Saturday, March 22, 2008

More Than Enough


The baby was a boy. The nurse took him, examined him, cleaned him up a bit, wrapped him in a blanket and brought him back for us to hold.

Even though I’d given birth several times before, I was again surprised at how perfect he was, and like every new mother I examined fingers and toes, fingernails, eyebrows. Everything was there, and so very small.

The most remarkable was his skin, which was dark and shiny, presumably due to the time he’d spent in floating in amniotic fluid after his heart had stopped a week before. In spite of the eerie sight umbilical cord still wrapped around his neck, we gazed at our son for a long, long time, his eight inch length no barrier to our silent speculation on what he may have been like, what he might have done.

Even though we knew this was the one and only time on earth we would see him, finally the fatigue of eight hours of labor, the hour of the day, and the self-consciousness of staring at a dead baby moved us to ask the nurse take him away. We tried not to think about his unceremonious end in the hospital incinerator; had he lived a couple weeks longer and made it to five months gestation, we would’ve been planning a funeral and burial.

Instead the only ceremony we knew about had been suggested to us by a nurse friend and was what we’d just done, bringing from home the blanket for holding him, taking some pictures and giving him a name. These artifacts were among the precious few that attested to his existence, along with sympathy cards, the tiny stocking that had hung on the mantle that December, and a dried up single rose that would be housed in a shoebox for the next 22 years.

That is where they were one morning this week when I got out the box and opened an envelope I’d forgotten about:

A flood of tears came.

That morning twenty-two years ago was unremarkable, other than the fact that it was my thirty-first birthday. I was a happy healthy mother of three kids and excited about the impending arrival of the fourth.

Come to think of it, maybe it was a remarkable day. I had felt the baby kick for the first time just a week or so before and had finally gotten over being angry about this unplanned pregnancy happening after I’d declared our family complete, ironically signifying its end by giving my maternity clothes away to a gal with her own unplanned pregnancy, and no husband.

At the time, I was quite involved in pro-life activities and remember thinking upon discovering my unwanted pregnancy, so this is what it feels like. I could see why girls would opt for an abortion, a quick solution. I too, felt trapped. One reason I’d declared an end to childbearing was, even though all our babies were healthy, and my pregnancies were uneventful, they had successively gotten longer- my third pregnancy finally ending one day shy of ten months with the birth of a ten pound boy, and that after labor was artificially started. In addition, I didn’t like what such pregnancies and deliveries had done to my body.

So I borrowed some maternity clothes and joined an aerobics class, determined not to gain fifty pounds again and to be in shape for perhaps another long labor. I had also changed obstetricians to one who delivered at a hospital that had a policy against performing abortions. I’d already had two prenatal exams and had heard the familiar chug-a-chug of the baby’s heartbeat the month before.

My exam that morning was routine until I noticed the doctor seemed to be taking a long time with the stethoscope on my belly finding the heartbeat. The baby must be in an awkward position, he said. He tried more angles; I rolled from one side to the other. After some time he said he was unable to find a heartbeat and that I should have an ultrasound at the hospital that afternoon.

That scared me. There’s something wrong, this isn’t routine, there’s something wrong with our baby; I hadn’t dared think the baby might be dead.

I collected our three-year-old son, John, from a friend’s house where he’d been while I was at my appointment (Laurie and Anne, 7 and 10, were in school), and went home. As it happened, my husband, Steve, came home for lunch that day for the purpose of delivering a single red rose for my birthday. With guarded tones I told him about my morning and the ultrasound appointment that afternoon and asked if he would be able to go with me.

He met me at the hospital that afternoon. I didn’t know how he felt, but I felt like I was in slow motion, in a dream, a bad dream. The ultrasound exam table was freezing cold; why did it have to be so cold? I began to shiver uncontrollably, much like I had during the delivery and following the births of our children.

The technician applied the cold gel to my promisingly-bulged belly. On the screen we could see our baby for the first time. He or she (wanting to know the gender didn’t even occur to us) looked whole. I suppose I lay there thirty minutes while she traversed all possible landscape with the doppler to detect a sound. Conversation –what little there was– was awkward; she gave no indication anything was wrong although we could see no heartbeat, it was much too quiet. I stopped looking at the monitor. She said we would meet with the doctor at his office to learn results.

