"To be known as someone who simply wants to live with them."

Well, off I go. Saturday we leave on our trip to the other side of the world with much expectation that God is going to show Himself in some life-changing and surprising way.

I've agonized over my presentation on culture learning, trying to chose what content is appropriate for a one-hour presentation to this particular audience, wondering what might result... dismissal? disinterest? engagement? input? invitations to travel the world and teach? or just a "we'll take it from here"? I really don't know what to expect or what to hope for. And I have been quite anxious about this and other aspects of our journey.

If you are a person who prays, think of me at 4pm Jan 14. Or 12-15 hours before that, if you live in the US, to account for the time difference.  I could use your prayers for this presentation / discussion.

Here's a video I hope to use to open it up. Of course I can't be sure technology will cooperate. This video can't be downloaded, evidently, and I hate to rely too much on internet access in a conference setting, in a different country, and on someone else's laptop. So I may just read the quote.

Still, I can share it with you here:

“More and more, the desire grows in me simply to walk around, greet people, enter their homes, sit on their doorsteps, play ball, throw water, and be known as someone who wants to live with them. It is a privilege to have the time to practice this simple ministry of presence.

"Still, it is not as simple as it seems. My own desire to be useful, to do something significant, or to be part of some impressive project is so strong that soon my time is taken up by meetings, conferences, study groups, and workshops that prevent me from walking the streets. It is difficult not to have plans, not to organize people around an urgent cause, and not to feel that you are working directly for social progress.

"But I wonder more and more if the first thing shouldn’t be to know people by name, to eat and drink with them, to listen to their stories and tell your own, and to let them know with words, handshakes, and hugs that you do not simply like them, but truly love them.”  

Is It OK to Pray This?

“When the question rises, ‘Is it okay to pray this prayer?’ let the answer be once and forever settled: Yes, it’s okay. How? Just ask!

“We worry about knowing exactly what to pray in some cases because we think we know what to pray in all others. We may, at times. But aren’t there many times that we have asked imperfectly? God was not befuddled. Our ignorance did not clog the wheels of the universe.

“When we are uncertain as to how boldly we may ask, we are saying, ‘I’m afraid to ask for this because I might confused the Almighty. I may just force His hand to violate His own eternal purposes, and suddenly bring our world to a screeching halt when my mightiness of faith has secured an answer on earth which God didn’t really want to give.’ It is as though we sometimes think that a cosmic accident might occur if we invade heaven with a request that would somehow slip through the machinery of providence without being checked out carefully. Somehow God would find himself awkwardly glancing toward earth wondering, ‘How did I ever let that happen? I must be more careful about my answers to prayer.’

“‘But,’ you will ask, what if my request isn’t appropriate to God’s will? What if I am asking for something that I shouldn’t?

“The discovery of God’s perfect will won’t happen by excursions of human reason, assertions of man-made theology or personal opinions about ‘how I think God does or ought to do things.’ To the contrary, the Bible tells us how to discover His will through praying, not how to find His will and then pray.

“‘I implore you, brothers and sisters: present yourselves before God in a posture of worship, the kind that God accepts. It’s the only truly intelligent thing you can do. Therein you will find a transforming of your mentality from the world-way of thinking of God’s new way for you, and therein you will discover the whole counsel of His perfect will’ (Romans 12: 1-2, paraphrase.)”   -- Jack Hayford

Climb EVERY Mountain?

"The fact that we had reached the summit seemed to matter little to my dad. To me it was everything. Every time I stood atop a mountain peak it was a marker, a triumph, an erosion of my sense of failure. I did something. I set a goal, worked hard and achieved success. In the caverns of my mind, worth and value were being fashioned all because I could climb a mountain...

"I glanced over at Dad. He smiled with affirmation. My thoughts began to wander. How do we know when we are loved? Is it that look of acceptance, a smile and warm embrace? Or is it when someone buys us crap we don't need or lets us have our own way? 

