I can tell you that my dad didn’t hear one word of the conversation in this picture. Great-grandson Jake was intent on telling him something about this year’s Easter Egg Hunt. My dad listened with full attention. Then he probably smiled, and nodded, and told Jake to hunt a little more. Between the slight breeze, the chattering people all around, and the softness of a six-year old voice, the words were certainly lost for my hard-of-hearing father.

But that didn’t matter. My dad isn’t bothered because he can’t hear the details of a conversations. He just loves the connection.

I’m pretty sure I sound like a six-year-old speaking against the wind when I talk to God sometimes. He isn’t the least bit deaf, of course. But my words are probably as useless as Jake’s were that day. And I think God smiles. And nods. And tells me to just keep on tramping along through life. Avoid the weedy patches. Walk where the grass has been mown. And keep my eyes open for a splash of color hidden beneath the edge of an overturned rock or discarded tire.

Sometimes, the words simply don’t matter as much as the connection.

I don't want to miss these moments.

Saturday morning, I caught myself practically hyperventilating over my calendar. I pulled it up just to check about a detail for Monday. But that led to Tuesday, and then Wednesday, and then the first two weeks of June, and then it was August and school was starting again!

I invest way too much time planning the future. Not big plans like a trip to Europe for our 40th wedding anniversary or more savings in our retirement account. No, I ignore those. I obsess over two weeks from Thursday when I need to go stay with my mother-in-law for a few days and how I’ll manage to do the grocery shopping, banking, and laundry that week to keep things running while I’m gone. Two weeks away. Two. And I’m obsessing.

Not only do I fail to live in the moment some days, but other times I get trapped there. You know the scenario. A conversation goes badly or someone makes an offhand remark that slaps your face. The next thing you know, that moment has done a mind-meld with your brain, and you can’t stop thinking about it!

So, I was wondering how to live in the moment without being trapped there when suddenly I thought of a scripture. In Him we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28)

Maybe that is the secret. Staying in Him (and Him in me) will keep me from running ahead to the moments I don’t yet have the grace for. And it will free me from staying tangled in the past, beating my fists against a situation that will not change.

Instead, I will live. And move. And be in every sacred moment.

In Him.

One of the great family heirlooms in our clan is a crocheted bedspread made by my husband’s grandmother. It was on the bed in his mother’s guest room for several years, but I don’t even know who has possession of it anymore. Nor does that matter very much to me. I simply love the story.

Many long years ago, when Grandma-Great was a small girl named Cora, she learned to crochet. After making a few doilies, I suppose, she decided to take on a larger project. Maybe a bedspread. And so she set to work. I have no idea how many weeks or months or even years it must have taken to spin the thread into the delicate swirls and curls that eventually created the masterpiece. It was a marvel. Especially when you consider it was crocheted by such a novice.

I do know that years and years and years passed before little Cora became a wife and mother and learned the rest of the story. Her own mother knew Cora had taken on a project much too large for her skill set. She also knew the effort itself would be good practice. By the time Cora finished the spread, she would probably have become pretty good with her needle, and the last half of it would be perfect.

But, the first half would be a disaster. Cora’s mother considered what a blow that lopsided bedspread would be. Then she made a decision. Every night, after Cora fell asleep, her mother sat down and unraveled the day’s work. Then she crocheted every stitch back into its right place. As the days went by, she unraveled less and less. Eventually, she only corrected small errors. And, in the end, Cora finished the spread on her own.

Today, our family has a beautiful crocheted spread somewhere. But more importantly, we have a heritage. We have a long line of mothers who know when to stand back, when to step forward, and when to to replace stitches in the night so dreams don’t come out lopsided.

Happy Mother’s Day to us all.

It rained on the day we were married, thirty-eight years ago this week. A gully-washer as we used to say. But I don’t remember that. When someone mentioned it nearly twenty years later, I argued. In my memory the day was sunny, birds were singing, and rose petals were floating from the sky.

