Impact

This is meant to be a short post.  We will see if I can manage that.  In women’s study we were talking about making a regular place to pray.  We got off on a little tangent after reading how one man prayed regularly on his commuter train.  Here’s the question:  Do you think subsequent passengers would feel anything if they sat in the same place?  The idea is that people and actions affect the energy of a place, for good or ill.

Our thought was that most people would be too preoccupied to notice anything.  However, some who are more tuned in spiritually might notice.  One person thought they would be disturbed by it.  This was surprising to me, because I thought the next person would feel a peaceful presence.  Perhaps it would depend on inclined toward God, or actively in rebellion?

I did throw in a story, for what it’s worth.  Some months ago, I was out raking leaves when a neighbor came by, walking her two dogs.  She stopped to chat a bit, then told me the dogs usually relaxed when they came to our house.  She seemed to feel it had some positive energy.  Of course, it may be that it’s just the amount of time it takes to settle down, since we are about 5 houses apart.  But I do like to think that my prayers for the neighborhood would leave a positive effect.

So what do you think?

Stories

Our women’s study talked a little about the end of our last study on the mutuality commands (those “one another” things) then moved on to look at a book we had studied back around 2005.  It was about prayer.  We once focused almost exclusively on prayer, but have since branched out.  But there were leftover books and we haven’t chosen anything else.  This one was Bill Hybels’, Too Busy Not to Pray.

Just two pages in we found ourselves stopping to share some of our own stories.  The idea was, there are times when circumstances seem to force us to pray, because we have no where else to turn.  Often God seems especially present at those times.  Several told stories of being with loved ones as they died, and feeling God’s presence there.  But two other stories stood out for their uniqueness.

They actually had a similar theme of trusting God through extremely difficult circumstances, especially when one really has no control over medical outcomes.  The older story was of a very difficult birth experience some twenty or more years ago.  The baby was born but was not breathing.  I’m sure the medical team was doing all sorts of things, but all mom could do was pray, not knowing how it would turn out.  She said somehow, the Lord’s peace settled over her, so instead of anxiety, she just knew that her baby was in God’s hands and whether he lived or died, he was safe.  Of course, we all knew he had survived, but what a wonderful legacy to know that God was powerfully present at his birth.

The other story was from just last year.  A family from our church was involved in a terrible roll over accident and were seriously injured.  The mom was the least injured but at first she said she had no strength to even move.  Finally she prayed for strength and she was then able to quickly recover and go to the bedside of her daughter, who had been moved to a children’s hospital in another town, with serious head injuries.  Let me tell you, the whole church was praying for their recovery, especially with dad and daughter in different hospitals.  The mom said she felt strengthened by those prayers.  But oddly enough, those who visited her felt she somehow strengthened their faith.  God is good and all have recovered from their injuries.

Of course, that isn’t always the way things go.  We all know stories that go the other way and it is a mystery to us why some are healed and others are simply taken home.  But I wonder if somehow walking in the valley of the shadow of death for someone dear to us leaves us more open to hearing from the Lord.  I did not share this at the time as it did not seem to fit, but I found that when each of my parents were dying, it seemed like I had a direct line to Jesus somehow.  The occasions were separated by nearly 30 years, in my case, but I was amazed to find myself brought nearer to the Lord, when my mother was dying, than I had felt in years.  No question about it, it did seem to be all about trust as well.

So what is your story?  Have you felt closer to Jesus during some crisis, or was it more like your prayers were bouncing off the ceiling and walls?  Most of us have been there too.  Did it take some crisis of faith to open the lines of communication again?

Speechless

One of our first developmental tasks after birth is to learn to speak.  Barring some sort of developmental disorder, we all learn how to do it and spend the rest of our lives speaking.   Some speak more than others, but for the most part, we like to communicate with others.  Of course it gets complicated.  Some speech is unkind, and then there are all sorts of rules we learn to keep things civil.  We have varying abilities to manage it all.

