Morning Thanks--Baby, it's cold outside

I don't remember it ever happening before out here in the country. It must have. It's minus-12 degrees right now, maybe for the first time this winter (btw, not bad for mid-February). It didn't wake me up--I was already a works in process; and it didn't scare me like it used to in the old house, where I swear it used to happen more often.

Who knows?--maybe old roof beams freeze more quickly than new ones. That's a theory. Anyway, it used to happen more, which prompts old-man glories, the kind that begin with a harrumph and end by making old days-claims that make old farts sound heroic.

But then, who knows?--all that snowbanks-up-to-the-telephone-wires stuff may have some currency--global warning these days, you know.

Anyway, it's weird or strange, even a bit frightening when suddenly something upstairs--we have no upstairs--cracks like a gunshot. Joists aren't really supposed to make noise. There's moisture in 'em, I suppose, and when that moisture freezes, it makes 'em pop, bang, crack.

It's a winter thing, and unless it scares the women and the horses, you just put up with it.

Still. Yucch. Baby, it's cold outside.

Always puts me in mind of the band that used to make camp just up river a ways, where the Floyd twists around from an overall southerly course to flow southeast and then, after a hairpin, straight west. Right there, on the bank where the river turns on a dime, my imagination sets a half-dozen tipis straight out of yesteryear.

About them, I worry, even though they have no joists in the roof and they've been gone since the winter of 1823 or so. But how did they do it? Seriously, how did they make do in this kind of winter--and, given global warning, even far colder winters? 

Like all of us, I suppose, they hunkered down, didn't try to do much but stay under buffalo robes. Chances are, they'd be out west somewhere, if not in the Black Hills, at least in the cottonwoods along the Big Sioux, where the temps would be just as wearying, but at least the wind wouldn't take your face off. You could find a spot at Oak Grove, somewhere off one of those steep river hills. Wouldn't be pleasant exactly, but you wouldn't be in the middle of it.

But this isn't the early 19th century, and right behind me as we speak there's a furnace purring out warm air, not enough to keep the roof from sounding alarm, but far more than we need to stay comfy down here, minus-20 or whatever out there. 

Beneath me is a heated floor, too, a wonder and a blessing. And, when the sun comes up, I'll make coffee, then flick a switch to light the fireplace. Yes, it's gas.

Don't let Minnesotans fool you--there's no great joy in Upper Midwestern winters, and thirty-below really doesn't keep out the riff-raff either. 

I'm not a tinkerer, even less of a handyman. I don't know a thing about our furnace but this salient fact--it's running, thank the Lord. It's running.

Shelter is fundamental, right?--like food and clothing. You got to have it. 

But it's not a given. We got it 24/7 x 365. But this morning especially, when the joists are popping, I'm thankful--really, really thankful. 

What they needed to learn

She'd been telling me about the terrors of the boarding school, how much she cried when they cut her hair, how they screamed at kids for incidental things, for not speaking the Lakota language, how they would tell kids to do things the kids didn't know how to do, then scream if they got whatever it was they were supposed to do wrong.

She told me there were some few older girls there that the little girls liked because some of the older girls in the dorm were kind or funny. She said she'd never forget the older girl who taught them how to march. They marched all over the boarding school grounds back then because the teachers said they had to, but their instructor was a Lakota too and she was kind. She was nice. She was funny. She made marching a good time, she told me, smiling.

And there was another older girl, a big girl, a really big girl--not just older but bigger. She was kind too, and at nights, when the teachers and the housemother was long gone, sometimes a couple of the little girls--she was a little girl herself back then--would jump up on her. That big girl would just lift up her arms and turn around, circle around and around with the little girls on her arms. She said she would never forget that because it was so much fun.

The big girl didn't return to the agency boarding school the next year. When the term started, she went to another school, an agency boarding school farther north, along with two of her brothers, both of them little boys.

And then a story began, a story she intended to be something of a sermon. It seems that when the big girl and her little brothers got to that new boarding school, the big girl determined that she would do everything she could to protect her little brothers because that big girl knew little brothers could so easily be hurt in boarding schools. The best way to protect them, their big sister determined, was for her to be around them as much as she could.

So the big girl disguised herself as a boy, my Lakota friend told me. The big girl lived in the boys dormitory, ate in the dining hall with the boys, dressed like a boy, acted like a boy. She as much as became a boy that year because she wanted to make sure that no harm came to her little brothers.

Here's exactly what she told me.

We discovered, sometime later, that she was winkda. She was a bi-sexual, a revered person among our people because the winkda are thought to be twin-spirited: in one person, two people, so their qualities are greatly expanded. They were thought to have two different ways of looking at things and doing things, and that extra perception was a blessing.

I remembered what she told me when recently South Dakota, where she was born and has lived for 98 of her first 100 years, has tangled with proposed laws about trans kids--how they should and shouldn't be treated. Such laws--and such discussions--generate instant emotional responses in great part because they rush into matters that are always difficult because terribly complex.

I remembered what she told me because the contrast was such plain and convincing proof that so much of what those Native kids needed decades ago was the moral wisdom of good Christian white people. 

Sure.

AJS--the case for justice (v)

It's an older book. I can't imagine millennials would go for it, but it was a gift, so we started it and now it's become a staple nightly for dinner devotions. The poems are old--John Milton-level old. When they've been put to music, as many have, the hymns they've become are classics to my generation, or else people who grew up in churches too stubborn to change.

A couple nights ago, we hit this darling oldie.

Take time to be holy,
The world rushes on;
Much time spend in secret
With Jesus alone;

The life of William Dunn Longstaff, who wrote those lines, spanned most of the 19th century. His friends included the Reverend revivalist Dwight L. Moody, who preached to overflow crowds in Longstaff's native England. When Longstaff heard Moody repeat a line from the I Peter: "Be holy because I am holy," he penned the poem that was sometime later set it to music. It's an oldie.

