An ancient Christmas card

 

It could be just about anyone, but it's not--it's someone, a very real family; and what I know about them--they're not relatives--makes this early family portrait monstrously more telling.  In a way, this old Christmas card pose breaks my heart.

There are four children, two boys and a pair of twins.  The oldest, the one in the sailor suit, will be smart and thoughtful.  It's probably somewhere in the early 20s here.  He will never marry.  He will fall in love, deeply.  He and his girlfriend will have what I know will be a wonderful, loving relationship.  But they will never marry.

There will be almost a dozen other children born to this young Dutch family, so many that Mom, here holding one of the twins, will, like her oldest boy, die young.  That one, the one at her side, will come to resent his father deeply for what he will believe is going to eventually kill his beloved mother, her incessant child-bearing.  The father, a great bush of hair over his forehead, will be a Christian school teacher, a headmaster, a man I think of as a strict, quintessential Calvinist, a man who probably won't smile as much as he should have smiled by the time his life is spent.  They won't be good friends, this oldest boy and his stern father.  They will fight.  That happens sometimes.

The younger boy moored at his father's knee will suffer greatly, but he will live to a ripe old age.  Both he and his older brother will join the Dutch Resistance as young men and carry out very dangerous clandestine work against the Nazis, work that includes almost every kind of underground activity.  I don't think either of them will ever kill a German, but between the two of them they may well be responsible for death.  

They will both be heroes, but only the younger one will live.  Both will suffer greatly.  And, in the summer of 1945, after the Liberation, the younger brother will claim some fame for the Resistance work he accomplished.  He will speak about that for years to come--to school children, for instance.  But what few will ever know is that his older brother, who won't come back from a German concentration camp, will have had to cut his brother out from much of the Resistance activity they were in mutually, because that little boy in the cap couldn't keep his mouth shut and therefore became a liability.  These two boys will not be good friends when the oldest dies.

But when the big brother doesn't come back, few will remember that the boy in the hat, the one clinging to his father's leg, was once shunned by the others--by his friends--because his silence could not be trusted.

But then that story will come back and haunt the boy in the hat years and years later, after his reputation as a freedom fighter is sturdily established.  He will become very angry when a story is told that offers a different view, one long before held only in silence.

It's probably 1925 or so in the picture.  This young Dutch couple--Frisian actually--has four darling children.  They sit together in a garden somewhere in Friesland, sit for a picture, what would be today, a Christmas card maybe.  They could be any other family.  They could be ours.  

And yet I know that all of that is ahead of them.  

A picture with a thousand words, as most all of ours are.

The father's own wider family will have a reunion soon, hundreds of them coming together from places around the world; and I think it a wonderful blessing of life itself--don't you?-- that those hundreds of people won't know any of that, nothing at all.  They'll renew acquaintances, meet new family, eat wonderful food, sing songs maybe, tell stories, remember good times and bad.  But this particular ancestral family's story will be only a footnote--

"Oom Leen's oldest children were in the Resistance, you know--and one of them died in Dachau."

"Is that right?"

"Yes--it was very sad."

"It was a horrible time--the war."

"It must have been."

"Pass the dessert, Wim.  I really shouldn't have another bite."

Yesterday, an old friend of mine sent me a little personal essay in which he explained that he was suffering with the first fruits of Alzheimers.  

"Sometimes even going for breakfast in our community dining room is a challenge these days," he wrote, "because I forget. I might hear 'scrambled eggs' yet cannot remember what that is."

If I let myself, I could have cried. 

And yet, when I look at this picture and see this family in the crystal ball that I own, I can't help but think how wonderful it is, in a way, that no one on this earth remembers everything.  

Sometimes it's a blessing to forget, a blessing not to know.

This world is, after all, a vale of tears.

But I swear, that it is, doesn't mean there isn't a time for Christmas cards or one more bite of another dessert.

The Algona Nativity

The first one was twelve feet wide, still quite a production because Jesus, Mary, and the babe were mud-sculptured, then baked, then painstakingly painted. Back in Germany, Eduard Kaib had been an architect. That’s not to say his hand-made Nativity–all of twelve feet wide–required architectural expertise. It was Christmas, 1944, and Kaib was a long, long way from home. Things just got to him; so he decided to create this most famous barnyard scene, a fully manned–and animal-ed–nativity.

Eduard Kaib was an ocean away from home that Christmas and fairly comfortable, if prison can ever be. He was in a German prisoner of war camp somewhere amid endless Iowa cornfields. Kaib and most a couple thousand others had been captured in North Africa and Italy. By early 1944, other Allied powers–England mostly, but others too–were overwhelmed with captured Gerries, or Huns, or whatever other names with which Allied forces blessed the blitzkrieg-ing enemy.

The U. S. of A. stepped up. Eventually, 425,000 captured prisoners–many German, some Japanese, some few Italian–were shipped to this country and imprisoned in as many as 400 camps, several of them–like the one at Algona, Iowa–“base camps,” home places from which gangs of prisoners could be sent out into the heartland and elsewhere, where necessary work wasn’t getting done. Eleven percent of all Americans–every color, every gender, every last hometown–were gone serving the nation during World War II, 16 million Americans out of the work force.

Across the land, agriculture alone required perspiration that wasn’t being spent. Emergency cleanups from tornadoes to earthquakes, from fires and to floods, kept thousands of German prisoners busy throughout the country. This side of the Atlantic, POWs got work done that otherwise wouldn’t have been.

Eduard Kaib was an officer and therefore had special privileges that allowed him time to create that creche. In all likelihood, Kaib knew that were he not in Iowa, he would have spent the winter in Belgium, carrying out Hitler’s last daring offensive, the Battle of the Bulge. Worse, he could have been frozen stiff or dead on the Eastern Front, where two million Germans were killed, thirty million people in all. In December of ’44, Algona was a warm blessing.

The Camp Commander, Lt Col Arthur Lobdell, took one look at Kaib’s twelve-foot nativity arrangement, smiled, and told Kaib that what he should do next was create was something a good deal bigger.

Most American homes this holiday season will have at least one nativity set. Some are beautifully hand-carved; some are tall silhouettes; some, set on music boxes, pipe their own beloved carols. Some are African or Hispanic or Native American. Some feature leprechauns. Some are tiny. Many are huge, life size, some bigger; some are accented in 24-carat gold. Check out Wal-mart sometime–they likely stock a dozen or more. These days, some churches do them live.