But then there is the experience of being speechless.  Sometimes it’s due to an opinion, delivered with some force and conviction, with which we disagree but we never saw it coming.  Sometimes it’s a reaction to the unsaid, an action we would never take in a similar situation.  It may be our reaction to seeing something very beautiful or tragic.  Or it may be our surprised reaction when we meet someone who seems like a kindred spirit to us.

When I was a child, I was painfully shy, and mortified at the thought that the teacher might call on me and I might not know the right answer.  Usually that wasn’t the case, but I always blushed at simply being the center of attention for the moment.  Sometimes I still do that.  I recall having a couple of buddies with whom I could converse nearly endlessly, when I was in high school or Junior college.  But if I got a crush on someone, then I was completely tongue tied in their presence, even if I could previously have easily conversed with them.  One time I recall meeting a young man who seemed quite interesting to me, though he was a complete stranger.  I managed some conversation then seemed to hit a wall, and simply stood there, trying to find something to say.  Of course, he took it the wrong way and disappeared!  I met the same man later in life and he could still render me speechless on occasion, and he still usually somehow got the wrong message from that.

Sometimes though, it seems there are simply no words adequate to express what we would like to say.  Nearly a week ago, my neighbor lost his wife of 29 years.  They still have kids in high school and she was only 48.  It was totally unexpected, probably one of those things where the heart stops due to some undetected anomaly, I suppose.  One day she was fine, taking care of her family, working, planning vacations.  The next she was gone.  It leaves me speechless.

At the time, when the emergency vehicles were here and they were trying to revive her,  I was trying to pray.  But all I could pray was Lord, have mercy.  Since then, I have been asking my many groups to pray for the family.  Still, I keep wondering what on earth I should say when we finally talk to them.  I’m still pretty much speechless.  I wish of course, that I could ask whether she had some preexisting condition, or if this sort of thing ran in her family, but it seems kind of crass to do that.  I’m sorry for your loss, is the pat answer, but it seems so little for such an enormous loss.  So I’m left speechless, thinking that we are meant to weep with those who weep, yet not really sure how to do that.  When it’s someone very close to you, it seems natural to sit with them and share memories and even weep sometimes.  But that is a lot harder when it is only a casual connection.  We’ve been neighbors a long time, but it is largely a matter of greetings in passing, as we don’t travel in the same social circles.

What situations leave you speechless?

Bearing one another’s burdens

I was able to go to our women’s class last week, for the first time in months.  I had given away my book, so was not up on the topic, but the discussion is not necessarily right with the book anyway.  It started with a story of someone who hosted an unwed mother until she could get on her feet, which ended up being 4 years!  Most of us had a hard time imagining ourselves in that position, though I do have a friend who has hosted nieces or nephews for a year or so, only she wasn’t there to put her two cents worth in.

We had some discussion of the difficulty of dealing with folks who are never satisfied, always wanting more and more.  There are also ones who really need to take some responsibility and simply seem to want to be taken care of by either the government or the church.  Then there are those who have an excuse for everything.  Well maybe the last two are overlapping categories.  I did point out that sometimes the interpretation is in the eye of the beholder.  I myself had an experience where someone called me an “obstructionist”  because I didn’t leap at the chance to implement whatever suggestion they made regarding my future.  Oddly enough though, the only reason I was visiting this person, who did not know me well, was in order to take a test that might qualify me for a job.  Thinking back, I wonder why they felt compelled to tell me what I should be doing when I was clearly taking steps toward something.  They did not seem to appreciate that since it was my life at stake, I wanted to think through all the ins and outs of any decisions.  Looking back, though I did not get that job, God led me to where I needed to be.

We also touched on the good Samaritan story.  Our leader noted that we are not given many details.  We don’t know if those who did not stop had pressing engagements, or simply felt inadequate to deal with an injured traveler by the side of the road.  Surely stopping must have been inconvenient for the Samaritan as well, at best a time-consuming detour from his travel plans.  Usually it seems that bearing someone’s burdens takes time and requires us to put the other’s needs above our own.  I notice though that the Samaritan did not seem to feel he had to carry this burden alone.  He had no problem with allowing the innkeeper to carry part of it.  And yes, there is an intrinsic reward when you help someone, at least most of the time.