"We are called upon to emulate him in partaking of his divine nature and expressing his holiness (2 Peter 1:3-4)," or so the devotional accompanying the poem directs us. "The first stanza tells some of the things we can do to attain this holiness," it says. "We can spend time with the Lord is prayer, abide in his presence, feed on his word, fellowship with other Christians, and do good to others."

Sounds like "old classic" stuff, right? "Holiness," we read, "means to be completely separate from all that is common." I've heard that for years. So have you.

But there in Honduras, the Association for a Just Society takes some liberties with such groundwork biblical principle, and it does so, in part, because thinkers like Nicholas Wolterstorff make a convincing case that when the Bible uses words like "holiness" and "righteousness," it is just as surely talking about what we think of as justice: "He leadeth me in paths of righteousness," says Psalm 23; but it could just as easily say it this way: "He leadeth me in paths of justice." 

And if it did, we'd probably read that famous line differently.

As we would 2 Peter 1:3-4. Instead of "be holy because I am holy," people like Wolterstorff make the claim that we might say: "Be just because I am just," and harvest therefore a decidedly different takeaway, a meaning and intent different from the classic definition -- "Holiness means to be completely separate from all that is common" doesn't work anymore because justice doesn't walk away from all that is "common," it embraces it.

That kind of reading invites--well, directs--believers into areas some good Christians think off-target. Take a societal problem like street crime. A 12-year old girl is raped. She's poor, and she's not been the only victim. Her life is shattered; she threatens to harm herself. No Christian I know would withhold mercy or aid. Anyone I worshiped with last Sunday would do what he or she could to help that little girl. Money?--no problem. "Does she need to move?"--we can help. 

But if one of the reasons for that child's continuing suffering rises from police inaction and a dysfunctional court system, then ministries like AJS not only find the victim the kind of counseling she's going to need to deal with what happened, they also go after the police and the courts to determine how it is that helpless victims of street crime don't receive the justice a functioning society should be offering. 

Think of it this way: That 12-year old has nothing to eat. We offer her a fishing pole, but the water in the river is rancid. Someone has to investigate why there are no fish. Someone has to do something about it. Someone has to make a claim for justice.
_____________________

Next:  Some ways in which AJS is working for justice in Honduras.

Morning Thanks--Oklahoma snow and so much more

The thing is, it just doesn't snow all that often in Oklahoma. If she were a Siouxlander, like her father, she'd be accustomed to it by now because a new powdery bit yesterday only served to swirl in cold, cold wind. Sometime this week, I'm sure there'll be more. But in Oklahoma, her mama's country, snow is no everyday thing.

And she's two now, too, old enough to not only see what's going on, but to take note of it, to stare, even, when what she sees is some blessed new phenom that takes real time to registers. That's why she's sitting there at the window, this otherwise eternally busy little girl; that's why she's so very taken with this strange blanket of what-is-that-again?

It was Mother Teresa--Saint Teresa--who taught me the word bewonderment, one of those strange words you understand instantly even if you've never used it or seen it before. Bewonderment is, methinks, the very beginning of wisdom--the ability to, even the practice of, being awed. This darling little girl, my granddaughter (others' too, but right now I'm taking full credit) is purely and publicly in awe. 

And it's beautiful.

But then, I'm her papa, whose evaluations are certainly not to be trusted.

So what I'm seeing right here is a whole gallery of reasons for thanks. For her, now in her second, awe-inspiring year, for the delight of snow in Oklahoma, and for bewonderment itself, for simply seeing it happen in the life of a darling little child who just happens to be my granddaughter.

Okay, twist my arm. Here's one more--this one from the party.

Arizona Senator with Orange City roots

As Arizona news outlets were quick to point out, their own Democratic Senator, Kyrston Sinema, was the only Democrat to stand and applaud President Trump at last week’s State of the Union—the only one.

Sinema is not difficult to recognize. The Senate’s boldest dresser loves to deck herself out in her own stunning wardrobe.

But some Orange City-ans may have noticed her for her name: Sinema seems, well, sort of Dutch.

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, who does triathalons, claims to be bi-sexual, is a graduate of Brigham Young University, and calls herself an atheist, has pioneer roots right here. You might even say her family is from Orange City.

Okay, it’s a stretch, but stay with me.

In 1867, Kyrsten’s great-great-great grandparents, Jacob and Trijntje Sinnema, along with three children, emigrated from Friesland to Pella, along with three children. Just three years later, the Sinnemas were among the original Dutch settlers who left Pella for the new Dutch settlement at Orange City, part of the second group to arrive by wagon under the leadership of Jelle Pelmulder.

The Sinnema family erected a sod house on an 80-acre homestead in Nassau Township, five miles south of OC and a mile-and-a-half west of Carnes, expanding the farm eventually to 240 acres. In May of 1871, Jacob became a charter member of the OC First Reformed Church.

In 1875, Jacob Sinnema lost his whole harvest to a summer hailstorm, and he was granted tax relief by Sioux County. The Sinnemas eventually had six children who survived childhood. Their second son, Lieuwe (Levi) Sinnema, is Kyrsten’s great-great grandfather. He was born in 1863 and worked a 160-acre farm southeast of Carnes.

When Trijntje Sinnema died in 1882, Jacob remarried to Grietje van Klompenburg, a widow who immigrated to Orange City with four children in 1881. In 1890, out there by Carnes, Jacob built a new windmill and rigged it up to provide water in the house for his wife.