It was 5:00pm by the time we got to the doctor’s office. While we waited for the doctor I read a magazine article about a woman who’d had a miscarriage. The doctor called us in. All I remember him saying is, “The baby is dead.” The disbelief and denial of the preceding hours gave way to tears. We cried.

With the tears came a flood of questions: Did I do something to cause this? What happens now? How would the dead baby be removed? And this absolutely terrifying thought: Would I have to go through labor and delivery?

The doctor assured me that nothing I did caused the baby to die and recommended we wait for labor to start on its own and if it didn’t in a week, labor would be initiated. Since we had driven to the appointments separately, I drove home alone and I took the opportunity to wail loudly.

Once we were home, having picked up the kids, we gathered in the living room. The kids sensed from our demeanor and reddened eyes that something -some terrible thing- had happened. I sat limply in the rocking chair as we explained that the baby had died. Anne and Laurie understood what that meant -in the past year three of their great grandparents had died- and cried along with us. John, at three, only knew that everyone was crying and was afraid. We explained the baby was in heaven, the only comfort available at the moment. I put the red rose in the baby’s new stocking on the mantle.

Labor didn’t start on its own and we went in to the hospital five days later. I knew that the focus required to use LaMaze breathing to control the pain, as I had done with my previous labors, would need to be far greater considering the result would not be a wailing baby. The contractions started out steady and got increasingly stronger.

About six hours into the eight hour ordeal, I closed my eyes to keep focused, and kept them closed; Steve thought I was asleep. I couldn’t risk opening my eyes and telling him I wasn’t sleeping for fear of losing concentration. Then came the irresistible urge to push, but I had to wait for the doctor to check my cervix. With one push, the baby was born.

I don’t remember much emotion at that moment except great relief that it was done. I hadn’t let myself think about anything other than the formidable task at hand. Now that it was done, I was mostly numb, and exhausted.

We went home to resume life and ponder other questions like, physiologically, why did this happen? We got some insight a week later when the pathology report arrived in the mail from the autopsy that we had requested. We had wanted to know of any abnormalities in case we would decide to conceive again. After a lot of technical lingo, the report concluded that, “no definable ideology of death was determined”.

That, with the fact of the baby being born with the cord wrapped around his neck, confirmed in my mind what I had begun to fear, that I could pinpoint the exact moment of his death.

It was two days before that fateful doctor’s exam that Anne and I were driving home from Wednesday night church activities. I remember exactly where we were on the road home when I made a comment to her that the baby must be a gymnast considering how much he was jumping around just then. I don’t recall any movement after that. Of course, there is no way to know for sure that he was suffocating just then, and I am thankful that I didn’t know it, because there would’ve been nothing I could’ve done about it.

The BIG question of course was theological, Why did this happen? Why did God let our baby die? I came to the inescapable conclusion that we live in a broken world where pain and death are very much a daily occurrence. Specific reasons beyond that were unknown then, but since have become somewhat clearer. As it was, the pain I was living helped me to long for that place where death and pain won’t be part of the landscape.

Which brings me to this Saturday morning- the day between Good Friday and Easter. In the predawn darkness I was listening to a radio broadcast of a Death Mass sung in Latin. The haunting, heavy dissonant sounds acutely conveyed the tragedy of death, Christ’s death. I closed my eyes and imagined that scene in Gethsemane where he not only cried tears of sorrow, but experienced the unimaginable -even to him- excruciating sweating-blood pain of the entire history of this very broken and defiant world.

In that listening dissonant moment it occurred to me that my recent shed tears were but a portion of the sum of his. I thought of the miscellaneous brokenness in lives I’d encountered in just the past month: a marriage gone sour, the stranglehold of addictions of various kinds, emotional deadness, bitterness, busyness, my left hand not being able to type very well, my own pride.

I remembered reading a simple but profound summary of the most important thing I’ve learned in the last few years about the ‘why’ of sorrows and tragedies from Frederick Buechner in his book Telling the Truth: “God himself does not give answers. He gives himself.”

This is the shocking, surprising truth that can be discovered through brokenness the size of Job’s, or my own, the life-giving gospel truth that easters up in us in the midst of the pain common to man. Incredibly, the Creator of the universe bends to tenderly embrace, dry tears, heal, and put life into things long-dead.

Time itself is measured from the centerpiece event where God gave himself: Mary’s baby was a boy. The God-man grew up in this same broken wailing world, submitted to death, and then did the unimaginable by walking out of his tomb.

