Cheap Tickets

     Many months ago, my husband and I reserved a mid-March condo week in Hawaii so I have been checking airfares periodically, despite knowing most of the good deals are published 6 to 8 weeks before you fly. As we approached the six week window and the airfares were still in the $800 - $900 range, instead of the $600 - $700 I was hoping for, I was getting desperate. Most of the decent airfares involved leaving from Missoula and spending a night in an airport one or both ways. I was looking for the least inconvenient way to do this when a Cheap Tickets' pop up showed a $700 fare from Kalispell to Lihue. Since four of the five travelers live in Kalispell, not Missoula, this was exciting.
     But I became skeptical of good airfares in December when I was trying to book a flight to Oakland through CheapOair and another similar sounding website. After filling out the traveler and payment info, the promised $450 tickets turned out to be twice that much. If they thought I would pay double just because I had spent so much time inputting data, they obviously don't understand cheapskates. So I was zipping through the passenger and payment information on the Cheap Tickets website with little hope of actually booking them. That is why I didn't notice my typo in Reed's last name, which I should know how to spell because it has been the same as mine for 38 1/2 years. I had booked a ticket for Reed Kamb. In the days of customer service by humans, this would have been easy to correct, but on a multi-airline website, not so much.
     Like most websites, Cheap Tickets customer service consists of printed answers to FAQs, frequently asked questions. The answer for misspelled names was to send an e-mail attaching Reed's passport. I scanned it into our desktop, but it disappeared from there. I couldn't find a way to attach it to the e-mail. Strike one. Unlike many travel websites, this one allowed free cancellation within 32 hours, however, if I sent them an e-mail about correcting the misspelling, they had 48 hours to respond. Strike two. Also like most websites, the customer service phone number was carefully hidden, but I managed to find it. I set my cell to speakerphone and prepared for a long siege. Eventually my call was answered by "Shasta" who was patient, helpful, and really slow. While she cancelled Mr. Kamb's reservation, I was online booking one for Mr. Lamb. This required some coordination because, in order to have Reed sit with the rest of us, Shasta reassigned the other seats while I selected his. I would gladly have paid extra for her to do this for me, but they were not allowed to book at that location. The website said there were only two cheap tickets left, so I would have preferred Shasta's speed over her patience, but that didn't matter because Visa kept declining my transaction. Apparently Visa flagged my rebooking attempts as fraud. Strike three.
     So, in case I hadn't had enough phone time, I got to spend a little more calling the phone numbers on the back of my Visa card. Admittedly, it was my mistake that I called the Marriott Rewards number instead of Chase Bank, so the time I wasted navigating their voice recognition phone tree saying "representative!" was all my fault. At the end of the Chase phone tree, I found one of those nice young men from India, who have American names. "Jeremy" agreed to approve the transaction so I could buy that last cheap ticket. A one letter typo cost me three hours of my life. I managed to accomplish all this without losing my sanity or most of my sanctification, but I did require chocolate to recover. Lots and lots of chocolate.

The Sons of the Eunuch

     The Bible records only one Ethiopian coming to faith in Christ. It is an unusual story. In Acts 8, God calls Philip away from a successful preaching ministry in Samaria to an out of the way destination where, by divine circumstance, he encounters an unnamed Ethiopian official. As was not unusual for court officials of that time, he was a eunuch. God himself did the prep work by having the eunuch, an apparent convert to Judaism, read from Isaiah about the suffering savior at the moment Philip showed up. Talk about an opening for the gospel. Philip began with that passage to teach about Christ.  The eunuch responded in faith right away, requested baptism at the first body of water they came to, then Philip was miraculously whisked away by the Spirit to another area of ministry.
     Why did God so uniquely pursue an unnamed traveler who didn't even have a family to carry on his faith? Because God knew that millennia of Christians would be born of that eunuch's faith. There are still believers in Ethiopia and there, like so many other places, they are being martyred by Muslim extremists. They are the spiritual sons of the eunuch. This is my tribute to them.

The Sons of the Eunuch

 The sons of the eunuch are dying

in Ethiopia, slain.         

