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Search for Truth

 

More than forty years ago when I needed University-approved housing at the last minute, I took a cancellation at a boarding house in Champaign. One of those accidental roommates in that small triple room was God’s intentional means to draw me into his heart. This excerpt from my memoir, Trading Fathers, describes our first encounter:

“When I returned to Leeman Lodge, the roommate who’d claimed the single bed was kneeling next to it on the floor. She had long brown hair, lively brown eyes, and a full mouth. She glanced up and smiled. “Hi, I’m Mercedes. I’m praying. I’ll be with you in twenty minutes.”

“I’m Karen.” She probably saw my face fall before I ducked behind the chest that separated her bed from the bunks. I sat on the lower bunk, my head in my hands. Praying, huh? Right.

Jerry had warned me about those “Jesus freaks.” He’d gone up to DeKalb, to Northern Illinois University, to sell some handmade ceramic incense burners to the head shops. The Jesus freaks had accosted him and wouldn’t stop bothering him. Though he’d also been raised a Catholic, like me, he had stopped going to mass. Neither of us thought Jesus had anything to offer us.

I had, however, intensified my search for truth since that suicidal crisis on the day I first talked to Jerry. I had not yet heard “You shall know the truth and the truth will set you free,” but I instinctively longed to know what reality was solid enough to build a life on. But I was sure Jesus wasn’t it.”

I was nineteen years old and knew I was right. God was unknowable.

But God knew my proud and broken heart and within the next year, Jesus revealed himself to me.  In the intervening years, God has convinced me he’s not only knowable, but lovable.  The God revealed in his Son is the solid foundation of my life. Sometimes he’s confusing, he’s always mysterious, and occasionally, he’s confrontational. He’s also gentle, humble, and kind. I owe him everything.

What’s your story?

Father, thank you for Jesus and for the Holy Spirit who reveals truth to our hearts. Help us to hear your voice and sense your smile today. 

 

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Over All

“What to write, Lord?” is usually my Friday morning prayer. This morning, my thoughts are many:

As I woke up, I thought about the relationship between sex and violence. Both penetrate physical boundaries, one in love and one in hatred. Not sure where that thought is going, but the similarity of the opposites intrigues me.

As Jerry and I took our morning walk, Tyler Perry’s comment on Oprah yesterday, about his physically abusive father, came to mind. “If I’d beat you one more time, you could have been president, like Obama.” I’m glad Mr. Perry knows his father is wrong.

Today’s USA Today includes a special supplement  about the need for global women’s rights. The right to be physically whole rather than mutilated, the right to be a child rather than a wife, the right to self-determination. Massive pain. Among others, a group called the Elders, including Jimmy Carter and Desmond Tutu, are working on some of these issues.

And the weather is finally breaking in central Illinois. Birds were singing this morning. Walking, we got overheated in our down vests.

Jerry just interrupted me to say, “I know you’re working, but you need to step outside. It’s 60 degrees.” In winter, does spring ever sound too good to be true?

Valley of the Fallen Pictures, Images and PhotosAnd yet, spring is here today. Snowdrops are blooming. The tiny bit of snow remaining in the front yard from the snowblower pile should clear out by noon.

And, after cancer and cataracts, we’re healthy enough to walk two miles every morning.

And, over it all,  amidst the jumble of evil and good that makes up the world, a good Father watches and waits and works.

 

Father, may we watch and wait and work with you.

 

 

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Bearers

This image of Mary bearing the child puts me in mind of all those who have borne the Messiah to my heart.

The ones who helped me grasp the gospel’s cohesion.

The ones who showed me the truth of the Christian story.

The ones who demonstrated the Father’s love made manifest in the baby.

At this season, we remember and are grateful for Mary’s labored journey.  Let’s also remember all those who have labored to bear the story to us.

May your Christmas be blessed with moments of true joy.

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Promise Keeper God

Spring is compressed in central Illinois this year.  Usually the redbud, dogwood, and crab tree blooms are separated by a week or two.  This year, however, everything is blooming together. In the backyard, the weeping cherry waves its pink blossoms. On my morning walks, I stop to smell the viburnums at the library. Last night, biking back from dinner with friends, the crabs perfumed the air. Bluebells dress the pasture out at Homer Lake. Unlike some years when they turn brown from an untimely freeze, tulip magnolias have bloomed and are spreading pink petals at their feet.

This winter awakening reminds me of an April a few years ago in Washington, D.C.. The tulips painted the ground with reds and yellows around the monuments while the crabs, dogwoods, and redbuds stood in full-dress guard. Another spring we caught the cherry trees around the Tidal Basin. We walked to the Jefferson Memorial as the pink blooms fell at our feet. And once, a very long time ago, the wisteria across the front of the National Gallery was in bloom. Magnificent green and purple against the white marble.

Every spring is different. Sometimes I’m in a different place. Sometimes the sequence of reawakening life is spread out or interrupted. But so far, spring has arrived. Every year.

Just like God promised in the beginning:  “While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.” Genesis 8:22.

Father, you are a God who keeps his promises. Thank you.

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Thanksgiving, A to Z

 Nantucket Rose hips, beach copy

Papa-God,

You who are from the beginning and who have no end, I thank you at this time of thanksgiving for apple crisp and broccoli, for cabbage and dandelions. I love your egrets and your falcons inspire me. Your goodness surrounds me. Honesty and imagination join to create your joy in my heart. Kindness and love meld my spirit with yours. Nothing will ever separate me from you.

It is love that made the world with a word. Thank you. Nothing compares with you. Only your promise is worth living for. Thank you for quince and rose hips on the Nantucket beach. Thanks for sound, and for tulips. Under each piece of your creation, your beat goes on. Thank you for ears to hear.

