The Little Boo Boos of Life

I clearly remember taking a skid on the pavement outside my home in Mayfair and scraping both knees.  It couldn't even be classified as an injury - just a little skin missing and a trace of blood.  But I went crying to my mother as if both legs had been broken off at the stems!  First she hugged me, then she sat me on the kitchen table, washed the scrape and drew a Mercurochrome dog on my knees.  Sent me back out with a kiss and that was the end of it.

What if my mother had assessed the "injury" as nothing and told me to stop making a big thing out of nothing?  As I grew up with many more scrapes and insults to my childish dignity I knew where to come for help.  In my teen years the problems were a good bit worse than a papercut or sore finger.  But I knew where to go with them.  My parents set the foundation early as the ones who would always have my back no matter what.  Even as a wife, mother and grandmother, I still knew where to come for some tea and sympathy.  Giving attention to the insignificant problems of life sets the stage for asking for help with the significant ones.

I've heard it said that giving attention to cuts and bruises only perpetuates negativity and promotes hypochondria.  Actually, it's the opposite.  An injury is a question that asks for resolution.  If a person doesn't find resolution they'll repeat and repeat, searching for a different outcome, sometimes for the rest of their lives.  Completing the cycle by answering the question ends it. 

You don't want a child completing the cycle or looking for that resolution outside of the safety of their parents' home.  Many a parent has wept over a lost child - "Why did they go with that person?  We raised her better than this!"  Unfortunately, a roof over her head and 3 squares a day don't fill in the place that longs for someone to care.  Have we adults been overlooked so often that we forget what it feels like to need that caring touch?

Caring about the small hurts of life also teaches the child some important things they need to know about God.  'Is He really a God who cares about little me?  Or am I on my own in the cosmos unless the need is of epic importance, and even then...' 


My message to young mothers and fathers is - Have patience, keep your eye on the goal.  You're building something here that needs a stable foundation.  Be that foundation for your child.

An angry and changable God?

I was having a discussion with friends the other day and the subject came up - can God change His mind and do something entirely different from what was in the original plan? This was in the context of prayer - do our entreaties cause changes in the universe that might not have happened otherwise?

Adam and Eve - created to live in a perfect world until they disobeyed God's orders. The days of Noah when all humanity was evil in God's eyes. In both of these cases, there was an original plan that went awry. A & E should have lived carefree in perfect harmony with their creator, but after the fall, God had to go back to the drawing board and arrange a whole nother way. Humans messed up His plan. Or did they?

In Noah's day, sin had already entered the world and people, subject to it, sinned. The scriptures say that God "repented" that he had made man. Was sorry he had gone to the effort. Again, human beings messing up the plan. So God had to wipe the slate clean and start all over again with the only righteous person on the face of the earth.

The Babylonian captivity - those darn Jews! Just wouldn't follow the plan so God arranged for a slaughter and long captivity, once again, needing a Plan B.

One thing that gives me pause about these scenarios is that the Plan B's didn't work! The promise of a redeemer didn't work because the new human beings kept right on sinning without regard to the possibility of a savior. (Did they even understand what a savior was and why they might need one?) The flood had only just wiped out civilization when Noah's son Ham sinned in a big way and it all went downhill - again - because through the fall, we have a sin nature. How was starting over with flawed material supposed to help? After a century in Babylon wouldn't you think the Jews would have learned their lesson? Not. The city of Sodom was leveled supposedly because of their homosexuality. One would think Lot and his daughters would choose to live righteously. Nope. They got their father drunk, had sex with him and began their own tribe.

Isn't God a better planner than this. He's God after all, he should know what's going to work and what's not.

Here's the thing - God is all the omni's - Omnipresent, Omniscient, Omnipotent. He knows everything past, present and future, He's everywhere at once past present and future, and He can do anything in all of those three locales at the same time. While we're living our tragedies and sins on September 3, 2011, God is already in tomorrow and next week and next year and next century and millennia. He's not surprised or shocked by what we do. He knew it before we were born, even before the world existed. Does he need to change his mind about earth and see if something else works out better? And if He did, how would we know without a WayBack machine?

