Sunday Morning Meds--Psalm 57

^“They spread a net for my feet—

I was bowed down in distress.  

They dug a pit in my path—

but they have fallen into it themselves.”

 A couple of thugs walk into a convenience store.  They threaten the attendant, and while one of them, the guy, is helping himself to the bucks in the till, his sidekick—probably girlfriend—spots a contest entry blank form, fills it out, dreaming of winning.  They leave, but the form she leaves behind lists her name, address and phone number.  Didn’t take cops long to get to their apartment.

 A bank robber out east created a standard M.O.  He’d lug a bag into the bank, claim it was a bomb, clean out cash drawers, then leave the bag—telling the cashiers it was going to go off.  The bags he used were often filled with books—I don’t know if one of mine was among them. His undoing came when he left a phone book in one of those bags, a book he’d been mailed, complete with his address.  Jig was up.

 Whether David might have been chuckling a bit when he thought of the cartoon irony he’s drawing here isn’t recorded, probably not.  The first half of verse six recounts his deep distress—“I was bowed down.”  But there is a kind of keystone cops act to what he describes—those enemies plotting and scheming, only, like dunces, to fall victim to their own nastiness.  What happens when evil turns inside out can be a hoot.

 When things like that happen, people occasionally utter profound theological truths:  “Aha, there is a God.”  When sinners get theirs, especially when the “getting” is done at their own hands, all seems right with the world. Chaos is flouted, righteousness reigns.  The tunes we hear in the air is the music of the spheres.

 Psalm 57 could hardly have been written in the middle of the drama. It feels like a camp testimony, really.  David’s opening-line distress—“have mercy, have mercy”—is short-lived, it seems. In verse four he documents the evil character of King’s posse, but the utter anguish of that first line soon seems not to have been utter at all. 

 Here in verse six we get the whole story, which means the heart-felt cries of the first verse are already behind us. What happened that day tested him, he says—or sings—but that anguish soared into triumph when the dolts became the victims of their own dingy treacherousness.

 We feel a peculiar joy when providence simply takes control. David’s deliverance isn’t as hard-fought here as it sometimes is.  This time, he barely had to lift a hand—or that’s what he tells us.

 King Saul’s boys dug a pit into which they fell, headlong. What a riot.

 God did it.  The whole thing.  Those good old Keystone Kops. It’s worth a chuckle to be attendant to his antic choreography. 

May his name be praised—and that’s David’s testimony.

Guy with a shotgun comes after the owner of a Chev, wanting the vehicle.  The owner gets out, scared, and the car thief gets in, grabs the keys, then realizes he can’t drive a stick shift.  

Feels so good when all is right in the world.  Bless His name.

First Missouri

In July of 2005, I went back to the Bultsma ranch--I'd been there before--and part of the reason, as I remember, was to take pictures. I hadn't grown tired of northwest Iowa landscapes, but--how can I say it?--I'd been to the mountain: I'd seen the Missouri River, its hills and its valleys and the river--even the lakes formed by its dams, and I came away permanently slack-jawed. Loved it. 

When I got home from the visit, I messed around a little, making a cover like the one above. What I'd done was get myself up before dawn to drive to a place where I thought a clear dawn might just be offered. I was wrong about that--the day was clear and bright, just a whisper of clouds, no glancing morning sunlight. But there was still the species of beauty that stills the storm in mind and soul. 

So I missed the big dawn that morning, which forced me to focus on other things around me. That was good for me--there's a sermon there, I'm sure. 

I'd like to live somewhere out there for a couple of summer months sometime, just to be around the awesome beauty of the Missouri River valley--say, Platte to Chamberlain. Makes me  heart swell just to remember. Takes my breath away.

Lament

 

I'm not exactly in mourning, but this picture witnesses to my sadness because I took this picture from the deck of our house, the house we used to live in, just beyond the same Floyd River that came up, a flash flood, and ate our bottom story. The fact is we saw more deer in the early years of our residency out there north of Alton, but I did catch this one against a stand of corn some people in the Third World would think not only extraordinary but impossible. But there she is. She's beautiful.