"... Isn't one illustration of God's love the offering of his constant presence to us? Even still, my struggle to show up for others remains. What does it say when I withhold this valuable commodity? Busyness is the ultimate trump card. It will get you out of virtually every social situation, or at least buy you amnesty a few times when you let a friend down. ...If I'm busy, I don't have to be responsible for what I fail to do...

"Like any other addiction, busyness works so well. It gives us the edge to avoid emptiness loneliness, unpleasant memories, hurt, intimacy - and consequently, the clarity that silence and an unhurried life can bring. Still, almost everyone I know is trying to get caught up, trying to commit to fewer things, and aching to get away from the frantic race that consumes modern America...

"Truth is, sometimes I don't want a slow-paced, intentional life. I have systematically engineered a life of chaos. The consequences at least appear better than facing the reality of my own life. And so each generation is more disconnected than the last. When I look around at the world, I see a bunch of people desperate to know they are loved living in the shadows of a community too busy to pay attention to anyone but themselves.

"...Dad and I meandered our way back to the car. In contentedness and silence I drove home. Here I was, spending all this time with my dad. My motivations were thrills and accomplishments. What were his? He didn't care about accomplishments. He was content reading an ancient book and falling asleep in front of the TV watching some old musical. Why was he climbing these giant mountains with his temperamental son? The answer was right in front of me, yet it would take years for me to discover."

Source: Wisdom Chaser: Finding My Father at 14,000 feet, by Nathan Foster, afterword by Richard J. Foster. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2010. pp. 42-44.

See also the excerpt found on the author's website, Answers Found on Mount Quandary.

Changing Channels (Cynthia Bezak)

"...in the wee hours last night when my Situation loomed large and kept me from sleep, I handed it over to Abba one last time, then switched channels.

"I decided to intercede through the alphabet, asking the Holy Spirit to give me someone or something to pray about for each letter. Sometimes He gave me more than one prayer for each letter. Usually I prayed for family and friends, but when I got to H, it was Haiti He led me to pray for, and when I got to O, He urged me to pray for our President. I dozed off a few times, but each time I awoke and my mind raced toward the Situation, I pulled it back to where I'd left off in the alphabet.

"When I finished that, I was still awake and tempted to go back to my Situation, so I started the alphabet over again, this time naming something about God that corresponded to each letter. I tried to use names and attributes that had personal meaning for me and rest in those qualities of who God is--for instance, my Deliverer, Glory, Healer, Lifter of my head, Protector, Provider, Shalom, and Vindicator.

"As before, I dozed on and off, but each time I awoke, I'd pull myself back to where I'd left off and continue centering on God and worshiping Him..."

>> Read the complete post.

Selectiveness: A Gift from the Sea

"I am packing to leave my island. What have I for my efforts, for my ruminations on the beach? What answers or solutions have I found for my life? I have a few shells in my pocket, a few clues, only a few.

"When I think back to my first days here, I realize how greedily I collected. My pockets bulged with wet shells, the damp sand clinging to their crevices. The beach was covered with beautiful shells and I could not let one go by unnoticed. I couldn't even walk head up looking out to sea, for fear of missing something precious at my feet. The collector walks with blinders on; he sees nothing but the prize. In fact, the acquisitive instinct is incompatible with true appreciation of beauty. But after all the pockets were stretched and damp, and the bookcase shelves filled and the window ledges covered, I began to drop my acquisitiveness. I began to discard from my possessions, to select.

"One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach. One can only collect a few, and they are more beautiful if they are few."

Gift from the Sea, Anne Morrow Lindbergh

A Word about Fear, from Yann Martel

Yann Martel's book "Life of Pi" includes this passage:

"I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unerring ease. It begins in your mind, always. One moment you are feeling calm, self-possessed, happy. Then fear, disguised in the garb of mild-mannered doubt, slips into your mind like a spy. Doubt meets disbelief and disbelief tries to push it out. But disbelief is a poorly armed foot soldier. Doubt does away with it with little trouble. You become anxious. Reason comes to do battle for you. You are reassured. Reason is fully equipped with the latest weapons technology. But, to your amazement, despite superior tactics and a number of undeniable victories, reason is laid low. You feel yourself weakening, wavering. Your anxiety becomes dread.

