Praying For Gas

Day Two

We thought Day Two of destination vacation would begin with an early morning continental breakfast, hotel checkout and then 'eastward ho.' It didn't work out that way. Turns out, Josh had endured a bad night and awoke with acute abdominal pain, so his mother called and spoke to the physician back home for an action plan. He recommended that we either take Josh to an urgent care for tests or to a hospital emergency room. We ended up doing both. An X-ray at Physician's Urgent Care was inconclusive in deciding between appendicitis, a virus, or another condition that I can't spell or pronounce, so they sent us to Vanderbilt Children's Hospital near Nashville's famous Music Row. Instead of heading toward Gordonsville, Virginia, there was a chance we were headed towards surgery.

After a brief stay in a gayly colored waiting room and learning that Josh's tests would take an undetermined time, JoJo, Joey, and I left Josh and his parents at the Children's Emergency Room and headed off to find a diversion for our oldest grandson. We drove down Music Row, through the beautiful campus of Belmont University, and collectively agreed that breakfast was a far too distant memory. I should have felt guilty for chowing down at Chago's Cantina, but confess that the pork belly tacos in lime sauce with red beans and collard greens temporarily put the whole crisis out of mind. We asked the waitress if she knew of a park nearby with a ball field of any sort, thinking that this would be just the thing to combine time killing with practice for Joey's upcoming state baseball tournament. McCabe Park was only three miles away, so after checking on Josh by text message, we proceeded to the ball field. A golf driving range adjacent to the field kept calling my name, but I ignored the summons and pitched batting practice to Joey for nearly an hour.  

It struck me while enjoying banter and play with Joey at the same time that his brother was having an ultrasound in a hospital strange to us, that this is the grandparent's frequent challenge--loving all grandchildren equally, while enjoying and responding to each according to her or his own personality, preferences, and 'sitz im leben'. Joey is nothing like Josh, who is different from Katie, who is older than Hannah, who does not resemble Hunter. Grand parenting may be grand, but it is sometimes harder than parenting in the first place.  Parents do well to learn the lesson of Proverbs 22:6, "Train a child according to his bent, and when he is old he'll not depart from it," and it may be easier for parents to follow that advice than for grandparents to do so. Maybe it comes from being one generation removed, but there seems to be an unwritten expectation that the parents of parents treat their grandchildren all the same. That is about as reasonable as it would be for someone to judge all taste buds according to the same standard of preference. Every child deserves customized parenting and grand parenting.

We received word that the tests did not reveal anything more for Josh than a significant bout of gas or uncomfortable case of constipation. It was the first time I can remember that having gas was an answer to prayer. It didn't take long to get back to the hospital, reconfigure the minivan, and resume our vacation trek toward Virginia. Grace is often easier to reflect upon than observe. Obscured by the press of the moment, grace is all the more poignant when the smoke clears. Josh is sleeping soundly in his car seat, we are headed east once again, and I am grateful for a Father whose nearness both defines and reveals Him.

Grace is Messy

Day One

Vacation has started and it seems to begin the same way every year--with grandson Josh getting sick, all over everything. We had just finished the mandatory travel breakfast at The Waffle House (our son-in-law's favorite) in Franklin, Tennessee, and were en route to Winstead Hill Park, when Mount Vesuvius erupted. Caught in the spray were Josh, the van where Josh was sitting, and the hanging clothes my wife and I had brought to wear for a business meeting later in the evening. Our first pressing priority was to locate a car wash complete with vacuum unit and deodorizer. Thanks to a quick search on the 'Around Me' iPhone app, we found one just 121 feet from where I had pulled over, and quickly started a decontamination process even NASA would envy. The bad news is that our vacation transport needed drastic and immediate help; the good news is that as soon as Josh emptied, color returned to his cheeks, pluck to his spirit, and the whole fumigation process became (for him) somewhat humorous. 

As soon as we could re-enter the van without feeling the urge to follow suit, our task was to find a laundromat. As luck would have it, the King Neptune Laundromat was situated catty-cornered across from the car wash.  I used the change machine to turn a $10 bill into enough quarters for laundry soap, dryer sheets, and two loads of clothes washed and dried.  The others took the car and went to play on Winstead Hill, a city park that once constituted my great great something's plantation, while Jo and I stayed to complete the laundry service. Once the money was changed and machines loaded, Jo and I settled into hard plastic chairs and we were able to discuss the unexpected anointing of our day. Jo was quite calm about the incident and entirely practical as to how to move forward. She is the wise and stable one, seemingly at all times, and I have learned to respect her greatly and do my best to adopt her response to adversity as my own.  All of life is grace, but sometimes grace is messy, and it helps to have a good example of how to deal with the clutter. 