Pardon my insistence, but Algona’s POW Nativity is somehow something else altogether. It’s not just the concrete on chicken wire, not just the hand-painted-ness. Algona’s Nativity is not the biggest or the most expensive or even the most lifelike. I’m not at all sure anyone would call it art.

But unlike any other creche I know of, the love story so divinely celebrated in this monumental barnyard moment begins, as impossible as it may seem, with hate and death. This nativity was sculpted from a whole world war of destruction, sadness, and grief. That’s its amazing genesis.

What the Algona Nativity so conspicuously displays, even in its story, is the beloved mystery of the Christmas miracle, a story of hope drawn by a single line of the visions of a prophet named Isaiah–“a little child will lead them.” It’s that mad and that beautiful and still that simple.

Sunday Meds from Psalm 4

Psalm 4 is “the evening hymn,” not because of the demands it makes for God’s ear in the first verse, or because of the 12-step program it outlines for those of us who don’t know the Lord (in vs. 3, 4, and 5).  Psalm 4 is “the evening hymn” because of this last line, because of David’s enviable drowsiness.  Surely, one mark of the “blessedness,” which is at the heart of Psalm 1, is the ability to turn out the lights, shut one’s eyes, and, without a ripple of anxiety, fall off to sleep.

But there is too much spilled blood in the David’s OT stories for me to assume that what he is claiming here is what he felt every last night of his life.  I’ll bet the back forty that he wrote this song on one of his good days.  In fact, Psalm 6, just two more down, sounds like some other guy altogether. . .”all night long I flood my bed with weeping and drench my couch with tears,” vs. 6).

 Last weekend, my son-in-law suffered something he called a migraine.  Whether or not it was remains to be seen, but the doctor he saw for the headache calmly suggested that he cut down on stress. We giggled when he told us what the doctor had offered, as if cutting down on stress is as easy as trimming toe nails. Sure, Doc, and just exactly how do you suggest any of us do that?

 There is an answer here, of course. What David tells us in this song isn’t a lie or even a half-truth. He doesn’t just say, “Get some rest and call me in the morning.”  That’s not what’s going on here.

In truth, sleep is a precarious time because we give ourselves up to something we can’t control. No one wants to snore. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who wishes to have nightmares or suffer bizarre, buck naked hikes through public places. No one would choose to do their hair in the style we daily wake up with. I wouldn’t wish insomnia on anyone; but all of us, at one time or another, have trouble sleeping in part because when we’re out cold, we’re simply not in control; and if there’s one thing all of us want in life, it’s control. You don’t have to be a control freak to fear chaos. We all do.

 Here—on the night of this particular song—David claims he nods off easily. You alone, Lord, he says, allow me to check out in ease.

 That out-of-control-ness that we give ourselves to every night is, in David’s mind and heart and soul, a piece of cake because he knows (and that’s a word we employ in the biblical sense) God’s hand is beneath him, gently rocking.Does he always know that? No such luck. But tonight, all praise to Him, he does!

For those of us who know the Lord, sleeplessness shouldn’t be a problem—and we know it. We should be able to hit the sack and fall like a rag doll into the arms of the Father.  We should be able. . .we should.  And saying that is itself a recipe for even more anxiety.

 But it’s the goal. That’s the blessedness we all want and ask for in those furtive moments when, in bed, we feel the shakiness we so much wish we didn’t have.

 For that malady, David says what we all know but need to hear time and time again.  In his testimony there is the brace of faith God himself tells us: “Be still and now that I am God.”

 Be still, then go ahead and turn out the light.

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 4

“You have filled my heart with greater joy 

than when their grain and new wine abound.

Years ago already, my father-in-law, as if out of nowhere, took me out to the barn one Sunday afternoon and told me he was going to leave the farm.  My wife and I had often wondered what her parents would do when the time came for them to retire, but neither of them had ever whispered anything about leaving.  In fact, we’d wondered whether her father ever could really quit.  The farm—and the land it stood upon and the work it required—was the only home he’d ever known.  And he’d loved everything about it.

I must have looked shocked that day because I was.

 “I just don’t want to go through another harvest,” he told me, and that was about all he said by way of explanation.

 But my wife had told me about the noticeable tension her father always carried come fall, when the crops had to get in and everything had to go smoothly, when rain and snow had to hold off until the corn and beans were safely in the bins.  I didn’t grow up on a farm, and I had no idea of the tension that can build in someone whose family’s livelihood depends on finally putting up a whole crop and doing it safely.

 That tension—the tension my father didn’t want to fight anymore—is my way of understanding the burgeoning emotion embedded in the allusion of verse 7 of Psalm 4, because it seems to me that the tension my father-in-law felt at harvest is probably directly proportional to abundant joy he felt once, in years gone by, when the barn doors finally swung shut in the first howl of a winter wind.

But it’s not just farmers who can relate to the joy David speaks of in his heart.  Not long ago, a niece of mine was married in a gala celebration that, all tolled, took several days.  The wedding ceremony itself was accomplished in a quaint country church, but the reception had more significant proportions: the downtown Yacht Club.  You choose:  stir fry, roast beef, pasta—all the trimmings.  Open bar.  It was a feast of biblical proportions, and a grand time was had by all.

 When, a month later in a supermarket, I bumped into my niece’s proud grandma from the other side of the family, a woman significantly into her eighties, she was still all smiles.  “Wasn’t that something?” she said of the wedding, raising a hand to her mouth, as if feigning embarrassment. “I tell you, that will be enough joy for me for a year.”

It strikes me that that’s exactly what David is saying here in this comparison. My overflowing joy, Lord, is greater even than what others feel at their daughters’ weddings, when food and drink abound.  It’s more than that blessed last look back on shorn fields once ripe with corn.  It’s better than the best that this world can offer.

David still got his mind on those unbelievers he’s been thinking about in Psalm 4, and what he’s telling the Lord is that he is flat-out bursting with joy, greater than those losers even in their best-of-times.

He’s crowing, really, but not at unbelievers. Instead, he is just braying out his joy at a God who, the Bible says, rather likes being so lavishly praised by those who love him.

 A full heart always trumps a full belly, David says—which is not to say that a full belly is something to sneeze at.

What the Lord has given him is just that good. Lord God, he says, it doesn’t get any better than this.

           

Cemetery--kind of. . .