Jacob and Grietje moved to town in 1892, where Jacob died in 1903. He and both his wives are buried in West Lawn. Jacob’s obituary claims he was a godly man, respected by all.

In 1889 Levi Sinnema married his stepsister, Dirkje van Klompenburg. They had three children, the oldest son, Jacob Sinnema, born in 1892, being Kyrsten’s great-grandfather.

In 1896, Levi Sinnema pulled up stakes from the Carnes area and moved to a new Dutch settlement in Oak Harbor, WA. Three years later, the Sinnemas moved to North Yakima, WA, where he operated a grocery store, before moving yet again, in 1906, to Twin Falls, Idaho, where her grandfather became a storekeeper in the new Dutch settlement there.

While there, Levi Sinema dropped an n from his name and became a Mormon, as did his family. Their son Jacob married Irene Visser at Twin Falls in 1922, and the couple had two children, one of whom was Gerald, born in 1929. Gerald is Kyrsten’s grandfather.

Gerald Sinema is the father of Dan Sinema, Kyrsten’s father. In 1959, Gerald, tired of the cold, moved his family from Idaho to Arizona, where son Dan went to law school, married, and had a daughter, Kyrsten, born in 1976, in Tucson.

Sadly, things fell apart for the Arizona Sinemas when Kyrsten was eight years old. The marriage broke up and her father lost his job and home. When Kyrsten’s mother remarried, the family moved to the Florida Panhandle and became homeless when her stepfather failed to get a job. They lived in an abandoned gas station outside a place named DeFuniak Springs—no electricity, bathroom, or running water.

They lived on welfare, relying on food stamps and the help of relatives, as well as the food pantry of their local Mormon church.

Still, Kyrsten excelled in school and received scholarships to Brigham Young, where she married, then divorced and declared herself bi-sexual. When she graduated—in just two years at the age of 18--she left the Mormon faith and, as she claimed, all others.

She returned to Arizona, did social work, then took several degrees from Arizona State University, practiced criminal defense law, and joined the Arizona Green Party, protesting American involvement in the Middle East while wearing a pink tutu.

The Tucson Democrat was elected to the Arizona State House in 2004, where she successfully worked across party lines to forge bipartisan coalitions. In 2012, she went to Washington as a State Rep, and has served three terms.

As her standing, last week, to applaud some of the President’s accomplishments illustrated, Kyrsten has been devotedly independent, emphasizing both the need for hard work and a government safety net when needed. If you’re wondering, Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), voted in favor of the President’s impeachment.

One way or another, you can’t miss her, even you try. She’s the flamboyant dresser.

Compiled by a distant cousin, Don Sinnema, who is married to an Orange City native, Karla Mulder.

Reading Mother Teresa--Be Still

“Be still and know that I am God. . . .” Psalm 46:10 

In a chapel speech at Liberty University a few years ago, then-Governor Rick Perry, of Texas, a candidate for President of the United States, talked openly about the nature of his faith in a testimonial that rather notably lacked the fire and brimstone he’s known for when he speaks about politics. He was reserved and very personal when he spoke of being someone who didn’t so much turn himself to God as being someone who had been turned to His throne:

My faith journey is not the story of someone who turned to God because I wanted to. It was because I had nowhere else to turn. I was 27. I’d been an officer in the United States Air Force, commanding a fairly substantial piece of sophisticated equipment, telling men and women what to do. But I was lost spiritually and emotionally. And I didn’t know how to fix it. 

There’s much to admire in his humility. I don’t share many of his political views, but his speech was, or so say a hundred reports, a performance totally as moving as it was sincere.

Sad, though, that anyone has to talk about it as a “performance.” I pity political candidates because, these days, they’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t talk about faith. Not addressing your relationship to God means staying in the starting blocks forever – or not even getting out of the locker room and into the race.

It’s ever so easy to listen to someone like Governor Perry and distrust what you’re hearing. Politicians, for goodness sake, all say what they need to. For Presidential candidates especially, doing a testimony is as important as being capable of tending the economy. And you’re judged. "All that yapping is just so much b.s. So-and-so’s faith ain’t nothin’ more than politics. Just listen."

Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, the editor of Come Be My Light, says that in April of 1942, Mother Teresa made a significant vow before God. This is how she described it: “I made a vow to God – binding under [pain of] mortal sin – to give God anything He may ask, ‘Not to refuse him anything’” (34–35).

That vow was, Kolodiejchuk says, one of her “greatest secrets.” Only two people on the planet knew what she’d done – she and her confessor; and when, 17 years later, she finally went public with that vow, she admitted, “This is what hides everything in me” (29).

It seems to me, as our preacher said not long ago, that the joy known to those who know the Lord may, paradoxically, be, for us, one of the most difficult things to talk about because the language of faith is so easily manipulated. I don’t doubt for a moment Rick Perry has great faith, but he becomes, in a way, a victim of his own politics – as does every aspirant politician – the moment he or she talks about faith, simply because that person is running for office.

It is not particularly easy to talk about faith because, in fact, it is so marvelously easy.

One of the most easily forgotten mandates Christ put on the table was the warning to pray in private, to go where no one can see you. Sometimes, with faith, Jesus might have said, silence is golden.

I wonder whether part of the marvelous spiritual legacy Mother Teresa leaves behind grows from the fact that her own life-changing pledge, the vow she says changed everything in her life – a vow not to refuse God whatever he would ask – was more binding because it wasn’t broadcast over CNN or written up in a Calcutta mission newsletter. Her witness to his glory in that pledge, that vow, was between the two of them and the two of them only – between her and God.

It’s impossible for politicians not to talk about their faith. They must. And because they are who they are – politicians! – it’s easy to roll your eyes. At any of them.

What Mother Teresa teaches me with this silent vow of hers is the lesson the scriptures offer, the lesson of Psalm 46: “Be still and know that I am God.”