In our Bibles we read the words - "God repented", or God was angry and changed his mind about man. Those phrases, however, have been mistranslated. In the original language of the OT those words are written - "Nachum" which means to "cause a change of direction". You're walking down the road and see a McDonald's to your left so you "nachum" - change directions. You've been punishing your child for not cleaning up their room and it's only making things worse, so you decide to nachum. In the record of Biblical history God sees that the world's populace is getting farther and farther away from his plan, so he nachum - changes the direction that the world is going. Through a flood, a captivity, an explosion of salt and sulphur. Although they bear a similarity, changing direction and changing one's mind are not the same. One implies that a mistake was made; the other implies an ongoing plan.



Do our prayers affect the direction of God's plan? Can we pray long enough and hard enough, enlist a thousand people to pray with us, fast and weep and it causes God to smack his head and say, "Of course! I was going to do it this way, but since you've got the right number of people helping you out, I'll do it your way?" How very human of God that would be. Which is probably why we believe it to be so. God carrying out His plan from beginning to end is such a difficult concept for us because of our limitations on this earth.

And yet, we continue to pray. Because prayer calls God into our every day lives. It's not a magic bullet or a vending machine - put your prayers in, get your wishes fulfilled. It helps to have something greater than ourselves involved in our trials and tribulations, no matter what the answer turns out to be.

Your God is Too Small - Part 2

This comes from the book Your God is Too Small by J.B. Phillips

Your God is too small if He's your Parental Hangover -

There are 5 ways to know about something, maybe 6. You see it, hear it, taste it, smell it or touch it. The 6th I would say is sometimes called The Sixth Sense. It's a spiritual knowing that's outside of provable, sensory knowledge.

On this earth plane we're faced with a quandry - how to know an invisible divinity when It doesn't show up in the 5 usual ways. Two ways to do that - we can sense It through spiritual sensitivity which doesn't give our human minds the photo file we need to make sense of It. Or we can use human world examples to form the images that we need.

The idea of the Parent is one of those. We assume God is bigger, stronger and smarter than we are. It follows that God is our authority figure. Who is our earthly authority figure? Our parents. Kids come to know who and what this thing called "God" is by making the connection between the heavenly and earthly parent.

That's an awesome responsibility, and I mean that contructively as well as negatively. A child is going to form their opinions about God, life, the afterlife, spiritual sensitivity - from experiencing life with Mom and Dad. The father who drinks, displays a violent temper, a cold, formal relationship with his children - will show by example that God is out of control, angry, prone to vengeance, and distant. A mother who is black and white, judgmental, and careless with the health of her children, teaches them by example that God doesn't tolerate mistakes, He's only concerned with the big events of their lives, and guilt is the best response to mistakes.

But God isn't the judgmental, cold, black and white, vengful, punishing, prioritzing parent. He's parenthood as it was meant to be in the best of all worlds.

If your God is a left over of your own parents' mistakes, He's too small.

Your God is Too Small - book report - Part 1

This comes from the book Your God is Too Small by J.B. Phillips.

I don't often read books that someone tells me I HAVE TO READ!! Usually, they aren't interesting to me at all. The Shack was one of those. I almost made a point of not reading it because friends pushed it so hard. Then I gave in and read the thing - and it changed my life - and now I'm the one who pushes it on others!

This book, Your God is Too Small was recommended over and over. So I wouldn't read it. Then, at the used bookstore, there it was in the dollar bin. Hey, for a buck I got it and kept it in the bathroom for short burst reading. And was captivated. It's one of the most touching, cogent, life changing books I've ever read.

So here I am, blogging it for you, in hopes that you'll hop on amazon and get it for yourself.

Our view of God tends to be that of a super human. He's like us, only really good at it. He's perfected our foibles. We tend to want a God based on childhood traumas and joys. If our own childhood was grim, or happy, or quiet, or isolated, that's how we relate to an invisible God.

But He is none of those. Basically, He is unknowable because He's outside of the reaches of our mental equipment. However, it benefits us to keep trying to understand Him. It nurtures the spirit to stretch our skills of perception. This then, is the God that most of us see at some point in our lives.