Just found this wonderful picture in a hidden corner of my computer. Haven't a clue who might be in it, but it's old--1910, which means not one of those standing outside of school is alive today to remember. Grim thought. Here's something worse: That they're all gone makes the school picture a cemetery of sorts. 

Then again, not. Click on the pic, get those small-town students up close, and look for your own face. Lots of us are here, after a fashion. Maybe all of us. In that way, it's very much alive.

That's what I'm thinking, a day or two ahead of my release from Heartland Manor. I'll be going home soon, my legs a shamble. I couldn't even do any slow dancing. I've been away from a keyboard for some time, even though my spouse saw to it that I'd have this computer right here in the room--working, as she was, on another variety of rehabilitation.

This morning, sitting here with nothing to say, I saw this old picture. Never bothered to note anything at all about who, what, when, and where, only scanned the old shot something ago when I couldn't take my eyes off the whole perfectly lined up student body. 115 years later, all of them are unable to point out that naughty boy or the teacher all of  them loved. They're all gone.

 

Here's why I'm encouraged. Writing demands vision, the kind of vision which found its way into my noggin when I looked sidewise at this old dateless, nameless shot and saw more than just that. 

For a long time my bum legs stood like Ft. Randall Dam between me and vision. It was as if I couldn't see, or, better, it was as if I could see nothing but what was right in front of me. 

Maybe Ft. Randall is breaking apart. That'd be nice.

Meanwhile, see if you can find your own face in that old schoolyard.

The day John didn't show

Greg is an able guy with a whole left side whose usage left him when he had a stroke, a bad one. Word on the street is that he took some drugs, cooked some meth--I don't know. His dinner plate sports a little inch-high aluminum fence the cook puts on so that he can eat without pushing his lunch all over the table. He has only one functioning arm and hand.

He told me a couple of lunches ago that John, a third member of our table's bunch, had been having headaches that morning at breakfast (I'd already finished when they'd eaten). He said he didn't know how John had fared after breakfast that morning, so he wandered over to Rosemary, John's wife, a saint who's distinctly troubled with Parkinsons. She comes into the lunch room in a machine that stands her up as if she were attacking her food. No matter--she's a saint. 

So Greg stops pushing his dinner up against that little silver wall his plate comes with, puts down his fork, backs up his wheelchair, then forwards it across the center of the lunch room floor and sallies up to Rosemary, who been eating lunch herself by this time, painfully slow but progressive. 

I didn't hear the conversation, and John is still a no-show. If people don't show up at Heartland, you send out the posse. In this case, a word from John's wife will be all anyone needs. Sometimes she talks to me, halfway across the room, without looking up from her food. It's always pleasant. You'd expect nothing less.

I don't hear the news until Greg swings that wheelchair back around and heads back to home.

I wait until he goes after his food. "What did she say? I ask him. John's a Trump man, has got all the accoutrements--cap, shirt, maybe even a flag--I don't know. He's also got a wonderfully droll sense of humor that emerges in a whisper and a smile. Headaches aren't killers. Chest pains--here--are reason to beware.

Greg looks up from his place across the table from mine, gives me half a stare maybe, as if to say the news he carries is worth more than he bargained for.

"She said, 'Pray for him," and he goes back to pushing goulash up against the fence around his lunch.  "That's all--'pray for him.'"

John came back to dinner that night in fine spirits. I don't know that I prayed for him. Should have. I don't know that Greg prayed either, but John's okay. 

On Wednesday I'll leave Heartland, having taken up residence here for just about two months. To speak the truth, I don't know if I'll walk out of here any more gracefully than I walked in, which is not to say, dear Lord, I'm no healthier.

And bless Rosemary, will you? 

Sunday night meds from Psalm 4

“I will lie down and sleep in peace, 

for you alone, O Lord, 

make me dwell in safety.”

 Psalm 4 is “the evening hymn,” not because of the demands it makes for God’s ear in the first verse, or because of the 12-step program it outlines for those of us who don’t know the Lord (in vs. 3, 4, and 5).  Psalm 4 is “the evening hymn” because of this last line, because of David’s enviable drowsiness.  Surely, one mark of the “blessedness,” which is at the heart of Psalm 1, is the ability to turn out the lights, shut one’s eyes, and, without a ripple of anxiety, fall off to sleep.

But there is too much spilled blood in the David’s OT stories for me to assume that what he is claiming here is what he felt every last night of his life.  I’ll bet the back forty that he wrote this song on one of his good days.  In fact, Psalm 6, just two more down, sounds like some other guy altogether. . .”all night long I flood my bed with weeping and drench my couch with tears,” vs. 6).

Last weekend, my son-in-law suffered something he called a migraine.  Whether or not it was remains to be seen, but the doctor he saw for the headache calmly suggested that he cut down on stress. We giggled when he told us what the doctor had offered, as if cutting down on stress is as easy as trimming toe nails. Sure, Doc, and just exactly how do you suggest any of us do that?

There is an answer here, of course. What David tells us in this song isn’t a lie or even a half-truth. He doesn’t just say, “Get some rest and call me in the morning.”  That’s not what’s going on here.

In truth, sleep is a precarious time because we give ourselves up to something we can’t control. No one wants to snore. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who wishes to have nightmares or suffer bizarre, buck naked hikes through public places. No one would choose to do their hair in the style we daily wake up with. I wouldn’t wish insomnia on anyone; but all of us, at one time or another, have trouble sleeping in part because when we’re out cold, we’re simply not in control; and if there’s one thing all of us want in life, it’s control. You don’t have to be a control freak to fear chaos. We all do.

Here—on the night of this particular song—David claims he nods off easily. You alone, Lord, he says, allow me to check out in ease.

That out-of-control-ness that we give ourselves to every night is, in David’s mind and heart and soul, a piece of cake because he knows (and that’s a word we employ in the biblical sense) God’s hand is beneath him, gently rocking.Does he always know that? No such luck. But tonight, all praise to Him, he does!

For those of us who know the Lord, sleeplessness shouldn’t be a problem—and we know it. We should be able to hit the sack and fall like a rag doll into the arms of the Father.  We should be able. . .we should.  And saying that is itself a recipe for even more anxiety.

But it’s the goal. That’s the blessedness we all want and ask for in those furtive moments when, in bed, we feel the shakiness we so much wish we didn’t have.

For that malady, David says what we all know but need to hear time and time again.  In his testimony there is the brace of faith God himself tells us: “Be still and now that I am God.”

Be still, then go ahead and turn out the light. 