During the last year of our stay out there, I don't remember ever seeing deer out beyond our back yard. They were gone. Why? The flood maybe, or perhaps that wasting disease that took many of them. My neighbor told me some guy told him that he'd found three or four dead deer, together a couple of times, victims of that disease, some kind of wasting disease.

I'm guessing the drop of in the deer population had at least something of the markings of that gigantic flood we went through--the high-water mark five feet (that's not an error) --FIVE FEET higher than the highest flood recorded previously at Alton, an unbelievable flash flood--all of it, one day. It broke down our downstairs door to a walk out basement and rudely knocked one of the family trying to save stuff when the surf suddenly washed up and in. By six that night, it was gone, out the same door it knocked down, retreated to its banks a day or so later.

Anyway, when some program or another kicked up old photographs of mine, it showed me this one eight years ago, where we lived and who we lived with. Very sweet.

Yes, I miss 'em. Even this guy, a little tiny bit. It's hardly a fair judgement because I caught him at such a good angle. He was probably never as cute as he was the winter day he inched right up to my boot, took a good smell, and crept off, as if I was of no particular interest.

Tonight,  in the DAHM's annual Nights at the Museum program, the very heart and soul of the museum board doing her inimitable thing with old Sioux County, throwing some light on both the antagonism and and the unity of two towns just a few miles apart, vying for life and success in the last decades  of the 19th century. 

It'll be good!   

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 57

 

^“Be exalted, O God, above the heavens; 

let your glory be over all the earth.”

 The basic paradigm by which I’ve always seen the Christian life is a series of ideas that rise from the Heidelberg Catechism, the handbook of doctrine with which I was raised.  Those steps are not difficult.  They go like this:  “sin, salvation, service.”

The story line begins with sin—our knowledge of it, as it exists specifically within us.  Calvin starts even a bit earlier, with the heavens, specifically with our sense of God as manifest in his world in what we see and experience.  Because humans can’t help but see God’s marvelous work in the heavens and earth all around, we there is something, someone, larger than life itself and much, much greater than we are—there simply has to be.

When we know we aren’t God, we know something about sin.

That conviction draws us closer to him. Knowing our limitations is a prerequisite to knowing God. Sin precedes salvation, or so the story goes, through the second chapter.

There’s one more step. That he loves us in spite of our sin makes hearts fill and souls rejoice; we can’t help but celebrate, and that celebration leads us into gratitude and service, into offering his love to the world he loves so greatly. 

Sin, salvation, service—that’s the story line, the narrative by which I was raised.

Mother Theresa’s take on a very similar tale is a three-step process not totally unlike Heidelberg’s narrative line, but colored instead by her experience in the sad ghettos of Calcutta.  Our redemption begins in repulsion—what we see offends us, prompts us to look away. But we can’t or shouldn’t or won’t; we have to look misery in its starving face, and when we do, we move from repulsion to compassion—away from rejection and toward loving acceptance. 

The final chapter is what she called “bewonderment,” sheer wonder and admiration.  Compassion leads us to bewonderment.

“Bewonderment” is one of those strange words no one uses but everyone understands, probably because, like reverence, it’s simply hard to come by in a culture where our supposed needs are never more than a price tag away.

Bewonderment is hard to come by for me, perhaps because it isn’t so clearly one of the chapters in the story I was told as a boy, the story which is still deeply embedded in my soul. “Service” is the end of the Christian life—or always has been—for me, not “bewonderment.” 

Maybe that’s why I’m envious of David’s praise here. What he says to God in prayer is something I rarely tell him.  I don’t think I’ve ever asked God not to hide his little light under a bushel, to display his radiant grace from pole-to-pole. I’m forever asking for favors, but only rarely am I adoring, in part, in part, I suppose, because I’m so rarely in awe. 

Bewonderment is something I’m learning as I age, and for that I’m thankful—for the book, for the song, for David the singer, and for the God David knew so intimately that he could speak the way he does in Psalm 57. 

It’s difficult for some of us to be intimate with God—to be so close to a being so great and grandly out of reach.  But intimacy is something a song can teach—and the heavens too.  Bewonderment is something even an old man can learn, if he has eyes and ears. 

