I Shall Not Be Moved

     There is a song in old Baptist hymnals (and most of them are) "I Shall Not Be Moved".  It is a wonderful thing to be immovable in the Lord's cause, but most of us prefer to be immovable in our own plans and preferences.  In two churches in which I have been a member there were pastors who decided they would stay at that church until they retired.  From the fruitfulness of their latter ministry, I would guess this was regardless of God's plan for them.  These pastors considered the reason only a few aging die hards remained at the church evidence of the members' worldliness rather than the pastors' selfishness.  If it is foolish for  Christians to make plans without being flexible to the Lord's leading, it is dangerous for pastors. Biblically they have greater accountability.
     Sometimes the flock is not following faithfully because the pastor is not leading anywhere.  There is a move in Zumba in which the outer foot makes a circle around the body while the inner pivots in place; if the pastor has anchored one foot to his retirement plan, he can only lead in a circle.  I love to study the Bible verse by verse, chapter by chapter, but this method can sometimes become self-propelled rather than Spirit filled and the pastor is spared the trouble of needing leading.   There is a saying, "Give an alcoholic a rut and he'll move in furniture."  A spiritual version might be "Give a Christian a comfort zone and he'll nail his cross to the floor."  It is our nature to lay down roots rather than take up our cross. 
     I love my town, my home, my work and my life, but I hope I love God more.  The older I become, the harder it is to be flexible, not just physically, but in every area.  After Israel's sin with the golden calf, God told Moses He would send an angel to lead them instead of Himself since He might feel compelled to destroy them. (Ex. 33:5)  Moses refused to go anywhere unless God went with them.  That is the kind of immovability I want to have.  God's leading should be the only place from which I shall not be moved.

The End of the Trip

     In Guatemala I had another one of those odd answers to prayer like I blogged in "Why I Stopped giving God Advice".  In general I think it's best to avoid countries whose name begins with the sound "guat".  It sounds vaguely like something you might be doing later. We took precautions while in Guatemala to avoid getting "traveler's distress".  We packed Pepto Bismol, ate only in well known restaurants and drank only bottled water, but towards the end of the trip we both succumbed nonetheless.  Reed and another inspector came down with it a few hours after eating lunch together. Even though they had eaten at the same restaurant earlier in the week without incident and hadn't ordered the same thing for lunch, the timing was too close to be coincidental.  That meant the one weekend we had to spend in Guatemala was spent mostly in the hotel room.
      Because I took the same precautions as Reed and ate lunch only at the hotel, I wasn't too worried. Besides, my system hovers over the other end of the regularity spectrum and gets worse when we travel, apparently my colon thinks it is on vacation too.  In my case Connie isn't short for Constance, it's short for constipated.  I practically have to take a laxative to pass gas. I had a more gradual onset of Montezuma's revenge (or whatever forgotten Mayan ruled that part of Central America).  At first it was a refreshing change.  I'm the only person I know who looked forward to that part of a colonoscopy prep.  By the Tuesday before we were to leave, it was unrefreshing enough to keep me awake part of the night.  The next day the cramping had stopped but, well but(t)'s the issue... I couldn't sit down comfortably in any position.  I would have given most of our remaining quetzales for some Tucks pads but we couldn't find any and, believe me, we looked. We hardly found any drug stores and the few we found had only Pepto Bismol and Preparation H, both of which we already had. High school Spanish didn't cover that particular dialogue and I certainly couldn't pantomime the complaint, so we gave up.
     The next day we would have 20 hours of sitting in airplanes and airports so I prayed that I would not notice the problem.  It seemed like a harmless and appropriate prayer at the time, but the answer turned out to be one of those weird ones God frequently drops in my life.  Early the next morning I was "sitable" but didn't know how I would do in the long haul.  As I was lined up for one of the customs procedures involved in leaving the country I picked up my briefcase, which was heavier than normal because of the borrowed laptop, and tweaked my back.  The spasm stopped just short of the kind that take your breath away.  Problem solved.  I was no longer noticing the nether pain.  Reed carried both briefcases after that.  Our long day of flying went uneventfully.  I was reminded of God's goodness to answer prayer and His inscrutable sense of humor. That was the end of the trip.  I can't wait to see how God answers some of my other prayers.