Communion Circle--a story (iii)

Suddenly, worship going on inside, three women are standing in the parking lot.

_________________________ 

Tracy Leonard went directly to the Explorer, but found it locked, of course. Will had the keys. She couldn't participate-she was sure of that; but the circle business would have made her not participating far too public. What she'd decided not to do was a private decision between herself and God. It had involved no one else, not even Will. That's why she'd raised her hands and coughed into them. She wanted to make him think a cough was the reason she couldn't stay.

She looked back at the church and saw MaryJane coming from the front doors, thought about running, but knew it would be silly and stupid. She wasn't a child. She was a sinner all right, but she wasn't a child.

MaryJane Amundson said absolutely nothing. She stood beside Tracy for a moment, then reached for her, her arm, her shoulder. She tried to hug her, something she'd wanted to do ever since yesterday's horrible conversation, and Tracy allowed her to, holding herself, however, stiff as plaster.

Neither of them knew any words at all, so there they stood, in the hot sun, holding each other, MaryJane crying, even though she was the one who had every reason in the world to thank God for the miracle that had happened within her. Anna Terwain knew nothing and everything. When she saw them in the parking lot, she didn't hesitate for a moment. She went to them, the two of them bundled in each others' arms, and she took them both on, wrapped her arms around the whole bundle.

Anna Terwain is an old woman, maybe forty or fifty pounds overweight. Pete was a city bus driver for most of his life, although in the last years he worked at the Christian school, a custodian. They'd never had a lot of anything, but two of her kids were divorced-Lord only knows how many prayers she'd sent up in their behalf and still did. Pete was dead three years already, a man who never said much at all while he was alive, but whose absence created a empty silence all around her.

Marian Anderson, that black gospel singer of long ago—it was Marian Anderson whose voice always came back to Anna in the middle of her woes. "Nobody knows," Miss Anderson used to sing in a way that Anna herself used to mimic when alone, "nobody knows the trouble I've seen-nobody knows but Jesus."

Those were the only words that came to her, so those words were the ones she used on the two women bugging each other in the parking lot. "Nobody knows the trouble I've seen-nobody knows but Jesus," she told them, and she took them, both of them, back towards the sanctuary, to the celebration.

Pastor Jake de Meester missed it all, as did, by far, the majority of parishioners of Bethel Church, because the whole thing-people handing each other the grape juice and the bread-it didn't go as smoothly as de Meester would have liked. Half the congregation was finished before a quarter of the congregation had even seen the elements. He'd have to have an extra set next time and choose the spots to begin more wisely, he thought.

He didn't notice the three of them sneak back into the sanctuary, and neither did he realize how it was that Anna Terwain stood between those two women and made sure each of them dipped the bread. In fact, he didn't realize-and no one else did either-that Anna didn't partake herself because she was making very, very sure that the two of them looked straight into each other eyes and knew what it was they were doing and saying. "The body of Christ," she said to Tracy Leonard, "broken for you."

Tracy Leonard dipped the bread into the cup of grape juice and did what she thought she shouldn't-couldn't. She took it despite herself, took it because she knew, really, what it offered was so much more than her own sin, so much bigger, so much greater, so much more to be prized. And when that soggy bread was in her mouth, it tasted, as it never had before, like Christ himself. She took the cup and plate of bread from Anna, but instead of turning to the right like everyone else, she turned back to Anna Terwain and said, "The body of Christ, broken for you; the blood of Christ, shed for you."

And then Anna participated too, smiling.

Pastor Jake de Meester thought the whole celebration was something of a success, figured, with a little better planning, he could try it once again sometime when he started to think of things getting too routine.

MaryJane Amundson cried all the way home. She told her husband, who kept shoving her Kleenex, that she didn't remember ever in her life being so happy.

Tracy Leonard told Will she didn't feel like making dinner. "You know

that great little Middle Eastern place we heard about on Marley Drive?" she said. "I been dying to go there-just you and me."

Anna Terwain went home to her apartment alone, praising the Lord.

And that's just one of the stories of a single Sunday's fellowship at Bethel Church.
__________________________

Communion Circle--a story (ii)

Yesterday, a cup of coffee--and tears. . .

They’d met at Hubbard’s, a booth in the back, where Mary Jane had reached for Tracy’s hand. They'd done that before, the two of them, crying through mutual sadness. She didn't say the word either—Mary Jane didn't. She sat there and held her hands and said, "Jeff and I. . ."

That's all—just enough of a hint of smile for Tracy to know what didn't need to be said, what couldn't be said.

For the first time Tracy understood the Old Testament story, how a childless woman could have wanted a baby so badly she'd take the birth mother to Solomon's court. She knew because she wanted, like nothing else, that tiny little organism clinging to MaryJane's insides.

She and Will rose for the first song. That's why she wasn't going to take communion. She wasn't deserving. She was as full of sin as she was empty of child.

MaryJane Amundson deliberately directed her husband to the seats just behind Will and Tracy Leonard because of what she'd seen yesterday at Hubbards--no matter what words hadn't come from Tracy's lips. She knew what Tracy was feeling. She knew very well because she would have felt it herself, the two of them so close through years of insufferably negative pregnancy tests. MaryJane wanted to sit near Tracy because she had to speak to her, had to touch her.

Pastor Jake De Meester had no clue about Mary Jane’s totally unforeseen pregnancy or Tracy's God-defying jealousy. He knew his parishoners' lives, he thought. He knew that both women wanted children badly, but he also knew about Madeline's unending gossip, Mark's corporate greed, Vangie's blind arrogance, and Brett's flirtation with adultery. When he planned out the service, he knew the church, like every one he'd ever served, was full of problems. But when he planned the service, he wanted to breath new life into an old form because he wanted them all to know and know deeply that the body and blood of Christ was broken and spilled for all of their sin. So that Sunday morning, he had the members of Bethel Church stand and step back to circle the entire sanctuary, forming a ring, a human chain, to celebrate the sacrament.