One Saturday near the Rock River

 

Went north, one Saturday morning in July, 2011, into the valleys of the Rock River, a tributary of the Big Sioux, whose valleys lack the depth and beauty of its bigger cousin's. Tougher area to get a shot that can take a viewer's breath away. But dawn is dawn, and the beauty isn't the river or the gravel roads or anything else. The beauty is in the dawn, here too.

What I came to understand fairly quickly into my journeys into early morning in the region was that the sky itself was hardly ever the whole story. Occasionally, the morning sun creates a sky full of abject beauty, enough to render  you unable to shoot pictures. There's just too much glory in the open world we live in.

But most often, what I had to learn was that a really good shot, like the one above, needs a character. The sky is a masterful setting here, but what makes the shot more memorable is the character of the story this moment on the Rock River creates, in this case, a half-gone elm (probably) reminding us somehow of our own tenuous hold on the reality of earth itself, our mortality.

So I shot and shot, in an attempt to let the space speak.

In this last, the tree up the gravel and the tiny little sign offer a little more to the story. 

Then I simply turned around to see what was behind me.

There's the Rock, and forever corn across it. It's catching, and I like it, but it's also, sadly enough, pretty much conventional Iowa--and therefore begets little more than a yawn.

Pointing the camera further south, I picked up an  unusual sight these days, cattle in an honest-to-goodness pasture (and not a confinement). Most foreigners in these parts might like to think this shot conventional, but it's rare, and that why I jumped on the shutter.

Honestly, this July morning you could take gravel roads all day long in this region and not see this--cattle in a pasture. It's a rarity.

And so, I went home. Not trophies, but blessed abundantly by simply having been out there. 

Remembrance

For years now, I've been contributing stories to KWIT, Sioux City, Iowa, 90.3,where Mark Munger produces them--edits them, adds sounds and music, then airs them, Monday mornings at 7:45, and then again at 4:45 in the afternoon. 

I don't know that I've ever slipped one into the blog, but this week's was so moving, even though I wrote it, that I can't help feeling that people who read my blog will enjoy listening. It's exactly six minutes long. It's produced just beautifully.

https://www.kwit.org/podcast/small-wonders/2025-07-14/i-will-never-forget-her-a-native-nurses-quiet-bond-with-a-wounded-soldier

And now we love them. . .

They were, not so many years ago, precious. Their country was at war, and they needed  help, needed a shield against the violence spreading across their country when Putin, who denied any such plans, determined he simply take over territory he deemed spiritually essential to reconstitute Mother Russia--or whatever. "No, I'm not going to invade Ukraine," he told everyone. And then he did.

That was about three years ago--February 24, 2022, to be exact.

So some of the refugees came here, even here to northwest Iowa, and, as immigrants have frequently done throughout history--and our own history, they took the jobs they could get here in America, despite their employment record or level of education back home. And now, the ones our church helped, appear to be doing well. 

But now they've been told they're not far from an seat on a jet taking them and a full house of others to wherever the wheels of the plane come down.

It seems, and it is, terribly, terribly wrong.

And it's not just here, of course. It's happening throughout this country because Donald E. Trump is doing exactly what he said he was going to do--he's reversing his predecessor's soft heart by enlisting his own, now huge, private army to grab immigrants wherever he wants and then flying them home--including Ukrainians. 

His fascist character has forever been on display, but somehow a majority of American believed him to be the only one who could carry the U. S. o A. out of strife. They voted the bigot in for a second term, and now he's doing exactly what he promised to do. A full 85% of my neighbors here in the county voted him in.

And now--wouldn't you know it?--the country doesn't think much of what he's up to. Here's the headline this morning: 

Gallup poll shows 79% of Americans favor immigrants, a significant increase from a year earlier and a high point in a nearly 25-year trend

All of a sudden, the fickle American public just love immigration. And it's perfectly understandable because at some level they know the immigrants around have become more and more essential to our way of life. They milk our cows, plaster our walls, paint our ceilings, clean our houses, build our highways, and do almost everything else good moms and dad don't bring up their children to do.