More than answers to pain, more than a pathology report, what we really need is him.

As it turns out, he is more than enough.

Saturday, February 23, 2008

Harvest of Gratitude

This morning the ten seconds that it took you to regain consciousness, and reach for the snooze button has taken Calvin the better part of five months to do- 145 days to be precise. That’s a factor of 1,252,800.

Calvin has been recovering from a brain injury as the result of a farm accident last fall. Come to think of it, what you did in ten seconds this morning, Cal routinely used to do in five, and since hitting the snooze likely wasn’t included in that five seconds, he was probably half dressed for another day on his dairy farm. So for Calvin, that’s a factor of 2,505,600.

To get a teeny idea of what emerging from a coma might be like, imagine waking up in a mental fog not being able to figure out where you are or what day it is, or perhaps WHO you are –which is unfortunately, perhaps like some of you, easy for me to imagine. Then, very slowly, you become increasingly aware of pain in spite of the sense that perhaps a crazed dentist (?) may have injected your whole body with Novocain, rendering you paralyzed, but not pain-free, unable even to open your eyes to glimpse who or what may have done this to you.

From that perspective, just waking up, hitting the snooze or not, and getting out of bed seems a privilege for which to be grateful.

In fact gratitude was Calvin’s prevailing emotion when I visited him on Day 145 of his journey out of the ‘fog’. I found him in the gym at the facility for the brain-injured where he is recovering, playing, as he would say later, ‘pretend’ volleyball, batting a green balloon back to Josh, his therapist, with his good hand (that the mad dentist missed).

The thrill of seeing Calvin in a standing position (with the help of the vertical board), laughing, talking, making wise cracks to the uninitiated about how standing directly behind a cow within range may be ill-advised for several reasons, would have been inconceivable considering the excitement generated on Day 10 when Calvin ‘merely’ opened his eyes for the first time for two seconds, or even the absolute joy on Day 122 when he simply laughed for the first time since the accident hurtled him deep into a coma.

“It was a good day today, a good day today,” Calvin repeated with his half-Novocained mouth and face as his wife Diane pushed his wheelchair back to his room. Perhaps because of the reference to cows and the review of his newly regained skills he said, “I can kick good.” And then remembering how that ability would need to submit to good will added, “But I shouldn’t do that.”

I inserted, “But it’s nice to have the option.”

“Yes,” smiling big with the cooperative side of his face, “Nice to have the option.”

Calvin recalled the inevitable pain he endured in getting his atrophied muscles to the performance level seen at Day 145, as well as the pain-in-the-posterior he realizes he must’ve been at times to staff (not unlike the risk of standing behind a cow), he lamented, “I bellyached about the pain, bellyached about the pain,” a phrase familiar to him presumably due to having Not Bellyaching near the top of his list of virtues.

After a few more recollections, I asked, “What do you think God is up to with you, Calvin?”

He paused, then said, “People tell me I encourage them, I hope I can yet…I'm going to try, to the best of my ability;…I hope I can…”

Tearing up he affirms, “I’m so glad to move legs and arm and play pretend volleyball.” He pauses, the work of speaking much more intense than milking the herd. “It's so hard to wake up [in the morning] and not be able to move.” Then, thoughtfully, “God is strong, I am weak,…I am weak…God is good,” now sobbing, “I didn’t know [how good].”

Another pause. “There was a baby died in our church- stillborn.”

The thought makes his upper body heave and he struggles to get out the words, “Much… worse… than my… prob…'ems.”

I fear I may have brought him into territory too painful and searched my brain for a happier thought. “Maybe the baby will meet your dad in heaven.”

Cal calmed and smiled at the prospect of their meeting and the wonderful thought of his dad living.

I added playfully, “I wonder if your dad will be smoking a cigar in heaven, and doing that [peculiar quasi-spit that endeared him to so many].”

“That's funny,” he practically blurted.

A few minutes later Diane was explaining how badly his left jawbone had been shattered, like corn flakes, the doctor had said, and repaired surgically with multiple metal plates. Calvin’s response was a confirmation-to-me that Calvin was indeed on his way back was when he responded with one of his favorite phrases, “No kiddin'.”

“No kiddin',” was music to my ears much like it would be to Calvin’s ears to hear that his crop yield was double or triple the expected bushels per acre- or that he’d inherited a billion dollars- to which he would likely respond with his classic understatement, “No kiddin'.”

