Mother's Prayers

It's 11:30 pm, I've brushed my teeth and taken my medication.  Lights are out in the bedroom, David is snoring.  I lay there with pillows plumped for a half hour and then got up, came in here to write more on the stories I have going.  Why?  Because nothing but dark thoughts are going through my head.  Depressive thoughts.  Things I should have done, things I did do that were wrong, regrets, scenarios of what I wish had happened in certain circumstances.  Does this happen to you too?  I bet it does.

In other days I would write a story in my head.  Or think of a Bible verse for every letter of the alphabet, or girl's names, or favorite foods.  I usually never got farther than G.  But it doesn't work for me anymore.  Maybe something about aging when the stories have been written, no new Bible verses to surprise myself, don't care about girls' names and I'm on a strict diet so shouldn't think about food.

So I get up and see if Joel or Joyce are on the religious channels.  Or go to my trusty computer and write or blog.  I have a memory of long ago.  This is the house I grew up in.  I was often frightened in the night but terrified to get up and face the monsters that lurked for me in the dark.  But when I did, I found comfort in the living room.  Mother would be lying on the sofa covered in an afghan that she had made, a radio at her eat tuned to the Family Bible Hour music.  She would be murmuring.  It wasn't a bad dream, she was praying.  An insomniac (is that where I get it?) and often having depressing thoughts (she told me on her death bed) she would go into the living room.  Dad would have set up her nest with the blankets and radio.  He would make her toast and go back to bed.  Mother would lie there in the dark praying.

And then one night, I heard my name.  "Bless little Martha..."  Little Martha was 13 and wild, rebellious, heedless and thoughtless.  Had nothing to do with God.  Was scaring my gentle mother to death with my antics.  But I heard my name in prayer.  My mother, who couldn't stop me, knew who could.  I felt so loved.

So in a few minutes I'm going to close up shop here and try again, if David's snoring doesn't keep me up.  I'm having a routine blood test in the morning and cannot eat anything until 10 tomorrow morning and if I sit here long enough, I'll eat and that will be the end of my blood test.  What will I do to get to sleep?  Stay tuned!

A Sweet Hobby

I remember the day, around 1962, when my mother came into this very living room and sat beside me on the sofa making me turn off the TV.  I was not pleased.  She had a sampler she had sewn when she was a child.  Why she would think I, her wild pre teen would care, I don't know.  I still see it - a home made counted cross stitch design that said 'Search the Scriptures'.  Of all the lame things to say, mother asked me if I would like to make a sampler too.  I think she was in the mood to share something with her daughter and that was what she came up with.  In a burst of uncharacteristic cooperation, I said I would like that.

Mother got out a piece of fine muslin from her fabric box.  Together we used a pencil to mark Xs in the shape of words.  Mine said, 'Love One Another'.  I was given a hoop and red thread and set to work.  Mother and I had a great afternoon together, laughing and sharing.

And that was the start of one of my favorite hobbies.  I loved cross stitch.  And it didn't take me long to finish a piece.  When I was thirteen my Pioneer Girl leader announced that she had started a business - glory be, a sampler company!!  And it was just up the street.  My father drove me over and I thought I would faint from the joy of it.  A warehouse full of printed cross stitch kits.  I chose two and remember that they cost about $3 each.  They were finished within two weeks.  He took me back.  And I picked the biggest, hardest one there - St. Francis of Assisi Prayer, 16x20, half inch letters.  It took a year off and on.  It hung in my parent's house until I got married and it moved to my house.  I have no idea where it is now.  Then I did an alphabet sampler with a flower for every letter.  My daughter has that one.  In my thirties, depressed, overwhelmed, my father knew just what would perk me up.  He bought me a crewel kit of a Hummel child thinking it would give me encouragement.  That was followed by three more Hummels.  In the following years I would take a piece of muslin or lawn and draw a picture or a poem and just free lance it.  I carried a 5x7 square of aida cloth with me at all times and would sooth my social anxiety by doing poems and Bible verses.  I can see myself, my busy hands on my lap, weaving the needle in and out, while trying to look like I was listening.