What's more, they absolutely hate the gestapo look and gestapo tactics of Trump's hooded police force. Americans don't like people being stopped on the street by hooded or masked guards. They don't like military vehicles rolling up to city parks, even though there's no one there. They don't like thugs. Except Trump.

Despite the fact that this was one of the issues that marked the presidential election and delivered the presidency to Donald Trump just eight months ago, support for immigration in the country has now reached record highs, even among Republicans. About 8-in-10 Americans, 79%, say immigration is “a good thing” for the country today, up sharply from 64% a year ago and a high point in a nearly 25-year trend. In contrast, only two in 10 U.S. adults say immigration is a bad thing, down from 32% last year.

Amazing. That's the good news this Monday morning. The bad news is that we're going to have Trump's masked crusaders around for another three years. 

 And he's talking about a third term too.  Ain't we got fun?

Happy birthday!

 

Happy birthday to the love of my life, a woman who has become the arms and legs of the family, my care-giver, the person who lugs out the trash and has spent most of her life for the last year trying to keep a house or two clean and her husband human.

I won't say how many, but this morning she's my age.

 

Sunday Morning Meds---Psalm 57

“I am in the midst of lions; I lie among ravenous beasts—

men whose teeth are spears and arrows, 

whose tongues are sharp swords.”

 

Taking writing courses can be tough if you don’t have material. “What am I going to write about?” is often the most perplexing question students face—even college students—through an entire semester, which is why most teachers make assignments.  For years I sprung the same one on students on the first day of class:  in 500 words or so, go back to middle school and describe and define your “nemesis.”

 

It’s a winner because everybody has one. The moment I say the word nemesis, eyes light up. Somewhere through junior high, every one of us felt like killing the kid we thought of as the boss or the snob, the bully or the hot shot, maybe the teacher’s pet.  We’ve all had a nemesis.

 

Sometimes I’d give those essays to my colleagues in the Education Department, who used the stories in class to make sure future teachers remembered that school can be torture, and often is. It’s a wonder some of us ever make it out of middle school. Those essays could make a ton of young parents think seriously about home-schooling.  Only once in twenty years did a student confess to being the bugger herself. 

 

One story I’ll never forget.  Its rising action is universal—little girl gets on the bus every day, teeth chattering, scared to death of the bully, an overgrown fourth or fifth-grade girl who makes her life miserable. I don’t remember the facts, but they’re all alike—mental abuse, physical abuse, even sexual abuse. It’s not pretty. Think the worst.

 

But this story didn’t end there.  Years later, this student, a junior in college, goes to a beautician to get her hair done and gets assigned a woman she recognizes as the satanic figure on the neighborhood bus. Chills flash up and down her spine, but she takes the chair, and the two of them start to talk, laugh. Eons have passed, of course, and neither of them are who they were. And yet both of them are.

 

The hairdresser takes a snip or turns or curl or whatever hairdressers do, then, out of nowhere, says, “I’m really sorry for who I was way back then.”  

 

Blew my student away, she said, and that’s the story she wrote, one of the only ones I’ll never, ever forget. 

 

For the record, that’s an argument against home-schooling. 

 

I find it amazing that the attribute David first notes in his assessment of his fierce and overpowering enemy isn’t size or ferocity or tonnage. After all, Saul was a giant, an all-pro tight end, the kind of physical specimen just about anybody would want for a king.

We don’t know a great deal about David’s pecs and abs, but we know he was a mouse as a boy. But then, with buff Saul threatening one’s life, most of us would be bloody scared.

 

Just exactly what he meant by “their teeth being spears” isn’t exactly clear, at least to me; but the next simile is transparent. If their “tongues are sharp swords,” what he’s telling us is that his enemies cut him to shred with their words, which is itself imaginative language since no one actually bleeds when people say bad things about us. But it’s almost hard to say that, isn’t it?—“no one bleeds when people say bad things.”  We all do. Okay, not literally. But we all do.  Everybody had a nemesis. Some still do.

It’s not sticks and stones for David, it’s words.  And maybe he’s right:  the worst we can suffer is a shard of something hateful cutting through the tender fabric of our own very human heart.  