Cramped in a Minivan

I plan on doing something I've not attempted before in my next blogs. There's no guarantee that it will be of any interest to anyone other than me, but for the next eight days I will be sharing thoughts and impressions while on vacation. We leave this evening for a trek through Tennessee and on to the Shenandoah Valley, mixing in a little work along the way, but mostly relaxing. The caravan (more accurately 'minivan') will contain my wife and I along with two grandsons, a daughter and son-in-law. Based on past experience, I anticipate the trip to be filled with plenty of humor, occasional reflection, and perhaps a life lesson or two discovered along the way.  Feel free to join us on the journey (but not in the already crowded mini van) and share your own comments and reflections in response. For now, I have some packing and loose ends tying left to do. 

Enos

I've been guilty in the past of poking fun at beauty pageant contestants, which is why I enjoy watching Sandra Bullock in "Miss Congeniality" so much. The curvaceous Miss-Somethings-in-waiting are asked what is most important to them, and each replies with agonizing predictability,"world peace." Now the shoe is on the other foot, or tiara is on a different head, whatever the case may be. 

Unapologetically, what I'm praying for these days is world peace; not a trite and hackneyed garden variety, but genuine, hate-free, battle-less peace. I have a personal reason for this sense of urgency. An email made it to my inbox yesterday morning containing tragic news.  According to a close friend in Kenya, a former colleague of mine and personal friend, Enos Nambafu Weswah, was brutally murdered along with 28 others at Mpeketoni near Lamu island this weekend as part of the escalating violence on the east African coast.  Enos was one of the professors at Kenya Baptist Theological College while I was academic dean, and he served KBTC faithfully as professor, Registrar, and then Principal until his retirement a few years ago. He was a gentle spirited man characterized by simple love and profound faith. Enos leaves behind his sweet wife Edna and precious daughter Yolanda. His death is a tragic loss and another chapter in the cruel tale of religious warfare mixed with majimboism (Swahili word for tribalism). Al-Qaida-linked al-Shabab militants from Somalia claimed responsibility for Saturday's attacks — just like they did for others last month that killed 65 people. Kenya police, however, said preliminary investigations pointed to a Kenyan separatist group (Mombasa Republican Council) on the coast. What makes matters worse is that this is truly out of character for a people I know personally to be congenial and hospitable.

I will never stand as a contestant in any pageant, but if asked what I want most these days, I would not hesitate. My clear response tinted by great angst would simply be, "world peace."

"The mountains shall bring peace to the people, and the little hills, by righteousness." (Psalms 72:3 KJV)

Rambling Fever

Everyone needs a moment to put work on hold, abandon the mobile, and stealth away for space and peace.  I'm not sure how you carpe diem, but my wife and I have found that we do it best by adding miles to my Jeep and transporting ourselves into an altered state that feels like vacation, even if it's just a day trek down the blacktop. The best part of traveling with my wife is that she reads to me while I drive. Although she insists that she does it simply to enrich us, I know she started doing it to keep me awake. Actually, the practice accomplishes both purposes. While keeping me alert behind the wheel, she has read to us novels and biographies, autobiographies and sermons. We've made friends in literature from slaves on antebellum Cane River plantations, to an Episcopal priest in a small town named Mitford. This Sunday afternoon's drive began according to script, the second installment of a political autobiography that my wife started on our last adventure, but the return leg later in the evening contained a twist. As I drove (wide awake I might add), something moved my soul and I burst into a poor rendition of a favorite song from my teenage years, Merle Haggard's "Rambling Fever."  My wife was startled, partly because it wasn't pretty, but mainly because it was more than slightly out of character. What ensued was a couple of hours of something like "Name That Tune."  We sang John Denver hits that shaped my youth. We laughed through the best of the Beach Boys, including one I sing often to our grandchildren: "Oh, I'm long tall Texan, I ride a big white horse..."  Kenny Rogers made our memory hit parade, along with George Jones, Dolly Parton, and others. You could write a person's biography with the lyrics they memorize through the years and still remember. The most telling part of the experience is what we revealed and learned about each other, and what we remembered about ourselves. Having loved and lived with each other as best friends for a number of years, there's still so much to explore. The whole experience reminded me that all of us are works in progress. We may reach mile markers and milestones, but none of us have fully arrived or ever will. Perhaps that's the point of humanity after all. To be fully human is to be in process; sometimes straining forward, other times pausing, but all the time growing. "But we shall lovingly hold to the truth, and shall in all respects grow up into union with Him who is our Head, even Christ" (Ephesians 4:15, Weymouth New Testament).