Dying because they are Christians,

martyred for Jesus' name.

Spiritual sons of a father

unnamed in the Bible's pages,

but in those that came after him,
his faith lives on through the ages

.

The ways of God are mysterious,

but the will of Christ is plain,

He lives through the sons of the eunuch,

and they die to live again.

How to Meditate Like a Preschooler

     Everything I know about meditation, I learned in the children's program. In the BSF preschool program to be precise. Sometime after the Bible story and the muscle activities to get the wiggles out, every class has Quiet Time. They remind the children of truths about God they learned in the Bible story, then they have them lie quietly for a few minutes, supposedly thinking about God. The children's biggest challenges are energetic, wiggly bodies. Mine is a lethargic, unfocused mind. So I am taking baby steps toward meditation by the same method. After my daily study, I focus on the main truth I learned about God, and then lay quietly for a few minutes. Quiet body. Quiet mind. Thinking about God. If my study raised a question, that is the time I listen for the answer.
     Lately I have been studying Revelation and meditating on grace. One idea that came to me from the sealing of the 144,000 in chapter 7 is that--Grace is not what is leftover after the judgment has passed, it is the foundation of it. That sounded impressively deep and spiritual but I wondered, was it accurate? So I thought my way through the Bible:

• God chose Noah before the flood. It would have derailed His plan for the continuation of man and the plan of redemption to have thought about Noah after the flood.
• God rescues Lot before the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.
• God positioned Joseph in Egypt before the famine, though that is never listed as a judgment.
• God preserved a faithful remnant before the exile.
• God is saving an exact number of Gentiles before completing the redemption of the Jews.
• God will seal 144,000 witnesses before the tribulation judgments.

      In the plan of God grace precedes judgment. The judgment would not achieve its intended purpose without God's grace in preserving a family of faith. Admittedly, sometimes my meditation leads to a few minutes of sleep, but what beautiful thoughts to sleep on.

The Other Four Days

     I have heard for years that there are 365 verses in the Bible telling us not to be afraid, one for each day of the year. But according to Strong's online concordance, there are actually 361. What about the other four days? Are we ever commanded to be afraid? Actually, we are--four times. I began this curious quest after I noticed a command in Romans 11:20 referring to the Gentiles being grafted into the plan of salvation,
   "Granted. they were broken off because of unbelief, and you stand by faith. Do not be arrogant, but be afraid."

     That began a brief (because I am lazy) search for other references to be afraid. I found one a few chapter away in Romans 13. In that passage, Paul is teaching believers submission to the governing authorities. Verse 4 says,
    "For he is God's servant to do you good. but if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the
 sword for nothing. He is God's servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer."

     I will spare the reader (I probably have one) my comments on how American Christians seemed to have forgotten the above concept, and go on to Matthew 10, where Jesus has been warning the disciples he is sending out to expect betrayal and persecution, mostly he is telling them not to be afraid, but in verse 28 he says,
   "Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One
 who can destroy both soul and body in hell."
   That means it is okay to have a healthy fear of Satan.

     Admittedly, this last reference may be cheating because God is not directly telling his people to be afraid. In Jeremiah 2, God's message is a lament of the fickle faith of his chosen and lavishly loved  people. In verse 12, He commands,

   "Be appalled at this, O heavens, and shudder with great horror," declares the Lord.

     For one thing, He uses the word appalled instead of afraid and the command is to creation, not man. But if the heavens, who are entirely innocent of the fickle faith thing, are supposed to be appalled, it would probably be a good idea for God's people, who are prone to wander, to be fairly fearful also.
     So now you know what to do with your time off from the command to fear not. It is okay to be fearful the other four days. Just make sure you are fearing the right thing.