The post I wrote at the time of Calvin’s accident last fall was titled Harvest. I observed, “…Now that I'm older I have the privilege of looking back and seeing that God has 'gifted' me with some painful experiences where my trust in him has taken deep root and grown, like corn in a hot Iowa summer… It's harvest season. And our Father is Lord of the harvest.”

‘Coincidentally’, one of my scheduled scripture readings for Calvin’s Day 145 was about harvest: “But the good soil represents those who hear and accept God’s message and produce a huge harvest - thirty, sixty, or even a hundred times as much as had been planted.”

Over this cold Iowa winter, when the landscape seemed dormant, the seeds of possibility for glorifying God ‘planted’ in the fertile organic matter of Calvin’s ‘accident’ have been growing and the harvest is beginning to come in thirty, sixty, a hundredfold.

Not only has his family witnessed their own bumper crop of trust in God, but Calvin may indeed be experiencing to a fuller, overflowing, need-to-add-sideboards degree what he already knew, that God works ALL things together for good to those who love God, a yield, the proportions of which, he couldn’t have imagined when healthy and whole.

He summarized the fruitful panorama in which he finds himself in his own words on Day 145 with typical understated simplicity, “God is good…I didn’t know [how good].”

Beyond the harvest yields of being conscious, upright instead of supine, laughing, joking, and playing ‘pretend’ volleyball, Calvin finds himself more alive than ever to the Lord of the Harvest. By definition, that aliveness, that becoming a bit more of who he was created to be, comes with a bumper crop of gratitude -perhaps by a factor of 2,505,600- for which he will likely have to build new barns.

No kiddin’.

Email Connie at:
TheJourneyBlog

@aol.com

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

One Moment of Grace


It was Sunday, day two of our otherwise uneventful tent-camping vacation. We’d gotten comfortably settled into the same camping spot as we’d done each of the three years since we discovered it. I say ‘discovered’ since the campsite was the perfect- on the edge of the park next to the woods with a large grassy area that has an almost perfect circle of trees in the center that says to anyone with sense, “Put your tent here.” So we always have.

Around noon Steve was off getting a newspaper or something and I was getting back to our campsite from a walk. At a distance I saw a white vehicle parked at our site and an older man in a green uniform, looking at our site and writing something down. I knew we’d paid our fees for a week, so he couldn’t have been there for that reason. And we hadn’t violated any ordinances that I was aware of. I was really curious what he was up to.

I walked up, said hello and saw on his shirt the insignia of the Army Corps of Engineers who ran the park. He turned toward me, said the same and then asked if this was my campsite. I replied in the affirmative. Motioning, he asked if that was my tent. Yes, again. So far I hadn’t discerned any reason for his presence.

Then he asked, “See that white post over there?” It was a steel post about 40 feet from our tent along the road.

“Yes.” I’d seen it many times in our last three years of visits.

“That’s the boundary of the park and your tent is outside the boundary.”

An incredulous look must have come over my features. “Wow, we’ve camped in that spot the last three years and no one has ever mentioned that to us.” Then curious about the degree of my guilt I wondered out loud, “How far outside?”

We walked over to the tent and according to where he said the boundary was our tent was a tent-width over the line. Moving it would put us outside the circle of trees and be labor intensive redoing about 40 stakes and tiedowns since our aging canvas tent needed to be covered with a tarp. We’d always stayed in one spot for two weeks to avoid this very thing.

I appealed to reason. “I’m curious why the park hosts have never mentioned this to us.”

“Oh, they’re new.”

“And what about the couple from 2 and 3 years ago?” We had gotten to know the red-headed wife and her laugh; her husband returned from heart bypass surgery last year during our stay.

He didn’t know.

“So how were we to know?” I thought surely this seemingly minor infraction of the rules would be excused on the basis of ignorance.

“You should’ve asked.”

He couldn’t be serious, could he?! This was not a minor infraction to him.

Then he asked, “How long are you staying?”

“Two weeks.”

“From when?”

“Yesterday.”

“Well, one of the jobs of the Corps of Engineers is to make boundaries and I have to enforce them.”

I realized had we been leaving in the next day or so he may have let it go. But 13 days of violation wasn’t going to happen on his watch. It was becoming increasingly clear that this encounter was going to require a fair amount of self-control, and that I shouldn’t say what I wanted to say which was, Are you serious?! Do you mean to tell me that you spend your Sunday afternoons busting campers for silly things like this?!!