Good Idea at the Time

     When the spare sons lived with us and were describing some past or present harebrained idea and its results I often used the expression, "I'm sure it seemed like a good idea at the time."  It is 11 p.m. Sunday night and I have no bedroom door.  No that's wrong, I have two bedroom doors, they are stacked against the walls of the dining room.  One has just been removed, the other is stalling the installation by having a frame one inch taller than its buddy in the dining room.  Installing it at 9 p.m. seemed like a good idea at the time.
      Reed used a reciprocating saw to downsize the header.  He said that wouldn't be as messy as the skill saw.  Boy am I glad.  Half the house needs dusting including a shirt I was planning to return to Kmart, I'd hate to think how messy it would have been with the skill saw.  Fortunately I am all practiced up on dusting having just done it Thursday.  Lucky for me our company for our Memorial Day barbeque is just my sister and her family, she is not bothered at all by the sight of dust.  Another stroke of good fortune is that our son and the dog he is watching for the weekend are at a cabin tonight.  And, since it is nighttime, using the dining room table as a work bench is not a problem.
     I have learned through the years that for any house, yard or vehicle project I should double both the time and expense estimate.  Now I know I should double the mess estimate also.  I am very thankful Reed  can remodel and is fairly good at cleaning up after himself.  I am thankful to have a house that looks nice in spite of the fact that nothing was square or well built. I am thankful I don't have to work early in the morning.  Most of all I am thankful I married my "adooring" husband, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Today I am Free

     In the distant past wars were fought over the next hill and in nearby pastures and at the back door, in the geographically distant present they still are.  As much as I love bonding over the barbeque and the first batch of homemade ice cream of the summer, this holiday is not about making memories for my family; it is for remembering those who cannot make them, who exist now only in memories.  It is easy to lose that amidst the picnics, house projects and sales, so I wrote the following poem to remind myself.

                                   Today I am Free

                                   Today I am free
                                   to remember or forget
                                   soldiers whose names I do not know
                                   who died in battles long ago
                                   and those who perish yet,
                                   in middle eastern sands
                                   or other distant lands.

                                   Today I am free
                                   to berate or celebrate
                                   the U.S.A. with all its flaws,
                                   unfair taxes, unjust laws,
                                   who excludes the God who made her great.
                                   I fight government's grasping touch
                                   because I have so much.

                                   Today I am free
                                   to honor or condemn;
                                   to sit in safety and abhor
                                   the very thought of death and war,
                                   or proudly be American
                                   like those who bought my liberty.
                                   Today I am free.


    May 2009

Little Ol' Me

     I used to think I was humble because I was shy.  Eventually I learned the two have nothing in common.  A person might be shy because they are always focused on what other people think about them, a humble person is thinking about other people. I also used to think I might be humble because I was self deprecating but that isn't it either.  Humility is not focusing on your shortcomings, it is not focusing on yourself at all.  I like humble people because their selflessness makes a lot more room in the conversation for me to talk about myself.  The more I learn about humility, the more I realize I don't have it.  I want to be notably humble. I want to master humility.  And that is the problem, you do not become humble by pursuing humility, you become humble by pursuing God. A humble person probably wouldn't blog but I think we've already settled my humility status.

                                                                          Little Ol' Me

God Told Me

     Some Christians use the phrase "God told me..." as if they were Facebook friends or texting on a regular basis.  God did text, but He had it all combined into the same message and He forwarded it to everyone.  It's called the Bible.  For the most part that is how He chooses to keep in touch.  We are free to message Him any time, but His response is not as obvious as an audible voice or written word.  The thoughts He impresses in our minds through the study of His word and illumination of His Spirit are seldom about such trivial things as where to park the car or what to buy at the mall.  And some Christians claim to have just this kind of mundane guidance.  It seems dangerous to me.  Claiming to speak from God is very close to claiming to speak for God.  At the very least it is a way to exonerate yourself from any bad decisions by claiming they were all God's ideas, like Adam claiming the woman God gave him was what led him to sin. 
     Daily guidance comes from the daily discipline of studying His word.  Listening to the thoughts in your head is easier but much more likely to be just your own thoughts, not God's.  He is not much interested in making things easy for us.  At least, that's what He told me.