1. The Resident Policeman - A child who has grown up under the constant judgment of an authority figure spends his adult life looking over his shoulder for the handcuffs to clink on and the bars to slam shut. In every life situation they think they hear the whine of sirens, the authorities coming to get him and punish him for the wrong he has done. God is FAIR - He is JUST. You do wrong, you're going to be found out and punished, no exceptions. Any negative thing that happens to such a person is evidence of God's judgment and justice.

Except that God is not our judge, policeman, father with a strap or teacher with a birch rod. His justice is loving, his plan is for reconciliation. He doesn't use life's tragedies to test or punish us, He uses them to reconcile us back to himself.

He's not the one who says, "License and registration please. Step out of the car and spread em." He's the one who says, "This activity is going to hurt you and the last thing I want is for you to be harmed. If you choose to do it anyway and harm comes to you, I'll still look for you and bring you home and tend to the wounds."

People who see God as a policeman have made God over into their own image. Arresting and punishing wrong doers is what's been done to them and what they'd do to someone else. But God isn't us. He's quite outside of our retributory responses.

Make Me a Blessing

I was a wild and crazy kid. A real holy smart ass. My childhood spiritual community was not a nurturing one, nor did it display an attractiveness that would make a child eager to choose the Sweet Jesus of the Bible stories. I came by my religious cynicism early.

Fortunately, in my home I saw Jesus in a better light. We were a passionate bunch, totally to the left of legalistic. My parents knew what they believed, and it was traditional fundamentalism, but as my Dad used to say, it was "faith with feet". He and mother believed that you had to walk the walk if you talk the talk.

They were "blessers". They lived to bless others. I remember going "calling" with my mother. She had a regular schedule of visits to shut ins and the elderly. We would dress in our best and board the trolley at the end of our street and travel out of our neighborhood to bring a cake and cheer to somebody's Aunt Mabel. Or we'd walk a few streets over to the elderly woman who never had visitors and never got out of her house. I loved being with my mother at those times. We would walk along, holding hands, and giggling like friends. I knew she was doing something sacred, something more important than the mundane details of daily life..

Dad was known for being the guy in the suit, shirt and tie guy. You never saw Mr. Mac looking tattered. In fact, the already tied tie was hung on the footer of the bed each night. If he received a call to go and minister, the white shirt went on and then the tie, then the suit. He brought a steadiness, a reliability to difficult situations. I loved going to preaching gigs with him. Because I was so unpredictable he would have me sit on the platform steps while he preached. I had a front row seat on the expressions on the audience's faces when Dad brought God down to our ordinary lives.

One fabulous time Dad, Mother and I went to a day long service in New Jersey. I had to be about 12 at the time. Dad had a garter snake in an aquarium. It was an illustration of sin. Sitting in the stuffy church with all the old people, getting my cheeks pinched and slobbered on by the spiritual Aunties, I certainly couldn't have guessed what was going to happen to Dad's carefully planned sermon. He picked the snake out of the tank and held it aloft. The congregation gasped with surprise -Dad announced "SIN is like a serpent!" and with that, the snake wiggled wrong and Dad dropped it. Chaos ensued. My mother and I looked at one another and laughed until tears poured down our cheeks. Wouldn't you know it, the people loved it and Dad was invited back often, but he could never top that performance.

Back to the crazy, cynical child... our church sang the hard core hymns - without accompaniment or speed. For a family who loved music as much as we did, it could get nasty. But one day, sitting there on the squeaky folding chairs, making rock-a-babies out of my mother's handkerchief, they sang the hymn Make Me a Blessing - and I was suddenly captivated. Why at that time in that place? Literally heaven only knew.

Out in the highways and byways of life
Many are weary and sad
Be to the helpless a helper indeed
Making the sorrowing glad
Make me a blessing, Make me a blessing!
Out of my life, let Jesus shine
Make me a blessing O savior I pray
Make me a blessing to someone today.

And the theme was set. For the rest of my life, my first foot out of bed in the morning accompanied the silent prayer, Make me a blessing today...

And that would never have happened to this wild, cynical, disgusted with religion kid, if not for the example of my parents who thought blessing people was more important than anything else in life. Not doctrine, not rules, not structured devotions - but simply being Jesus wherever they found the hopeless and helpless.