If this was his usual approach I could see how he probably regularly got verbal lashings from campers and rarely got respect. I offered, “I understand it’s your job, but person to person, I’m wondering if leaving our tent there would be such a bad thing.”

“Oh, I hear you. But what if we let that go, then we let something else by and then the next thing. Pretty soon, where would we be? What if 30 people came and put their tents across the boundaries, what kind of a mess would we be in then?”

I was simultaneously fascinated and frustrated. This guy is obsessed with boundaries and rules. Keeping them was perhaps what held his world together.

“I’m all for keeping the rules and doing what’s right,” I offered.

He continued, “What if the land owner came over here and made a fuss about your tent being here?”

I wondered what would make a person act this way. “Well, of course we’d move it then.”

If we ended up really having to move the tent, as it appeared, we’d probably just pack up and go find another park with another site worth driving eight hours for, as this one would no longer be.

“Your tent is clearly over the boundary, so you’ll have to move it.”

Resigned to packing up instead of climbing into the hammock as I hoped, I responded with a sigh, “Okay.”

“I suppose you put the tent here for the shade,” he observed.

“Well, yes.”

Then he looked at the other campsites within view, about seven, one of which was occupied. “Well, there’s lots of shade over there. Why didn’t you choose one of those?”

Now I was offended at being treated like a child. I wanted to say something like, “Any idiot can see this site is about five times bigger than of any of those.” But I was pretty sure that wouldn’t be helpful.

“This one’s big,” I said.

“Yeah, especially when you go beyond the boundary!” he laughed. Perhaps the deep lines on his face were evidence of a career in boundary line enforcement.

Then he spied the tarp we’d draped over the unoccupied neighboring campsite’s picnic table. We’d put it there to dry after using it to keep the light rain off of things while we were setting up the day before. “Did you rent that site too?”

It was almost as if he was testing my self-restraint with more knit-picking. I marshaled my shrinking patience. “No, but that is our tarp. We put it there to dry.”

“Well, you can’t put your stuff on other sites,” he informed me. I knew that pointing out our knowledge of camping etiquette wouldn’t be of much use.

Then I did something I should not have done. I’m really not sure why I did it since I had little hope it’d make any difference with this no-exceptions enforcer. I played the Parkinson’s card.

“I know this isn’t your problem,” I explained, “but I have Parkinson’s and moving the tent will be a lot of work. Just hauling the stuff from here (the parking spot) to there (about 50 yards) was a lot of work.”

At the very least I’d hoped he would see that our doing THAT instead of violating the rule about driving on the grass to get closer to the tent to unload would testify to our being rule-keeping folk, even if it was inconvenient. I was thankful I could truly say that, since the year before we HAD driven on the grass to unload. Call it selective righteousness, but I didn’t mention that.

I looked for some indication of compassion and I thought I saw a brief look of regret soften his resolve. He looked at the ground and said quietly, “Yes, I have a brother-in-law with Parkinson’s and I know how it is.”

I didn’t expect what happened next. In a softer tone he asked, “What’s your name?”

“Connie.”

“Well, Connie,” he said evenly, “in the year 2007, the Army Corps of Engineers is going to make an exception.” Unbelievable. There was a person in there after all.

“What’s your name?” I asked, conferring on him the same honor.

“Jim.”

“Jim,” I said reaching out to shake his hand, “thank you for your grace.”

I can’t be sure, but I’m almost positive I saw a glimmer of a tear when I said the word grace.

As he walked back to his truck he said, “I’ll make sure the hosts know I’ve approved your tent staying there.”

“Thank you!” I hollered. “If anybody comes around giving me any trouble, I’ll tell ‘em to talk to Jim.”

Closing his citation book, “You do that. I’ll take care of it.” Now he was taking care of me! Incredible. With that he drove off.

What had just happened?

Weak-kneed, I sat down at the picnic table and reviewed the encounter. I thought of several other ways it could’ve turned out, most involving anger: me hardening my position, being disrespectful toward him, resentful; he leaving angry, confirming his belief that breakers of the law need to be prosecuted. Or me acquiescing to his enforcement; he feeling he’d done his job.

But somehow we both got a blessing out of the deal. I wondered why my use of the word ‘grace’ seemed to touch a place in Jim. From under that prickly and hardened exterior something grace-ful had emerged.