Attending Church

My wife and I are part of a small church (attendance was up yesterday, edging above 40 for the first time since Easter) that's been in our community since 1853, and to be honest, I wonder at times if it really makes a difference that I'm there at all (and I'm the preacher); but then I look around and remember why it's important that I'm there and that anyone else would be there too. There's a young man on one side holding a little girl who isn't his child, but she clings to him like they belong together. There's a man my age who was just released from jail, signaling me with a victory sign as he entered the sanctuary. There's an older woman who sees life differently since her stroke, waiting to hug me and give the same greeting from her sister she gives twice every Sunday morning. There's the older man who lost his wife a few years ago and finds his purpose in life these days by tending the climbing roses in the prayer garden. There's the sweet rancher in the choir who silently mourns the fact every Sunday that she can do everything with her weathered husband except attend church. There's the bent and largely hairless woman who has helped so many others through their times of crisis, but now wages her own battle against the onslaught of cancer. We are all different, but each Sunday morning is a kind of family reunion. 

The reason, I think, that so many find it hard to go to church is that we've largely lost the notion of what it means to be church.  We confuse participles for the noun. Singing, praying, dancing, preaching, teaching, these are all but modifiers of the real thing. I do enjoy pageantry. I'm a person of habit, so I like ritual in worship as well. Predictability need not stifle expression; it may, in fact, liberate it. I thrill to soul stirring music (unless we repeat the same lines more than seven times). Good Preaching has always moves me and bad preaching perturbs me (not to say I haven't done more than my fair share of it). But all these may be experienced alone and in private, particularly with the advent of wireless and television. What makes church "church" is that I am present with other pilgrims, connected spiritually as well as physically. It is the connection (relationship) that morphs worship into life transformation. Absence does not make the heart grow fonder; it cools the heart and dulls the spirit. This is not a new problem. One particular church in the New Testament was having a dickens of a time getting folks to show up, hence the admonition: "Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is; but exhorting one another: and so much the more, as ye see the day approaching" (Hebrews 10:25). Me loving you, and you loving me, liberates both of us to love God and worship him "in spirit and in truth."

All of this reminds me of something Frederick Buechner said during his  200th anniversary sermon at the Congregational church in Rupert, Vermont: "Despite the enormous differences between them, all these  men and women entered this building just the way you and I entered a few minutes ago because of one thing they had in common. What they had in common was that, like us, they believed (or sometimes believed and sometimes didn't believe; or wanted to believe; or liked to think they believed) that the universe, that everything there is, didn't come about by chance but was created by God. Like us they believed, on their best days anyway, that all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, this God was a God like Jesus, which is to say a God of love. That, I think, is the crux of the matter. In 1786 and 1886 and 1986 and all the years between, that is the heart of what has made this place a church. This is what all the whooping has been about. In the beginning it was not some vast cosmic explosion that made the heavens and the earth. It was a loving God who did. This is our faith and the faith of all the ones who came before us" (Buechner, "The Clown in the Belfry").

Bocce

Yesterday made for an odd 4th of July for our family because it was our first without Popi. He'd not been with us for our family celebration the past two years due to deteriorating health, but even then we took the party to him. The first such effort he seemed to recognize and appreciate, while the second seemed to escape his largely expressionless stare. Alzheimer's is rarely forgiving, especially on holidays. The change was noticeable, yet he was still present in a way. In the past, Popi held center stage with his love for the great grandchildren, for food, and for our annual bocce tournament. More than anything else, he simply loved family being together.  When the center is removed, what normally revolved around it tends to wobble a bit while seeking out a new focus. When this happens, the whole thing appears out of sync, even slightly warped, like an old wooden tennis racket exposed to the elements. We pressed on this year and even persisted with the bocce tournament (naming it the Ury Armand Memorial Tournament), but we were conscious of the trying, and conscious trying carries with it an emotional strain all its own. The good news is that wobbling objects often right themselves, and, no doubt, so will our family. We will once again celebrate in rhythm with one another and become unaware of what makes being family work. Thank God for making families resilient, and for bestowing the gift of joy in spite of loss. Popi is remembered, and remembering keeps him with us. "Sharing tales of those we've lost is how we keep from really losing them" (Mitch Albom, "For One More Day").