It wasn't the first time Bethel Church had celebrated the sacrament that way.

Not everyone liked it, of course; but then any innovation Pastor Jake had attempted at Bethel had encountered some understandable resistance. That particular Sunday morning, he was trying to be sure that everything worked smoothly, that there were no wrinkles in the celebration because he wanted the people of Bethel Church to be more comfortable with change. And the fact is, he didn't see Tracy Leonard walk away from her husband and leave the sanctuary. He Hwas busy with the elements.

MaryJane Amundson, however, couldn't miss Tracy’s leaving, since MaryJane and her husband had taken chairs just behind the Leonards. So when Anna Terwain--old enough to be both of those women's mother--when she saw the two of them leave the church as everyone else moved toward the outside walls of the sanctuary, she knew the entire story in a moment, and that's why she left too, unseen.

______________________ 

Tomorrow: what finally happened outside--and then again in. 

Communion Circle--a story (i)

Yesterday, I received a note from someone in Michigan who wondered if she could cite this story of mine, originally printed in Reformed Worship, because she wanted to talk about it in a book she's writing about ministry. Needless, to say, I gave her my permission. 

I'd not forgotten this story, although it's by no means new. I remember it fondly because in just about scenario where I've read it publicly, it's gone over well. By that I mean, well, there are tears. Not all stories should prompt tears certainly, but tears are a indication that it worked, the story succeeded at find a place in readers--or listeners'--hearts. 

It's prototype is very real. Long ago, a woman I know grabbed my arm somewhere--I don't remember where, probably at a reading--and told me that I needed to write her story. It was about childlessness, about her being unable to conceive. 

More than that I won't say. For those of you stay with the story--it's in three parts--I would hope for maybe a tear or two again, tears, however, of joy. 

We'll see.

_________________________ 

Tracy Leonard was planning on not taking communion, but not a soul in Bethel Church knew it. That morning, she got into the Explorer in silence, brought both hands up in front of her face, almost as if praying. Her husband drove. He didn't know a thing about her decision either, but then there were lots he didn't know.

This is the path her determination had taken. The Lord's Supper is a means of grace-the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ broken and spilled all over the earth for the sin of mankind, hers included, hers foremost maybe, because hers was the only sin she knew deep within the marrow of her bones, deep within the tangled sinews of her heart, deep within her own barren womb. She knew she could look around Bethel Church and pick out other's sins-Madeline's unending gossip, Mark's corporate greed, Vangie's blind arrogance, Brett's flirtation with adultery-but the only sinner she knew to be worthy of judgment was herself. With her heart overflowing with sin, she was in no shape to accept God's grace. She knew her jealousy. She knew her envy. She hated what she felt in her heart, but she was powerless before its rapacious appetite.

Like Othello's, her jealousy had begun to eat upon itself. The green-eyed monster grew in her like ghoulish serpent; it prayed upon her, a deviant murderer cutting her heart up into pieces. But she wasn't its victim; she was its perpetrator. She did the sinning. She envied, horribly.

The tires sung at a different pitch when they crossed the bridge. They were almost at church. She knew the body and blood would be passed that morning, as always, in complete remission for all their sin. She'd taken communion for years, understood every word of the forms, knew, from the inside out, exactly what was happening. She was 35 years old, a successful head hunter with a reputable firm, salaried far beyond her own expectations, capable of moving into new jobs by way of offers that came at least once a month. Her closets were full of clothes, she and Will had a cabin on the lake, in addition to twice-yearly vacations which had become more and more exotic-Peru, Mongolia, Tanzania. But she couldn't have children. Or at least it hadn't worked. But that wasn't her sin.

Will, still in silence, pulled into the church parking lot in that patient way he had, so as not to make the trailer hitch scrape against the pavement. There were times when she hated almost everything he did, even though he didn't deserve it.

Nothing of this was his fault. She looked up at him as he parked, third row away from the door. She spoke to no one, kept her face down as they walked to church and Will found them seats. The only thing she was ready to proclaim at this communion service, bread and wine in hand, would be her own sin. She'd flunk the self-exam, just as she had flunked countless others in the privacy of her own bathroom. She knew very well the Lord would take her repentance, but she had no will to repent. She wasn't ready. That was her sin. She knew she took great joy in her envy, because envy was all she could feel after years of trying to have children, years of countless tears at the mere sight of baby toys, of cribs, of grocery store diapers, years of wishing and hoping and worrying about every last period, years of trying, a millennium of unanswered prayers that never rose above the ceiling in that empty room they'd so long ago designated for the baby who never came.

And after all of that, her own best friend, another barren Sarah like herself had announced, in tears, that she was. . .Tracy couldn't say the word. When she couldn't be, her own best friend, the only soul on the face of the earth, the only woman who knew what she felt, Mary Jane Admundson was.

________________

Tomorrow: Worship, that Sunday morning. . .

AJS--Honduras (iv)

In the recent past at least, Honduras has never risen or fallen into civil war, not like, for instance, Nicaragua, or today Venezuela. There is a long and stout Spanish era in its history, just as there is in all of Latin America. Then, for a century or more, Honduras was the original "banana republic," the government essentially under the thumb of two fruit giants--Chiquita and Dole--both of whom are based in the States. For more than a few decades, those two multi-nationals took turn running things, as if the government was nothing more than an instrument panel.