It seemed I’d witnessed a miracle.

As it turned out, I had. The camp host came by the next day and after some chit chat said she really came by to meet the only person ever to out-talk Jim. Even though she was new, Jim’s reputation apparently wasn’t. I told her the only explanation I had was that I treated him with respect and had told him I had Parkinson’s. She didn’t believe the Parkinson’s info would’ve swayed him.

I felt extremely humbled by the power of this thing called grace. We’d both been ambushed by it- he in the apparently unexpected joy of granting it and me in the sheer surprise -not to mention gratitude- of receiving it.

I wonder if Jim left that day feeling he’d done something Godlike. He had, you know.

In his book Living a Life of Distinction Lewis Smedes has noted that, “Anywhere, everywhere, somebody may at any moment cross our path and ask us: What are you going to do about me? When they ask it, they give us a moment of grace. We can write beautiful stories out of our moments of grace."

This is one.

Sunday, December 16, 2007

Seeing More Clearly


Our small group has been reading the book by Lewis Smedes, The Art of Forgiving. “Forgiving,” says Smedes, “…is the art of healing inner wounds inflected by other people’s wrongs."

In chapter one Smedes tells us the basics of forgiving are the same for everyone:
1. Rediscover the humanity of the person who hurt us.

2. Surrender our right to get even.

3. Revise our feelings toward the person we forgive.

We’ve been stuck on point one for months. And it may be years.

Rediscovering the humanity of the person who hurt us.

Hurts can be significant. Sometimes those hurts are like having a broken arm; sometimes they are like having an arm hacked off.

Debbie Morris knows more about significant pain than she would have chosen. In her book Forgiving the Dead Man Walking*, she tells her story of being kidnapped and repeatedly raped at the age of 16 by Robert Willie and another man. That unfair pain in her young life was preceded by unfair pain of her mother's alcoholism and her parents' divorce.

Smedes asserts that the only remedy for the unfair pain of the past is “a surgical procedure called forgiveness.”

For Debbie that very painful surgical procedure took years. As it turns out, the basics of forgiving for her were the same as they are for everyone, starting with point one, rediscovering the humanity of the person who hurt us.

The implausible notion that buried somewhere beneath the blatant inhumanity of her kidnapper there may be a human being created in the image of God became less remote when she had a son of her own, Conner.

"I realized Robert Willie, too, was a baby once,” helpless and vulnerable. “Over the years, …my heart [was softened] little by little so that I was finally able to forgive him for what he did.”

Part of that ‘little by little’ was her searching the Bible for stories about grace and forgiveness. She remembers, “The parable in Matthew 20:1-16, about the workers in the vineyard, leapt out at me. In it workers were paid the same price despite how long they'd worked. It infuriated the people who'd worked all day that they received the same wages as those who'd put in only a couple hours. I realized I was just like them. I felt I deserved heaven—and Robert Willie didn't. But that parable showed me God's grace is accessible to all of us, regardless of when we turn to him.”

Debbie was surprised that rediscovering the humanity of the person who hurt her was easier to do with Willie than with her own mother. She more or less stumbled upon the discovery of her mother’s humanity, seeing her as a person with frailties not unlike her own, when she herself went into rehab for alcoholism. “I finally realized I needed to accept my mom as she was.”

So, why is rediscovering the humanity of the person who hurt us so difficult?

Smedes points out, “We shrink him to the size of what he did to us; he becomes the wrong he did. If he has done something truly horrible, we say things like, 'He is no more than an animal.' Or, 'He is nothing but a cheat.' Our 'no more thans' and our 'nothing buts' knock the humanity out of our enemy. He is no longer a fragile spirit living on the fringes of extinction. He is no long a confusing mixture of good and evil. He is only, he is totally, the sinner who did us wrong.”

The very logical reason we don’t see the humanity of the person who hurt us is simply because we don’t see clearly. We’re vision impaired.

Smedes explains, ”We filter the image of our villain through the gauze of our wounded memories, and in the process we alter his reality.”

Not surprisingly, it would be difficult to see ANYTHING clearly through bloody gauze.

“As we start on the miracle of forgiving,” Smedes asserts, “we begin to see our enemy through a cleaner lens, less smudged by hate. We begin to see a real person, a botched self, no doubt, a hodgepodge of meanness and decency, lies and truths, good and evil that not even the shadows of his soul can wholly hide…We see a human being created to be a child of God.”