When I scoffed at the rain story, Wendell started reminding me of details. How it stormed so badly his big brother could barely see the road while driving us away from the church. I have no memory of that. How we snuck back to our little house to spend the first night and then shivered for hours because we didn’t have any matches to light the heating stove. Oh, yes. I do remember that. Maybe it had stormed after all.

And it has gone on like that for years. When I look back over our sickness and health, richer or poorer, till-death-do-us-part-and-it-might-be-today, I mostly see sunshine and bluebirds. If I concentrate, I can conjure up the details of darker days. I can hear the thunder of old arguments and see the lightning of great loss. But I never actually feel the rain.

I think mercy does that. Forgiving others as we ourselves have been forgiven keeps us living in the sunshine here on Mercy Street.

I tried to count how many times I’ve heard that phrase in my lifetime, but I got lost trying to cover this year. We make this statement at the end of church services, weddings, funerals, and graduations from Christians schools. We use it to quiet the family before dinner and even to open new sessions of Congress.

In all those contexts, the phrase is gentle. Inviting. Even, benign.

But, I’m not hearing it that way today.

This Thursday is the National Day of Prayer, and I’d like to suggest we use the phrase in a slightly more militant tone. I think we should stand up, look our culture in the face, and say, “Let. Us. Pray!”

Do you remember the movie It’s a Wonderful Life? The young George Bailey faces a terrifying situation when Mr. Gower accidentally fills capsules with poison and demands that George deliver them to a family fighting diptheria. George knows it’s a terrible mistake, but he doesn’t know what to do about it. So, he rushes out to find his father. He runs up the steps, slams through the door of his dad’s office, and ignores mean old Mr. Potter who is sitting in the room.

I think we should be that way, too. Our Father has the answer to all the mess in this world. He is the only one who knows what to do about all the distraught Mr. Gowers, the corrupt Mr. Potters, and the sick-almost-to-death families. As His children, we have every right to crash through the door of political correctness and seek an audience with Him.

And, we better do it. We better gather around school flag poles and on courthouse lawns. We better take a moment in office break rooms, factory parking lots , neighborhood cafes, and local coffee shops. While we still have the privilege many of our international brethren don’t share, we better exercise this right out loud.

This Thursday, and every other day, we better say to the world, Let. Us. Pray!

And then, we better do it.

A neat line can make all the difference in life.

Recently, I took a vacation day to clean our closet. This may seem like an extravagant use of a vacation day, but it has yielded great rewards. Our closet is the first thing I see in the mornings when I stumble from our bed to put on my work-out clothes. See is a relative term, since my eyes are not fully open most days. And, work-out clothes should more appropriately be called slow-stroll-on-the-treadmill-with-a-Hallmark-movie clothes. But, I digress from the closet.

This morning when I stepped inside, I smiled. Instead of a jumbled mess, I saw order. Sweaters actually folded on shelves. Shoes actually tucked into cubbies. I didn’t trip over a single thing in my stupor!

A few minutes later, I settled into my prayer chair. Which might be more appropriately labeled my whining chair, or my list-recitation prayer, or my can’t-keep-my-eyes-open-today chair — depending on the morning. No matter what frame of mind I carry with me to that chair, I find it serves the same purpose as my vacation day. Maybe I should call it my Sorting Chair. Because this is often the place where the Holy Spirit takes the chaos of my messy life and sorts it into neat stacks of Keep, Clean-up, or Throw Away.

I always come out of the experience neater. Just like my closet. Now, if I can keep us both that way with some daily maintenance!

This week, I heard an add for a local  Hospice program: Adding life to days when adding days to life isn’t possible.

Isn’t that beautiful?

Unfortunately, it is flawed. Adding days to life is never possible. The only person who ever tried it came to a very bad end. On his deathbed, Hezekiah convinced God to relent and give him fifteen more years of life. Unfortunately, he sold his legacy into bondage during those last years.