The Frio

 

I didn't take pictures to describe a flood back then. A couple dozen writers were attending an annual confab we were privileged to attend at Laity Lodge, on the Frio River, somewhere close to the Guadalupe in the Texas Hill Country, nearest city of any consequence was Kerrville, where the flooding spent most its murderous power.

But a look at the Frio's history shows flooding all too evident. It runs, gentle as a lamb, right through the camps on the river, clear as glass. The river bed is rock, which means there's no mud so the water is crystalline. Look for yourself. 

But its track record left formations that are enough to make you shiver because there sure as anything was a moment or two in time when a gorgeous stream was devastating. The lines on the opposite bank reminisce. 

The canyon walls are scored and scared with torrential floods. The only way to get to the Lodge is to drive through the Fria River, which is possible--just think of it--because of its rocky bed. No dirt, no mud. The river flows proudly through a valley it created itself through a thousand years.

 Try to imagine what this must look like at flood stage, 25 or 30 feet higher, 

carving out rocky river banks with no machinery other than the inestimable power of storm, swooping though the hard rock canyon in a torrent that leaves stooped walls like these.

It's hard to think of something so placid and beautiful as the glassy look of a quiet river in the Texas Hill Country.

I lugged my camera along to Texas to take shots like these--of images simply unavailable on the emerald edge of the Great Plains.

The Frio was little more than a crick when we walked along, but what was all too evident was that it hadn't always been as compliant as it was for the last century or so. The Frio's own penchant for violence has not been forgotten--nor will it be.

Mean

The dozen or so distinct lines crossing his face looked good on him, made him seem legendary. He smoked a lot--most men did back then--but all those Chesterfields or Luckies lowered his gravely voice, made him sound like a man who could have spent his life in film. A trimmed goatee gave him the look of a seasoned artist.

He wasn't. Honestly, I don't remember what he'd done pre-retirement, but he was, back then, a man who was not only capable of, but willing to impart stories of the past. He had them, and he was more than willing to share with a young prof, someone who wanted to be a writer. He talked, and I listened eagerly to Montana stories, where he spent his childhood, as well as stories of Calvin College in the 1920s, of going to the denominational school when every last kid who enrolled still spoke Dutch or at  least understood it. 

He knew Fred Manfred, the prairie novelist who grew up in northwest Iowa and made the whole region, first, proud--and then ashamed when he swung his attention to his people's dirty laundry. This Montana-born story-teller remembered the day that Fred Manfred, then Feike Feikema, walked on campus at Calvin, a sky-high sodbuster whose height was as memorable as his farm boy ways.

Feikema was the only 6'9" kid on campus so the basketball coach dragged him to the gym where he was building up a team. Now this Montana story-teller explained that he was himself the coach's assistant. What the coach couldn't help but observe was the giant farmer had just plain zero timing, so he assigned his assistant coach to run with him on the court and jab him in the back at the exact time he should expect a rebound, to teach him when to jump. 

Montana got off the kitchen chair to demonstrate. It was a moment I'll never forget because I worshipped Feikema/Manfred and couldn't help but love the story.

Montana's rendition of coaching Fred Manfred happened fifty years ago. Montana is long gone. His story of teaching the giant to jump happened fifty years before that, so I'm retelling a story that's a century old and totally forgotten. And that's okay.

But there's more it. Montana was a wicked conservative, a man who believed that the church--our church--had long ago lost its bearing and was veering far off the track of what he thought to be doctrinal purity. His son, my friend, tried to argue with him. Invariably the volume grew heavily.

After Montana's couple of visits to Iowa, I couldn't miss his name beneath cantankerous letters to the Banner editor, some of which I couldn't help think the editor didn't really need to let see the light of day. Montana had a side that was a monster.

A half-century ago I was writing things for The Banner frequently enough to get to know the editor, Rev. Andrew Kuyvenhoven, yet another character in this museum I'm remembering this morning. In the doctrinal wars of the time, Andy tended left--not radically, mind you, but his voice was a progressive's. He tore up the denomination with a Banner cover that featured burning wooden shoes.

I'm not at all sure how Montana came up between us, but one day I mentioned I'd met Montana in Iowa and couldn't help but note his Banner letters, so fretfully full invective.

"That's nothing," Andy said, or something to that effect. "You should read the ones we don't publish."

Kuyvenhoven was reared in the occupied Netherlands, like many CRC members back then. Once upon a time his people had fought Hitler. Andy was not a man who feared a fight, but Montana's letters made him shake his head shamefully.

I say all of that because there's mean streak in the people from whom I come, the people I've served, really, as a teacher of their covenant children for most of the last fifty years. And that mean streak is never quite as proud as when it can hang on some doctrinal principle that legitimizes its existence.

I read a summary of the 2025 Synod yesterday, and in its repeated declarations of no, it reminded me of Montana and his letters to the Banner editor, and the commitment he'd made to a doctrinal line that wasn't all his own--he had compatriots, of course. That 2025 summary--maybe it was biased--made it very clear to me that Montana's mean streak is alive and well.

A century later, I still find that preening righteousness repellant. We're no longer a bunch of quarrelsome immigrants struggling to know when to jump in a brave new world. We don't have to be mean as we have been. 

Judging by the very nature of our faith, we shouldn't be. 

Sunday Meds from Psalm 57

 

“He sends from heaven and saves me, 

rebuking those who hotly pursue me; 

God sends his love and his faithfulness.”

 

Have mercy on me, my God, have mercy on me,
    for in you I take refuge.
I will take refuge in the shadow of your wings
    until the disaster has passed.

I cry out to God Most High,
    to God, who vindicates me.

 He sends from heaven and saves me,
    rebuking those who hotly pursue me--
    God sends forth his love and his faithfulness.

 

“He who, struggling with his own weakness, presses toward faith in his moments of anxiety is already in large part victorious.”

 

May not seem like John Calvin, at least the caricature John Calvin, but it is—from Book III, chapter II of the Institutes of the Christian Religion, a section in which he is discussing “Faith in the struggle against temptation.”

 

I’m just not sure there is a way of understanding the frenetic modulation of emotions David not only lives through but sings about and of in Psalm 57—and elsewhere—without understanding the character Calvin ascribes to believers in this section of the Institutes. 

 

David has, after all, every reason to be deathly scared.  It’s the King, King Saul, who’s hot on his trail, who has threatened his life, whose poison envy is more terrifying because it is so immeasurably beyond reason.  David sits in a cave, surrounded by his closest friends and family, nowhere to go, nowhere to hide. I like to imagine him composing, singing, alone, maybe at the mouth of this craggy spot, nothing to be seen over the land before him but eerie shadows created by the doubtful light of the moon. 

 

Outside the cave is madness, but he knows he can’t hide forever.  He has a mission.  Deliberately, benevolently, he has given Saul grace and allowed him to live when, with good cause, he could have killed him with his own hands. Instead, he took a shard of his robe.  But Saul, who David refuses to see as anything other than God’s own anointed, won’t purge the envy that has poisoned his soul; instead, he gorges on it.

 

That’s why David cries the way he does:  “Have mercy,” and then again, “have mercy.”  There is nowhere else to turn.

 

“And yet—and this is something marvelous,” says Calvin, “amidst all these assaults faith sustains the hearts of the godly, and truly in its effect resembles a palm tree:  for it strives against every burden and raises itself upward.”

 

Verses two and three—amid the harrowing fear—is heart-felt testimony:  you offer your wings as a refuge, Lord; you use me for your purposes, you hold back my enemies, you send love and faithfulness.  David is still sitting there where he was, the moonlit landscape’s eerie outlines still teeming with terror, but he’s saying that he knows.

 

Maybe it’s a kind of mantra he’s offering, in part to God, in part to his own anguished soul.  Maybe he’s remembering the chapters of his own story, when, not by his strength but by his God’s, deliverance was his blessing, his good fortune.  Whatever the reason, faith, like that palm tree, is growing, right there from the stone on which he sits.

 

Faith, Calvin says, means a sure knowledge of God’s will, of his faithfulness. It arises from a knowledge and assurance of his Word and his will of love.  “Unless you hold to be beyond doubt that whatever proceeds from him is sacred and inviolable truth,” Calvin says the terror of those shadows, like Saul’s insane envy, will overwhelm.

 

Seems to me that David’s song—his fears and his testimony—at the mouth of a quiet, silent cave is the Word of the Lord.

The Fourth

It was, I’d like to believe, a big choir, lots of folks on stage. I was a boy–kindergarten, first grade or second–and it seems to me that the woman who ran the whole pageant that Fourth of July night was my own beloved kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Nyenhuis, another mom really, a teacher who fashioned a child’s first scary year of school into pure joy.

We don’t do pageants anymore, probably for good reason: there’s too much cynicism in all of us--and, just maybe, too much money. But I was, back then, on the other side of ten years old, and the whole event, right there in the Oostburg Village Park, was big time. Was huge. Somewhere during the pageant, I walked across the stage–I have no idea when, perhaps as the pioneers were introduced or something. I’m almost sure I had some kind of costume Mom put together, but all of that is long gone.

What isn’t, sixty-plus years later, is the grand finale, when everyone who had any kind of role crowded back on the makeshift stage to sing “This is My Country.” I’m sure Mrs. Nyenhuis asked the crowd to join in. It was a massive village celebration, sometime mid-fifties, when, in that crowd, almost any dad–like mine–had some kind of service uniform he still might have worn, folded neatly in some upstairs closet.

What diff’rence if I hail from North or South
Or from the East or West?
My heart is filled with love for all of these.
I only know I swell with pride and deep within my breast
I thrill to see Old Glory paint the breeze.

I don’t remember holding sheet music, don’t remember reading lyrics, and we were several decades away from some massive screen. I only remember standing up there among many others, most of them older, and I remember singing. We’d just told the blessed nation’s story in a procession of tableau tales I was just old enough to understand; and now, the last song before the fireworks, the finale, had everyone in town standing, hearts overflowing with love and swelled with pride “to see Old Glory paint the breeze.”

I was struck almost mute by an emotion I could not have identified but understood to have grown up within me when that Old Glory flew high somewhere just off stage. Whatever it was, this attack seemed almost crippling, and a bit scary because somehow it rose out of my own control. I couldn’t have shusshed it, couldn’t have stanched the wave of whatever it was that clouded my eyes, made my lips go all bouncy. I remember singing, but not as loud as I might have because something alive was coursed through me. It was my first trembling moment of love of country, even though I knew next to nothing about American history.

With hand upon heart I thank the Lord
For this my native land,
For all I love is here within her gates.
My soul is rooted deeply in the soil on which I stand,
For these are mine own United States.

The old hymn’s passionate possessive adjectives sound pushy today–so heavy on my and silent on yours too; but I was a kid, and I wasn’t thinking of keeping others out or running others off. At that precious moment in my perception, “This is my country” was a spiritual testimony. I lived in a rich and beautiful land, a land that actually, truly, belonged to me too, just as it belonged to every other kid on that stage beneath the stars.

The song itself had very little history in the mid-50s. It was composed in 1940, and made popular by Fred Waring and his singers (one of whom was a Kranendonk, from Oostburg, my mother told me proudly). Somehow I knew every word, probably because she pounded it out time and time again on our piano while my dad sang along.

That night, Fourth of July, mysteriously filled me with an emotion I’d never felt before and didn’t understand, and claimed its own homestead in my heart’s memories. Whatever coursed through me I knew had to do with the land, with George Washington, Betsy Ross, and “Fourscore and seven years ago.” And it had to do with fighting wars–it had to do with what little I understood of battles won and lost, and something called sacrifice, and then also the sheer beauty of mountains and fruited plains in a land that somehow, even to a boy, seemed brimming with possibility.

I am so far beyond that now, the moment that night. “This is My Country,” comes as a flashback I’ll always remember because I cannot forget. Still makes me smile. Proudly.

“Innocence,” some sage said, “is so much more powerful than experience.” Sometimes it is.

Something got lost. I’ll never be seven again. I can’t go back to an Oostburg childhood, the wonderful "doings" in the park, and a Fourth of July that is no more. What’s more, the language of that patriotic hymn, now rarely sung, feels embarrassingly self-centered. 