The American Dream

"The American dream" is more important than one might think. Something about dreams both define us and deny us. They define in that they uncover ourselves at the most honest level--what we want most, the raw and uncut version. But they deny us in that a dream never acted upon calls into question a large measure of that which I think makes me "me." Left long enough in the Land of Oz with no mooring to Kansas, I regress to a wispy shadow of intention. Great courage is always required to move from here to there. The greater distance betwixt the two, the higher is the demand for an intrepid spirit. God grant each of us the lion's courage, the tin man's heart, the scarecrow's brain, but most of all, the derring-do of Jesus of Nazareth that catapults beyond the plains of dreams and onto the summit of fearless abandon.

On Fire

Am I the only one that tries not to notice the tabloid covers at the grocer's checkout, but inevitably reads a few headlines before swiping my debit card? I gave in again last night after stopping at HEB to buy the mandatory k-cups for the next morning's wake up call. This time, the bold print that lured my gaze was situated next to a photo, and read, "Katy Perry is on fire." I didn't take time to peruse the fine print, and it left me considering its meaning. It might indicate an incident of spontaneous combustion; on the other hand, it may be a slang expression meant to describe her pop culture ascension. Either way, the phrase surfaced some timely questions. Just the day before, a former student had posted a fiery comment to one of my blogs: "You were preaching the Kingdom of God with fire when you returned from Kenya & began teaching/ preaching/ mentoring at ETBU. This memory will last a lifetime!" I'm certain that his comment was meant to affirm my relationship to Christ, and although I greatly appreciated the sentiment, the inevitable follow-up question must be, "Have I lost the fire?" Does my behavior and demeanor still warm those around me and cause others from a distance to draw close in efforts to catch a spark that will ignite a fire of their own, or have the embers grown cool with time? How would I know? If I have lost the fire, can it fall again?

Life has changed since I stood daily in front of eager students and did my best to instill an appreciation for Bonhoeffer's "Cost of Discipleship", decipher Bernard of Clairveaux's "Four Degrees of Love", and challenge them to join Laubach in experimenting with practicing the constant conscious awareness of God's presence. Life is different. I'm different, but has time and change dimmed the heat? Have pain, disappointment, mistakes, choices, silence, and cultural noise muffled my impact and diffused the power?  Have I forfeited any gifts? Do I settle for insipid relevance and cower to comfort? While change is inevitable, must spiritual fervor be a casualty to time? Yes, there are wounds remaining to be healed and demons that linger, yet brokenness has always been the necessary tinder for spiritual awakening. Father, let my heart cry out with Evan Roberts of the Welsh Revival, "Lord, bend me!" Shape my thoughts, form my words, and direct my passion so that brokenness paves the way for prophetic impact. Make me a perpetual light, rather than a pathetic shadow. My heart joins in David's emotional refrain:

"Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation; and uphold me with thy free spirit. Then will I teach transgressors thy ways; and sinners shall be converted unto thee"(Psalms 51:12-13 KJV). Stoke the embers into life. Set my soul ablaze, Lord, and consume me once again with your holy fire. "Light yourself on fire with passion and people will come from miles to watch you burn" (John Wesley).

Faded Caboose

On my way to Fort Worth from Waco last week, I saw in an open field adjacent to the Interstate a faded purple caboose adorned by a handwritten 'For Sale' sign. After doing a double take, I had my hands full remaining focused on the road ahead while stealing glances to consider the anomaly. Instantly, I bombarded myself with questions: How does a thing designed to run on steel rails end up perched awkwardly in a grass field far away from the nearest tracks? Where had it traveled during its lifetime? What had it seen? Who and what had it carried? When did its usefulness began to fade? What replaced it? Why was it painted purple? Who could want it now? How much would someone ask for a grounded purple caboose? Almost as quickly, I thought of reasonable parallels in my own life, and by reflex uttered an audible prayer, "Father, prevent me from ending up like that." For some time now I've been gripped by what might be termed an obsession. I want to end well. I want my life to count today, but I really want my sum of days to result in a life well lived. Quite the opposite of Tantalus, the Greek mythological figure standing in a pool of water beneath a fruit tree with low branches, with the fruit ever eluding his grasp, and the water always receding before he could take a drink, this seems like a reasonable goal -- to have the curtain close with integrity intact, both useful and inspiring. Stated in another way, let me be anything but a faded and abandoned caboose. The inspired apostle expressed it best: "But I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection: lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway" (1 Corinthians 9:27 KJV).