And then I stopped.  Never picked up the needle again.  I think life got too busy and overwhelming for hobbies.  When the girls were here last summer and we went through the cedar chest, they exclaimed over the many needlework pieces, almost fifty, that were stored there.  When they went home, I couldn't get embroidery out of my mind.  So I went out and bought a large length of aida cloth and looked up some counted cross stitch patterns online (something my mother didn't have).  And started to stitch.  And stitch.  And stitch.  Pictures and words and alphabets.  I have a quilt made of embroidered Bible verses, 14 samplers of all kinds.  Just started #15.  I love going to Michael's and ruminating over thread colors.  So many more than I had in 1965.  What am I going to do with them?  Nothing.  Roll them up in a tube and when I'm dead my girls will find them and say, "What the heck?"  Or maybe they'll value them as I did my mother's work.

I know that at some point, like Forrest Gump, I'm going to be done and just stop.  I only have one piece of aida left so maybe the time is coming.  How sad.  But until then, I'm having a ball.  Thanks Mom.

The Impossible Hand of Understanding

Corrie Ten Boom was a Dutch christian, an ordinary person, in an ordinary family, strong papa, dear mama, loving sisters.  Their lives were flowing by with nothing of any great importance happening.  And Corrie had every reason to believe she would reach the end of her life having lived a quiet, humble life.  Then World War 2 happened and the Nazis swept into Holland and occupied it, dispatching the Jews and anyone who aided them.  The quiet life ended.  Corrie joined the underground, at age 45, and her family ended up hiding Jews in a secret space in their home.  One of those women became so frightened she left the hiding place and made it known to one of the boy soldiers in their neighborhood.  He was their childhood friend.  And he gave them up.  The family was arrested, thrown into a train with the town's Jews, and landed at Auschwitz.  Papa, Mama, sisters, brother, nieces, nephews - all were sent to the ovens upon arrival.  Only Corrie and her sister Betsy survived to go through events that even a horror writer's imagination couldn't conceive.  Betsy died two years later, and Corrie survived until rescued by the Americans.  She went on, for the rest of her life, as a speaker, healer, recounter of the Holocaust from her perspective as a Christian.

This is one of the stories she tells in her book, The Hiding Place.  She was speaking at a meeting in America, four years after the war, telling her story.  Urging the audience to forgive as God forgives us, not to hold hatred or grudges against the wicked, but to seek to bring them back from their darkness.  When she was finished, a handsome young man came up to her and in a German accent told her this - he had been a guard at Auschwitz and had done evil.  After the war he had come across some Christians who had ministered to him and he had completely repented and changed his life.  He put out his hand and said, "I would like to ask your forgiveness and shake your hand as a brother in Christ."  Corrie looked closer.  She saw that he was indeed one of the guards who had beaten her sister and taken pleasure in the inmate's pain.  Corrie was paralyzed.  She felt hatred well up, pictures of the vile things he had done to her and her sister.  She had visions of revenge.  She most certainly was not going to shake his hand as if nothing had happened.  And then, a strange thing happened.  She thought, "God I can't shake his hand.  If you want to, fine, but I won't."  And with that, without any conscious motion on her part, her arm rose, her hand went out, the man took it and burst into tears.  "Please, please, forgive me!" he begged.  Corrie said everything changed.  The coldness broke open and she embraced him as a brother.

This week, two young men, ordinary boys, living ordinary lives, friends, parents, extended family, education, a wife and child came to a boundary.  They could choose this way or that way.  One way to a constructive life, the other to destruction.  For whatever reason, they chose destruction.  Six months ago, a young boy, mentally ill, consumed by video games, executed 26 children in a school.  He too had a choice at some point in his life, as did his parents, and he too chose the way of death instead of life.

We're supposed to hate them.   I know what I think 'they' should do to them.  I know what popular knowledge says should happen.  But I just can't.  Not because they aren't evil, and deadly, because they are and the events they caused are going down in history as holocausts.  I don't take that lightly.  But I don't want to be the person who hates, or judges.  I can't carry that around with me.  On a smaller scale, I've been a criminal, making the choice to do the destructive thing, stepping over that boundary with terrible consequences for someone else.  And along with the regret I will always carry, I can't also carry the burden of knowing I'm not forgiven even though I've repented.

So I do the motion.  I put my hand out.  And hope the emotion follows.