But our most haunting example did not come from the book.  One of our members began talking about how, several years ago, a neighbor girl would come to her house and not go home.  The parents would not come to get her, so at the very least there must have been some neglect involved.  My friend said she had a feeling that the girl was there because it felt safe to her, for whatever reason.  The child was not telling if there was anything more.   My friend brought this child with them to church and even camp one year, wondering if she was meant to have yet one more child in her family of adopted kids.  Finally a grandmother took the child, but at least we have the comfort of knowing that for a time, she was loved and included in a church family and hopefully will be willing to turn in that direction when she is older.

Then another lady volunteered her story.  She said she had a friend who acted in a similar fashion when she was growing up.  Years later, after both were grown, the friend admitted that her father was an alcoholic who became violent when drunk.  She literally was afraid to stay in her own home.  That’s so sad, but again we can be thankful for neighbors who were willing to let her stay with them and be safe.  I don’t know if I could do the same.  I used to get put out with the kid who came over just to play games on our computer, because his parents didn’t allow him to play computer games at home!  My problem was, he was supposed to be my son’s friend, but my son didn’t care for his company and made himself scarce whenever the kid came over, so it seemed like more of an imposition.  It wasn’t much the same either since the parents made sure he came home for dinner.

Honestly though, those situations aside, I’ve always thought the main way we carry burdens for one another is in praying each other through difficulties with kids and aging or dying parents, moves, job changes, and so forth.  Who has carried your burdens, or have you carried burdens for someone else?

It is finished

I don’t think I ever spent much time thinking of what that phrase meant.  It was the one thing that jumped out at me last week in our study of the Last words of Christ.  The author pointed out that it wasn’t even a phrase in the original language.  It was a word, an exclamation actually.  It was a shout of triumph.  Finished!

Wow!  Just think of the last time you worked hard to create something.  At the end, you may be exhausted, but also jubilant, right?  You are thinking, it’s finished!  I really did that hard thing, or I survived that time of testing that had me out of my mind with worry.    Maybe you poured your heart into a blog.  That is the sense of this one word that Jesus said before He died.

This was no sigh of resignation.  Whatever the cross was meant to accomplish, whatever Jesus’ 3 years of ministry was meant to accomplish, all the prophecies He fulfilled it was all complete.  That is truly mind blowing to me.  I hope you think so too.

 

The unwanted

Last week in Sunday school, we were talking about the crucifixion, mob mentality and how easy it is to get swept up in that.  That led to thoughts about peer pressure and bullying.  Several of us shared experiences with bullying, though for some reason we were mostly female, so it was not the classic type as seen on the school bus video that has been in the news lately.  By that I mean pushing, shoving, tripping, snatching of backpacks and the like, which are often the way our men remember bullying, though it is unfortunately still quite common.

The female version is more often about social exclusion, which I guess is also the message of the physical form, but subtler.  Our leader was a tall woman, and she has observed before that she was teased for being taller than most of her classmates.  But this time she wasn’t talking about that.  She said she grew up in Pennsylvania, literally on the wrong side of the tracks, for the school she attended.  So of course her clothes were never just right.  In fact, her family could not afford tights, which many girls wore for warmth and style alike under their skirts.  I know this dates us, but we literally were not allowed to wear pants in the 60s, so you younger folks can be thankful that we got that changed!  The other option was knee socks, but of course they sometimes fell down.  Well, in her case, she had dry skin, sometimes to the point of cracking, which was exposed when the socks fell down.  Then she was treated like a leper, even though there was nothing contagious about it!

Boy could I relate to that!  I was in a similar position, in a class with a lot of kids whose families had a lot more money than mine.  I didn’t have tights either, or if I did, they were reserved for church.  I once begged my mom to buy me a furry acrylic coat, so I could fit in.  I found one at JC Penney, I think, that wasn’t too expensive and it was machine washable.  My mom bought it, then would not let me wear it to school, because in her mind, it was too nice for school and it would just get dirty!  Instead, I had an exceedingly ugly jacket that was a hand me down from my brother.  Needless to say, I was not allowed to join the in crowd, even if the leader was someone I had known since kindergarten.  In fact, if I got to the classroom door ahead of them, they would ask to “borrow” my glasses and cover them with fingerprints, so I had to run to the bathroom to wash them off in order to see.  I fell for that more than once, though I think I eventually wised up and started to just say no.  But I suspect that those sort of things are rarely noticed by the teachers, in any case.