Thanksgiving thanksgiving

Some people may be accustomed to scarfing down such huge platefuls of turkey and stuffing in the middle of the day, but I'm not one of them. Thanksgiving dinner--for which we all give thanks--is just so thick and starchy (heavy-laden with gravy that honors our departed Grandma, whose recipe it is) that by two or so in the afternoon, it's a wonder the whole adult family hasn't passed out.

That's why I like to hike on Thanksgiving afternoon*, even though there's not all that much daylight by late in the day. We drive out to Oak Grove, a wooded park along the Big Sioux, and work off some of the excess after the Thanksgiving extravaganza. But this year it was too blame cold, a sharp northwest wind icy enough to take a bite out of your face, the windows still thick with Jack Frost.

The bowling alley's long gone, so I asked my daughter if there were any movies playing downtown, something appropriate for her kids, which is to say our grand kids. Yeah, she said, so three blocks was the best I could do for a hike--straight west to the theater, where we donned special glasses and watched Tangled, Disney's version of the Repunzel story in a 3-D version so real my grandson and I kept reaching for butterflies when they came floating past.

In David Brooks' last column in the NY Times**, he quotes that odd Christian curmudgeon Tolstoy like this: “The aim of an artist is not to solve a problem irrefutably, but to make people love life in all its countless, inexhaustible manifestations.” I sat there beside my tow-head, second-grade grandson, watched him lose himself in the story, and told myself that there's so much I just haven't learned about stories, like what they're all about, after all. He was teaching me. I was learning new stuff from him because between the two of us, we were dead lost, him loving the story, me in him loving it. And him.***

I watched him turn away disgustedly as little boys do when finally Repunzel and her sweetheart thug-turned-saint finally, delightedly, kiss. He just couldn't watch. When the two of them faced sure death by drowning, when it looked like the end was near, he flipped off those glasses and looked up at the ceiling, sure, I guess, the whole story was going to come crashing down on him like a third-rate garage door. I watched Tangled through my grandson's eyes, and when he snuggled up against me during all that high Disney tension, I felt the tremors in his heart and soul.

I came out of that theater telling myself that it's no dang wonder I haven't figured out how to finish that novel of mine**** because I hadn't been thinking of what it's all about, hadn't seen the wonder in my grandson's bespectacled eyes or thought at all of trying to making sure that novel offers people what Tolstoy says it must--the sheer joy of loving life.

Disney snatched a few tears out of me on the holiday--I'll admit it. Maybe one or two because all things worked together for good in that zany, hairy movie, but also because my grandson lent me, for two hours, his child's heart, an act that gave that movie even more wonder than anything you could see through those plastic glasses.

This morning--three days after--I'm still on a high, and for all of that I give thanks. Thanksgiving thanksgiving.

Oh yeah, the meal was terrific and the pie was to die for. That too.*****

________________________ 

*I'm still a resident of Heartland Home; I can't walk without a walker. There'll be no hiking today for me. That doesn't mean I'd wouldn't like to be out there somewhere. 

**Sometime 17 years ago now--that's how old this blog post is.

***For the record, he's 23 or so today. . .

****Looking for Dawn, available on Amazon for Christmas giving. . .

*****Just one more thing worth noting--last Sunday his sister and her husband baptized a baby, my great-granddaughter. . .just sayin'

"It ain't my first rodeo"

For the record, these days I have no idea what my rear end looks like. At home, we've got at least one full-length mirror, but I don't know that I was ever vain or crazy enough to spin around and survey the scene. 

I was a high school jock. I've taken a thousand locker room showers with countless other wild-ass nakeds. It was impossible not to see loads of other posteriors, so I think I know what they look like--what I look like--with one exception: it's seventy years later. The lot of us, if left undraped would most certainly look. . .well, how should I say it?--forlorn, droopy maybe. 

But I've never looked in that full-length bedroom mirror, so I swear I don't know what kind of impression my own bare butt might make.

I know the bundle I carried was of considerable heft years ago, when I couldn't have won wind sprints if the other guys wore 20-pound weights on their ankles. I remember being a lousy hitter because I knew that if I swung hard I could slam a good pitch 500 feet in our fence-less ball diamond and, if I was lucky, end up on third. My butt was a burden, an embarrassment. It's true. 

But that was a thousand years ago. In college, I'll never forget being at a motel swimming pool with friends. Later, alone, this girl I was seeing told me that some of her friends told her I had cute buns.

Cute buns. That was sometime during the Paleozoic Era.

Right now, there's no chance of my checking out what's behind me. Besides, I'd rather not know.

All of which is a dirty shame because right now, living in a nursing home's rehab center as I do, I couldn't begin to count the number of women who have, already, pulled down my pants. Dozens of women of all shapes and sizes have come face-to-face with my keister. I've hosted whole gatherings in front of the toilet, but mostly it's just two or so tugging down the sweat pants one more time before I aim my butt at the throne. 

Morning comes. "Wanna change your briefs?" one says. 

Nod, and down they come, full Monty.  

Listen, it takes some moral, emotional, and spiritual adjustment for a 76-year-old Dutch Calvinist Professor of Literature to adjust to full frontal nudity before a bevy of CNAs. But they're sweet about it and quick too, which is nice. 

For my first bath--I hadn't taken a bath since the early years of this century and never, well, in public--a sweetheart named Mollie smiled when I let her know I wasn't yet at home being buck naked in her cold plastic bath chair. "Oh, get over it," she said. "This ain't my first rodeo."

I'll admit it--that helped. When I can't help but feel exposed, I tell my chilly soul, it ain't none of them's first rodeo. 

For Dutch-American Heritage Day

Whatever the cause, we  needed a sump pump--new house, too dang much rain, walk-out basement--we needed a sump pump. But where to buy one--'twas a Sunday as I remember, and there sure warn't no place I knew of to buy a sump pump on the Sabbath. 

"Go to Le Mars," the neighbor said.

"Bomgaars open there, you think?" I said. Orange City's sure enough wasn't.

"South of 10," he answered easy en0ugh.

I had to think that answer through. Hwy 10 runs through Sioux County, west to east, from the Big Sioux at Hawarden to Granville. When it does, it creates a line behind which--to the north--lies "Dutch Siouxland." "South of 10," roughly, abides a different world, the world whose inhabitants my people for  years, maybe a century, called "Americans."  