Rubber Meets Road

     Most of us have heard the expression "You can't judge a book by its cover", we often use it to teach our children not to judge others by their appearance.  The biblical version of that adage is "man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart".  (I memorized it from the KJV with "looketh", but it just seemed silly to insert the "eth" on a computer).  The problem is it is very hard to do.  I find judgmental thoughts entering my mind and often trickling out my mouth on a horrifyingly regular basis.  Where the rubber met the road for me was when that misjudged person was my son.  We didn't allow our children to get tattoos or body piercings which was easy with the oldest two, who didn't want them, but our youngest chose another path.  In his teens Tracy chose to exert his individuality by dressing like all the other skateboarders with the baggy, droopy pants, puffy untied shoes etc.  The one bonus was it was easy to tell if he was wearing clean underwear.  People who didn't know him thought he was a punk.  Those of us who did, knew him as a nice boy who chose to dress like a punk.
     But when he turned 18 and no longer needed our signed permission, Trace got both piercings and tattoos.  The holes in his ears weren't too hard to get used to, ears close up fairly easily if he should change his mind and I didn't have to look him in the ears.  I told Trace he was welcome to get tattoos as long as I got to pick the designs.  I chose bunnies and butterflies.  Actually, his first tattoos were fairly small crosses.  What kind of Christian mother would object to that?  His first big tattoo was the outline of flames on his arm.  I told him he might as well have had "Welcome to the Dollar Store" tattooed on his arm because, with a tat like that, it was the only kind of place that would hire him.  That bit of parental prophecy went far astray, he is now an auto mechanic and garages are not known for being fastidious about their dress code.  By now tattoos have become so mainstream I fully expect someday to look up from an operating table at my tattooed brain surgeon. 
     Meanwhile he had his tongue pierced, has three studs, and has not had any of the infection or dental problems I dutifully warned him about.  But for me the rubber really met the road when he had his lower lip pierced.  There was no way to look him in the face and not see THE LIP.  In glaring mothervision, I saw my baby with a black booboo under his lip.  I was torn between wanting to rip it out or kiss it and make it go away.  For a while I tried holding a book or my hand in front of the lower part of my face when I looked at him so I didn't have to see THE LIP, but then I realized that he felt I was rejecting him and not THE LIP.  It was finally time to grow up and practice what I had been preaching.  I, who knew my son so well, knew that he was so much more than THE LIP.  He was still the sweet, gentle boy that I had loved and enjoyed for 18 years, he was just that sweet, gentle boy with a hole in his lip.
     It is so much more fun to figure out what other people need to change than changing yourself, but God is more interested in our fundamental character than our fun meter.  I have learned a lot of things about God, and about myself, from my children.  May they continue to find me reachable and teachable. That pierced lip pierced me. Hello road.

Hitting Bottom

     This about not about my discipline methods, it is about addiction.  I believe there is some fallacy in the idea of letting an addict "hit bottom".  Certainly those who love an addict shouldn't intervene to separate the addict from the negative consequences of their addiction, calling in sick for them when they are drunk or hungover for example.  The negative consequences are what give an addict incentive to stop, the more the not merrier.  There are times when someone steps away from a loving family and all they once valued to pursue drugs or alcohol.  The perverse pervasiveness of sin is powerful enough to do that to any of us.  Those individuals can "hit bottom", come to the end of themselves and realize they need to return to what they had before everything went wrong.
     Where I think the idea of letting an addict hit bottom goes astray is in assuming they have something else to go back to.  When all a person has known is instability, immorality, amorality or abuse, hitting bottom is more likely to lead to suicide than sobriety.  You have to have somewhere to go besides the bottom and many have no idea where or what that may be. That is why it is vitally important that Christians don't ignore the "riff raff" we see living in the streets.  They are already close to, if not at, the bottom.  They need to know there is somewhere to go from there, that there is hope in Christ.
     They may know, if only from watching television, that there are people whose lives are very different from their own, but we don't behave like people we have heard of; we think, speak and act like the people we know and grow up around.  For example, I know from television what a southern or English accent sound like, but I speak like a person from the western U.S. because that is where I grew up.  Even if I moved to the south or England, I would still speak the way I do now.  Addicts at the bottom will not automatically know how to change their lives.  The default setting of their lives is still set pretty low.  Even knowing Christ does not make an immediate change in that default setting.  Knowing how to show love to a person even though they are still an addict requires patience and wisdom.
     I have had opportunities to experience this with some of my spare sons and discovered that the main thing God gave me to help these young men was not spiritual strength and wisdom, it was the humility that came from my own failures and love.  Fortunately, God  not only called me to love them, but gave me the love to do it with.  God is good that way.  He always equips those He calls. And now He has given me the love to let them go and trust God to finish what He started, which is the same thing I do for all my children.  Few addicts need assistance to get to the bottom, many of them started there.  I want to let help them  hit "the top"--heaven.

