O, Come Let Us Adore Him

When God shows up, we can do nothing but fall down in praise and adoration.  That’s what happened the very first time God made an appearance on this earth in human form.  It’s what will always happen whenever we find ourselves in the presence of the living Christ!  All discussions of the “how’s” and “what’s” of worship styles, or worship aids and devices, will fall silent in the presence of the Holy One.

When God is present we will at first stand in awe, fall down in wonder, or bow low in repentance; then, finding our voices, we will sing, shout, weep, dance, beat drums, play instruments, clap hands, make banners, march around the altar (or the manger or the stable or the living room)….  Indeed, we will not be able to find enough ways to express our praise.  We will not argue about old songs or new songs, hymnals or screens, robed choirs or blue-jeaned worship teams, pipe organs or guitars.  We only argue about such things before God shows up or a very long time after He’s gone away. 

But when He comes – when God Himself is born among us, we may have to shut up entirely and let the angels sing.  One thing for sure, there will not be dissension and fussing and dividing of services or churches.  No, there will be peace on earth, goodwill toward men, and women, and children, and neighbors, and strangers, and all the world!

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The After-Christmas Carol

The Christmas music has died down in the department stores, and the JANUARY SALES signs have taken its place.  The relatives have mostly headed back home to work and to school, and the needles are falling from the real trees as we take down the ornaments and store them away for next year.  The after-celebration reality has settled in, and for many the post-Christmas-depression is lurking around the corner as we vacuum out the car and sweep up the glitter and styrofoam packing balls from the living room. The jingle of Christmas bells have been silenced by the 6:00 news, and bewildering lead stories are shattering the spell of “joy to the world.”

Perhaps now is the perfect time to break out another carol, a timeless, unconquerable carol for the spirit.  It was written in 1863 by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow after the death of his wife, and following the departure of their oldest son to fight in the Civil War without his father’s blessing.

From that Christmas of 1863 until the present, people have entered the “season of peace” when the world and their personal lives were in chaos.  No, this year is certainly no exception, yet the Peace Jesus came to bring is not and never has been at the mercy of the current lead story.

The Song that started with the angels one night on a Judean hillside cannot be silenced by the dissonance of opposing political or religious factions or the cacophony of war.

There has to be a Song!  No one can live without hope!  The gift of “the Song” is the best gift of all.  Let us fill our own hearts with it.  Let’s fill our homes with it and our cars with it as we travel back to our regular routine.  Let’s give it to those who mourn and to those who struggle with debilitating illnesses.  Let’s sing it in the ears of our children as we tuck them into bed, and take it to the discouraged and the lonely.  Because, as Longfellow wrote those decades ago: God is not dead nor doth he sleep!  The wrong shall fail, the right prevail, with peace on earth, good will to men.

I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet, the words repeat
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

I thought how, as the day had come
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along the unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

Then in despair I bowed my head,
“There is no peace on earth,” I said,
“For hate is strong and mocks the song
Of Peace on earth good will to men.”

 Then pealed the bells more loud and deep
“God is not dead, nor doth he sleep!
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail
With peace on earth, good will to men.”

In the gray winter of our days, let’s not only believe but practice with our last breath and action, the lived-out message of the new life of Christmas and the new life of the resurrection, LIFE WINS!  LOVE IS STRONGER!

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The Water of Life on Earth's Shore

The great Creator who breathed galaxies into existence began the creation of our world by speaking into the swirling, formless void of nothingness, “Let it be!”  Because He is light, His first “let it be” was “light.”  And there was light.  Then He separated the light from darkness and gave them both names:  day and night.

Then He called the firm particles out from the misty wetness, drawing the firm together and separating what was solid from the liquid.  He named the firm firmament and the liquid water—water below, vapor above and land in between.  His first foundational work was done.  There was light.  There was night.  There was earth, and there were seas.  “Good work!  Necessary work!” He breathed.

Photo by Angela Kellogg

Eons later, this great Creator would choose to plant Himself on this planet.  He longed for His created work to know Him, especially the creation He had named man.  But this would require an enormous risk of limitation.  Life itself would have to distill itself into the smallest denomination of life of which this tiny planet was capable:  a single cell.  This cosmic singularity must become a single cell to combine with a human cell.  This great God would become one of us in our most vulnerable form—a helpless baby.

The story of this Creator-God reaching all this unfathomable distance is a wonder that stretches credulity.  Yet, it is simple enough on its surface for a child to understand and so profound that the most brilliant and most schooled of minds cannot truly comprehend. So all, the simple and the brilliant, must hold the mystery with an open hand like one holds for a moment a snowflake on an eyelash in the moonlight.

Photo by Angela Kellogg

How fitting that this human-encased God-essence, pure and true, walked in sandaled feet the sandy shores of a small sea—a place where firmament and water come together—telling the secrets of the mystery in earthy stories filled with metaphor, so that we who were made of the very earth He called forth could have inklings, now and again, of a truth beyond words and a Life that transcends the living out of our days.

This Holy child that was born in earth’s simplest of circumstances never got very far from a seashore where water and grains of firmament meet.  There He taught with stories that explanations could never impart, so that we ourselves could transcend time and space, earth and water to recognize the essential kinship between eternity and this moment.

Click below to listen to the podcast “The Story You Never Heard” featuring Gloria Gaither.

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By This Fire

This is the fourth in the series of “vlogs” or video blogs that have included the three blessings books (Marriage, Home, and Child). This one is a personal tribute to long-term marriage.