So, don’t try it. Don’t think you can bargain with God and promise to be a missionary if he’ll let you live another fifty years in good health. That’s like promising you’ll build orphanages around the world if you win the lottery. You know you’ll blow it on cars and clothes and Caribbean cruises.

I’ve always sort of known this concept about life. The Bible has several passages about all our days being numbered. But that slogan grabbed my attention and made me wonder where I’d been frittering away my allotted days.

That is why I took a long drive after work Saturday afternoon. I was pretty sure laundry, groceries, and bill-paying wouldn’t add any life to my days. But a granddaughter’s piano recital? Oh, yeah.

I saw an eagle on the lake today. It’s one of the perks of living Forty-Five minutes from Anywhere. We may not have a Starbucks, but sometimes we see eagles.

It had been a tough day around here. Our intentional community in the middle of a cornfield is all about helping troubled souls. They come from all over the place. I have no idea how so many of them hear about us. They come battered, broken, and abused by life without God. Our job is to point them toward reconciliation with Him through Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit does the rest. Leaving it up to Him, though, can be an emotional task.

Some people start getting healed within days. Lives are restored. Hope is renewed, and eventually the restored soul is leading a business or a choir or a family.

But, other days, three high-school seniors walk off down the road (literally) five weeks before graduation because the boarding school rules are too hard. We cry when they go. We plead. We promise, that if they’ll stick it out just a little longer, they will be so glad they did. But, they walk anyway. So fast that they don’t take their shoes.

That happened today. And we cried. I felt a special heart-tug for one of the girls. I’ll call her Julie. I always saw such promise in her eyes, and I couldn’t believe she had thrown away her future and gone off to inherit the wind.

I prayed for the girls, and I prayed for all of us, and then I took a deep breath and went back to work. It’s all I could do. Just before lunch,  I checked email and found this beautiful note : Julie came back.

It can be hard out here in the Middle of Nowhere with all these troubled souls. It can be completely heartbreaking on occasion and seem like we are miles away from hopeful. But, sometimes we see eagles.

The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places… Psalm 16:6.

King David wrote those words, but we don’t know when. Maybe when he was a shepherd boy fighting lions and bears or when he was composing worship songs on his harp.

Maybe when he was a fugitive living in a cave or when he was pretending to be a double agent working for the Philistines. Or, maybe, he wrote this verse when he was living in Hebron surrounded by wives and children and stepping into his call. Maybe in Jerusalem, when all the people had crowned him king and worship had exploded in his city.

The thing is, he could have written these words at any time or any place. Because the words before it say, “Lord, You are my portion and my cup.” David didn’t get to pick a city and choose a career path. He didn’t make a pro’s and con’s list for which college to attend. David just chose God. After that, anywhere the boundary lines fell for him was pleasant.

I’m pretty sure there’s a lesson here…

Our Treasures

One of the [few] things Wendell and I have consistently done right in life [I think] has to do with giving. We have tried to always be faithful in tithing and in offerings and in alms.

Even when we couldn’t pay all the bills we had wracked up from poor choices and impulsive spending, we gave. I don’t tell you that to brag or to allow my left hand to high-five my right. I have a point.

One day, years ago, we found ourselves in a dire financial condition [again]. I think it was about the time I got my first copy of Quicken. I plugged all our financial data into the debt-calculator and punched the button for results. I got this: Warning: You will NEVER be out of debt. [I'm not kidding. It said that.]

Anyway, Wendell was bemoaning this fact to a friend. “We always give back to God,” he said. “We believe all the money is His anyway, and so we never cheat Him on our tithe. Don’t you think He will honor that?”

Our friend resisted the urge to point out the obvious. If we really believed all our money belonged to God we wouldn’t be blowing the other 90% on things that got us into debt in the first place!

Instead, he said something that rocked our socks. “Oh, yes. God will honor your generosity. But it might not be in the way you think. Maybe you will never be rich or even out of debt. Maybe you will always struggle financially. But maybe your kids will  turn out great.”

[Selah]

And, they have.