Sour Grapes

     I have noticed that the older a Christian becomes, the sooner the Lord is coming back.  I will most likely feel the same way when I graduate from senior citizen to elderly.  I think one of the reasons older Christians feel this way is because they can look back over their lifetime and see increasing spiritual and moral decay in the world.  This has certainly been true in my lifetime.  When I was a child in the 1960's there was a common standard of right and wrong, a shared moral code.  This code was questioned in the free love 70's, probably because right and wrong had been separated from their source, the Bible.  Hippies thought the rule makers were the establishment, actually the rule maker was God. This was followed by moral relativism which questions not just the standard and source of right and wrong but the existence of truth itself.  Even worse than questioning the reality of truth is the inclusive view that truth varies from one person to another.  Even though most people would realize the ridiculousness of an airline that let each passenger determine the route and destination, many still believe this will work on a spiritual level for our final destination.  No matter how sincerely the passengers believe, the destination is determined by the pilot.
     However, this belief that the Lord is coming soon because the world is worse than ever before has been around since the beginning of the church, although I hope not in the ages of great revivals, and Christ has not yet returned.  It is Biblical to live in expectation of the imminent return of Christ, but I hope when my twilight years come my expectancy springs from my joy in the Lord, not my discouragement with the world.  It reminds me of  the Aesop's fable of the fox and the grapes. After the fox made many "fruitless" attempts to reach a cluster of delicious looking grapes he minimized the loss by deciding they must be sour grapes. It made it easier for the fox to walk away.  I do not want to leave this world with this sour grapes attitude. I hope to be ready when my time comes even though I am still enjoying life and have things I am looking forward to.
     I once had a pastor who said regularly from the pulpit that he had nothing left to do on earth and couldn't imagine why the Lord hadn't yet taken him home.  He said the best thing that could happen to him would be getting hit by a truck.  He said this in front of his 11 year old daughter. Imagine growing up with that message in your head.  I do not want to yearn for the beauty of heaven because I can only see the ugliness of the earth.  The blessings of this life are a foretaste of heavenly life, an appetizer so to speak.  You don't make the main course more appealing by spitting on the appetizers.  Christ died on the cross because of the joy set before him, not to escape His suffering in this world.  It is easy to let go of sour grapes.  I hope I can let go when the taste of life is still sweet as chocolate in my mouth.

Things I Wish the Bible Said

     When my kids were growing up and I was teaching them to apply the truths of the Bible to their lives, I noticed it was a couple truths short.  It would have been so handy for me if the God had added a couple more commandments:  Thou shalt not drink alcohol.  Thou shalt not gamble.  No thinking required, just follow the list. Those additions would have made my job as a mother so much easier as my kids were getting ready to leave home, but after spending all those years teaching them to interpret the Bible literally I was in no position to extemporize.  Since the whole theme of the Bible is that God  is in control of everything, gambling seems contraindicated because it is predicated on chance or luck, but there is no command against it.  And although the Bible prohibits drunkenness it does not forbid drinking alcohol, no matter how badly we want it to.  For the most part God wants us to do the hard work of applying the principles of the Bible to our specific situations instead of relying on a list, even when it involves alcohol.  I did warn them that there are alcoholics on both sides of our family and that the safest course would be abstinence but they would have to make their own choice when they were old enough to drink.  A good old commandment would have been so much easier.
     There is a handy verse in Leviticus 19 about not getting a tattoo, but I was honest enough to admit to my children that the context was referring to pagan grieving rituals.  Done in by the context rule! Also the verse immediately preceding it (which non Hassidic parents never quote) is about not shaving the hair at the sides of your head and the trimming of beards. After training my children all through their years at home to rely on God's word alone as their authority of faith and practice, I should not be disappointed if they do.  My children have made their own decisions and have not become alcoholics, gamblers or pagans.  Listless Christians rely on lists.  Even the lost like lists.  Those who choose the labor of study and application of Bible truths have more than lists, they have light.

