In the Garden Update – Almost April

(Peas, spinach, broccoli rabe...or not...)

St. Patrick's Day evokes thoughts of parades, corned beef, and green beer for some, but for me it marks the day I usually officially start my vegetable garden. Peas, spinach and broccoli rabe (rapini), my favorite cool weather crops, don't mind being sowed directly in the cold ground as long as it's not frozen and the winter mushiness has dried into a workable soil. This year, with April only a day away, the most positive thing I can say about my gardening

Compost Island

conditions is that the snow is gone. (Gone from the 

garden, not from the yard...) St. Patrick's Day has come and gone, and my soil is still frozen except for a very muddy top layer of only a few inches. I've also got bags of my neighbor's leaves under my deck, waiting to be layered with manure in my

mostly empty composters to be turned into midsummer's compost. (No trees in our yard, so I actually ask people for their leaves.) Said composters are presently on a small island surrounded by water from melting pond ice and sump pump run-off.

So my gardening season is off to a slow start...

An advantage of the slow start is that the seeds I plant later than usual will come up quicker with the rapid warmth that (often) comes in April. The downside, unless the early summer remains cool as well, is that the peas, spinach and broccoli rabe will flower and go to seed before their prime as soon as the heat hits. Timing is crucial now, and as soon as the soil is workable (which means thawed at least six inches and relatively dry), I will immediately sow my seeds for the above mentioned plants in the ground and hope for the best.

Mud-capped frozen garden

The beginning of April is also when I begin to start the not-so-cool(lettuce, random herbs) and warm weather (tomatoes, peppers, any flowers I want to set out in pots) seed indoors. Since I don't put these plants in the ground until the end of May, an early April sowing indoors gives these plants about eight weeks of growing before they are ready to be transplanted. The lettuce I will transplant into the garden after about four weeks, when the seedlings are about two inches tall. (Lettuce likes it cool, but not cold. Any herbs I'll eventually transplant into pots on the deck where they'll grow all summer and be brought inside to be used over the winter.)

The sun is shining today, and the temperature is near 60°, so there is hope the ground will thaw, the soil will dry out and the start to the gardening season is just around the corner. Time to get dirty...

(If this is the year you've decided to finally become a vegetable gardener, you might be interested in reading my blog posts from May 14 through May 20, 2013, where I outlined the techniques of square foot gardening, a method of gardening that gets you thinking about planting things in squares rather than the more traditional rows. It's a garden that is easy to weed, easy to water, and once the soil is prepared, easy to keep going.)

Now is the winter of our discontent, made glorious summer by this sun of York

- Richard III, William Shakespeare

Me(n)tal Shelving

My husband grew up in a neat,organized home. Whenever things got a little cluttery, items were collected, bagged and donated to a worthy cause. I, too, grew up in a neat, organized home. Whenever things got a little cluttery, my grandfather would build another wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling closet. Needless to say, the working definition of “a neat, organized home” was a subject of much debate in the early days of our marriage...well, O.K....still is. My husband's idea of neatness focuses on what you can let go of; my idea of neatness focuses on how you store the things you can't let go of just yet...

I think it was my grandfather who most influenced my “neat,organized” paradigm, partly by providing all those closets. In my childhood home, three of the four bedrooms each had one, with another two in the basement. Things were neatly stored, usually labeled, saved because you never knew when you might need something. Grandpa also had his carpentry shop in the basement of our house, neatly organized, filled with wood salvaged from old furniture, boxes of old hardware waiting to be repurposed, 60 years before the word was trending. After his death, my mother, telling the story of cleaning out the basement, described taking out bushel after bushel of boxes neatly labeled “broken locks”, “old hinges”, “old nails”, etc. She put a few bushel baskets out at the curb each garbage day. After she had dragged 54 bushels to the street, she said she just stopped counting as she cleaned out the rest of Grandpa's old shop. We had been married several years by this time, and my husband said that it was one of the scariest stories he had ever heard. He realized that day what he had married into – a powerful family heredity of hanging onto stuff...

Grandpa was gone by the time we bought our first house, so I was on my own to provide storage. I built bulk wooden shelving in the basement, and that took care of most of my clutter. Our next house, however, was a huge challenge. Never having lived in a house without a basement before, I found myself in a ranch on a crawl space with only a small utility room. In serious danger of having the contents of previous basements under every bed in the house, I discovered the joys of metal shelving. Three in the small utility room, more in the garage, I coped with having a place to store my stuff. In our third and present house, we again have a large unfinished basement, this time, filled with metal shelves. Much to my husband's relief, the above-basement living area is relatively “neat and organized”, largely due to these shelves in the basement and garage, providing storage of that stuff that might come in handy some day. But more importantly, my gracious, patient husband also has learned to appreciate the shelves as providing a way station for those things that his wife hasn't quite decided what to do with yet.