"...Quickly you make rash decisions. You dismiss your last allies: hope and trust. There, you've defeated yourself. Fear, which is but an impression, has triumphed over you.

"The matter is difficult to put into words. ...You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don't, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you."

Are We Almost There Yet?

"Every diary is a mystery story to the person who's writing it." Tina Brown (source)

Are Other People Interesting?

Malcolm Gladwell introduces his book of essays, What the Dog Saw, with what he calls the "other minds" problem - the discovery children make, at an early age, that what's in somebody else's head is not the same as what's in theirs.

"Why is a two-year-old so terrible? Because she is systematically testing the fascinating, and, to her, utterly novel notion that something that gives her pleasure might not actually give someone else pleasure."

Even as adults, he says, we never lose that fascination. We are curious about the lives and interior worlds of other people. Gladwell says this curiosity about what life is like for others is one of the most fundamental of human impulses, and it's the one that shapes his book: he's following his curiosity and giving his readers an inside scoop.

Then he says something that seems to be a contradiction:

"The trick of finding ideas is to convince yourself that everyone and everything has a story to tell. I say trick but what I really mean is challenge, because it's a very hard thing to do. Our instinct as humans, after all, is to assume that most things are not interesting. We flip through the channels on the television and reject ten before we settle on one. We go to a bookstore and look at twenty novels before we pick the one we want. We filter and rank and judge. We have to. There's just so much out there. But if you want to be a writer, you have to fight that instinct every day. ___________ doesn't seem interesting? Well, dammit, it must be, and if it isn't, I have to believe that it will ultimately lead me to something that is."

Malcolm Gladwell, What the Dog Saw, pp. x, xiii.

A Prayer and Cheer for the World’s Most Popular Life-sustaining Potion

'''Coffee,' Hannah breathed and it was more of a prayer than a statement. She needed caffeine and she needed it now, before Newton’s First Law of Motion, the one about inertia, came into play. A body at rest tended to stay at rest. And applying this principle of physics to her own life meant that if she didn’t get up soon, she might fall under the First Law and just sit on the edge of her bed, staring at the wall all day.

"'Coffee. Coffee now!' it was as close to a cheer as she could come up with in the cold predawn of a December morning, but it served to whet her appetite for the hot, aromatic brew her great grandmother Elsa had called Swedish Plasma.

"Before she had time to think, which would only have served to confuse her, Hannah was on her feet. And then her feet were moving, heading down the hallway toward the kitchen. The coffeepot that had been activated automatically five minutes before her alarm clock had sounded was now sitting on the counter with a full carafe of the world’s most popular life-sustaining potion, just waiting for her to imbibe."

Joanne Fluke, The Candy Cane Murder, p. 52.

Full Face to the Sun

"It was in a little wood in early morning. The sun was climbing behind a steep cliff in the east, and its light was flooding nearer and nearer and then making pools among the trees.

"Suddenly, from a dark corner of purple brown stems and tawny moss, there shone out a great golden star. It was just a dandelion, and half withered – but it was full face to the sun, and had caught into its heart all the glory it could hold and was shining so radiantly that the dew that lay on it still made a perfect aureole round its head.

"And it seems to talk, standing there - to talk about the possibility of making the very best of these lives of ours.

"...there is an ocean of grace and love and power lying all around us, an ocean to which all earthly light is but a drop, and it is ready to transfigure us, as the sunshine transfigured the dandelion, and on the same condition – that we stand full face to God."

Focussed: A Story and a Song, by Lilias Trotter, quoted in A Blossom in the Desert.

"Take the very hardest thing in your life," she says in another book, Parables of the Cross, "the place of difficulty, outward or inward, and expect God to triumph gloriously in that very spot. Just there he can bring your soul into blossom."