Don't Cry for Me Guatemala

    I want to share one last time about Guatemala before I move on.  There was a book years ago about ugly Americans, arrogant travelers who expect everyone worldwide to speak English and act like us.  I don't wish to be an ugly American, but I did notice a certain amount of injustice in Guatemala--the young men wore swimming trunks and the old men wore Speedos (and excessive body hair).  As both a related note and a mixed blessing, the middle aged women are not too youth and body conscious to be ashamed to wear bikinis after they have lost their figures or, as in my case, gained even more figure.  As I stated on Facebook, Guatemala was my first third world country and I should probably have eased into it by visiting the second world first.  So, with apologies to Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber:

                                    Don't cry for me Guatemala
                                    the truth is I never knew you
                                    All through my days there
                                    my safe existence
                                    kept me above you
                                    I kept my distance
                                   

Freedom of Speech

     I remember high school speech class distinctly, just as I do all near death experiences.  The teacher was a loud, large man covered with black hair almost to his fingernails.  I was as terrified of him as I was of giving a speech in front of my classmates. We were required to give four speeches:  to introduce, inform, persuade and entertain. Consumers of mass media need to be able to tell the difference between the speech to inform and to persuade.  In one sense there is no way to impartially inform because information is always filtered through the biases of the presenter.  The viewpoint of the observer is why witnesses give different accounts of the same event. This also explains the similarities and differences in the Gospel accounts in the Bible. In order to make writing cohere, even the most scrupulously unbiased writers still have some point they are trying to make; otherwise the facts would be jumbled together like puzzle pieces in a box.  Viewpoint gives us a framework on which to organize facts.
     Documentaries, history programs, even the news, are not speeches to inform, they are speeches to persuade.  They are trying to sell you something.  Even channels like PBS, too elitist for common advertising, are trying to persuade you to watch and support their channel.  They are still selling something, they are selling themselves. As wonderful as it would be if strangers on television were really trying to protect your health, finances or food supply, if helping people was their motivation it would be more logical for them to market their products as widely and cheaply as possible so they could help the greatest number of people.  Genuinely altruistic people are usually too busy doing good to appear regularly on national television and, frankly, are seldom considered interesting/controversial enough to be asked.  The same people gallantly informing the public of the nefarious motives of other individuals or groups have their own agenda to promote--including me.  This concludes my speech for persuade.

Mother's Day

     I will probably never write something funny about Mother's Day unless it is about me as a mother.  That is because I have a love/hate relationship with Mother's Day.  I love being a mother, raising my children was hands down (and often they were--spanking) the best job I ever had.  Even though God was kind enough to extend our parenting through the invasion of the spare sons who lived with us for a couple years, it was still very hard to be downsized.  I love the Mother's Day celebrations I have had with my children when they were young and now that they are grown.  What I don't love is having a mother.  For unknown reasons it was God's plan that I not have a real mother beyond my early years.  The slow sickness of schizophrenia has been taking her away from me since I was six years old.  It still is.  I know she loved me in the ways it was possible for her, but there is no Hallmark card for a mentally ill mother.  I bought Mother's Day cards from the "For anyone" category, and now I make my own.
     For those of us who sit silently through the tearful tributes at the mother daughter tea, count ceiling tiles during the sentimental sermons at church and sift through our shadowed memories for some way to relate to what others are sharing, Mother's Day is a mixed blessing.   To me Mother's Day cards are full of lies and praises I do not understand, I hate the unwanted memories that force themselves into my consciousness and I hate myself for feeling angry and sad and loving at the same time.  So I buy her a gift and make her a card that simply says "Happy Mother's Day.  I love you." because that, at least, is true.  This year I will visit her at the dementia home where she has been living since October. I honor her in the ways I can, but I will not post her picture on Facebook, it is too painful.  God has given me poetry as a coping mechanism and He has given me a sense of humor.  I do not write these blogs to hide my pain, I write them because my life is blessed, beautiful and funny.  I would not have chosen this path for myself, but it was chosen for me by someone who loves me even more than I do.  Most of the time it is an easy path, just not on Mother's Day.