My paradigm for storage in my physical world is really just a reflection of the paradigm I have for my mental processes, for storing information and organizing my beliefs. I have metal shelving in my basement, in my garage; I have mental shelving in my brain, in my heart. I'm not a black and white thinker or decision maker. I have to put stuff in the basement for a period of time before I decide whether to allow it a permanent place in storage or plan to give it away the next time the purple heart-disabled veteran-epilepsy foundation person calls. In the same way, my mind needs to have that way station where I decide what to do with things spiritual, intellectual, cultural, political. I keep them on my mental shelf. I put ideas, concepts, dilemmas on my mental shelving, taking them down when I'm feeling introspective, turning them over in my mind, examining their worth and staying power, deciding whether I keep them, find a permanent place for them, or whether I let go of them, get rid of them.

There are all kinds of stuff found on my mental shelf. Am I a democrat or a republican or some green hybrid of the two? Independently undecided – back on the shelf... How do I really feel about the internet? Is the instant access to so many more things worth reading outway the instant access to so many more mindless distractions? Still wrestling with that one, still on-line... Does the big bang theory in fact say more about the book of Genesis than it does about Stephan Hawking? Is The Big Bang Theory worth watching for its superbly clever scientific nerdy humor, or is it just another tribute to television's sex culture? Still pondering both big bangs...

Matters of faith have always taken up a good amount of space on my mental shelf. Years ago, the inerrancy of scripture had a place on the shelf. After careful examination, it moved off the shelf to a permanent location, a definite keeper. The sovereignty of God was briefly on the shelf in the early days of my faith exploration, though it quickly became another keeper. The complementarian/egalitarian debate is still on the shelf, though one of them is always boxed up and ready to be tossed. I just haven't taken it out to the trash yet. The shelf has a large collection of intelligent design–evolution–creationism pieces sitting on it that I play with, examining each, fitting them together in different ways to see how they do or don't fit before putting them back on my mental shelf. The problem of evil has occupied a place on the shelf for as long as I can remember. I never know what to do about that one...

It is a great relief for me to know that in this world I don't have to have everything figured out and understood. I'm rarely certain about anything, and I'm never certain about anything quickly. I appreciate the metal shelves that have given me time to figure out what to do with old glass jars and those really great cardboard boxes. I appreciate the mental shelves that have given me time to figure out what to do with the remnants of my substantial collection of Catholic thought and to examine the still undiscovered purposes of prayer yet to be answered. Both sets of shelves bring me (and my spouse) a measure of peace as I sort through my stuff, and I consider myself blessed that I have both a patient God and a patient husband...

All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on. - Havelock Ellis

Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff. - Frank Zappa

 

Happy Pi Day!

I'm not quite sure how it started - probably something to do with the husband and father being being a scientist who loves math - but we are a family that celebrates the nerd holidays. The two biggies are Pi Day, March 14 (3.14), and Mole Day, October 23 (10²³). There exists a myriad of others – Stars Wars Day (May 4, as in “May the 4^th be with you”), Tolkien Reading Day (March 25, commemorating the downfall of Sauron in The Lord of the Rings) – I could go on and on - but March 14 and October 23 have always been the big ones in our household, probably because there are traditional foods associated with those days.

Pi, or ϖ, is that mathematical constant, 22/7, often expressed as the decimal, 3.14159..., the number that represents the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. An irrational number, calculated to over one trillion digits beyond its decimal point, never ending and never settling into a permanent repeating pattern, it is affectionately “nicknamed” 3.14, hence its association with March 14. And on March 14 we celebrate pi with pi(e). Yes, I was that mom who baked pies for high school math classes...at my kids' request. Well, the kids are on their own now (maybe at Baker's Squares somewhere today?), but I couldn't let the day go by without acknowledging it in some way. Below is one of my favorite pie recipes, and if the market has good pears today, one that I will be baking for tonight...

Pear Crumble Pie

6 medium Barlett pears

3 tablespoons lemon juice

½ cup sugar

2 tablespoons flour

1 teaspoon grated lemon peel (optional)

1 unbaked 9-inch pie crust

Crumble Topping

Cut and peel 5 pears. Sprinkle with lemon juice. Mix sugar, flour, and lemon peel; stir in pear slices. Put into pastry shell. Cut remaining pear into 6 – 8 neat slices. Arrange on top of pie in a pinwheel pattern. Sprinkle with Crumble Topping. Bake at 400º for 45 minutes or till pears are tender. Serve warm.