For the record, the Dutch came to Sioux County, Iowa, in or around 1870. At the same time--same year--another ethnic contingent, this one from Luxembourg, found their way to the last unsettled region of Iowa and parked their colony just a bit east and north of the wooden  shoes. The Dutch came from Pella mostly, the Luxembourgers from St. Donatus, where they left a tiny village that looks in places as if nothing's moved.

For the record, the sprawling lines of the railroad picked out a place and determined it to be a stop--water and wood for billowing engines. They created similar burgs out here for their convenience until homesteaders came along to call the place a town. That's how Marcus was born, a railroad town, no nirvana for ethnic types in wooden shoes, black dresses, and long prayers. 

There were no visions, no scriptural mandates, just cord wood and water for the boiler.

In Marcus, a depot went up, as well as the section man's shanty, together creating the very first sense of something standing here in a treeless prairie so broad you could ride all week long and not get out of it. The town's name wasn't particularly difficult for John Blair, the railroad king, head of the Iowa City to Sioux City Railroad,, whose son just happened to be named--well, Marcus. 

Orange City is named for a storied Dutch hero of mythic proportions. 

Mr. Blair had a thing about names. When Aurelia was incorporated (it was platted as early as 1883), the king of northwest Iowa railroads simply slapped down the name of one of his daughters.

Cherokee, Iowa, had only a bit less pragmatic birth. A half-dozen families from Massachusetts bought up land for purposes of trying life out west. If those original families shared a religious heritage, history doesn't mention it.

I've spent a month now "south of 10," in a convalescent home in Marcus, Iowa, cared for lovingly by a bevy of nurses, CNAs, and others who don't call Orange City home. They're a terrific bunch I'd commend to anyone, but many of them don't know the Dutch, except for this Tulip thing of theirs and the sheer awe they exhibit in the presence of high school volleyball giants.

They're the children of Americans, all of them, and daily they do my dirty work--they sweep my legs into bed and out, they  undress me, change my underwear, wipe my butt, and move me, when asked, from chair to toilet and back. 

They have tougher stories than I'm used to and a bunch more tattoos. They seem to have more dogs than marriages, although that might be disputed. Many work part-time, then double up at other old folks' homes. They're not rich. They're just plain dang good at what they do. 

Don't mention this north of 10, but I believe I've fallen in love with a dozen of 'em--"Americans."

Where to listen

 

She’d told me about the school she’d attended as a little girl, almost ninety years before. She spoke of the humiliation of losing, so quickly, her free-flowing long hair, felt the absurd foreignness of having to speak a language she didn’t understand. All of that in a big reservation school, the school at the agency, the school her parents insisted she attend. She held very few memories from that place that were a joy, but she remembered how her father would come to visit almost weekly.

She was a child there. She was being shaped into adulthood.

Years later, after nurses’ training in Rapid City, she’d returned to the Agency hospital, same town, the hospital where she worked on the same reservation where she was born and reared. First school, first job—home, in a way, even though she lived a half day’s ride away. She wanted to show me all of that, wanted me to see what I could of her childhood really, and, at the same time, history of her people.

Sometime previous I’d asked her to take me to her precious places, those places where significant things had happened in her life, the really important things. I wanted to see those places with her. It was a joy for her to remember and for me to watch and feel her explain.

First stop was a cemetery, where we hunted down her grandfather’s grave. She knew where it was but hadn’t stood there before. Then we drove on, all the way to a long crooked finger of land so high above the river it didn’t go under when the Army Corps of Engineer’s finished the Big Bend Dam, far down river. It was the far eastern bit of reservation just off Hwy 212. A little park just off the road is hardly elegant, but the great blue lake the river formed is gorgeous, so elegant against rough-hewn reservation boundaries that it looks like Disney.

“There,” she pointed straight into the water. “All of that life, so much of my history, our history is lost forever beneath the water.”

Who in South Dakota could stand against the dams 75 years ago when they were built? Who didn’t rejoice with the kid waterskiing directly over the old Agency on that perfect summer day? What on earth is not to like about Lewis and Clark Lake?

That moment returned to me last week when Wright Thompson says a similar thing in  his new book, The Barn: A Study of a Mississippi Murder. Floods explode down, into, and through the Mississippi Delta area, he says, and have for more than a century. Flooding has destroyed whole river towns. swallowed them up beneath rampaging water and mud that swamp alleyways and streets and bury businesses and churches. In some locales, Thompson says, locals swear “they can hear church bells ringing when the currents move right.”

It's a beautiful image, isn’t it?—the sense that when the currents are just right you can hear church bells from churches long buried in the deep?

I’d like to believe that because that reservation memory came back to me in a torrent when I read it in Thompson’s book, at least something of what my Native friend was trying to teach me got home. 

I know lots of empty places where I swear I can still hear distant church bells.

Sunday Evening Meds--from Psalm 4

“Let the light of your face shine upon us, Lord”

 Like all of us, Moses’s brother Aaron stumbled through a life far less than perfect. Because he conceded to the Israelite mob that demanded an idol to worship, Aaron was almost single-handedly responsible for his brother’s wrathful smashing of the God-inscribed stone tablets, not to mention God’s wrath on his own chosen people.  No one ever mentions Aaron in a roll call of the saints.

 Yet, Aaron’s words ring throughout millions of church fellowships around the world every week.  The Lord told Moses (see Numbers 6) to have Aaron bless the Israelites with words that you can still hear almost any place two or three are gathered to worship God: “The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you. . .”

 If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a million times.  King David likely did too.

 And maybe that’s why the line itself has lost its visual character; simply said, I’ve heard it so often. Just for a moment, it’s helpful, I think, to create the picture this famous benediction offers. Penitents, millions of them through the ages, are on their knees (it’s almost impossible not to see them in some kind of supine position physically) and in some kind of darkness, waiting for a brightening glance of Godliness, just a glance.

 Now delete millions of those people from that image and picture just one penitent. Put yourself there, on your knees, eyes slightly arched but staring downward in helplessness, a nervous shakiness in hands and arms and legs in anticipation of a passing glance, and repeat: “Let the light of your face shine upon me, Lord.”

 I dare say that the only people who can effortlessly create that image of themselves are those who, for whatever horrifying reason, have spent time themselves in that position.  Those who, like me, have never suffered significant bouts of abandonment or grief or despair have trouble creating an image of so great a helplessness. After all, I might say, I’ve got fairly substantial bootstraps to prove my internal strength. What I’ve done, I’ve done on my own.