Blogging through Holy Week: Wednesday

We don't know much about what happened on Wednesday of "holy week." More of the same, likely. As Luke says,

Each day Jesus was teaching at the temple, and each evening he went out to spend the night on the hill called the Mount of Olives, and all the people came early in the morning to hear him in the temple. (Luke 21:37-38)

So, let's use our Wednesday post to look ahead, to the bigger significance of what is to come. I think the real hinge of history is not the crucifixion - after all, hundreds or thousands of people have died that awful death. It's shocking that Jesus did as well. But what's more remarkable is the resurrection. (Even then, not unique; others have been risen from the dead.)

But Jesus conquered death and broke its chains. Amazing. It's the beginning of God's "making all things new." New heaven, and a renewed earth, too.

The point of the resurrection, according to N.T. Wright:

"The point of the resurrection…is that the present bodily life is not valueless just because it will die…

"What you do with your body in the present matters because God has a great future in store for it…

"What you do in the present—by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself—will last into God's future. These activities are not simply ways of making the present life a little less beastly, a little more bearable, until the day when we leave it behind altogether (as the hymn so mistakenly puts it…). They are part of what we may call building for God's kingdom."

— N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church

To better understand where he's coming from on this and for more food for thought, see also:

• N.T. Wright on the Resurrection
• Christians Wrong about Heaven, Says Bishop

Anne Lindbergh, Part 3 of 3: on the Pressures of Connectedness

“Modern communication loads us with more problems central than the human frame can carry,” wrote Anne Morrow Lindbergh, even of her life in the 1950s. I struggle with this tension, sometimes, both wishing to get away from the bombardment of news, and reveling in it, feeling lost without it.

Moreover, as a mobilizer, my job is to try to wake up the sleeping beauty that is the American church to the world outside her borders. So, I feel deflated when I meet Christians who boast (almost) about not having a television, or not watching the news, or not sending their kids to public school. These can be very appropriate defense mechanisms but at times they also seem to reflect a harmful tendency to think good Christians should not engage with the world. What a loss, on both sides!

And yet, I recognize the problem it creates to know and care about things far away.

“It is good, I think, for our hearts, our minds, our imaginations to be stretched; but body, nerve, endurance, and life-span are not as elastic. … Our grandmothers, and even – with some scrambling – our mothers, lived in a circle small enough to let them implement in action most of the impulses of their hearts and minds. We were brought up in a tradition that has now become impossible, for we have extended our circle throughout space and time.” Gifts from the Sea, p. 124.

We do seem to need those experiences that re-center us, that allow us to disengage with the world and renew ourselves. What Lindbergh does not mention in the book, you may know: Anne’s husband was the famous pilot and explorer Charles Lindbergh. Following the tragic, high-profile kidnapping and murder of one of their children, they moved to Europe for protection and privacy, only to be driven back by the onset of World War II. At the time she wrote this book Anne was raising her five remaining children and trying to live a quiet life. With such a household I imagine it was seldom quiet.

“America, which has the most glorious present still existing in the world today, hardly stops to enjoy it, in her insatiable appetite for the future. Perhaps… we are still propelled by our frontier energy… Europe, on the other hand, which we think of as being enamored of the past, has since the last war, strangely enough, been forced into a new appreciation of the present. The good past is so far away and the near past is so horrible and the future is so perilous, that the present has a chance to expand into a golden eternity of here and now. Europeans today are enjoying the moment even if it means merely a walk in the country on Sunday or sipping a cup of black coffee at a sidewalk café.” pp. 126-127

Are these dynamics still true of America, of Europe? More true, or less?

Anne Lindbergh, Part 2 of 3: on Solitude

“How one hates to think of oneself as alone. How one avoids it. It seems to imply rejection or unpopularity… We seem so frightened today of being alone that we never let it happen,” says Lindbergh. What do you think? Is this a struggle for you? Do you find yourself filling the space, the silence, unable to bear the risk of boredom or isolation?