Crumble Topping: Mix ½ up flour, ½ cup sugar ½ teaspoon ginger and ½ teaspoon cinnamon, ¼ teaspoon mace or cloves. Cut in 4 tablespoons butter or margarine until crumbly.

 

Enjoy! And if I remember, come October 23, Mole Day (commemorating that great basic measuring unit of chemistry, Avogadro's Number (6.02 x 10²³), I'll share my recipe for mol(e)asses cookies...

...yep, nerds...

      A happy memory never wears out.  - Amish proverb

                           

The Myth of Fingerprints

My daughter attended a work-related conference last year, and as part of the conference festivities, there was a booth where two people, with headphones and sunglasses on, would generate a written personality profile of a person just by looking at them. No questions were asked, no verbal interaction between the two profile writers and their subjects, just visual observation. The profile they wrote of my daughter was startlingly accurate. She posted it on facebook, and her friends agreed – eerily dead on. I saw the profile and thought, ''The Barnum Effect strikes again...”

I had, myself, run into the Barnum Effect (also know as the Forer Effect*) in a testing and measurements psychology class as an undergraduate. The professor who taught the class, wanting to familiarize the students with the questions and structures of different tests, would frequently give us pieces of personality tests to respond to, have us hand them in, promising to eventually give us feedback on our responses. He came into class one day and announced that our test results were in and he handed each of us a sealed envelope with our name on it. There were murmurs of agreement as we read our personality profiles. He asked for a show of hands as to how many of us felt the profiles were reasonably accurate. Most of the class raised their hands. He then asked us to be vulnerable to each other and exchange our profiles with the person sitting next to us. A new wave of murmurs, louder this time, rose in the class as we discovered that each of us had received the exact same personality profile...

The entertainer P. T. Barnum (“We've got something for everyone.”) was a successful businessman partly because he recognized that people were largely more alike and had more in common with each other than they liked to believe. He found those commonalities and focused on them, making people feel like he really knew who they were and what they wanted in entertainment. My daughter's personality profile experience was similar in that the profile was general enough overall to fit a great number of other people, but the visual cues the two observers were provided with in the one-on-one situation were just enough to personalize her profile to make it really seem they had assessed who she was.

So, now we find ourselves in a personality paradox. We like to think of ourselves as unique individuals, human “snowflakes”, no two alike. And so we are. The Psalmist tells us a truth about our Creator's making of us:

For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother's womb.

I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well.

My frame was not hidden from you,when I was being made in secret,

intricately woven in the depths of the earth. (Psalm 139:13-15)

Everything I know in the craft realm about “knitting” and things “intricately woven” implies a loving creation of one-of-a-kind masterpieces. We've only to look to our fingerprints to see, like a snowflake's dendrites, they are ours alone. But if we stare too long at the tips of our fingers, we loose sight of the other great truth of our creation, that we each share a great commonality with the living God, and therefore with each other. Even before Adam and Eve shared a rib, the writer of Genesis tells us:

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness...So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

(Genesis 1:26, 27)

 

And in case we still don't get it, the apostle Paul spelled it out like this: 

 

Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust (Adam), we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven (Christ). (1 Corinthians 15:49)

Think about it. Some of the brightest moments you may have experienced in interacting with others has probably come when a shared commonality is found. “Hey, I love that, too!” “Yeah, I feel like that a lot also. I thought I was the only person who did...” “You mean you have doubts about that, too?” “Why don't we get together some time and we can both __________ together?" (Fill in the blank...)  As good as we may feel when we are lauded for our unique abilities and talents, or love the unique qualities we see in others that we ourselves may not share, there is nothing quite like finding the kindred spirit, the person we recognize as having some of the same internal pieces we do.

So we need to embrace the paradox, acknowledging we are unique creations, sharing a common blueprint. We are one big family of siblings who are made to all bear a striking resemblance to our heavenly Father as well as looking more and more like our Brother and Savior every day. And do we? Can we look past our fingerprints and see ourselves in each other, the image bearers that we were created to be? 

 

And she thinks "most people don't talk enough about how lucky they are

Most people don't know what it takes for me to get through the day

Most people don't talk enough about the love in their hearts"

But she doesn't know most people feel that same way.

- from “Most People” by Dawes

He says there's no doubt about it

It was the myth of fingerprints

I've seen them all and, man,

They're all the same - from “All Around the World” by Paul Simon

*See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forer_effect if you are interested in knowing more.)

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