Our first baby was 18 months old when we built our house that we have lived in all these years. The house has grown up with us, and our family has grown up in it.  We always had a fireplace, but when we added our “new” kitchen to the original house, our son was seven years old.  We knew we wanted a fireplace in the kitchen, and a day bed, and a window seat.  We wanted a big island for serving as many people as would fit in our house, and a big long table where at least 10 people could comfortably sit together.

Little did we know that the fireplace in that big new kitchen would become much more than a fireplace.  It would become the soul of our house.  And it would witness all the things that a marriage comes to experience in more than a half century of living and loving together.  Somehow, the marriage, the family, and the house have endured—as has the sweet habit of building fires through the seasons of our lives.  We would like to share with you a bit of what those fires have witnessed over the years.  All of our children are now fire-builders on their own, thanks to Bill’s passion for drawing us all together around a fire.  And that son who was seven when we built this fireplace now is building fires for his own family and created the music score for the reading of all of the Blessing Books as well as the following tribute to the memories we all made BY THIS FIRE.

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HOME -- The Most Loaded Word

Writers, especially poets, learn to choose words that come with their own built-in emotional baggage. This is especially true when one wants to say a lot in as few words as possible. The right well-chosen few words can cover more territory than a whole carelessly constructed paragraph.

One of the words that carries such built-in DNA is the word home.  There are other words listed in the thesaurus as synonyms: house, dwelling, abode, residence. See what I mean? Home says more. Most of us have lived in several houses.  We have had many addresses.  We have built or bought different styles of dwellings and stayed there long enough for them to qualify as residences.  But home—well, that’s another story.  If your heart says you need to go home, where would that be?  What does that place look like in your mind?

Some of would say it’s the place we now live, the place we raised our babies and planted our gardens and decorated rooms to suit the tastes and activities of our family.  Others of us would name a place we haven’t been in years; the home-place where grandma lived or daddy built or the kids grew up. For some, home means a part of the country that shaped our view of things or gave us our roots.  The South, or the Plains, the Smokies, or Colorado.  Some of us long for the lake country or the red dirt of Georgia, the coast or the wide-open spaces of the old west.

Some long for a home they’ve never had.  Abuse, estrangement, mobility, or divorce may have kept them from ever having a sense of place.  On the outside looking in, they’ve ached in some deep place to identify with that tone in others’ voices they hear when they say “home.”

This is the season for going home. Songs like “Over the river and through the woods, to grandmother’s house we go...” and “I’ll be home for Christmas; you can count on me”  call us to make our way back to the places and the people that shaped us and help us to remember who we are.  Going home helps us remember the stories, hopefully, the good ones, that we want to pass on to our children so they will know who they are, too. Sadly, for far too many, though, this is the time for digging deeper into a commitment to recovery from pain, estrangement, or alienation.

The good news is that whether or not we have had a healthy shaping place, we are being called by one, nevertheless.  One way or another we can all go home.  That’s what the gospel is all about.  That is what this Jesus we follow came to do: to bring all the lost children of the Father to the only perfect home. And when we get there, we’ll know our hearts have been there all along.  We’ll hear the only perfect Father—say, “Welcome home, my child.  I’ve been waiting for you!”

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Gratitude Changes Us

The joy of summer is the harvest, whether it be golden grains, the bounty from the vegetable gardens and orchards, or the armloads of blooms that border our yards.  The season of the summer of life, too, results in harvests that bring us joy:  children and grandchildren, enduring friendships, and well-established relationships with neighbors and our broader communities.

It is impossible to enjoy these joys without being grateful.  And when a roomful of dear friends and family gather to express their gratitude in stories and singing, games and crafts, something unforgettable is bound to happen.  Yes, when families bring the gift of time and bounty just to give thanks, to eat and talk together, and to sing our hearts out to God for all the blessings they have experienced, we are somehow changed.

It is really true that “the hand that gives, gathers.”  Whether times are sparse or abundant, let’s keep being generous with whatever blessings we have.  If we are blessed with good memories, share them.  If we have been given the gift of music or art or writing, sing or paint or write something to share.  If we are good at sports, an afternoon on the drive-way basketball court or the front yard football field is great for the heart, the body, and relationships!  Making something together around the cleared Thanksgiving table will unfailingly lead to the greatest conversation and lots of laughs.  Give what you have!  And enjoy and revel in the gifts of others. No matter how hard we try, we can never, never out-give the Lord!  Let’s live these end of summer days with an attitude of gratitude!

I am thankful for the beautiful comments you have posted on this blog.  Not only do I read them, but they are also encouragement to others who read them.  Every time you share the blog with others or register a ‘like’ spurs me on to keep sharing with you.  Thanks!

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What If?

Last summer our daughter, Amy, went to visit a few places in England she had missed the year her family was living there.  She sent me this picture with a text that simply said:  “I had breakfast here this morning.”  The picture took my breath away.

“Where are you?” I texted back. 

She answered that she was in Durham and had stayed at the castle which is used as a Bed & Breakfast in the summer.  The whole estate has become part of Durham University, the third oldest university in England (after Oxford and Cambridge); the university uses the Durham Cathedral as a dining hall for students and guests.

 But my mind was stuck on the picture.  Wow!  What if this were a church?  And what if when you went there on Sunday, this is what you saw when you entered the sanctuary?  And what if there was a seat with a place card for you—a card with a mirror on it so that you would see your face when you picked it up?

And  what if  there were twice as many places set as the church thought would be there?  And what if after you had your fill of food and fellowship and singing and conversations, you took an extra place card with you and gave it to that young man at work or the single mom next door, or the new immigrant family across the street and said:  We had this special place set for you at the table.  Want to come sit by me next Sunday for breakfast?

