A Metaphor for Ageing

Like a fireworks finale, the 15’ high “bush” in front of my house celebrates a productive summer with a splash of color. In the spring there were flowers. Later juicy red berries kept the local birds fed, including the ones nesting in its branches. I understand that the red color was always there, but was covered up by the green chlorophyll. There was too much “vim and vigga” before, but now the chlorophyll isn’t being produced any more. People are like that, too. We can do a lot of useful things when we are young, but when the vim and vigga decline some things that have always been there but were covered up by activity and excitement can come out. I’m finding stuff in my storage boxes I had forgotten about. Time to dust them off!

Famous folks I have known

I’ve known some important and even famous people. Don’t stop reading just yet; I’m not going to go about name-dropping. For one thing, that isn’t what this post is about. For another, I would run the risk that some of them might sue me for defamation of character (by association).

At the time when the path of my life crossed that of theirs, mostly they weren’t famous yet. They were just the guy that lived down the street, the woman in a class I was taking, some people in a church we were attending, someone who worked for the same organization I did: just ordinary Joes and Jills. Who knew that they would become famous? How could I have anticipated that they would write what they did, accomplish what they did, or have the positions that they later obtained?

(OK, I will do one little smidgen of name dropping, but it was someone I never actually met. You knew that the science fiction author Isaac Asimov had a doctorate in chemistry from Columbia University? Well, he did. And his mentor was the same prof who was my mentor there a few years later. I worked in the same laboratory he did. That poor prof had the unfortunate distinction of having the highest percentage of his mentees who never became practicing chemists. Asimov and me. What disappointments!)

ANYWAY, my point is that when I was associating with each of these people I had no idea “who they were”. They just seemed ordinary, but later they showed that they were anything but ordinary. This weekend I watched the movie, Made in Dagenham, a depiction of the 1968 strike by a few women working in the Ford automobile factory in Dagenham, England. They wanted to be paid as much as men were being paid for equal work. They won not only the pay raise they wanted but sparked laws in England and in the U.S. guaranteeing that right. Ladies, if you work outside the home, your paycheck reflects what these anonymous “ordinary” women accomplished.

I think this was the problem with the people of the little town of Nazareth when they refused to believe that their long-time neighbor, Jesus, was anybody special. He was just the son of the carpenter. Because they couldn’t see that he was who he said he was, he couldn’t do anything special for them. The story is in Matthew 13:53-58.

I need to stop considering people “ordinary”. Each person I know has special talents and abilities that could lead him/her to accomplish extraordinary things. And if they know Jesus and are being led by the Holy Spirit, they certainly are somebody special. Get out of the way, world, because I know a lot of people like that! They’re going places and doing things, even if they don’t look like it right now!

Don’t let me down, now, y’ hear?

Not Fair!

Washington, D.C. is having a blizzard. Here in Northern Indiana where it is SUPPOSED to snow, just a few flakes are floating to the ground like they had all the time in the world. Is this fair? No, it is not. I’m sure the folks in Virginia, D.C., Maryland, and surrounding areas would agree on that. Not fair. I may be mugged even by my best friends for saying this, but I don’t think it’s fair to me either. I like snow. Even when I have to shovel it.  I am a northerner. I have lived for forty years in places where it never snows, so I need to make up for lost time. Not fair.

So the world is not fair. We don’t get what we want all the time, even when we deserve it. And often we get what we don’t deserve.

So what can I do about it? In the case of the snow, I could just grouse about it. But not out loud so as not to lose my friends. Or I could move to Alaska, as my sister-in-law has already done. She says that’s really the best solution. Or I could learn to accept what I cannot change, and give thanks for what I do have.