In some significant societal line items, Honduras was falling behind the rest of Central America. They didn't do well at all at educating their kids, infant mortality was high, as was poverty and death on the streets. Honduras was as dangerous a place as any in the Americas--for a time, 85 deaths per 100,000; the gun crazy U.S.A., registers only five. (For the record, Japan is lowest homicide rate in the world at .5 per hundred thousand people.) As legality and morality sunk, corruption soared, as you might guess. Honduras, a country and culture celebrated for its charming, peaceful nature, was falling into dysfunction.

Drugs are a problem--oddly enough, not drug usage, but drug trafficking. It makes no sense to drug bosses to sell drugs in Honduras; they don't make money off poor people. Instead, they run them through Honduras and market them royally in the U.S. of A., where a couple saddle bags full of whatever is vastly more valuable. Still, moving contraband, the drugs, creates gangs and the filthy lucre that becomes a huge problem.

There are no mythic heroes here. There are martyrs, but if you're thinking you're going to hear that a few high-minded yankee do-gooders came in on white horses and strong-armed the country back up to its knees, Kurt Ver Beek and Jo Ann Van Engen would be first to demur. The first step, as it always is or should be, was for them, Yankees from a place called Calvin College, to learn to see Honduras not as an verdant garden for social research, but as home. 

The two of them, greatly interested in relief work, moved in to Honduras. To stay. 

Let me hit the pause button. Read those words over again. No horizontal commitment could be greater or more profound. They moved in to Honduras to stay. It's somewhat unlikely that anyone reading these words lives each day and night in an abode less North American than they do today in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. When their section of the city has no water, they have no water. They run on dangerous streets, buy their food at street markets, have friends, many of them, who've never been up north. They're not on an errand, a work or a church group. They moved to Honduras to stay.

And one of the first things that struck them was that Honduras had lots and lots of NGOs and relief troops (the airport is full of them), lots of people willing and able to rescue the babies from the river and even help others learn to fish. Honduras had loads of service projects that took up the mightily important task of bringing relief to micro-economic issues, where those issues needed remedying, immediate remedying.

But what they discovered is that there were very few such organizations working on the macro issues, issues like a dysfunctional police force, courts that simply didn't deliver the justice they should have been delivering. There were no distinguishable efforts to take the graft out of delivering medicines to people who needed them. No one was delivering justice--or love, for that matter--to the grieving victims of rampant street crime. 

There were things to do on that macro level, where the action required would be just as crucial--maybe more so--than it is when people are hungry or in need of basic health care. There were few organizations and missions that were looking up river--that's what they found. Why are there babies in the water?

They'd moved to Honduras to stay, and they'd found a place to work--a thousand places to work in fact, no end of places to work. "What happens when someone builds a fence around a pond and says that no one can fish?" Van Engen told a reporter. That's the question they asked themselves and the question that gave them direction in their new home, Honduras. 

Art work from the National Museum of  Honduras

AJS--Rebuilding a failed state (iii)

Street scene, Haiti

A friend, a development worker in Haiti for decades, once told me how he had reacted when a work group, a relief group from a church in the States who'd thoughtfully taken a bag of soccer balls along with them when they came to Haiti. They'd be building a church or some kind of building, but they knew Haitians loved soccer, so they brought along--and used--that bag of soccer balls at night in the compound where they were staying and working.

When they were leaving, the crew boss told him that they had no good reason to take the soccer balls back to the States--"why don't you just keep them here?" he said.

My friend, who'd been in Haiti for a long time, declined. What the people of Haiti didn't need, he told the crew, was more gifts. Haitians, black folks all, don't need white people from the States giving them things. They just don't. The work group took the soccer balls home. 

My friend is no fascist, nor is he racist. I couldn't help thinking that, as unfeeling as he appeared right then, he knew what he was doing. He'd been in Haiti for years.

We'd read some things, lots of things actually, before we left for Haiti. From a distance, the descriptions are can be so critical that they don't easily register to a Yankee imagination. To say the country is combustible might suggest that it hasn't already a disaster. The 2010 hurricane left 300,000 casualties, according to the government; but who really knows? Hundreds of thousands of the Haitians were displaced, their homes--such as they were--destroyed. 

Ten years have passed. I'm guessing if you'd go to Port au Prince today, masses of brokenness would still litter the steep mountainous hillsides. 

Some people call Haiti a "failed state," even though such an expression seems pompous. Things don't work in Haiti. They just don't work. Buildings--even the seat of the government--didn't stand up to the quake, in part because building codes either didn't exist or were rarely used or enforced when major building projects were mounted. Five years after Hurricane Hazel, downtown Port au Prince had no stoplights. Getting across the city required endless jockeying, most vehicles adorned with crash bars mounted out front of their headlights for inevitable bruises. 

Yet today, Haiti slumps at the confluence of major societal problems: political dysfunction, dismal economic outlooks, and a combustible political climate capable at any time of igniting violence. What's there doesn't work, and, worse, most often there's nothing there.

It's impossible to estimate the amount of money and goods other nations have given in an ongoing attempt to bring relief. But nothing seems to matter. That's why some say, simply, Haiti is "a failed state."

Of the books I read before going, one of them stays with me because of the preposturous nature of its point of view, a book with an unwieldy title: The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster by Jonathan M. Katz. I am no expert, but I couldn't help think that Katz's answer to making Haiti into something other than a failed state was the only viable option--and that is, he says, to support the government.

It's a laughable notion really. After all, the government is the very heart of national deceit and chaos. National corruption begins with the Haitian government. Jonathan Katz says when the next horror arrives on shore--hurricane, earthquake--immense relief will be needed, relief that has to be done. Someone must leave soccer balls. If there are babies in the water, the very first action that must be taken should be to lovingly pull them out. 