And what if there were no “church-building” ulterior motives except to break bread together, sing our hearts out, and enjoy the bounties of the Lord?  What if we could confess our most urgent worry and find prayer, support, and understanding without judgement or condescension? 

 I know now that this was just a bed in a castle and breakfast in a cathedral, but what if...?

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Bless This Child

My mother always said that we human beings get real about life at two times:  when somebody we love dies, and when a baby is born.  I’ve lived long enough now to learn that she was right.  I have handed off the hand of those I love into the hand of their Maker, and I’ve sat by our two daughters and our son’s sweet wife when they were giving birth to our seven grandchildren.

I think of those plastic pet doors people put over openings to their garages so that puppies can go in and out in the winter.  It seems that in watching someone I love pass into eternity or a new baby entering this world from eternity, there is a moment when the flap of eternity opens, and the sparkling dust and the warmth of somewhere-else gets on me just enough to change my perspective for the rest of my life.

This glimpse of forever must be celebrated, for we who stand and watch can never be the same; we have stood on holy ground.   The birth our babies with eternal souls is call for the community that will surround these children to commit to be there, not just when the children are little and cute, but also when they go through the difficult or awkward passages of life—to love, to encourage, to support, and to patiently nurture them to wholeness.  Together, let’s bless this child.

If you want to share this blessing with anyone expecting or welcoming a new baby, it is available in gift book below.

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Bless This House

The house where Bill and Gloria began their married life together.

The establishing of a home takes more than a house, but a home certainly needs a place to be, and that place is very important.  If it is a place where someone else has lived before the new occupants move in, what has taken place in that space is mostly unknown.  To begin fresh, no matter the history of the place, it is a good idea to dedicate and celebrate the new place with good friends and family who will be there to share and enjoy the space in the years to come.  A blessing of this new home is the best way to clear and christen the rooms, inviting God to be the center of all activities and relationships to come.  Joy and laughter, music and good food might follow to set the tone for future expectations.

CLICK BELOW TO WATCH AND LISTEN TO GLORIA READ THE BLESSING

If you want to share this blessing with a new home owner, it is available in gift book below.

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Bless This Marriage

I believe that life is sacred—all of it—because it is God’s currency of time, given to us to spend on this side of eternity.   The passages of our lives deserve to be marked by a sacred celebration and a renewed commitment to recognize what is eternal in every moment.  We need times to stop down and refocus on the “why” of life and to prioritize the way we are spending this precious gift we have been given.

Marriage is not only one of the most important passages of life, but also should be a holy sacrament, bringing together two people, two families, two histories, and two futures.  It is much more than a civil contract; it is a serious long-term commitment, because it marks the beginning of a new home, the natural habitat for human beings and their nurture to maturity physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

This blog (or vlog) and the two to follow will be audio/video blogs, celebrating three of the most significant passages of life:  marriage, the dedication of a new home, and the birth of a baby.  They will also be available in gift book form for sharing with friends who are celebrating these passages of life.

CLICK THE VIDEO BELOW TO WATCH AND LISTEN

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It Ain't Done 'Til It's Done

Photo by Angela Kellogg

While I was growing up, my mother said more times than I wanted to hear, “It’s not done until it’s done!”  This would apply to everything from taking the bait “clean off the hook” before I put away a fishing rod, to hosing off the spade and rake (and, at the end of the gardening season, oiling the spade) before I put the tools away in the tool shed.  It was applied to putting my bike in the garage before I went to bed, neatly hanging up the dish towel after the dishes were dried, and making my bed and straightening the bathroom before I left for school.  Along with this valuable training, came the ethic I learned from my parents and grandparents before them: pay your bills in full, don’t buy what you can’t afford, and always “pay your tithe” first, if you want God to bless the rest.  Oh yes, and never live so close to the edge financially that you can’t help those who are in need and offer hospitality to whomever God brings into your life.

Photo by Angela Kellogg

I have been so grateful for this heritage of responsibility. My parents didn’t leave my sister and me much of an inheritance, but they left us a legacy of great value.  I hope Bill and I have passed that legacy on to our kids.

We have learned that we must be frugal so that we can be generous.  We’ve learned the value of “deferred gratification,” that the things we wait for are all the dearer when they come.  We’ve discovered that gratitude makes every day a treasure and the simplest pleasures sweet.  And we’ve learned that how we do a thing is as important as the doing of it, whether it is writing a song, making a recording, pruning a grape vine, or putting garden tools away for the winter.

Photo by Angela Kellogg

We have experienced in our own home and in our homes of origin the joy of deep rest after a day of honest labor, the contentment in knowing we have paid our debts, and the rich reward in sharing our blessings with others.  We have been as enriched by drives into the Indiana countryside as by trips around the world.  In our travels we’ve enjoyed a few really lovely hotels and some of the simplest accommodations, but we always think the best place of all is home.

Photo by Angela Kellogg

                  We have found true what Paul once wrote to the believers in Phillippi:

“I’ve learned by now to be quite content whatever my circumstances.  I’m just as happy with little as with much, with much as with little.  I’ve found the recipe for being happy, whether full or hungry, hands full or hands empty.  Whatever I have, wherever I am, I can make it through anything in the One who makes me who I am.”  (Phil. 4:12-13  The Message)

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Plumb Lines and Levels

Photo by Angela Kellogg

My Daddy was a carpenter.  I grew up making “villages” for my miniature people and animals out of piles of sawdust and pinning curls of wood shavings into my hair when I was pretending to be a princess.  I became familiar with Daddy’s tools, and he showed me how to use them: the plain, the saws, the sanders, and, of course, hammers, nails and screwdrivers.  To this day I love beautiful woods with interesting grains and can’t help running my hands over their smooth polished surfaces.