 It seems so medieval almost, doesn’t it?—the image behind the blessing; so, well, Islamic:  hoards of people, face to the floor, hoping for a fleeting glance from the King of Creation.  Good capitalists create their own fates, after all; we seal our own successes with the sheer tonnage of our personal industry.  We make our fate.

 But the line we repeat so often—and hear repeated as a blessing to us—offers a wholly different portrait.  There isn’t a dime’s worth of self-sufficiency in David’s abject request here: “Just a glance, Lord.”

Embedded in the old line is something of the sun, of course—God Almighty as iridescent force whose rays bless abundantly. And what David wants, as has each and every one of us who’ve been in that abjectly needy, is but a glance of divine favor, a glimpse of light in the darkness. We’re not even asking to meet God’s eyes; the line begs for something to take away those heavy shadows, just a glance.

 It’s so medieval, so lords and serfs, country manors fortified cathedrals. It’s so impotent, so paralyzed, so defenseless. It’s so blasted un-American.

 And yet I know—I really do—that such helplessness is what He wants. “The Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you. . .”

That Dreamy Little Cabin in the Woods

There's no accounting to taste. Just exactly why it is some people adore Terry Redlin's perfectly darling paintings is unfathomable to those art lovers who declare unequivocally that any mess by Jackson Pollack is (ahem!) real art.

It comes as  no surprise that one might find a Terry Redlin or two on the walls of Woodbridge Clinic, since among the residents it would be difficult to find an admirer of, say, Piet Mondrian: I'm guessing Terry Redlin lovers almost certainly abound. 

I can't quite make out the painter who did the image framed and hung on the wall outside the bath, but I noticed the painting when I was next in line for a dunking. Like almost anything by Terry Redlin, a powerfully comforting source of light drops a heavenly radiance over it all. Here, it's a cabin in the woods (you're surprised?) surrounded by a gorgeous forest, every last limb of the blessed pines encircling the place hung heavily with lovely lake snow. Comfy. Sweet. Nary a mosquito. 

For years my wife and I nurtured a dream of buying a cabin like the one that lights the whole scene so warmly. We thought (maybe I should say I) that maybe we could swap the bare naked prairie of northwest Iowa for some Minnesota hideaway beside still waters or lost among towering pines someplace breathing out warmth like this one. The image the picture offers is almost exactly the sweet image we (one of us especially) painted in our hearts. 

When the opportunity finally arrived, we backed out of our Terry Redlin dream. Family matters kept us in Siouxland, the emerald eastern edge of the plains. A painting like the one on the wall of the home, right there at the nursing home's bath, I reckon will never, ever be ours. 'Twill always be the dream it was, both of us far closer to 80 than we'd like to scribble down. 

Redlin's work is not great art, nor is this knock off; but it did get me thinking, which is something great art should at least begin to offer. I was  in line for the bath, waiting for the soapmeister to wheel me in for my turn in the suds. When I looked up at the painting, I wasn't thinking of Terry Redlin, wasn't even thinking of the perfect charm of the log cabin in windless, saintly pines all around.

I've been here at and in the home for coming up on three weeks. How long I'll stay is anyone's guess. There are things I have to learn, I'm told, things I have to master before I'm shoved out into the world behind a walker or throned in a wheelchair, things as elementary as how to put on shoes, or get up from a toilet--unbelievably difficult stuff when for the most part you've got no legs.

Amazingly, just about the moment I looked at that sweet little warmly-lit cabin, the I couldn't help believing I had no business dreaming of the place because I had no way of getting there. That heavenly cabin has no ramp. It's beaten snowy path is no place for a wheelchair. I couldn't cross the bridge. I couldn't even dream.

I've changed, I'd guess. I never would have thought of what I couldn't do. What I saw was that I could never even get there.

For the record, the bath was big and soapy and hot on my swollen, numb lower legs, just what I needed. . .just exactly what I needed.

Sunday Morning Meds--from Psalm 4

 

aftermath of flooding just off our land

“Many are asking, ‘Who can show us any good?’”

As we’ve said before, the very first word of the very first Psalm is the life’s wish of every last human being who has inhabited or is or still will inhabit this earth. What everyone wants—no exceptions here—is to be blessed. Like that man whose image graces Psalm 1, everyone—red and yellow, black and white; rich and poor; urban or rural cowboy; all genders; all creeds (and none); mass murderers and untrammeled saints—all of us want to be happy.

David’s characterization of the cry of “the many” here in verse 6 is thus perfectly understandable. He’s right. The questions we’re all asking are “Who can bring some joy into my life? Who can turn my mourning into dancing? How can I be blessed?”

Relative degrees of prosperity mean little, of course. Those of us who live in the affluent West often suffer more emotional woes than those whose lives, near and far, are at or below the poverty level. Which is not to say, of course, that the poor don’t plead the same question, which is, really, “who will help us?”

Even though the question David brings to our consideration is the question we all know well, just exactly how he means the comment seems to me to be up for grabs. Spurgeon can’t help but see in David’s characterization an implied criticism of the wicked; they’re rapaciously sinful appetites are constantly a-whoring, constantly chasing ill-fated images of happiness. But Spurgeon was a believer of his time, and his propensity for determining who is and who isn’t “the wicked” is legendary. To me, drawing the kinds of deep lines is a much tougher job than he found it to be.

I’m not sure that David is lambasting the wayward wicked with this line. What we’ve just come from in this very strange little psalm is a treatise sympathetically offered to those same sinners. “Here are the things you all should do,” David says, and then lays out his 12-step program. He’s concerned. He wants their blessedness.

Furthermore, at the end of verse six he uses the collective pronoun us; it seems to me that what David is saying about people is meant to be about us, not just, well, them. We all want somebody or something to show us good.

I may be wrong, but I’d like to read this verse as penitence, not preaching. That kind of reading at least brings some greater unity to the song. This odd little psalm began with a short but deeply felt request to God that the speaker heard (vs. 1). Then, it turns to sinners and howls (“how long. . .”), but that tone subsides into a warmly offered how-to, a description of the means by which those far, far away from God can draw closer.

In verse six—like verse one—David once again talks to the Lord, and I’d like to think he’s pointing at those who’ve listened to his little sermon. As he’s pointing, he’s asking God for the blessed warmth of His generous face on them, and on us, on all of us.