This snow thing is just a whim of mine, though. Some people don’t even get what they actually need, like a warm place to be and a hot meal to warm up with when it snows. Injustices lurk in every part of human society, even here in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. Young girls are enslaved in the sex industry. Youngsters in some neighborhoods are forced into gangs, which then prey on others. We tolerate corruption in our elected leaders and in our court systems. People can’t get jobs. For some of those who have jobs, employers are unfair. Football stars make millions while school teachers preparing the next generation have to work second jobs to feed their families. “Somebody” made off with billions of dollars from the Social Security system, so seniors who paid into their retirement funds for decades may not have the money they need after they retire. Including me. Countless pre-born babies are being murdered by their own mothers. And all of that is without even touching on ISIS or sweatshop manufacturing in southeastern Asia, or the orphans in Haiti.

So what can I do about that stuff? Moving to Alaska doesn’t seem appropriate. I could decide to accept these things as stuff I cannot change, but is there anything I could do to change them? Even if all of them were changeable, I personally do not have the resources to contend for all of them. The barrage of information which arrives at my desk almost daily doesn’t move me to work, but rather to “compassion fatigue”. I get tired just thinking about it. I could give money so some organizations working for “the cause”. I could work myself. I could organize protests, send out literature, write to my congressman. But even if I worked 20 hours a day I still could not fix it all. I’m just me, still struggling after all these years with my own bad habits.

Truth is, I can’t change other people. I can’t even change myself. Only God can change people’s hearts. And even if I could change others, I couldn’t possibly solve all the world’s problems. Jesus said that the harvest is ripe, but there aren’t enough workers, so we should pray that the Lord of the Harvest would send out workers into His harvest. I can do that. I can also pray that He will show me which part of the harvest He wants me to work on. Then I need to suit up and get out there. Jesus is the Messiah, not me, but if I ask Him he’ll let me go along on some of His adventures.

At least today I won’t have to plow through snow to do it. Gotta give thanks for what I don’t have.

Pies - My Way

I have trouble following recipes. It has been a joke in our family ever since our wedding 50 years ago. Someone tells me how to make something new, or I see a good recipe in a book and I resolve to fix it just like the recipe says.

Only I never do. Afterwards I say things like, “This time I made it EXACTLY according to directions. Except that I didn’t have any cloves so I used ginger”. Or “My oven always cooks things faster than it should, so I took it out sooner.” Or “I don’t like garlic that much, so I used less.” In other words I didn’t make it like the recipe. I don’t recall ever having made anything like the recipe said.

This afternoon I decided I was going to break that pattern. Pumpkin pies were called for, so I decided I would follow exactly the directions on the can of pumpkin. And I did. Except that instead of mixing the spices and stevia into the pumpkin I mixed them into the beaten eggs instead, because it seemed like less work and required one less bowl that would need to be washed. I didn’t realize what I had done until afterwards. Once again I had not followed directions.

Something in me rebels at following someone else’s directions. I’ve never been fired for this, not even when I was doing biochemical research, because I kept records of what I did and justified the changes. It is true that as a missionary in Costa Rica I was reproached by my supervisor for having the audacity to lead a grandmother to the Lord when I was supposed to be concentrating my attention on university students. But then, there she WAS, and she wanted to know JESUS.

I think my rebellion against recipes and laws in general is a condition common to all of humanity. I want to do it my way. Like the song, you know? “I did it myyy way.” And that’s supposed to be so great. That’s creativity, that’s how we do things better and better. Just yesterday I posted a piece on my website (www.treasuresnewandold.org) in favor of not establishing one best way to do things.

And yet, wanting to do it our own way can get us into trouble when it is God’s way we want to ignore. And we do. All we like sheep just go wandering away in pursuit of our own plans and goals, either ignoring or willfully flouting what He says about our purpose in life, our relationships, our behavior. “And the Lord has laid on Jesus the sin of us all.”

It boils down to knowing the difference between the recipe you can play with (think potato salad) and the one you really shouldn’t (think soufflé). Our relationship with God is not based on our keeping all the rules, fortunately, but rather on the sacrifice Jesus made for us on the cross. Nevertheless, maintaining a relationship with Him while deliberately flouting what He has told us to do isn’t going to work very well. He didn’t make the rules for His own benefit, but for ours. He knew what would make us happy and what would make us miserable and He told us how to get to happy. “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”

Anyway, my creative adjustments to the pie recipe seem not to have ruined the results. The local population has expressed a desire to eat them anyway, in spite of the burned spot on the top of one of them. That happened because I was going to leave them in for the stipulated number of minutes. Good job that I took them out “early”.