“Even if family, friends, and movies should fail, there is still the radio or television to fill up the void. Women, who used to complain of loneliness, need never be alone any more. We can do our housework with soap-opera heroes at our side. Even daydreaming was more creative than this; it demanded something of oneself and it fed the inner life. Now, instead of planting our solitude with our own dream blossoms, we choke out the space with continuous music, chatter, and companionship to which we do not even listen. It is simply there to fill the vacuum. When the noise stops there is no inner music to take its place. We must re-learn to be alone.

“It is a difficult lesson to learn today – to leave one’s friends and family and deliberately practice the art of solitude for an hour or a day or a week. ” Gifts from the Sea, pp. 41-42

Now, even more than when she wrote those words 50 years ago, we have that same chatter. I find myself seldom eating, if I’m alone, without a book or catalog or magazine in hand; I constantly check for messages in all the multitude of ways one can receive them these days, and I almost always choose being with people over being alone. Yet even with such a strong preference against it, I need that time alone, I need the quiet.

“Every paid worker, no matter where in the economic scale, expects a day off a week and a vacation a year. By and large, mothers and housewives are the only workers who do not have regular time off. They are the great vacationless class. They rarely even complain of their lack, apparently not considering occasional time to themselves as a justifiable need.” pp. 48-49

Again, you who are wives and mothers may find yourselves in these words more than others, but the tensions are not limited to one population, are they?

Anne Lindbergh, Part 1 of 3: on Simplicity

While hurling my body across the country on a recent trip I took my mind on a vacation of several hours by reading Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s book, Gifts from the Sea. Written more than 50 years ago, it’s a collection of meditations from a few weeks’ vacation taken alone. The 1950s world she was leaving behind was a different world, and yet, much the same too.

As she adjusts to the rhythm of life in her beach cabin, Lindbergh embraces its simplicity. The world she lived in was already characterized by choice, by freedom, by the opportunity to expand in any or all directions. This can make life quite stressful and complicated. She points out that women in large parts of the world have been forced back by war and poverty and the struggle to survive into lives with fewer choices; necessarily, simpler lives. The typical American is relatively free to choose a wider existence. While that’s a tremendous privilege, it often leads us away from a sustainable life of simplicity into a fragmented multiplicity.

At the beach, in her bare seashell of a house, things were different. Not only was she able to leave behind her husband and five children for a time, but also the round of chores, errands, and appointments, of what to wear and what to say and what to do. To sit, and rest, and listen, and think, and write.

What extraordinary freedom and peace a simpler life can bring. Surely we should all seek some days, at least that are simple, and not crowded with the many choices and privileges with which we fill our lives.

“I remember, again, ironically, that today more of us in America than anywhere else in the world have the luxury of choice between simplicity and complication of life. And for the most part, we, who could choose simplicity, choose complication.” Gifts from the Sea, p. 33

As she reflects on it, Lindbergh realizes that this has been a struggle for mankind all along, but maybe more so in our day, and maybe especially for women.

“For to be a woman is to have interests and duties, raying out in all directions from the mother-core, like spokes from the hub of a wheel. The pattern of our lives is essentially circular. We must be open to all points of the compass; husband, children, friends, home, community; stretched out, exposed, sensitive like a spider’s web to each breeze that blows, to each call that comes. How difficult for us, then, to achieve a balance in the midst of these contradictory tensions, and yet how necessary for the proper functioning of our lives.” p. 28

What do you think? She was writing in a time when to be a woman was to be a wife, mother, and housekeeper. And you who are housewives may recognize and identify with this description more readily. But perhaps it describes many other lives as well. As a single person I find my life is a bit different yet in my work it does tend to ray out in different directions. People know they can come to me for help, or connections, or resources, and I’ll help them get what they need. Is it just my personality, or is it in some sense because I am a woman?

Would such words ring true for some men, as well?

Asking, with C.S. Lewis: Is this Christian thing supposed to be hard, or easy?

A small group I’m part of recently met and talked about part of the C.S. Lewis classic Mere Christianity, in which he explores the question, “Is Christianity hard or easy?”