Now that experience changed my expectations.  I went to Junior High mostly with other people, but did not expect to be accepted, though on some level I was.  At least I don’t recall being excluded in my Junior High class.  I think though, that in some way it drove me to Jesus, because there I found acceptance.  I also became a rugged individualist, who wore hiking boots to school for much of my freshman year and pretty much shrugged off any criticism.  It’s kind of amazing, that if you ignore that sort of thing and do what you like, after a while it seems that the critics lose interest.

I can only wish that that was the end of the story.  In fact, that insecurity returned in Junior college when I found myself wishing for some male attention.  I was, at that point, treated like a leper myself, simply because my acne had not yet cleared up.  To be more accurate, it would nearly clear up then break out again due to hormones.  That came back to me because somehow this week the topic of makeup came up.  One woman said she decided very young that she would not be the type who had to put on her “face” in order to be comfortable in public.  I never wore makeup until I was in my twenties because my mother disapproved of it.  But I do think that those late teen years would have been less stressful perhaps, if I had covered it up to some extent.  I still use foundation as a cover for my overly reddish complexion, and sometimes a bit more for adult acne that has reappeared in my 50s.

So where is this going?  Have you been bullied or excluded?  How did you deal with it? Did it ruin your life or make you a better person?  I think for many of us, the way we were treated when we are young has been one of those areas where God has to break through from time to time and tell us that yes, He does love us just the way we are.  He has certainly done that for me.

What you love…

Last Saturday I was at our local Spring Ring, where a number of bell groups get together to play en masse.  It is an all day thing with rehearsals and workshops and a concert at the end.  Years ago we did something similar with Christmas music called Twelfth Night. That one got pretty large and more and more expensive, until we finally quit going.  Eventually it went by the wayside though, so when another church started this one in the Lenten season, we jumped at the chance to go.  At one point we actually brought two groups, but many of our younger ringers from the second group have gone away, so it only happened that one time.  It is a chance to learn some new music and play with master directors.  In fact, much of our music is from one or another year, at least around Easter.

At the end, someone from the audience came up to greet me.  I could not recall her name, but obviously sang with her in Masterworks.  She said something that has stuck with me for the week at least, kind of like a burr since I found it a bit bothersome.  She said something about how it was nice to see me doing what I love most of all.  Okay, aside from why she would think that, I found it rather dumbfounding.  Sure, I’ve been doing this a long time, since I was 12 actually.  I like to think I’m pretty good at it.  I certainly enjoy it, or I wouldn’t be still at it.  But what is the most of all part about?  I also sing and read and write.  I’ve been doing those things since even before I took up bells.  I’m not at all sure I could pick any one above the others.  I am also passionate about Jesus and healing prayer, especially for inner healing, and Ashram.  I used to be nuts about swimming as well, and still do it whenever possible, though by no means regularly.  You see what I mean?  We all have an assortment of interests.  Usually we try to schedule them all in if at all possible, or we move back and forth between them as our interest waxes and wanes.  So why would someone try to say any given one is above all the rest?  In any case, I would hope that my love of Jesus would be supreme, though so far I have not been forced to pick and choose.

I do admit, of course, that bell people are a unique breed.  We all have to be a little crazy to engage in playing an instrument which requires us to work together with a number of others to make it happen.  And there is a lot of fetching and carrying, setting up and breaking down tables, at least if you ever go anywhere.  In my case, there is also bell maintenance.  I have over the years played with quite an assortment of people as well, many of whom are still my friends, even though they have moved away years ago. Still, I don’t think that fact alone makes bell playing the one thing I love over all else.

What about you?  Do you have one thing you love more than everything else you do, or do you have a variety of interests?