I Like My Church!

I come from a fundamentalist background, ultra conservative, uber evangelical.  It's never sat well with me.  Even as a child I had questions and doubts but heaven help the kid who expressed them!  As an adult in a traditional church I also had doubts that what I was hearing was the whole truth.  But by then the church's value to me was confidence building.  I was Mistress of the Church - baptism hostess, kitchen worker, bereavement committee, VBS director, banquet head and all around background detail person.  It was easy to ignore the restless whispers in my head that were telling me how off base some of the traditional doctrines were. 

In the late 90s my life fell apart.  A series of misfortunes, including the pastor from hell, pushed me to the edge of suicide.  I came to hate God for allowing the pain.  "Donald Trump is a better father than God!  He takes care of his children!"  It was a very dark time in my life.  And the church's pastoral counselor didn't help when he insisted on reading me Bible passages and telling me what I should feel.

At that time, my job was falling apart as well.  Dear friends/colleagues were jumping ship.  Gerri was my angel and before she left she insisted that I come to her church's women's retreat at a christian resort on the Chesapeake.  Yeah, yeah... but she was paying so what the heck.  Free weekend away from the husband and children.

First, the Chesapeake is gorgeous.  I wasn't prepared for the beauty of it.  The resort sits right on the bay with all the smells, sounds and colors one would expect from a movie.  You get to the place through a tiny town with quaint, tourist shops, and then along a winding dirt road through a forest.

Secondly, our room was really nice, not the typical hotel room, especially not a christian hotel room.  The place had a pool, hot tub, snack bar, thrift shop and private chapel.

We were just in time for the first meeting of the afternoon and our clique got on the elevator to the conference floor.  As we got off a young blond woman came striding down the hall with the most beatific smile.  "Hurry and get there!  The worship is fine!" she said as if talking about a day at the shore.  And the worship was fine.  I thought I knew what worship was - stodgy, staid, boring songs and windbag testimonies.  But this was different.  The songs were rocking, the women on their feet, shouting all manner of things from Amen, to Yes Lord to WhaaHoo!  Arms in the air, dancing, swaying.  I was in love.  I was absorbed into groups of women like an amoeba.  That weekend I became a Calvary girl.

Fifteen years later, I'm still a Calvary girl.  And this is why -

- the same people sit in the same places in this cavernous room, so you know a lot of people by sight and that's okay because you talk to them as if you know them but it doesn't involve an investment in people you might or might not want to hang with.

- it's big enough (2500 a service x 3) that if you want to be known you can be, if you don't want to be known you don't have to be.

- it isn't embarrassing.  I can safely invite anybody of any class, gender identity, religion or lack of and know they'll probably have a good time.

- the music rocks.

- it has a support group for everyone - new christians, medical, war vets, pornography addicts, regular addicts, gamblers, Russians and Spanish, divorced adults and kids, bereavement and on and on.

- everything they do is done well.  The bathrooms are beautiful, original art work on the walls, a bride's section with private changing room, bathroom and make up mirror.  All repairs are done immediately so there's no wreckage to look at.  Programs are planned for maximum organization.

- there's a bookstore.

- if you liked a song they'll copy the words for you.

- security is highly organized and secret.  Children couldn't be safer in the building.  I once saw an Adam Code when a child was missing from the room.  Men and women rushed to the doors and locked them.  Another team swept through the sunday school rooms.  She was found in her brother's room.  On the anniversary of 9/11 friendly security people were posted on every hallway.  I know some of them carry weapons.  The pastor has a body guard, very low key and it's sad that Joe needs one but that's life.

- we get to call our pastor Joe because he's just a guy who does his job well, not a demi god.

- if you're upset and cry you get a half dozen people with their hands on you praying.

- if you go out and sit in the lobby during the service, which I like to do, you see and hear the most interesting people!  One guy was on drugs and he sat right next to me to talk about it.  One guy was telling his friend how he married a young girl and he didn't want children but she deserved at least one so what the heck.  One guy was calling his mother to tell her he had gotten engaged.  Thanks - over the phone from the church lobby.

So if you want to go and check out Calvary Chapel, call me.  I guarantee you'll like it whether or not you agree with the message.