Photo by Angela Kellogg

One of my father’s tools often made its way into his sermons.  It was his “plumb line”, a piece of heavy metal shaped like a tiny child’s top and tied to a piece of twine.  He used it as the acid test on vertical supports like wall framing, beams, pillars and the finished edges of walls of wood and masonry.  The plumb line was pulled by gravity, so even unlevel ground that could fool the naked eye, couldn’t fool the plumb line.  If the plumb line said the board was straight, it was straight.  Cross beams could then be lined up on the horizontal and their accuracy could be measured with the “level”, a wooden board with a hole in the center across which two tiny tubes of oil had been fixed, each with a bubble inside.  The “plumb line” and the ”level” measured the quality of a carpenter’s work and predicted whether or not, years later, the plaster applied to that wall would crack or the floor joists laid would creak.  The plumb line and the level could even prophesy whether a hundred years from now a building would still stand straight and strong. 

Photo by Angela Kellogg

There are in any age, at any time, winds of public opinion, changing trends, and popular viewpoints.  There are styles of dress, transportation, décor and behavior.  There are “fads” and “stars” and “influencers” and “idols”.  There is political rhetoric mainly designed to get votes by appealing to voters’ immediate material advantage and current felt needs.

But there is only one perfect model and one accurate measuring stick that is trustworthy.  It is the “plumb line” of God’s word and the walking, living Word – Christ himself, the great leveler.  Against this Living Word everything else must be measured if it is to stand the winds of change and the storms of time.

The prophet Amos lived at a time not unlike our own.  It was a time of control freaks, self-sufficiency and affluence, yet a time when the poor were too often oppressed and injustice was an accepted practice.  Religious performance was common but spiritual integrity and real obedience to God was uncommon.  Here in his own words Amos said: “The Lord was standing beside a wall built with a plumb line, checking it with a plumb line to see if it was straight”. 

And the Lord said to me, “Amos, what do you see?”

I answered, “A plumb line.”

And he replied, “I will test my people with a plumb line……” (Amos 7:7-8a)

Jesus was a carpenter. He would have been very familiar with this measuring device. He came to be the living, walking plumb line so that our lives would stand straight and strong, enduring and withstanding all the pressures of the times. He asks us to be citizens of another Kingdom, and to measure wealth, success, acceptance, and status by another measuring device than the fickle opinion of the current culture. It is an eternal edifice that we are building with the moments and choices of this day.

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Folding Sox

We were on vacation with our son and Bill’s father whom I’ve always called by his first name George.  One morning George found on his dresser the socks I had washed and folded for him with his underwear.  He came out of the bedroom grinning, unfolding a pair.

“Lela used to fold socks like this,” he said.  “But I never learned how to do it.  I just can’t get it right.”

He was pleased and was relishing this small gesture of holding a household together, treasuring a family.  He and Lela had been married 65 years when she died.  I wondered if he ever noticed this while he had her.  I wondered if he ever told her thank you for the millions of socks she folded.

Photo by Angela Kellogg

When Bill and I got married, Bill still lived at home.  His mother changed his bed with air-dried sheets she used to carry, wet and heavy up from the basement where she did the washing – up and out to the clothesline where she carefully shook each sheet free of its wrinkles with a crisp snap, folded it in half, and pinned it with wooden clothespins to the line in the back yard where the sheets were dried by the Indiana prairie wind and the sun.  She would fold them and all the other wash – underwear, dish towels, bath towels, pillowcases, and dozens of socks – and put them all clean and smelling of summer breeze and marigolds into drawers and linen closets.  The dozens of pairs of underwear – boxer shorts and white tee shirts – and the pillowcases and cotton handkerchiefs she sprinkled, folded into themselves into round mounds that looked like bread dough rising, and placed them in a laundry basket to be ironed that night by the T.V.  Yes, the underwear, pillowcases and linen handkerchiefs, white shirts, blue shirts, work shirts and blue jeans, housedresses, aprons, and feed sack dish towels were all ironed.

Gestures of love – touching the clothes, smoothing, patting, folding, patting some more – when sometimes she couldn’t pat the bodies they went on because they had changed from little boys to men before her eyes, or because they were too busy or too “grown-up” or too gone-all-the-time to be touched and enfolded or patted any more.

I couldn’t help thinking about all the nights this family of five had crawled into bed between fragrant sheets and burrowed their heads into sweet-smelling freshly ironed pillowcases, felt the comfort, inhaled the “summer” and caressed their pillows.  Did Lela long to be caressed sometimes too, and patted?  On cold nights did George sometimes burrow his nose into her soft neck smelling of Estée Lauder after her bath, and tell her how much he loved having his socks folded, his shorts ironed, his meals hot, his house clean, his needs met, and a warm body to hold?  Or did he just trust that there are some things that don’t have to be said.  Does he still think that now?

Maybe not, maybe now he knows how important it is to say it.  So he says it to me.  “Lela used to fold my socks like this.  I’ve never been able to do it, but Lela did – just like this.”

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Dwarfed by Majesty

There is a certain thing that can happen in a one-night concert in an auditorium or arena, and Bill and I have been sharing such evenings with beautiful people all over the world for more than fifty years.  We have seen many a cold sports center or city auditorium turned into a cathedral by the presence of the Lord.

