Purpose

I ran into a neighbor and told him that our senior ex-neighbor Comer had written poetry, which I offered to publish for him as a book.
"Comer wrote poetry!" exclaimed the friend, shocked.
"Yes," I said, "And he was very excited about my offer to make it a book."
"Well you better hurry with that," said my friend.
Comer is 93, and slowing down. I knew I had little time to waste if I was going to help him touch this dream.

So I spent the whole day typing Comer's poems. I edited the few grammatical errors and guessed on the words I couldn't quite read. The paper they were written on were small yellow scraps.and sometimes the words trailed off into indecipherable squiggles. Some were haunting and enigmatic, images I wished I had thought of. Many were of an obviously young man hurt by spurned love. Those ones were simple, but the honesty and aching soul they exposed was something everyone could relate to. Some were lessons learned through a rich and difficult life.  When I finally finished around dinner time, my head ached, but I wanted to rush them over to Comer for proof-reading.

I knocked on his door at the Assisted Living home and his face broke into a wide smile of delight and surprise.
"I brought your poems," I said, "I wanted to get them to you as fast as possible so you could start the big job of proofing them."
"Oh my!" he exclaimed.
"Most I could figure out, but at times, I just couldn't decipher some words."
"Well, I wrote them at night....in the dark."
"Why?"
"That's when they came to me."

He was holding the binder with the neatly typed pages, and slowly thumbing through them, reading and remembering the strong emotions that had propelled him to huddle in the dark, capturing verses before they fled. I realized that I had not told him how much I had enjoyed them.

"I thought they were wonderful, by the way."
"You did?" he said anxiously, "They weren't too...silly?"
"No Comer, they weren't silly at all. They were wonderful."
His eyes teared up, and I realized anew how desperate every human soul is for encouragement, no matter how many years we have walked the earth.

"Who was this one about, by the way," I said, flipping to one about a love that was lost.
"Oh I don't remember now. I didn't marry Evelyn till I was 33.  I had a lot of girlfriends before then," he said sheepishly.
I laughed, "Well, now you have a big job in front of you. Edit the mistakes, and correct the words that I guessed at. Then call me and I will pick it up and make the corrections, and order your proof!"
Comer beamed.
"I am going to sit down right now and work on this," he said.

As I walked out, I saw the other residents gathering for dinner. I suspected Comer would be skipping dinner that night. I had left him more purpose driven and excited than I had ever seen him. I hadn't known him as a working man, but I know he loved his work. He had once lamented to my husband as they stood chatting in his yard a few years back, "You know, I made millions of dollars in my day, and now I just sit and watch the grass grow."

I methodically work my way through the Bible, and when I finish, I start back at the beginning. Each time, I glean new thoughts, new comforts, new chastisements. I am back in Genesis again, and reading about Abraham, how he followed God to a ripe old age. Abraham was 100 years old when he had his son, Isaac. We were never meant to fade away with no purpose. If nothing else, every aging person should be writing a journal of what they have learned to pass on to their children. And every child should know that in every old heart, there beats all the passions, and fears, and insecurities, and hopes that beat in his own youthful chest.

As I left Comer, he called out, "Oh, I thought all night about what I should call the book."
"Did you come up with a name?"
"Yes, I think I will call it Comer Lafayette's Poems. Lafayette is my middle name. In the south where I grew up, they pronounced it lafeet. I know my readers won't pronounce it right, but I thought that was a nice name for my book."
"It's perfect Comer, " I said, hugging him goodbye, "Now get to work."

Jeremiah 31:3
I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have drawn you
with loving kindness.

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Something Infinitely Better

I love Sundays. I love wondering what perfect message God might wrap in a sermon. I love the big fat Sunday newspaper. When it is warm outside, I even love the one time a week when I put on a dress to go to church. But this Sunday, I will be hunkering down with several cups of tea and my jar of Vicks Vaporub. Even if I felt well enough to leave the house, which I don't, I would not want to expose others to this nasty cold.