Our typical starting point in considering the Christian life, says Lewis, is quite naturally with our own interests and desires – some of which we recognize are probably good and should be encouraged, and some of which are not so good and ought to be abandoned.

“But we are hoping all the time that when all the demands have been met, the poor natural self will still have some chance, and some time, to get on with its own life and do what it likes.”

Unfortunately, this approach is bound to end in frustration. "The more you obey your conscience, the more your conscience will demand of you. And your natural self, which is thus being starved and hampered at every turn, will get angrier and angrier. In the end you will either give up trying to be good, or else become ... a far greater pest to anyone who has to live with you than you would have been if you had remained frankly selfish."

The good news and the bad news is that the Christian life doesn’t work that way. Jesus doesn’t want part of our time, part of our money, part of our service. He asks for the whole enchilada.

“No half measures are any good. I don’t want to cut off a branch here and a branch there, I want the whole tree down. Hand over the whole natural self, all the desires which you think innocent as well as the ones you think wicked. The whole outfit. I will give you a new self instead.”

So it’s no wonder the scriptures sometimes describe the Jesus way as harder and sometimes as easier, than other approaches to life; it is both.

But the compromise we are longing for – having it both ways – is harder.

“In fact, it is impossible. It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.”

Here Comes the Sun

"It is supposed that if a thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead; a piece of clockwork. People feel that if the universe was personal it would vary; if the sun were alive it would dance...

"The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every morning; but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction. Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life.

"The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, 'Do it again'; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony.

"But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, 'Do it again' to the sun; and every evening, 'Do it again' to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them."

G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

This is filed under Quotations.

Blue Guitar

They said 'You have a blue guitar

You do not play things as they are.'

The man replied, 'Things as they are

Are changed upon the blue guitar.'

And they said then, But play, you must,

A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar

Of things exactly as they are.'

-Wallace Stevens (1937)

Staying Warm, Keeping Cool, and a Word from Shel Silverstein

What’s Hot and What’s Not

When I first heard a younger, hipper friend mention attending an “ugly Christmas sweater party” I was surprised. I did not realize there was a such a thing. Are there “fabulous Christmas sweaters”? There may be. They would probably be made of cashmere or trimmed with angora or something.

But in perusing the ads and the streets I realize the purchase and wearing of Christmas “novelty” sweaters outside such an event seems mostly limited to women my age and older, and the not-so-fashionable ones, at that. When you have something you only get wear once or twice a week for a few weeks of the year, it doesn’t wear out very fast, so the not-so-fashionable, not-so-young, not-so-rich types like me may not think of getting rid of it. Perfectly good sweater, one would think.

However, I’ve seen the other side, and I have to say: ladies, the day of the Christmas sweater seems to be over. If you love your Christmas sweater, fine, but realize the younger, cooler people in your life may respect you less for it. Unless you take it to their ugly Christmas sweater party. 

I’m trying to decide if I care. I don’t interact with the young and cool as much as I did when I was part of a college-and-career group, a few years back, though there are times when how I dress could matter in terms of how I’m received and how effective I am in my work and ministry. So it’s not completely meaningless, not solely a matter of vanity or personal choice.

I do have one Christmas sweater. Well, it could just be a winter sweater, as its only adornment is a pattern of white snowflakes. But the sweater itself is red, so I think it’s a Christmas sweater. I don’t think it would even “place” if I wore it in an ugly Christmas sweater contest, but I’m not sure I understand the criteria.

Sweater Envy

Back in the day when novelty sweaters (and vests, and jumpers, and jean jackets, sweatshirts, and embroidered denim shirts) were all the rage, I was torn between wanting one (or more) and realizing they were (even then) quite a poor investment. Some were topical (related to your hobby or profession, for example) but many were seasonal, and therefore only appropriate for a small portion of the year. And of course they were not solid colors: they all had “stuff” on them, and generally should only be worn with solids, not prints (though, there’s a rule that may have gone by the wayside as well).