But there is something quite different that can happen when a group of seekers travel together on a ship for a whole week, bumping into each other over breakfast, experiencing a salmon bake in the pine woods by a cold spring-fed stream, or being reduced to silence by the intimidation of a glacier.  Or how about smelling the pristine waters where blue icebergs float by just a few feet away carrying a family of seals?

Some of my most memorable conversations have “just happened” in a little Russian Orthodox church in Sitka or while standing at the ship’s rail listening to the once-in-a-lifetime sound of a glacier “calving.” 

I have to admit that Alaska is my favorite trip.  Maybe that is because I grew up in Michigan where there were logging villages in the Upper Peninsula and cold rivers where the Coho salmon climbed the “ladders” to fight their way upstream.  I guess that may have been where I learned to love people who are willing to swim upstream against the current of common opinion.  I love the hardiness of people toughened and tempered by weather and sometimes the struggle to conquer the elements and survive.

This summer, cruising the intercoastal waterway in Alaska, I especially loved being surprised by a waterfall as the ship sailed round a bend of an emerald green mountain,  or seeing a pod of orcas playing like children in the icy waters.  Most of all I loved both the solitude and community—the quiet moments by myself to listen to the “still small voice,” as well as the accidental chance to  have coffee with old friends I’d never met.

For whatever reason, there is a certain thing that happens when the Family of God gets away from the plastic pressures of dulling routine to sail to a place where we are once more reminded what God had in mind when he created the beautiful, unspoiled wilderness and gave it to us to enjoy and preserve.  Fill that ship with music celebrating the wonders of not only God’s creation, but the marvel of a God who walks with us (or in this case, sails with us) through the oceans of our lives, and something so memorable happens that it continues to inform years of landlocked days back home.

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Good Things Just Take Time

photo by Meg Ballard

As kids prepare to go back to school, we realize that the jeans that fit fine in May are halfway to their knees, and the tennis shoes are so worn and stained that they certainly won’t do for the first day of classes.  The marks on the wall we made last August to record their height is two inches shorter than the one made this morning.

The voices are changing, too.  The sound of that sweet child calling from his upstairs bedroom sounds strangely like a man; and the little girl that loved to wear her pink and lavender dress is bounding in to breakfast in brand new tattered and frayed jeans and an oversized tee shirt tied in a knot just above her navel, allowing a peak at her bare belly.

When did this happen?  When did we go from holding a cuddly infant to dropping a child at kindergarten?  And where went the time between kissing a second grader good night to hosting a pizza party for 14 teen-agers?  How amazing, too, that we survived the turbulent years adolescence to enjoy these coming-back-home moments with responsible adults with kids of their own, parenting with wisdom that sometimes puts to shame my own bungling attempts at being wise and engaged.

I’m sitting on the porch today sensing hints of the season changing from summer to fall.  The zinnias are tall and in full bloom of outrageous colors.  I saw the first chrysanthemums at Welche’s Nursery this week, and the leaves of the giant maple beside the driveway gate are showing edges tinged in scarlet.  That tree was just a sapling when we first poured the cement for the driveway. In fact, when we built this house and were still teaching English fifty-three years ago, we could still see my parents’ back deck across the creek.  Now there is a forest of pines, maples, sycamores, oaks, and willows between us and what we now call the Creek House.

I readily confess that patience is not a natural virtue for me.  But over the years of serving God, I have come to know that good things just take time.  Tall, lush trees, an English garden, a good rich marriage, deep friendships, and responsible adult kids just take time, whether I’m patient or not. “And who of you by worrying,” asked Jesus “can add a single hour to your life?” But I am learning to sigh fewer sighs of exasperation because things aren’t moving as quickly as my limited perspective would like.

I am learning to trust the process and to “pull the camera back,” to see the bigger picture and not be so focused on the details of today. I am learning to pick my battles and save my “nos” for the big stuff.  I am coming to realize that the promise to “work all things together for our good” means “good” from an eternal perspective; I am also learning that pain is often the shovel God uses to dig a wider, deeper capacity for holding what is eternal in the here and now.

And my impatient nature is finally relaxing in the trust that “good things just take time.”

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Michigan in My Bones

Bill was born two blocks from where we now live; he grew up less than a mile from there.  When we got married (he was 26), he simply moved across the driveway into the little house we rented from Bill’s parents.  Four years later we moved to the house we built less than a mile away while we were still teaching high school English.  We have lived in that house ever since, here in the vast farm country of Indiana, the center of the even more vast heartland prairie of America.

I have come to love this flat country where you can see the sun rise and set across fields of soybeans and corn, and measure the days of summer by how tall the cornstalks and how thick the beans.  It is home to memories made ever since I first came at seventeen as a freshman at Anderson College—now a fine University.

But sometimes I get a longing for Michigan where I was born and grew up and where my pastor parents lived until they moved to Indiana to help us with our tiny children so I could travel and sing with Bill on week-ends.  I am a March-born Pisces, and I am drawn to water like a fish; it is near water where I can best breath.

So sometimes, as much as I love Indiana, I just need to get my Michigan fix.  Bill is quick to sign on, and we go north to the places that shaped me:  the tiny village of Burlington, the cereal city of Battle Creek, and the gateway to the real north-country, Clare.  Last week was such a week. 

My grandparents’ house with the field stone porch.

As we drove, I told the stories once again about how before I was born my parents’ families lost their farms in Missouri during the dust bowl year of 1932, about how they took my tiny sister and moved to the industrial north, to Battle Creek, Michigan.  I told him once more about how they got work in factories like United Steel and Wire, Union Steam Pump, and, eventually, Post Cereals.

Farm house where we lived when I was little.