As it turns out, in rediscovering the humanity of the person who hurt us, we see person not wholly unlike the one we see in the mirror- "a human being created to be a child of God.”

The forgiveness miracle begins with seeing more clearly.

*Debbie's story

Email Connie at:
TheJourneyBlog
@aol.com

Friday, November 30, 2007

Slow Learner


…being formed into a people who love God and one another…[is] slow work. We are slow learners. And though God is unendingly patient with us, we are not very patient with one another.
–Eugene Peterson in Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places

I was standing in one of those long checkout lines, about three people away from the register, a couple of people behind me. I was facing forward, minding my own business, when a man’s voice behind me launches into a monolog that could have gotten him the role replacing Joe Piscopo as Doug Whiner on the old Saturday Night Live “Whiners” spoof. Those episodes had titles like The Whiners at the Doctor, The Whiners in the Hospital, The Whiners on a Plane, and featured Doug and Wendy Whiner complaining about everything including any food that wasn’t macaroni and cheese. The episode I found myself in could’ve been called, The Whiner in the Checkout Line.

“Never fails. I get in the line where this happens,” he sighs.

I had been blissfully unaware what ‘this’ was.

To the back of my head he goes on, “She waits until all her stuff is scanned, AND THEN decides to pay with a check, fishing around trying to find the checkbook and THEN trying to find a pen. (Sigh.) Always in the line I’M in.”

If he would’ve had a nasal tone like Joe Piscopo as Doug Whiner I would’ve laughed out loud. But he didn’t. As it happened, my initial decades-of-being-a-Christ-follower thought was, “Oh great, a whiner,” a response which, as it happens, is conspicuously absent of Christ-like love.

John Ortberg in The Life You’ve Always Wanted says, “…the true indicator of spiritual well-being is growth in the ability to love God and people.”

Shoot. Why couldn’t it have been spotting personality faults at two-hundred yards or keeping score on who’s naughty and who’s nice? You know, stuff I’m pretty good at.

Since I wasn’t in a hurry myself, I was able, half-turning, to offer, “Would you like to go ahead of me?”

“Oh no,” he said quickly. I think he was a bit embarrassed because he proceeded to justify his aggravation by listing other irritations in his life, including idiot drivers. His theory- apparently unique to him- was that it didn’t matter what lane he chose to drive in, amazingly some idiot driver always ended up in front of him.

“This guy must be an idiot magnet,” I thought, “And it’s always the people in front of him,” noting my place in line.

I couldn’t think of anything appropriate to say. “Have you ever considered you might be an idiot magnet?” just didn’t seem quite right.

I took the 'less is more' option and didn’t say anything. I discouraged more details about his magnetic properties by avoiding eye contact and facing forward, hoping the line would be idiot-free and move quickly.

Later I thought of this response, “Yeah, when that happens to me I just figure God’s trying to teach me something. And since it happens so much, I must be in the slow class.”

Now that I think of it, God was probably trying to teach me something. About love. Again. I am a slow learner. Apparently.

I must be in the slow class.

Email Connie at:
TheJourneyBlog
@aol.com

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Providence


Providence. God’s sovereignty. I usually don’t think about it unless something bad has happened. When all is well, I don’t question why, only when things go wrong. Sometimes horribly wrong.

In the last chapter of her historical novel of the American Northwest in the late 19th century, The Living, where things going horribly wrong was as abiding and massive as the 200 foot Douglas fir trees the settlers spent their lives felling, Annie Dillard has one of the characters ponder this question, “How was it possible to endure the losses one accumulated just by living?”

My first real encounter with mortality and loss happened on my 31st birthday, when my obstetrician couldn't find a heartbeat at my 5-month prenatal check. My reaction was the same as anyone’s would be: shock and then denial. Even through the two ultrasounds that day I still couldn't bring myself to believe that our baby could be dead. I was young, in excellent health, had already produced three healthy children and experienced zero complications in pregnancy.

But reality became clear about 5pm that day in December when the doctor spelled it out. He wanted to let labor start spontaneously, but after a week when it hadn't, labor was initiated and eight hours later I delivered a dead baby boy.

It was BY FAR the most difficult thing I'd ever done in my young life and took every last ounce of strength I could manage to summon.

Years before I had learned the answer to the Heidelberg Catechism question #27 as a fifth grader but now I needed a review.