Alternate Reality

     Television shows love to do alternate reality themes. It allows the characters to step out of their usual roles, good guys become bad guys, strait laced become free spirits, etc. Then the whole thing turns out to be a dream, hallucination or near death experience, unless it is a sci-fi show where alternate reality is a given. Mentally ill people often live in an alternate reality of their own making, if not choosing. But since my son's accident, I have had an alternate reality sub-script running through my mind. While we were driving back to Montana and figuring out what steps we needed to take to get his injuries checked, legal help etc., my alternate reality was planning his funeral. Working out details like--where would we have it since he didn't attend our church? Even after we got home and could see he was okay, I was imagining driving to the hospital daily to deal with my son's head injury. Both of those alternate realities were more likely outcomes than his miraculous survival given the severity of the crash.
     Even now I consider how empty and joyless this Christmas would have been if I had lost my son in September. I am so thankful it didn't happen to us, but I am also very aware that there are some of my friends living that painful reality. I pray for them often and try to let them know that. Though their loved ones live on in the heavenly reality we cannot see, the pain of loss is intensified at holidays and there is no alternate reality to escape to, nor dream to wake up from. The grace that spared my son is the same grace that would have sustained us through losing him and the grace that helps those grieving now. But the reality of grace is that it doesn't let us escape the hard times, it lets us endure them.

The Lord or the Latte

     I have been thinking lately about my water bottle. I'm one of the few people I know who actually like drinking water. We have well water, so it tastes good besides being good for you, and I drink a lot more water when I have a bottle handy than I ever did out of a glass. When I drink out of a glass, I tend to sip a little and dump the rest. With the bottle, I take a sip here and a sip there until it's all gone. Until--I can't believe I drank the whole thing. So what's the problem? With a water bottle always at hand, I never know the discomfort of thirst. Being a middle-aged American, comfort is my middle name. I live in a comfortable house, sleep in a comfortable bed, drive a comfortable car and can afford almost anything I want in order to be even more comfortable. But it is not God's plan for his children to be comfortable, often is it just the opposite. Look at the tempting job offer Jesus made Paul in Acts 9, with special emphasis on the word suffer.
     I don't enjoy suffering, and I seldom have to, but maybe I need to. Maybe having all my wants and needs supplied is making me too soft to be a soldier. Not that I'm complaining. After all, it was not my idea to be born in a place and time of plenty. God chose this land of hot showers and lattes for me. I just don't want to find myself loving the Lord less than the lattes. I have never belonged to a church that practices giving up something for Lent, although as a Mormon child I fasted the first Sunday of every month. Ironically, the church in which I was saved had a potluck the first Sunday of the month, a dietary demonstration of the contrast between law and grace.  But I have friends who talk about giving up chocolate (ouch!) or all sugar (gasp!) for Lent, and I wonder if  I should set aside a time to deliberately deny myself some comfort. Could I even survive a month without chai?
     I still carry a water bottle with me, but am trying to leave it in the car when I go to church and BSF. How thirsty can I get in two hours anyway?  And some days I practice the "Poor Woman's Diet", which differs from the "Pioneer Woman's Diet" in that instead of eating foods only available to pioneer women, I eat as if I didn't have money to dine out or buy a frappe. In other words, the diet I followed of necessity while we were trying to raise a family on one income. This may be only a token step toward self denial, but it is a reminder to get off Connie's Continual Comfort Channel where it's always ME Time and pursue the mind of Christ, one small sip at a time.
    

3 Visitors

     I have written previously about my annual holiday visits from the Ghost of Christmas past, sad feelings from childhood Christmases with my mentally ill mother. But this year, like Scrooge in "A Christmas Carol", I have three visitors. The Ghost of Christmas Past is still my mother, though those thoughts come later every year. The Ghost of Christmas Present is the granddaughter I had for two years and lost when her mother and my son broke up. I have not seen her since April, except in my memories. The Ghost of Christmas Future is the baby the two of them announced last Christmas, but lost in January. We never got to meet on earth, but I look forward to meeting him/her in the future. I gave a donation to Hope Pregnancy Center in my grandchild's honor. Where the form asked for a name, I wrote "Peanut", which was all I ever called him. On the line for address, I put "Heaven".
     I used to long for unclouded memories of Christmas, but if I must be visited by those I cannot reach, at least my ghosts are not unwelcome. As with Scrooge, through them my life was changed. Deepened, broadened, opened. Christmas is better when shared with loved ones, even those no longer with us--or with us only in spirit.