But Katz says the really difficult job in Haiti is the one that has to be done between disasters: rebuilding, or building anew, a functional, caring government. Katz says if people want to help Haiti, they need a government; and that's a job that's seemingly impossible and even more difficult than putting up a building, leaving fishing poles behind, and even--yes--taking babies out of danger. Building a government that works from the ragged mess of failed state--now that's an impossible problem.

We spent some time in Honduras a few weeks ago, a country that functions many, many times better than Haiti. The two are hardly comparable. And yet, there are parallels--or were. 

Or were. In many ways, in the last decade Honduras was suffering badly. Today, they're not out of the water, but at least, it seems, they've been able to get to their knees and draw some needed breath. The government, which was failing--the highest murder rate in the world--is coming back. No one claims Honduras is out of the water. But it's coming back.

How did that happen? 

 (More to come)

Reading Mother Teresa--Ambassador of Joy

"Shout aloud and sing for joy, people of Zion, 

for great is the Holy One of Israel among you." Isaiah 12:6

There’s something so elemental about Mother Teresa’s success that when you witness it, you’re shocked at its simplicity. “Every Sunday I visit the poor in Calcutta’s slums,” she wrote in letter. “I cannot help them, because I do not have anything, but I go to give them joy” (27).

Ambassador of Joy.

Because she had nothing in her pockets, she didn’t have to refuse beggars. Quite simply, she had nothing to give them except joy, which is, of course, a marvelous gift – and very, very expensive.

Great cheerleaders don’t win ball games, and everyone knows you can’t reverse malnutrition with a smile, fight disease with sheer happiness, nor deliver people from hapless poverty by a winning personality.

Some significant criticism of Mother Teresa and her work begins with that knowledge, the assessment that just being nice isn’t enough. That criticism is understandable.

But it can’t deny her gift.

What Mother Teresa brought to the poorest of the poor, and gave away freely, was essential for life: she brought them joy – joy as a synonym for love. In the same letter, she tells the story of a mother whose family suffered immensely, a woman who “did not utter even a word of complaint about her poverty,” a woman who begged Mother Teresa to return: “Oh, Ma, come again! Your smile brought sun into this house” (27).

Mother Teresa brought that family the sun.

I don’t have neighbors so deeply impoverished. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t know from whence his or her next meal will come. Those sad children with extended bellies – you’ve seen them in a ton of photographs – live somewhere in a world other than my own. I’m a long ways from Sudan and all the way around the world from Calcutta.

But then, I suppose, darkness has a thousand faces.

And I can, just as nimbly as she did, lug in the sun, even as she did.

Or could, if I really, really wanted.

Meisy and Wiltz and Luxembourg

Wiltz, Luxembourg, WWII

The Battle of the Bulge had not gone well for a California kid named Ralph Ellis, who, like countless others in the fog of war, had lost track of his outfit and they of him. He was in awful shape, as so many were when the Wehrmacht sprung sprung an immense December surprise and bullied their way through "the ghost front" of the Allied lines in France and Belgium. Ellis was very much alone, wounded, frozen and famished, hiding out in an uninhabited house in a wreck of a town pummeled--for the second time--by the Nazi advance. He thought he was dying. He had cause to believe he was.

He had found his way to Wiltz, a tiny town in a tiny country, Luxembourg, a nation that found itself, not to its liking, in the bloody heart of the biggest battle on the European front. Wiltz, like the entire country, had got itself occupied early in the war, when Nazis stormed in, then freed when the Allies snatched it back. Then, in December's blizzards, it was beat up again when Hitler decided the only way to win was a desperate attack in the unforgiving cold.

Confusion?--all over. Death?--everywhere. Positions?--insanely scrambled. Thousands got lost, like Ralph Ellis. The U. S. sustained 75,000 casualties at the Battle of the Bulge, 20,000 American "boys" never returned. Hiding in a house in Wiltz, Ralph Ellis, some might say, was among the lucky ones.

He spent some time upstairs in that old house in Wiltz. I have no idea what unabated hunger feels like, but Ellis was feeling it. And his feet weren't just cold, they were frozen, literally frozen. That too means pain unlike any I've ever felt. And he was alone. 

On the street below, he heard voices, people speaking in German. He'd known for a day or two that he was behind enemy lines. He leaned out a ways simply to see. Two civilians were talking to two German soldiers. He leaned out farther. It seemed unreal. The Germans had a cart full of schnapps.

One of the civilians, a woman, just happened to look up. She saw him. He was seen. 

Ralph Ellis was convinced his time had come. He heard footsteps on the stairway upstairs. Yes, she'd seen him all right. The door opened. They pointed to each other--"Meisy," the woman told him. He knew it was her name. "Louis," she said, pointing at the man.

"Ralph," he said, pointing at his chest. 

Meisy and Louis engineered a way to get him out of the cold of the abandoned house and into the warmth of the tiny basement grocery store Meisy ran and where she lived. Louis played nurse, cut off one of Ralph Ellis toes with a razor blade. Had to. But Ralph Ellis was regaining strength. He was alive, still suffering but alive, dressed up in Meisy's son's clothes, sitting in a rocking chair, still alive in the back of the little store. 

When one day the Germans came in, there was no one to stop them. In a second, they were in the back room, where they told Meisy they were going to sleep in her place. 

"That's impossible," she told them. She said she had only one room and that was already full with her and her nephew here in the rocking chair.

They wore the uniform of the SS. They pointed at Ralph Ellis and asked him why a young man his age wasn't in the war effort. 

Meisy stepped between them, told them the boy was sick--were they blind? Couldn't they see that much?

"Let him talk for himself," the SS said.