What do you mean by the providence of God?
Providence is that almighty and everywhere present power of God, whereby, as it were by His hand, He still upholds heaven, earth, and all creatures, and so governs them that herbs and grass, rain and drought, fruitful and barren years, food and drink, health and sickness, riches and poverty, yes, all things, come not by chance but by His fatherly hand.

I believed God was in control and our baby had died because there is sin in the world and these things happen in a sinful world.

As the novel The Living illustrates, to truly appreciate life, a person must first be reconciled to mortality. I had a whole new appreciation of life.

Some years later, again in December, I visited my doctor with some symptoms for which I had no explanation. She was the first medical professional to speak the word “Parkinson’s” as a possible explanation for my fatigue and left side weakness: “You’re too young to have Parkinson’s”.

Now it was the certainty of my own what-had-seemed-distant mortality that I was faced with. It was time to review the doctrine of Providence. I was greatly comforted by it. I memorized it.

Eighteen months later I got a call from my neurologist that my chest x-ray the day before for my routine screening for a Parkinson’s drug study revealed what she called a ‘concerning mass’ of some size in my left lung. Her call was followed by another from my regular doctor, who was less able to restrain her fears about the ‘concerning mass’.

The doctrine of sovereignty was pretty fresh in my mind; little review was needed, the comfort was abiding.

Why is it so comforting? Why is it comforting to believe that the One who loves you the most allows, even ordains, things that go horribly wrong?

The most horrible explanation for life’s trials is that there is none- that they are random, pointless and meaningless and wasted. That belief can only produce despair.

Comfort, on the other hand, grows from being rock solid sure that ultimately my Almighty Father has control of every molecule in His universe, even things going horribly wrong. He doesn't cause sin but has a leash on it.

“[The Bible is] an extensively narrated story of life assaulted by death but all the time surviving death, with God constantly, in new ways and old, breathing life into this death-plagued creation, these death-battered lives...” observes Eugene Peterson in Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places.

How IS it possible to endure the losses one accumulates just by living?

My Father's control coupled with His intimate love means there is an eternal purpose for what is happening that is beyond my control and far beyond my knowing. My pain is not meaningless and will not be wasted, but meticulously used as organic matter by my Father to grow something good and glorious.

Like a stately 200 foot Douglas fir.

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

What Do Big Boys Do?

Our daughter and her husband are in the midst of potty training their son, Shannon. As you might expect, part of the process is a clear understanding about the basic premise and goal of potty training:
video
("Shannon, where do big boys go pee-pee?" "Pee the potty, pee the potty. Not the pants.")

That’s what BIG boys do. Easy, right?

Anyone with a smidgeon of experience in this department understands that knowing what to do and doing it are entirely different planets in the growth galaxy. Shannon knows what to do; it may take some time before the doing comes without effort.

It’s the same with any aspect of being a Christ-follower. The knowing part is comparatively easy and doesn't take all that much effort in a Christian community. It's kind of like Shannon showing the greatest interest in the aspects of potty training he loves: flushing the potty and washing his hands. He could do that all day long. And would if left to himself.

Or take the challenge of becoming physically fit. The easy part is doing the research, acquiring the equipment, activewear, memberships, magazines and paraphernalia ‘needed’, and then doing some more research, to be sure.

I've read about prayer for decades. I've gone to seminars, heard messages. It’s only recently that I actually started put those ‘knowings’ into doing. Consistently. I’m a long way from having prayer be effortless. But it’s more so than a couple of years ago.

My favorite part of prayer used to be making a list of things to talk to God about. Type A folk love lists. I could do that all day long if left to myself.

I don’t make as many lists anymore.

Or talk as much. Being quiet is WAY more difficult than filling God in on how to run my corner of the universe.

Making progress from knowing to doing is not a new challenge. The apostle Paul chides, “By this time you ought to be teachers yourselves, yet here I find you need someone to sit down with you and go over the basics on God again, starting from square one - baby's milk, when you should have been on solid food long ago!”

If having a church full of folks who prefer liquid diets doesn’t sound so bad, imagine a church full of folks who aren’t potty trained yet. Kinda gives a new perspective on the importance of growth, or the consequences in the absence of it.

I am beginning to leave ‘childish things’. I, too, want to be 'big'. I don’t always want to make the effort, but more and more often I do. It takes effort. And that’s how things change.

That's what 'big' girls and boys do.