 I did discover why God gave me such a congested nose yesterday, however, so I am not complaining. It was the middle of the night, and I thought I smelled something rather awful, but being so very congested, decided it was my imagination. Then, when day broke and I walked out of my room, I was sure I smelled something awful. For a smell to permeate the solid gunk blocking my nasal passageways, it must be something exceedingly putrid. That's when I saw a big pile of watery poop. I had thought Honeybun looked a little under the weather last night, and she had gone to bed early in my closet, her favorite "den". I also went to bed early so the door got shut and she must not have gone out for her last evening business walk. She has never ever done this before, so I suspect she ate something she shouldn't have and it violently insisted on exiting her body.

If I had not had a cold, I don't think I could have cleaned that disgusting mess up. I gathered, and scrubbed, and disinfected, with barely a tear. I could with all honesty thank God for my cold and my stuffed up nose. Sometimes bad things are preventing you from worse things. You just never know, so to be on the safe side, praise God in all things.

Asherel is learning this lesson. She is spending countless hours on her trebuchet and helicopters for Science Olympiad. She has almost no free time, and as our contest date approaches, she recognizes that she has no choice but to give up her weekends to work on those projects.  This is bad, but not as bad as walking out in front of all those people on competition day, throwing the helicopter in the air, and having it flutter to the ground for a total flight of .06 seconds. That is worse.

There are countless Biblical examples of people in very bad situations- Joseph in the bottom of a well to be sold into slavery,  baby Moses floating in a tar pitch basket on the Nile, teenage virgin Mary pregnant and her fiancee was not the dad, Jonah in the decomposing acid churn of a fish stomach. My guess is all these folk thought the situation was not particularly to their liking. However, think of the result had they not undergone all those bad things:
1. Joseph's people would have ended up dying of starvation had he not been plucked from the well and ultimately become Pharoah's right hand man.
2. Moses would not have been preserved to go on and lead his people out of slavery and Jews might still be making straw bricks in Egypt
3. Baby Jesus would not have been born to the perfect fulfillment of prophecy and we would not have a Savior.
4. Jonah would not have gone on to preach to the Ninevites who then would not have repented and we would not have one of the best stories in the Bible!

There are countless examples, of which these are just a smattering, but I think God's point is clear, even to this stuffy headed invalid. Bad things only look bad to those of us bound by time and place. But an infinite, timeless God who sees the whole enchilada is probably preserving us not only from something much worse, but preparing us for something infinitely better.

Luke 16:24-26

²⁴ So he called to him, ‘Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.’
   ²⁵ “But Abraham replied, ‘Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony. ²⁶ And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been set in place, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us.’

Thanking God for the dishwasher

As I stood washing the sinkfull of dishes by hand while Asherel dried, I realized I had forgotten to thank God....ever.... for the dishwasher. But now it was too late. The dishwasher was dead.

As we washed the dishes, and the first real cold snap was settling its icy fingers around our city, I told Asherel how in the days before modern appliances and indoor plumbing, imagine what a typical evening was like.
"There was no time for Beatles Rock Band, I assure you...they had to carry a yoke of icy water either from a cold stream a mile away or a well if they were lucky, haul it home, heat it over the fire, wash the dishes...."
"What if the rags they had to dry them with were dirty?"
"Well of course they had to wash those first by hand also. And all their clothes, though of course they didn't have many clothes because they had to spin the wool to make the thread to make the cloth all by hand."

We went on in that vein, while washing the dishes, enumerating the harshness of life before Nintendo one thought after another. Strangely, I felt a camaraderie, and a peaceful joy standing in the kitchen with my daughter washing the dishes and recounting a time much more difficult than we had ever had to live.  We argued good naturedly about the most efficient way to dry the silverware, Asherel insisting it was better that she dry and I put away, and I insisting each person should dry and put away their own utensils.

"But they knew about the assembly line in the old days," she insisted, "And that each person does only one part and wastes less time."
"First of all, the assembly line came much later, and second of all, while what you say is true, with assembly line work, they also lost a great deal of satisfaction in their labor. I mean who can be proud of poking a hole in a widget a million times a day?"

Thus in one dishwashing session, we waltzed through a few centuries, from the frontier days, to the industrial revolution, and even onto musing about leisure time and its pitfalls and the value of pride in one's work. She probably learned more in that half hour than we had learned all day in "school".

When we put away the last dish, and she scurried off to her modern conveniences, I paused and felt something like peace in the pit of my stomach. And this morning I have remembered to thank God for the lack of a dishwasher....and for the coffee maker.

Jeremiah 6:16 (NIV)
This is what the Lord says: "Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls.