have to give me an opening so big that I can't help but fall into it.”

I was at that moment driving on an interstate in the middle of Pennsylvania in a year the potholes were so big and numerous they eventually became an election issue. I had no sooner asked God for that big conversational opening when my car ran over what looked like two dark patches of blacktop. The resulting thud told me, no, those were, in fact, really, really big potholes. Out of the corner of my eye I saw both of my right side hub caps rolling off into the twilight. I pulled over to the side of the road, and John, sitting in the front passenger seat, got out to take a look at the damage. As he opened the door, I could hear the unmistakable hissing sound, and looking straight ahead at my dashboard, I visually observed the car slowing sinking to the right. John stuck his head back into the car, and with a horrified look on his face, informed me that I had two flat tires. I got out to take a look and saw that the potholes had been so deep both rims had hit and bent away from the tires.

Now this was back in the day when many cars still had snow tires on in the winter that were exchanged for regular tires come the spring. Jim and I would buy tires with rims so we could change and rotate the wheels ourselves. We were living in a small apartment, so we kept the regular tires, complete with rims, in the trunk of the car, along with the spare. When John informed me of the two flats, I told him, not a problem - I have three spares in the trunk, on rims. He then apologetically told me that he didn't know how to change a tire. (He just a short time earlier told me that one of the interesting things about growing up in the city was that no one in his family had a driver's license or owned a car...) I told him again, not a problem - I knew how to change flats. He offered to be the muscle if I would talk him through the process, and it wasn't long before we were back on the road. I got off at the next exit to have the underside of the car checked for damage. The mechanic put the car up on the lift, but found nothing more than a few minor scratches on the oil pan. We headed back to the interstate. John was quiet the first few minutes back on the road and then he turned to me and asked, “Do you ever think that sometimes there might be a God or someone like that looking out for you?” And there it was - the opening I had prayed for...so big that I couldn't help but fall into it...

We spent the next two hours talking about God and spiritual matters. John had lots of questions. His mother had recently gotten involved with Scientology, and while he could understand her spiritual searching, he somehow felt she was looking in the wrong place. I shared with him my experiences in searching and finding God in my own life. I told him about groups back on campus that would encourage and help him find a relationship with a God who loved him enough to provide for him in unexpected ways – like getting a ride from a girl who knew how to change flats and kept three spares in her trunk. I never saw John again after I dropped him off, though I did pray for him for a long time after that weekend.

Many years have passed since that road trip. I still get a sense of God's urging at times to talk to someone about Him. I still don't always think of doing it on my own, or have a deep desire to want to do it at all. And I'm not really much better at steering conversations in a particular direction. But I have become quick to pray - “Lord, You are going to have to give me an opening so big that I can't help but fall into it.” When I finally realized God doesn't always answer that prayer the way He did the first time I prayed it on that road in Pennsylvania, that the answer doesn't always involve potholes and flat tires, I was free to see the other ways God would work through my prayer. Ultimately, it is God who reveals Himself to the people seeking Him, drawing them into a relationship with Him. But He does use us to speak into others' lives, often whether or not we feel willing or naturally equipped to do a good job of it. Asking God for the opportunity, the opening big enough, wide enough and deep enough that we can't help but fall into it, starts positive movement in the direction of talking about Him to others. Suddenly, conversations get steered in the right direction. People hear and see the gospel in operation in another person's life, often growing hungry to see it in their own lives. Even one's own desire to see people come to know God grows. That graciously large, prayed-for opening, sometimes scary as it approaches, becomes a place of blessing for all – even when it looks big enough to swallow a car...

Concerning all acts of initiative or creation, there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. - William Hutchinson Murray, mountain climber

 

If Memory Serves Me Right...

There was a day last week when the outside thermometer read -12°. All day long. So long, in fact, I believed the thermometer had broken in the cold. When I got up the next morning, it read -4°, so I knew it was still working, but that it was, indeed, very cold out. No records were broken, though, for lowest temperature, or for longest cold streak, or for lowest highs. Yet I had only to turn on the news or pick up a paper to be drawn into the hype of the cold spell and think it had never been this cold in the Midwest in January. Why do we become so obsessed with an infrequent, yet not rare, meteorological event? Because we have such short memories...

I recently read a book I found very entertaining for just this reason. Some of the subjects of this non-fiction piece were a famous celebrity who had to fight off mobs of media wherever he went; an exceptional athlete who had a substance abuse problem and a voracious sexual appetite; a president who accomplished very little as president, loved taking vacations and was shrouded by whispers of sexual scandal; a group of financial wizards whose greed brings down Wall Street; terrorist attacks on American soil. The book also contained stories of bad decisions in the auto industry, this country's obsession with the motion picture industry, and historic Mississippi River flooding. The book? - One Summer – 1927 by Bill Bryson. The players? - Charles Lindbergh, Babe Ruth, Calvin Coolidge, anarchists Sacco and Venzetti, Henry Ford...

The book is a very informative picture of the summer of 1927 in America, told in the entertaining manner that Bill Bryson brings to all his writing. And I did enjoy it for its information and humor, but what I really loved about the book was this unintentional and oddly comforting reminder - there is nothing – NOTHING - new under the sun!

I think we all have a tendency to look around ourselves and believe all we know in our immediate surroundings – the government, the economy, natural disasters, crime, media manipulation, even people and the temperature – are growing worse than “ever before”. The truth is, we just don't remember the “ever before”. Solomon, writing in the book of Ecclesiastes, nailed it with this good reminder:

What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing of which it is said, “See, this is new”? It has been already in the ages before us. (Ecclesiastes 1:9,10)

We forget what we, as human beings living in this glorious, yet fallen world, are capable of, both the good and the bad. We forget the eternal now of the One who created and redeemed us and this glorious world, the One Who sees the summer of 1927 and the January of 2014 in one glance and is neither surprised nor overwhelmed by anything that He observes, neither the cold temperature or the outrageous behavior of us human beings. We need to be reminded that the everlasting Father is unchanging, but we and this world, like the old ad campaign for the Volkswagen Beetle claimed, stay the same but keep changing. We just forget over time our sameness in the midst of our perceived changes. We can take both comfort and hope in the fact the eternal God remembers who we are even if we don't. We can trust Him with the past, the future and even the “ever before”...

Tomorrow is another day only up to a point. - Annie Dillard

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