Flash back with me to the autumn of 1994. I was not long out of college and neither pursuing a career nor yet in full-time Christian ministry, just heading in that direction. I was just starting to raise support. Money was tight. A long, expensive trip overseas to try things out with the ministry I ended up joining had left me almost penniless. And here were all these women at church with their new sweaters.

I thought: Voluntary poverty has a lot of appeal and I don’t find fund-raising humiliating, like some people do, but as long as I’m living here in suburbia it seems kind of unfair that I can’t have a new sweater this year. JUST ONE. Something with a bit of style, not just a plain pullover, but still versatile and practical.

My parents were the answer to my vain wish, though I don’t remember if I expressed it, or not. (Knowing me, I probably did). At any rate my stepmom and mom each gave me a nice sweater that fall. One, a hand-me-down, the other, a birthday gift. They didn’t have leaves or apples on them, nor snowmen and Santas – they were just nice cable sweaters, in go-with-everything shades. Perfect. And after that I was okay and didn’t feel sorry for myself anymore. 

This post is getting long, but I leave you with this…

Santa and the Reindeer

“This is the hour,” said Santa Claus,
“The bells ring merrily.”
Then on his back he slung his pack,
And into his sleigh climbed he.

“On, Dancer! On, Prancer! On, Donner and Blitzen!
On Comet and Cupid!” cried he.
And all the reindeers leaped but one,
And that one stood silently.

He had pulled the sleigh for a thousand years,
And never a word spoke he.
Now he stood in the snow, and he whispered low –
“Oh what do you have for me?”

“I have games and toys for girls and boys,”
Said Santa cheerily.
The reindeer stood as if made of wood –
“But what do you have for me?”

“The socks are hung, the bells are rung!”
Cried Santa desperately.
The reindeer winked at a falling star –
“But what do you have for me?”

Then Santa reached into his beard,
And he found a tiny flea,
And he put it into the reindeer’s ear,
And the reindeer said, “For me? Oh gee!”

And into the blue away they flew,
Away they flew with the flea.
And the moral of this yuletide tale
You know as well as me.

Where The Sidewalk Ends: The Poems and Drawings of Shel Silverstein. New York: Harper and Row, 1974.

Gradual Dazzle

Why is it I so often think of something worth writing down when I cannot? I’ll be driving, or in the shower, or cooking a meal, when something clicks. My mind often working best (loosening a knotty problem for example) when it’s quietly running in the background. Turning my full attention to something is sometimes just the thing, but other times causes the brain to freak out a bit. It’s like having a conversation with someone who is socially maladjusted, who stares at you and stands too close.

If I try to completely relax, that’s not good either. The feverish thoughts of a sleepless night seldom hold much insight. A friend of mine recently said, "guys can just go to the street called Oblivion...." I know women who can do that too, and men who can't, so it's a bit of a stereotype. I'm not like that, at any rate. Throw me for a loop and I tend to "stay thrown" for a good while.

The trick to getting to the place where things click is that you have to be awake, alert, and focusing on something that doesn’t require too much thinking.

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant -
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightening to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind –

Recognize those words? They’re from Emily Dickinson.

Fraser on Prayer

"Paul may plant and Apollos water, but it is God who gives the increase; and this increase can be brought down from heaven by believing prayer, whether offered in China or in England. We are, as it were, God’s agents - used by Him to do His work, not ours. We do our part, and then can only look to Him, with others, for His blessing. If this is so, then Christians at home can do as much for foreign missions as those actually on the field.

"...Such work does not consist in curio exhibitions, lantern lectures, interesting reports, and so on. Good as they may be, these are only the fringe, not the root of the matter. Solid, lasting missionary work is done on our knees. What I covet more than anything else, is earnest, believing prayer, and I write to ask you to continue in prayer for me and the work here."

- James O. Fraser, from a letter home quoted in The Prayer of Faith (which is posted in its entirety on the web here. My inside sources tell me it's also being reprinted for easy packaging with the new J.O. Fraser film).