I guess I’d like to think that this isn’t a Psalm that shoves unbelievers into the fiery throes of hell, but puts in a good word for those folk, just as affected as we all are with wanting to be blessed.

Shine your love on us, Lord, he seems to me to be saying. We’re all lookin’ for love in all the wrong places.

Feeling Small

“Before my addiction, I used to love rock climbing,” so says, James Browning, one of the tough Appalachian guys Arlie Russell Hochschild interviews in Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and Rise of the Right. Hochschild’s concern is an ill-fated march by neo-Nazis, a prelude to the 2020 “Unite the Right” Charlottesville protest. What Hochschild wants to explain is the profound drift toward far-right politics the region has taken in the last few decades.

But this man Browning finds his way through the tribulation of joblessness and a besotted drug culture to moral redemption elsewhere. A rock-climber before his own addictions, he regains some balance high above the Appalachian Mountains. “Look out at these mountains on one of my first post recovery climbs, I felt part of life, “ or so says Mr. Browning. “I felt big. And I felt good.”

For four weeks now I’ve been institutionalized, a citizen of a land and a people unknown to me before. I’m in a nursing home, my third, because I’m crippled. I hope not to be thusly maimed in some distant future, but for right now I’ll say it again: I’m crippled. For some unknown reason, my legs don’t work. My quads, as the PT likes to say, have simply checked out, which means I’m largely subject to the loving hands of what seems a hundred nurses and CNAs, most all of which, let me say, I’ve discovered to be delightful. They dress me, take me to the bathroom, bathe me, pull up my drawers, and put me to bed.

They’re here, as am I, but they leave, end of shift. I don’t.

It would be vainglorious, in an odd sort of way, to think of myself as incarcerated, but I can’t help feeling that way some times, given the fact that in an earlier institution if I even stepped out of bed, alarms would shriek and the room would soon be thick with CNAs, most of them equally flustered and fascinated as the boss takes hold of my helplessness and returns all that doesn’t work on its own to the sheets.

If you’re asking yourself right now if it’s easy to get down about things, the answer is yes, of course. What I know about depression is camped far, far way at this point, but it’s not particularly difficult to feel the darkness. My wife is here daily; she leaves in early evening, so that the absolute worst part of my day is her going home. On the other hand, it’s a joy to send her off, knowing she’s going to the place I’d love being.

She called me last week, late morning, because she had news, “Big news,” she said, proudly, confidently. Honestly, I didn’t know how to react since she’s not one to overuse superlatives.

She couldn’t tell me about some miraculous healing—how could she know? I had no clue. “I give up,” I told her. “What is it?”

“You’re a great-Grandpa,” or so said a brand new great-Grandma.

I was alone, of course, in my cubicle. No one to grab. No one to hold. Maybe that was why—I don’t know, maybe that’s what explains the tears coming up like minor flooding. I found myself helpless to stop, even though, believe me, I tried. They just came. I didn’t ask--in fact I don’t know that before in my 76 years I’ve ever, ever bawled my eyes out for sheer joy.

I put the phone down and cried some more.

Neaveh Kay, eight darling pounds. Mom, Dad, and baby all well.

There wasn’t much to say. Maybe that’s why the tears.

So one of those CNAs dropped by just then and found me slobbering, still wiping my eyes. I told her the news without sparing superlatives and tried to apologize for the water works.. She told me not to be stupid. I had her crying too.

It’s probably idiotic for me to wonder why the waterfall? What was it in me that prompted emotion unlike any I’d ever felt before; but right there in the institution I kept seeing a lovely picture of fresh snow on a broad field. That fresh snow held footprints—my Mom and Dad’s out front, then mine and Barb’s, then, slightly smaller but no less distinct, Andrea’s and Piet’s—the brand new grandparents.

Finally, came two more, Joce and Lucas, the new mom and dad,

Then way at the end, two tiny little footprints. Right there in the snow lay five stories, that new one pinched and pigeon-toed, tagging along and holding its own.

Somewhere in Appalachia, I can’t help but hope that this James Browning, who beat the rap to which so many of his peers fell, is staying up there on the top of the Appalachian Mountains. “As time went on,” he remembers, “ and I felt more reattached to the world, when I reached the top, I felt something different. . I felt small,” he says, “and I felt good.”

That too, I can’t help but think—that too made me cry.

Sundday Morning Meds--from Psalm 4

“Many are asking, ‘Who can show us any good?’”

As we’ve said before, the very first word of the very first Psalm is the life’s wish of every last human being who has inhabited or is or still will inhabit this earth. What everyone wants—no exceptions here—is to be blessed. Like that man whose image graces Psalm 1, everyone—red and yellow, black and white; rich and poor; urban or rural cowboy; all genders; all creeds (and none); mass murderers and untrammeled saints—all of us want to be happy.

David’s characterization of the cry of “the many” here in verse 6 is thus perfectly understandable. He’s right. The questions we’re all asking are “Who can bring some joy into my life? Who can turn my mourning into dancing? How can I be blessed?”

Relative degrees of prosperity mean nothing, of course. Those of us who live in the affluent West often suffer more emotional woes than those whose lives are at or below the poverty level. Which is not to say, of course, that the poor don’t plead the same question, which is, really, “who will help us?”

Even though the question David brings to our consideration is the question we all know well, just exactly how he means the comment seems to me to be up for grabs. Spurgeon can’t help but see in David’s characterization an implied criticism of the wicked; they’re rapaciously sinful appetites are constantly a-whoring, constantly chasing ill-fated images of happiness. But Spurgeon was a believer of his time, and his propensity for determining who is and who isn’t “the wicked” is legendary. To me, drawing those kinds of deep lines is a tougher job than, apparently, he found it to be.

I’m not sure that David is lambasting the wayward wicked with this line. What we’ve just come from in this very strange little psalm is a treatise sympathetically offered to those same sinners. “Here are the things you all should do,” David says, and then lays out his 12-step program. He’s concerned. He wants their blessedness.

Furthermore, at the end of verse six he uses the collective pronoun us; it seems to me that what David is saying about people is meant to be about us, not just, well, them. We all want somebody or something to show us good.

I may be wrong, but I’d like to read this verse as penitence, not preaching. That kind of reading at least brings some greater unity to the song. This odd little psalm began with a short but deeply felt request to God to be heard (vs. 1). Then, it turns to sinners and howls (“how long. . .”), but that tone subsides into a warmly offered how-to, a description of the means by which those far, far away from God can draw closer.