We drove past the house with the field stone porch were my grandparents lived and where I went as a little girl to pick black raspberries in the woods, gather the eggs from the chicken coop, and watch my grandmother make apple butter in her huge copper cooker on the wood cookstove. We found the farm house built in the late 1800s just down the road where we lived for a while before my parents took a struggling group of less than thirty people and began a ten-year journey of building a strong congregation.  We found the “parsonage” where I grew up, at first a rat-infested, run-down two-story house that my carpenter father and design artist mother transformed into a livable, welcoming place where teen-agers, church families, and visiting clergy could be enfolded into the warmth of our family.

Bill and I went by the church where my parents pastored and the cemetery where my grandparents are buried.  I showed him the roaring St. Joe river that flows behind the church, the river where the youth group speared carp and fished for bass and bluegills, and the square white building across from the church that was then a small market run by an Italian family named Ricotta where Daddy stopped many times to pick up bread and milk on his way home.

The parsonage in Burlington

We found the little clapboard building that was the library where I read or checked out every Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mystery in print.  There were book shelves on all four walls and wooden benches facing them, a desk for the librarian, a few wooden chairs for grown-ups, and a pot-bellied wood stove in the middle of the room for heat in the winter.  I remember having to choose which side of my body to fry and which to freeze, depending on which way I sat on the benches.

As we drove down M-60, I named families that were our friends, most of whom went to the church.  We passed the land that was once the Michigan State African-American camp ground where our family went every night of the camp to hear some of the greatest preachers and singers in our movement and beyond.

North Ave church of God

We drove on to Battle Creek and visited the church that my parent led that congregation to build on North Avenue when I was still in college and where Bill and I came to visit when we were first married.  We talked about the nights Bill picked me up at midnight when I got off work from Kellogg’s where I worked summers to help pay for college.  It was on one of those nights that Bill gave me an engagement ring.

We are not good at selfies, but here we are beside the Cass River in Frankenmuth.

We checked into the Bavarian Inn in the darling German-Bavarian town of Frankenmuth to spend some time with my sister’s daughter Melody and her husband Greg who pastor in the near-by town of Millington.  What a sweet time we had with them remembering my sister, sharing stories, and then attending worship with them on Sunday!

Sitting on Melody’s and Greg’s long porch.

All the while, I was breathing air fragrant with cedars, pine and the smell of fresh water lakes and streams. The white paper birch and poplar leaves were quivering in the breeze, and stray gulls from the Great Lakes glided sporadically overhead.  We sat on the long porch of Melody’s and Greg’s log house and caught the flashes of bluebirds and gold finches against the dark green of the trees.  A deer or two nibbled leaves in the edge of the woods behind their yard, and a great blue heron could be spotted now and then rising from some lake in the distance.

The next time I have a longing for the state that’s “in my bones,” or maybe for the fresh water in my veins, my sweet husband and I will go on up to the north country above Clare and on to the big lakes and the dunes.  But for now, I’m okay in Indiana.

Michigan

Michigan isn’t just a state;
It’s a state of mind.
The fragrance of pine and the nutty smell of birches,
Their bark peeling into sheer ruffled sheets of grey paper.
Michigan is a liquid place of creeks and rivers,
Lakes and streams and springs bursting out
In the most unlikely places.
It’s sand – between your toes,
In your tennis shoes, on the linoleum.
It’s piles of sand in the yard,
Under the swing, along the road.
It’s dunes of sand, beaches of sand,
Get-lost-winding-trails of sand.
Michigan is fried potatoes and onions
Cooked on a Coleman stove along the highway.
It’s Vernor’s Coolers at Dairy Queen,
Fudge from Murdick’s and pasties
From a roadside stand on the Keewenaw Peninsula.
Michigan is something fragile –
Fragile as an Indian Peace Pipe,
A pink Ladyslipper or the delicate
Color of Northern Lights in the silent sky.
Michigan is tough –
Tough as the steel on a Detroit assembly line,
Tough as the year-round residents
On Beaver Island,
Tough as the survivors of the Missouri Dust Bowl
Or the lean years in the Kentucky mountains,
Who lost it all and built it back
With worn-out tools at Ford or Post or Kellogg.
Michigan is the music over the lake at Interlochen.
It is art on the gallery sidewalks of Petoskey.
It’s a Dutch dance in wooden shoes
Among the fields of tulips.
It’s a Frankenmuth Christmas that lasts
All year long, and the mist
Rolling in while your head is turned
To hide the bridge.
It’s black dirt, golden wheat,
And ten shades of purple lilacs.
Michigan is an attitude.
It’s helping a neighbor without being asked,
Fishing ‘til the catfish bite,
And waiting ‘til the cows come home,
If you have to, to see a kid “turn out.”
And once she does, Michigan is a big mitten
To warm her hands
And welcome her home.

© Gloria Gaither, 2005 Used by permission

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Coffee Evolution

Since these days there are usually just the two of us rattling around our kitchen in the morning, we bought a Keurig coffee maker.  Bill likes it because he can work it and, he says, each cup tastes like the first cup from a fresh pot.  I like a different roast than he does, so each of us can have the roast we like best.

But really I like coffee from the old stove-top percolator I grew up with.  I love the cheery rhythm of it perking along to some unnamed primitive melody, coaxing the sun to rise and sing along for joy.  I love the aroma of real coffee escaping from the ground beans and permeating the atmosphere of first the kitchen, then wafting its way to the corners of the bedrooms, pulling sleepers to consciousness in a way they’ll never forget.

I love to pour the first cup, inhale the coffee steam, and take the first sip.  Yes! Morning is here! A fresh start.  A new possibility. A new me.  I love the sound of my husband’s “u-m-m-m” as he, too, smells the full-bodied scent and tastes the rich flavor only perked coffee can produce.  The day should start like this!

These days it is followed by a shared reading—he in his chair and I in mine by the fireplace—of a real newspaper.  He reads the sports section first, while I go over the front page for local and national stories, and then the editorials.  Conversation naturally ensues, applying to regular life the principles of good team-building and fair play (or not!) of sports and the encouraging or devastating results of political or economic choices.

Beginning the day like this is a new luxury for us, lingering over a great cup of coffee having uninterrupted conversation. We treasure these minutes that often also include phone conversations with some or all of our grown children about their children’s activities and endeavors or about their own spiritual breakthroughs or aspirations.

It’s all good.  It was good when the scurry to collect homework, uniforms, instruments, and lunches was a part of our morning.  It was good when the house was full of neighborhood kids making cornstarch clay figures, finger painting, carving pumpkins, and stringing cranberry and popcorn garlands.  It was good when the place was rocking with teen-agers dancing, practicing with their rock band, writing and filming video mysteries, and rehearsing scenes for high school plays.  It was good when college students came home with roommates, girlfriends and boyfriends and a month’s worth of dirty laundry.

Soon, it will be good when our children and their families come home for a week-end of bonfires, cook-outs, swimming, and fishing.   It will be fun to cook big meals again and hear the house reverberating with guitars, keyboards, basses, and drums.  It will be good sitting and talking on the porch with a fire in the firepit until it gets dark and the lightning bugs come out and pond frogs and cicadas start their serenade.

And it will be good when the smell of fresh perked coffee wafts its way up the stairs to pull from their sleep the people we love the most to gather around the big oak table for pigs-in-a-blanket, scrambled eggs, and fresh fruit to share new spiritual insights, political opinions, and stories of the grandkids’ latest adventures.  The prayer time around the table will be deeper and richer than when we once read Egermeiers Bible Story Book before school.

After we circle the kitchen to pray for safe travels, hug each other, and walk these beautiful children down the mill stone walk under the grape arbor and to their cars, it will be just Bill and me in our old farm kitchen, reading our devotions and a real newspaper, and sipping good coffee.  And it will be good. It will all be good.

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This is The Place

Not too long ago I had coffee with a friend I’ve known for years.  Before we knew each other, we were growing up in the same area of the same state.  Both of our fathers were pastors in similar churches, and I’m pretty sure we went to the same youth camp in the summer.  Our fathers knew each other from pastors’ fellowships and both had a passion for helping new areas establish new churches.  Both served on Boards of Church Extension, my father in our state and hers, eventually, moved to our church headquarters to serve on the national board.

Photo by Angela Kellogg

We really became close friends as adults, and that friendship has grown more important to us both over the years.  We meet as often as our schedules allow just to catch up and share our hearts. Over coffee that day she said to me, “I’m going to have my grandson for two weeks this summer (He is eleven).  I am going to take him to Park Place Church and walk him down the aisle, show him where my mom used to sit, show him the alter and tell him, ‘This is where we pray and sometimes cry; here is where we dedicate little babies and get married and have funerals....’” She went on to basically say she was going to explain the sacred places we both hold dear and the community that has held us both through more chapters of our lives than I could ever share or even explain.  Her precious grandson—only one generation removed from the community of faith—had never been inside a church.

That night I could not get her words out of my mind.  I told Bill about this and spent a restless night thinking about this little guy and so many other kids I know who are without the safe haven of the community of true believers in this chaotic world.  We wanted to somehow share what we were feeling in a strong, maybe even urgent song for families everywhere.  Bill came up with the perfect music for the words that were echoing in my mind from the coffee conversation.

We all need a sacred space where our souls can find peace.  But we need to make sacred again other spaces for us to dwell as well.  Our homes need to be sacred again.  Our porches where we talk, the spaces where we work, our bedrooms and kitchens where we make love and share meals:  these need to be touched with the eternal and made to be sanctuaries of safety and wholeness.

As I write this, I am praying for a purging of anything that has fallen short in what we call the church.  I am asking for healing of our broken hearts and a restoration of a powerful support system of firm believers—the Family of God—full of love, mercy, forgiveness, and grace so that we who claim the name of Jesus can gently scoop up a generation of beautiful kids and their families and love them back to the table where there is already a place set for them.  One thing for sure:  things will never be right or complete until all the children come home.

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The Alabaster City

I’ve always thought our national anthem should be “America the Beautiful”.  It captures so much of what America is on her best days.  (And it is easy to sing!). It pictures the unparalleled geographical variety of this vast country, much of which Bill and I as traveling troubadours have been privileged to experience.

Photo by Angela Kellogg

Historically, this has been a nation formed from vast migrations of peoples from all over the world, yet whatever our countries of origin, there is a corresponding terrain in America to make us feel at home. Rugged coastlines? They are here in both our northeastern and northwestern states.  Vast plains covered with miles of golden grains and grasses?  The belly of America is the breadbasket of the world.  Parched arid deserts?  Ah, yes, we have those, too, stretching for miles across the badlands with shifting sands hot enough to scorch the toughest of the brave.  There are the painted deserts and the red rocks, rocks bigger than a cathedral, but looking more like stacked giant loaves of baked bread.  Did your family immigrate from the high mountains? There are in America the great Rockies with peaks to take your breath away or the mist-shrouded Smokies covered with forests so green and lush even artists never tire of trying to capture their mystery and nuances of color as the seasons change.