It transformed me at a very young age. And it can happen today to any other child who is ready for a touch of the Spirit. They only need the example...

Rust out or Wear Out?

In 1959 my parents moved here to Willow Grove from the city. It was a country paradise then although it eventually became a regular, run of the mill suburb. The house was pretty much of a shell. The yard was completely as is - a sea of mud with a storm ditch running through it.

Dad and Mom dragged my brother and I into the process of making a home out of the mess. Finished the inside, built my brother a beautiful bedroom in the basement with bathroom, and completely landscaped the yard, even building a rustic bridge over the ditch which we then rechristened The Creek. Dad got baby pines from our summer home in the mountains, mother organized flower gardens, and the steep hill of dirt was painstakingly whittled down to a pleasant grassy bank.

My Dad was 55 then. And he kept renovating and improving for the next 30 years. It wasn't until he was almost 85 that Dad began to slow down.

Heck, he didn't retire from his optical business until 79! And then, he and mother took on a pastoral role in several area nursing homes. At 84 mother was teaching her beloved women's Bible study group in their home and Dad, at 93 was her support with elaborate charts, illustrations and drawings, not to mention the perfectly presented refreshments.

And every time someone would warn him that he needed to take it easier and slow down, enjoy his retirement he would say - "I'd rather wear out than rust out." And he did. On Bible study night all was as usual - the support materials, the food, the sweet banter with "the girls" - by 10 pm he had a cardiac aneurysm and dropped dead.

David's mother exemplified the same principle. With terminal breast and colon cancer, barely able to stand, undergoing cruel chemotherapy, we found her outside raking leaves. David was alarmed and begged her to stop. He couldn't understand why his father allowed this. But she wanted to be doing all the normal things one does on a Fall day before it was all over.

Wear out before you rust out.

However, and here's the big but... notice I didn't say big butt although it might be true --

Got to be smart about wearing out. It's hot here in Willow Grove. Going to be 100 this week. Sure, we could have gone to the parade yesterday and sat in the heat. We could be outside today doing yard work. And part of me says, "You lazy thing, watching old movies all day and eating ham sandwiches and corn puffs. But the smarter half says, "Live to work another day." The world will go on without my help on this particular day.

Enjoy the movie, make some microwave brownies, walk around the mall, stay in the AC. As Scarlet says, "Tomorrow is another day!"

Introduction!

Online journal? Discussion starters? My life journey? All of the above!

One of my favorite things in life is thinking about stuff. I love sharing what I come up with and I love discussing things with others. We don't have to agree - in fact, its probably more fun and educational if we don't!

Yes, we could all stay in our comfort zones. Hold on to our parents' beliefs, our family political ideology, our particular church's view of God. But what would that do for anybody? Got to grow up sometime, and that means setting aside the traditional lens through which we see the world and opening ourselves up to discovery - even about tried and true, cherished childhood beliefs.

I find myself on that journey of discovery. Too much of life seems to consist of clinging like crazy to tradition. For me, I'm finding out that letting go of what someone else told me is true, and searching it out for myself, is very satisfying and fulfilling.

Sometimes that means mother wasn't always right about cleaning my plate. It could mean that just because the candidate isn't from my party doesn't make him wrong or a monster out to trash everything we hold dear. Or it could mean that I can't use a second hand God... Just because the pastor says so, doesn't make it true!

I've also become disillusioned with the divisions humans seem to make out of everything. Got to make everything into a competition. I'm right, you're wrong. My group's way or the highway to hell. If you're not in my group then God is not on your side.

I just don't envision God loving division. "Hear O Israel, our God is One!" And He is. I don't think He gets all bent out of shape because this one sees Him this way and that one sees Him another way. I don't think He clucks over Mormons or shakes His head over Catholic ritual, or cries when Jews gather for Rosh Hoshanna. I don't think He's keeping a list of who's doing what to whom, when and how many times. That's a human response - not a divine one. We wield the cookie cutters, not Him.

So that's where I am now. We're all in this together. Come talk, discuss, share and laugh with me!
Mama Willow