In verse six—like verse one—David once again talks to the Lord, and I’d like to think he’s pointing at those who’ve listened to his little sermon. As he’s pointing, he’s asking God for the blessed warmth of his face on them, and on us, on all of us.

I guess I’d like to think that this isn’t a Psalm that shoves unbelievers into the fiery throes of hell, but puts in a good word for those folk, just as affected as we all are with wanting to be blessed.

Shine your love on us, Lord, he seems to me to be saying. We’re all lookin’ for love in all the wrong places.

Wet drawers

 

There are so many nurses, so many aides, so many cnas and techs, that remembering names is impossible. She had some miles on her, this one--she was what my mother would have called "a hard woman,' but then many of them n the care center were. My people are Calvinists; they don't let themselves go.

The requisite tattoos lit up both arms. Her hair, brushed up in a bush, was multi-colored, an entire branch thereof faux-orange. She's neither young, nor tidy, but, like the others, no matter how she parts her hair, she's good at what she needs to do. She's been my nurse before and  gives me no comfort but the best. 

 I've been in hospitals for the last four weeks now, had literally dozens of nurses, and I can't help but wonder if pre-requisite to the profession is a perfect ear for jokes amid a thousand acres of sheer grace. Still, this darlin' seems vastly more fastidious about my care than her own.

I'd sounded the red button with great reluctance. After all, had I worked at it at all, I might well have gotten away with my soaked bottom. I'd argued with myself about it, tried to conjure a dodge, then finally tossed in the towel. That urinal--what a wonderful invention that is!--isn't without its shortfalls. Fifteen minutes earlier I'd wet my drawers when something or other misfired. There I sat in a lounge chair beside my bed, my legs largely worthless, around a lap full of wee.

I'm quite sure I could have covered up the entire discretion, could have stripped off the soak, found a fresh pair of Jockies, and not had to fess up. I mean, I'm 76 years old, Ph.D. in English, dissertation long ago parked successfully in the library of my alma mater. I told myself I was too dang old to lie--I'm going to call some nurse in here and tell her no matter how young or old: "Sweetheart, I just peed my pants."

When she showed up, I realized I'd been hers before. This nameless,"hard woman" had already proved herself a champ.

"The truth?" I asked. That she knew me made it easier. What the heck?--I told myself, so I just let her know. "I wet my fricken' drawers," I told her. 

She was already working at my shoes. Never looked up. 

"I'm so sorry for what I'm putting you through," I told her.

She stopped on a dime. "Think you're the first?" she said and started ripping at the other shoe. "It's no big deal," she told me, pitching a sock in the corner. "You should know that."

She directed me to the rocker, stood me up like a rag doll, and jerked at that offending piece of clothing. "Shoot, you just got to go on, got to get up and go on."

It was that simple. There I stood, drying out. 

"Doesn't amount to anything, believe me," she said. 

"But it's embarrassing," I told her. "I'm old enough to be your dad and I wet my drawers?" I said. "I feel like an idiot." 

Not one word. Not one glance. You couldn't help but know this wasn't her first rodeo. Then it came. "Oh, don't go feeling sorry for yourself," she said, cleaning me up. "You just got to pick yourself up and go on. "It's what I tell my son all the time, you know?--shoot,  it's what I tell myself--'you got to go on.'"

"How old's your son?" I said, sitting now, back on the Lay-Z-Boy.

"He's 13," she told me, slipping me back into a dry pair. "He's autistic," she said. "He's autistic and he's ADHD and what not else and it's what I tell him, and shoot! it's what I got to tell myself."

It was something I might have avoided, I think, scrambled around the room in my wheelchair, getting a clean pair, pulling it up myself. 

No one might ever have known.  

Sunday Morning Meds--from Psalm 4

“Offer right sacrifices and trust in the Lord.”

My wife and I have developed our own language.  If I say—as I did last night—that tonight I’d be going to a “should thing,” what both of us know I mean is that I really don’t want to.  I’d prefer to stay home; in fact, I’d much, much rather stay home.  But I’m not. I’m going. It’s a “should thing.”

 What both of us know is that, in life, often as not, we have to do things we’d rather not.  We do them because we should. In the Christian’s life “should things” compel us much more often than they do, I’d guess, in a life that isn’t entangled in the commitments that rise from church and school and what not else with a halo.

 Is it good for me—doing a whole raft of “should things?” Wouldn’t I be better off emotionally if I didn’t get collared by responsibilities that, with just a little tweaking, might well be seen as, well, appearances anyway?  “I really should be there,” I say sometimes. Can conscience ever be a burden?  Don’t all of us want to flip off the world once in a while and go our own way?  I sure do.  Don’t tell anybody, but often as not we get downright sick and tired of “should things.”

 Of course, I choose to live in a small community, where what it costs to flip off the world is nothing to sneeze at.  Where’s there’s no anonymity, there’s more responsibility, or so it seems to me.  My wife and I live in a virtual Wal-Mart of “should things.”  Just about every blasted night there are “should things.”  Maybe I’m overstating.

King David’s twelve-step program in Psalm 4 continues in verse five with a couple of “should things”:  “offer right sacrifices and trust in the Lord.”

Honestly, I don’t have much trouble with the trusting, but his first command strikes me as a “should thing.”  It shouldn’t, but it does. Which is another conundrum, I guess, isn’t it?

If you want to get answers to prayers, David says, here’s a list of things to do; one of them is offer “right sacrifices.”  It’s not even a matter of should here, it’s a matter of must.  Sacrifice.  Give of yourself.  Echelons of therapists be hanged, if you want to sleep well (which is, in a way, what Psalm 4 is about), there simply are things you should do.

I remember reading Abraham Kuyper’s suggestions for “should things.”  He advised that if we really wanted to be near unto God we should act like him: we should forgive, we should love unconditionally, we should seek the best for others, we should sacrifice.  You’ll know him best by doing what he does—that’s what Kuyper suggests. It made sense when I read it, and it makes sense today when I think it through. But oh, my goodness, what a multitude of “should things.” And they’re all so demanding, so tough.

Yes, my dear, there are “should things.” And yes, me, we ought to do them. Some should things are really must things.

And we’ve certainly got this much up on David, the poet king. We know darn well that some massively important things were done deliberately for us—and those events weren’t “should things” either. Start here: a cross, a death, a trip to hellishness.

Thanks be to God. Thanks be to God. Thanks be to God.