Meisy told him her nephew couldn't speak because he'd been hurt in one of the American bombings. And then, or so the story goes, she just turned furious. "And don't think you're going to stay here either," she told them. She said she had nothing for them or for her to eat. "And somewhere in Germany you too have a mother, don't you?"

The SS cowed, nodding.

She had a son in the war, she said, and pointed at a picture of her boy in a German uniform, then steered them both back out into the store. "Just what would your mothers say?" she scolded, then gave them each an apple. "That's all I can give you." 

That did it. They actually cowered. "We didn't mean anything," they said when they took the apples and left the store.

Ralph Ellis said nothing but never forgot.

*     *     * 

Just down the road, Luxembourgian-Americans will, this summer, celebrate the 150th anniversary of their arrival in Siouxland, May, 1870. They'll dress up the little commemorative stone east of Alton at the place where they built their first church. The Oktoberfest Choir will sing, and the Mass will be celebrated at St. Mary's Church, Alton. 

It's unlikely, I suppose, that any of the celebrants could count Meisy from Wiltz as a distant relative. The Iowa Luxembourgians were here more than a half century before the Battle of the Bulge. 

But if I were one of them, I think I'd try to find a way to tell the story anyway or at least stories like it, stories of what Luxembourgians have done, stories of what we all could be. That the rest of us aren't dying behind enemy lines doesn't mean we don't need men and women like Meisy and tales of their astonishing selfless lives.

Lord knows, we do. 
___________________________ 
Ralph Ellis's story is adapted from John Toland's Battle: The Story of the Bulge.

AJS: Miriam and relief (ii)

The Bible doesn't say so exactly, but centuries of readers have liked to believe that Moses's big sister, the gutsy kid who walks right up to her royal highness, the Egyptian princess, bathing in the river, was Miriam. Could have been another sister, but Miriam is no bit player in the great exodus story.

It was, after all, sister Miriam who not only composed and sang a song but in fact led the Israelite chorus in a soaring melody of triumph the moment Pharaoh and hosts were swallowed up by the Red sea. "I will sing unto the Lord. . ." or so it went. Look it up.

But Miriam was no saint. She got a little pushy eventually, when she and brother Aaron grumbled about their brother Moses's superior power. "Has the LORD spoken only through Moses?" they whispered to each other. Besides, little brother Moses had up and married a girl from the way wrong side of the tracks, a Cushite. 

When the two of them groused, the Bible says, "The LORD heard this." Oops.

Still, I've always admired that little girl at the river's edge, not only for walking right up to Pharoah's daughter the way she did and walk away with baby Moses. Whether or not she was a cutie, she was a Levite, a stupid slave. She dared to be a Daniel.

Little gutsy liar is what she was. Next thing you know, she lets out a half-truth: “Shall I go and get one of the Hebrew women to nurse the baby for you?” she says, as if she'll check with the employment agency.

Thus, this little sweetheart not only rescues her little brother, she brings him home to her grieving mom, and most importantly saves a baby who will one day lead his people out of slavery. Great story. Unforgettable. 

Last week we visited an agency, a mission enterprise really, in Central America, in Honduras, where I heard the scenario of that ancient biblical tale used to explain the vision of that enterprise, a turn on the tale, and it goes like this:

Say you're down by the river and you see babies floating by in baskets, a la Miriam. Most of us would wade out into the water and grab them, save them, pull them from imminent danger. That's rescue work that has to be done. When people are hungry, really hungry, they need food, the basics. Retrieving babies from the water is relief work in its most pure form. When that work involves danger, it merits the scripture's greatest praise--"Greater love hath no man or woman than that. . ." You know the rest. 

In 2017, the American people gave 410 billion--let me write that out: $410,000,000,000--to charity, the first year on record that the total exceeded the 400 mark. Needless to say, that's some kind of cash. 

Did all those bucks cover needs? Probably not. According to Food Aid Foundation, 795 million people still don't have enough food "to lead a healthy life." It seems, as callous as it is to say it, that there's always babies in the water. There's always more we can do. 

When we use the phrase "relief work," we normally mean giving money or food or shelter to those who don't have it. The Good Samaritan did absolutely blessed relief work by helping the beat-up victim of a highway robbery get on his feet. And it didn't stop there either--he got that poor guy a place to clean up and rest--and he was a lowly Samaritan, too, a lousy, spat-upon Samaritan, the only one with a heart.

In this rich interpretation of the story by a 17th century artist named Jason Jordaens, a Samaritan dressed only a diaper, is helping the naked, bloody victim, while three heavy-set dandies sort of watch, slack-jawed, at the evident moral reckoning of what's happening before their eyes. One--the most pompous, a religious man, too--appears to help. Appears. 

There must be untold relief organizations who use the word Samaritan in their titles, who identify themselves by way of the famous biblical story. You just can't say enough about the good Samaritan. He's a model of selflessness. 

Nor can you say enough for Miriam. She took that baby from the river, walked right up to her royal highness, and saved that child for the mission God almighty had in mind--and what a mission that was. 

But last week I heard a man explain a Honduras ministry in a line that, to me, made all kinds of sense. He said it this way, something close anyway: Praise God for those who pull the babies out of the water, who save lives, who bring relief where it's most required. Praise God.

But there comes a point when those who stand at the river's edge have to start to ask themselves why all those babies are floating down the river--who's dropping them off up there, why they're not with their mothers, what's causing this damned phenomenon, and what on earth can we do about it?

That's relief work too, of a different type. There are babies in the river and no fish in the water. People are suffering; they're hungry and dying. We need an army of Good Samaritans to do something now, quickly, to pull those babies out and give away five loaves and two fishes and more.

But somewhere along the line for rescuers face a difficult question, and that question is "Why are there babies in the river?"

(More to come)