So much for recipes.

Blooming in the snow

We’ve had a long, cold winter in northern Indiana this year. Folks have been grousing about it forever. It even snowed on April 14, and how unfair is that?

But way back on March 25 I looked out my window toward the back of a neighbor’s house and saw these forsythia bushes in full bloom. In the snow. The forsythia we have wasn’t even showing signs of life (and even now hasn’t yet bloomed). The crocus hadn’t come up. Nothing else was looking springy.

They seemed to be saying that their contract stipulated that they were to come out at the end of March, so there they were, as promised. What everybody else was doing was unimportant. The weather was irrelevant.  They had their calling. This is what they were created to do, and they were faithful.

It didn’t even matter that as far as they could know, nobody would see them. The man who rents the house doesn’t get out into the back yard. Except for me, the nosy neighbor, nobody would care if they bloomed or not. But I got the idea that they had bloomed just for me. They were my encouragement that spring was coming, a bit of color in the black and white world.

They were also my encouragement to get on with what I was called to do. Even though I would be the odd-ball doing something weird. Even though the “time was not right”. Even if nobody much cared whether I did it or not or even noticed. It might encourage someone, who knows? Or I could just get the satisfaction of being myself.

What have you been created for? What are you called to do? Are you doing it?

Maybe the climate isn’t right. Maybe you’re the only one who would be doing it. Maybe nobody would notice if you did. What if none of that was important? What if you were true to yourself?

What if you were the encouragement someone needed to keep them going?

Would it be worth it to bloom in the snow?

The cheese, the baguette and the papaya

Once upon a time, more years ago now than I care to admit in public, I received a phone call that led me into experiencing a miracle.

I was relaxing at home in Costa Rica with our children, while my husband was away accompanying some North American young people who had come for a short term missions experience. The phone call was from my husband, who told me that the whole crew was on the way to our house for a meal. Nobody had warned me about this, and I had less than half an hour to prepare.

We were used to offering hospitality, which I suppose is why Edwin felt free to invite them over to eat, since he logically assumed that I would have something to serve. Unfortunately I didn’t. A quick inventory of the kitchen produced less than a pound of cheese, a day-old baguette, and a papaya. That wouldn’t be much to serve two full carloads of guys, especially since they had been outside working all day and would have impressive appetites. My first thought was to run over to the little corner grocery store and get a few things, but that was impossible since it was Saturday afternoon and the store was closed. I couldn’t drive off to the supermarket, either, because Edwin had the car.

So I set the table nicely, as though there would be some sort of banquet, and started cutting up the papaya into cubes. Fortunately papayas in Costa Rica are large. Then I sliced the baguette, almost paper thin, and laid a small square of cheese on each piece. I thought that if I toasted them in the oven it would not be so noticeable that the bread was a bit stale, or that there wasn’t really much cheese. Actually the fact that the bread was old and a bit dry made it easier to cut thin slices.

The guests arrived, and began guzzling the fresh lemonade I had made from the fruit of the tree we had in the back yard. I kept slicing that baguette and the cheese, toasting them, and putting them out on the table. I kept two cookie sheets busy for quite some time producing these miniature sandwiches. Finally the demand slowed down, and there were a couple left uneaten on the serving plate. Everyone declared that they were comfortably full. A short time later they were off on their next adventure.

As I cleaned up I suddenly realized what had happened. I am not sure this long after the fact how many people there were, but ten is the most likely number, plus our little family of five. Everyone ate and was satisfied, and I still had bread, cheese, and papaya left over.  

Where it came from, I don’t know. All I know is that when I went to cut more bread and cheese there was more bread and cheese to cut.

Now when I read the stories of Jesus feeding the five thousand and the four thousand, they don’t seem strange at all. Whatever He wants to do can be done with whatever He provides.