Light Speed

    Last night my husband and I were discussing what we did for Tracy's birthday last year, I said it was the cowboy party, Reed said it was an army theme.  Actually the cowboy party was for his third birthday and we had the army party when he was in third grade.  I guess our dates were a little off,  we weren't talking about last year--it was yesterday.  If Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus, their offspring are racing through the galaxy at light speed.  Not only is my body malfunctioning randomly, but now my mind is playing tricks on me, making 24 years seem like 24 hours. 
     Of course there is a sense of relief in knowing our children turned out okay in spite of limited genetic potential and very imperfect parenting, but why did they have to grow up so fast?  Tracy was generous enough to live with us until he was 23, and I consider those extra years a bonus, probably undeserved.  I look at Trace and see his father's skills for fixing and building and the basic life competence that I admire so much, but where do I fit in?  What traits of mine are in him?  Perhaps a touch of humor, but not enough to thoroughly warp him.  Mercy, perhaps, in his heart toward others.  Like me, tough talk but gentle ways.  Guitar playing?  Neither of us can take credit for his muscular build, Reed was a toothpick when I met him and I considered myself normal, sized at least.  And where did that incredible smile come from?  I was my orthodontist's worse case scenario demo for potential customers.
     For his gift we bought him a Husky top box to mount on the Snap On toolbox he uses at work, but I warned him they would never successfully mate.  24 years ago I had a baby boy, or was it yesterday?

Vengeance of the Vendors

     Nothing in my life experience prepared me for the aggressiveness of the street vendors in Antigua, Guatemala.  A famous (and probably fictitious) quote from Julius Caesar is: veni, vidi, vici--I came, I saw, I conquered.  A fitting Latin phrase to match the Latin American peddlers would be: veni, vidi, vendi--I came, I saw, I sold.  On the streets around our hotel there were street vendors with DVDs, cell phones etc., we would politely tell them no and they backed away, not so in Antigua, the colonial capital of Central America.  The Guatemala City vendors had the annoyance factor of an occasional gnat compared to the starving mosquitoes persistence of the Antigua sellers. 
     They certainly weren't physically intimidating, some of the older Mayan descent women were four feet tall.  The children, however, used shameless cuteness intimidation, that is why I wound up with five wooden flutes.  I wanted one.  Women would approach me (as if Reed had some sort of peddler repellent on) wearing a sling like you might carry a baby in, full of scarves and table runners which they would pull out one at a time to display the beauty of the embroidery.  I thought of the sales clerks back home who want to see your money before unfolding something for you to look at and even get annoyed when you do it yourself.  Guatemalans are into table runners the way Americans are into tee shirts.  They would gladly have sold me enough to fill our hotel suite, but then there wouldn't have been room for the necklaces they were also selling.  There was one tee shirt Reed was tempted to buy, it said "No I don't want to ride in your tuk tuk ( motorized rickshaw),
I don't want to buy jade and I don't want any **** cashews".  We didn't buy it because of the ****, but Reed isn't the one who needed it anyway.  There might have been more merchant mobs than usual because it was Holy Week and that is high tourist season in Central America.  Some of the irresistible urchins probably would have been in school otherwise.
     For the most part I didn't buy more souvenirs than I needed, but I had to creatively expand my list of people who might want souvenirs to make that true.  We stood firm.  Actually, we would get up and walk around the park to get away as if the sellers actually were mosquitoes. We refused to let anyone put shoe polish on our tennis shoes, I only bought one more table runner than I intended, I didn't melt and buy an ice cream for the adorable shoe shine boy, we didn't ride in the rickety horse drawn carriages or tuk tuks and we didn't sample the **** cashews.  I needn't have bothered replacing my 1970 Spanish-English dictionary, all I needed to know how to say was "No, gracias".  I got lots of practice saying it, but I was not convincing enough to produce even a thin layer of peddler repellent.  I came, I saw, I bought (it sounds more impressive in Latin).