Thank you for making us valuable, in your image. For forever counting us worth what we cost. "Who for the joy set before him, endured the cross." We are that joy. Along with xylophones, yeast, and zebras. I await the day when all creation will rise to worship.

I am waiting, with hope. You will come, with joy. Thank you.

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Seminal Sermons

"The dead man came out, his hands and feet wrapped with strips of linen, and a cloth around his face.  Jesus said to them, 'Take off the grave clothes and let him go.'" John 11:44

Either Gayle Erwin or Dick Foth spoke on this text thirty years ago at Urbana Assembly of God. I still remember the point:  it's the body of Christ who is given the responsibility to "take off the grave clothes." Jesus didn't take off Lazarus' wrappings after he raised him from the dead. He charged those around him with the task of unbinding Lazarus' graveclothes. At an art museum in Lafayette, Lousisiana a few years ago, I saw a small sculpture of Lazarus, fresh from the tomb, exalting, but still bound round with fabric. He obviously needed help to get out of those dead clothes.

The speaker that day encouraged each of us in the congregation of several hundred to help each other recognize and remove the shroud of our old thinking.  I"m grateful for that group in the seventies, who helped me recognize lies the enemy had planted in my early traumas. That teaching, of course, was one of many on the topic of loving each other, but that specific imagery has stuck with me, as I, too, have helped others remove the wrappings of habits that bring death rather than life.

Do you have a seminal sermon that comes back to you at important times in your life? An image, a thought, a feeling, even, that continues to guide your choices today? Something someone said at a time of transition, when we are particularly open to new ideas? Maybe a friend spoke God's words to us when we were finishing graduate school and seriously depressed. A time when we faced a tricky surgery, anxious about the outcome. Or like me at Urbana Assembly, a nurturing pastor's good words that laid the foundations for our spiritual lives. If you do, I'd love to hear it.

Father, thank you for those who have spoken your word to us and those who help us release the old lies. You, alone, are truth.

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Handmade Beauty

In junior college, thirty-eight years ago, a sociology professor predicted the current resurgence of handcrafted items. He said the increasing mechanization and mass culture would create a desire for the personal, the handmade, and the individualized.

I was reminded of that prediction this morning when I ran across an admonition to Buy Homemade this holiday season. In the last five years, my husband and I have sold our handmade jewelry, made of Jerry's lampworked beads and my silver designs. We've discontinued that business as my memoir nears publication, but the pleasure of the personal transaction remains. Our customers received not only bits of beauty made by the hands of someone they'd met, but we enjoyed the many conversations about life and art that resulted. I've yet to have such a conversation with a Wal-Mart clerk.

I'd be dishonest if I said I don't appreciate the standard of living I enjoy because of the mechanization of, say, towels. I can afford absorbent, soft pieces of fabric to dry my hands because they are mass-produced in quantities large enough to allow middle-class Americans to buy them. Pioneers probably made do with linen they grew, spun, and wove themselves. But even more, I appreciate my mother-in-law's watercolors–personal, handmade, and some of them, individualized. Several are painted from photos I took.

This Thanksgiving, I'm grateful Jesus is personal and treats us each individually. He knows our hearts and our needs. He speaks personally in ways we can hear–images for some, the still, small voice for another, "feelings" for others. He takes the lives we give him and, like a craftperson, weaves beauty.

Father, thank you for all the beauty you have created, are creating, and will create–by your hand.

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More than It Looks

 

“I am asking you to bring the Kingdom to people, sweetie.
That often looks small, as in quick acts of prayer, little kindnesses, and small words.
But it is big. Like everything in the Kingdom it is more than it looks.”

 

God gave me these words a few months ago and I keep them posted
on my desk. We often don’t know what a small action means to the recipient.

 

A few years ago, I was enjoying a local sweet corn festival,
wandering through the crafts booths and listening to my favorite genre
of music, bluegrass. My husband was working behind the scenes at the festival,
so I was alone. Near one of the two stages I sat on the grass to enjoy the
music. Soon two couples I knew brought their chairs and sat with me. The men
went to get sweet corn and I chatted with the women.

 

When the guys returned, in addition to their own food, they’d
brought a lemonade and an ear of corn for me. A very small gift. And yet, I
still cry as I write these words. Why? They hadn’t asked me if I wanted
anything. They took the risk of rejection. And one of the men was the man who
first demonstrated to me that Christianity was a viable option. The other was a
psychiatrist who’d briefly seen me when I was at my worst, during a serious
emotional crisis many years ago. The value they saw in me, communicated by the
gift, touched me deeply.

 

Our kind words, our small gifts may seem insignificant, but
like everything in this inbreaking rule and reign of good King Jesus, they are
more than we know.

 

Jesus, may we be ever alert to the gifts, the prayers, and
the words that will help bring in the kingdom of God in others.

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Take No Good Thing for Granted

Creator-God, Father,

Today we would take no part of your good creation for
granted. We thank you for lungs that absorb your oxygen and release our carbon dioxide.
We thank you for hearts that keep up the rhythm for our pulsing blood. We thank
you for bones that fortify us.

We are grateful today for green plants and blue sky, not to
be taken as our due, but to be received as magnificent gift. Rice, potatoes,
and cassava are your provision. We appreciate trees— cypress, sassafras, maple.
We rest against their trunks, we drink their tea, we savor their sap.

You have set for us a mysterious world to explore. Neutrinos
and quarks; cell nuclei and mitochondria; DNA, RNA, and the human genome. Light,
both wave and particle. Is the variety of color infinite or does it just seem
so?

Every piece of your work shouts your name. Had we ears
to hear, the reverberations would split our eardrums. Today, we want to join
that unheard song of praise. Thank you for listening.

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