Photo by Lucas Finley

Did your ancestors make their living from the sea?  The Great Lakes are seas with—can you believe it?—fresh water fed by deep springs; great boats can sail from “sea” to “sea”.  And what of those warm countries where magnolias perfume the night air, and giant pines drop pine cones as big as your head, where peaches and sweet apricots fall in juicy, golden pools and where oranges and grapefruit drop in your own back yard?  We just call that the South.

Photo by Angela Kellogg

So this song captures the endless variety of a great land “from sea to shining sea.” But it captures much more than a welcoming terrain and breathtaking vistas.  It captures the character of people who have endured, suffered, and persisted in believing that there must always be a cause worth dying for.  While admitting that our country has not always been noble and admirable, we have sought to forgive each other our short comings and have aspired to higher goals and better character.  We have chosen to never give up even on ourselves.

The song encourages us, when we are too reactionary and sometimes downright vindictive, to pray for more self-control and to ask God for the character to show mercy instead of revenge.

Oh, beautiful for patriot dreams that see beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam undimmed by human tears.

If we who love our great land lose our vision, our drive to keep believing that there is a dream out there for a more perfect union and an ideal that could become a reality, we will slide into the oblivion of lost nations and forgotten people.  If we accept more and more as the norm, filthy streets, polluted waters, crumbling infrastructure, and children crying in the night because there is no one sober or sane enough to feed them, we will quit singing any national anthems or respecting any song of freedom.  If through the darkness we stop pressing toward the goal of “alabaster cities” that gleam in the dawn of a new day, “undimmed by human tears”, we will be destined to disintegrate into dust and end with a whimper.  If violence replaces graciousness, if anger eclipses mercy, if rancor drowns out laughter and misery extinguishes the flame of hope, there will be no nation and, eventually no such thing as beauty or aspirations.

It is we who belong to another Kingdom, who are called to be light in the darkness,  yeast in the loaf, salt for preserving and bringing out the delicious savor—it is we who must daily lift our nation’s aspirations to  a better city, a new standard, a more worthy goal. 

Until this nation has a new birth of freedom, we must hold high a more holy model and work to realize a more compassionate community by living—each of us every day—in a way that convinces the desperate that at least in our corner of the world God’s Kingdom can come on earth as it is in heaven.

America the Beautiful

O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain
For purple mountain majesties, above the fruited plain
America, America, God shed His grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea

O beautiful for Pilgrim feet, whose stern impassioned stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat, across the wilderness
America, America, God mend thine every flaw
Confirm thy soul in self control, Thy liberty in law

O beautiful for heroes proved, in liberating strife
Who more than self their country loved, and mercy more than life
America, America, May God they gold refine
Till all success be nobleness, and every gain divine

O beautiful for patriot dream, that sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by human tears
America, America, God shed His grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea

Katharine Lee Bates

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"A Place of Her Own"

Every woman needs a place of her own; a corner, a room, a space in the garden she can call her own where she can get alone with God, where she can go to read or think, where she can shed private tears or write in her journal. Given the pressures of life, the demands of work and family, most women need “an escape hatch,” a place where we can run and hide for a moment to catch our breath, recoup and regain perspective.

For my mother I suspect it was her sewing room, where to the whir of the sewing machine (and earlier the rhythm of the treadle) she could think undisturbed while she created designer fashions from the patterns on her sewing table.

Photo by Angela Kellogg

For my sister it has always been her garden with its abundant blooms and bird-feeders and trellises growing with the great globes of red tomatoes she had nourished.  There in the garden she and God have had many an intimate conversation and, I suspect, these encounters were why her spirit always seemed to be a homeplace for weary hearts.

Our daughter Suzanne has her writing place where the sweet fragrance of blank paper and the pungent smell of ink blend with the delicious musty aroma of treasured books.  There she cocoons herself away with her cat and gives into her natural hermit nature to express a world that only comes alive for the rest of us on the page.

Amy is a nester by nature, so she makes every space her own and invites the world into her quiet place.   She and Andrew both have the gift of hospitality and live their outwardly frantic pace as a natural rhythm that we have always referred to as “AMYtime.”

My special places are an old mission chair by the fireplace in our Indiana farm kitchen, our cabin in the woods, and my potting shed.  The potting shed and its secluded green space is by now an old friend and a place where I can go to dig in the dirt, write in my garden journal, and pray. My other soul-place is the seaside; I’m sure there must be salt water in my veins, for the beach always calls to me.

The other day Suzanne sent me this poem about décor.  She called it “Finishing Touches.”  I loved it so much, I asked her if I could share it with you.  After all, the most beautiful décor of all is light shining on the special place where your heart feels at home.

The GUIDE TO STYLE IN LIVING tells how
to arrange with organized random
the globed scented candles, books, vases,
how to find palette (no more than three

patterns), how to fill wall space.
“There is a balance to this room,”
it says, the fresh coat of indigo paint
drying behind a fire engine red armoire.

I sling it down on the body of my one
random border collie who looks at me
like I’ve lost it.  I glance around this room
centered around the rich texture of woods
winter bare.  Still I admire how the charcoal,
taupe roughness juxtaposes my worn
jean jacket strewn haphazardly across
the pine trunk at the foot of my four poster bed.

This rocker I received from my husband
when our oldest was born now recovered
for the third time, rests rightfully in the corner.
the book on Aristotle Jesse was reading

lies decorously, a disconnected leaf,
in the floor next to the yellow and black
stripes of Cliff’s Notes on PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
screaming their presence at the muted door.

And I realize how we have found palette
filled empty wall space, and how we
balance, sometimes precariously, in the details
of our randomly, organized lives.

Suzanne Renee Gaither Jennings

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