But I can never and will never give up the memory of that Fourth. That night still stirs up a smile in my soul.

This is my country! Land of my choice!
This is my country! Hear my proud voice!
I pledge thee my allegiance, America, the bold,
For this is my country! To have and to hold.

I remember.

Posting for shots

A slight haze made this both a gracious dawn and kept it from being as gracious as it  might have been. Twenty years ago, July 2005, I went west out of town to a hill I knew got close to overlooking Canton, SD, a wonderful big hill where I worked hard at trying to reach my initial goal in shooting pictures early, outside of town--I wanted to catch the sheer beauty of open land and radiant sky.

The one up there didn't quite make it, even though I was blessed to be out there to witness. I haven't gone out shooting in a long time now, but what I wanted to do was "post" for the morning sun, be at the right spot at the right time, as if I were a deer hunter who simply knew exactly where to look, where to be when the moment came. This dawn is what I saw.  

And, a few minutes later, these friends.

See those farms way out there beyond the blue--they'll clue you in to what I was after. But I wasn't about to catch the motherload that morning because what was out there just wasn't enough, that morning, to take the day.

So I had to look elsewhere. I had to compose, not just record.

That's not a helicopter readying for attack on the big cottonwood on the horizon (see him/her coming in high and from the right?) It's some kind of bird, I'm sure.

I took these pictures 20 years ago. When I look at them today, I realize I was learning something about seeing--what to look for.

This is what I came for, too see the morning sun on the valley of the Big Sioux. It'll  take your breath away if you're just standing there and looking, but no camera I know of will get this landscape in through the lens. 

Then again, sometimes grace simply walks out of the corn like Shoeless Joe and makes you forget everything. 

 

Bridge-builder resigns

 

Between warring sides on a campus rally against war in the Middle East, Shiao Chong, then a campus pastor, claimed he saw two--just two--demonstrators holding a peace flag.

“It was like a parable,” Chong explained. “God was telling me to be in the middle; this is my ministry. I’m supposed to go in the middle and proclaim God’s peace. That’s what I have tried to do ever since, to be a bridge builder.”

So said Shiao Chong, a minister of the Word and, most recently, editor of The Banner, the official magazine of the Christian Reformed Church in North America. Chong outlined his perspective toward the job he was given in 2016 and then held until just last month. The story clearly explained the ways and means of the job he held for nine years—he attempted to make peace where war was all around.

Being an advocate for peace, recent Synods have said, is simply not enough when war against the Word is raging, especially and precisely because of the issue of gay marriage. In the CRC and elsewhere, there simply is no middle ground—or, if there is, the footing is so slippery and the sides of the argument so determined, that peace is simply not possible.

Shiao Chong waited until Synod 2025 to turn in his keys to the office, when Synod 2025 voted to sustain overtures from two classes, who asked Synod to alter the mission of the magazine to what Chong considered something less than his ideas of journalism. In brief, those overtures demanded that the magazine be more reflective of church policy and politics. By Chong’s definition, the denomination wanted a denominational magazine that consistently toed the line, creating stories that deliberately avoided the difficult issues. The CRC didn't want a peace pipe, they wanted a bugler.

Those overtures won the day, and Chong stepped out of a calling he says he felt that day he was campus pastor during a politically explosive campus demonstration. Peace would not do in a church body that wants no part of it, that considers doctrinal purity as the vital character of church life.

I’m sure that the faithful remnant of the denomination will find a new editor--somewhere today potential candidates are pitching their qualifications.

Sadly, resignations generally accomplish very little, other than to allow those resigning some measure of personal dignity. A couple decades ago, I resigned from the consistory of the church we were attending. I did so because my father suggested it himself when he saw the war being waged in that church taking a toll on my family.

Resignation settles nothing. In the old days, when football teams could walk off the field with a tie, we used to say that a tie is like kissing your sister. In this case, the Banner’s new protective mandate won the day. Chong, who worked hard at trying to manage a voice from the middle, resigned because he found it impossible to be that.

I wish him well. I can’t help but think he unloaded a ton of responsibility when he resigned, as I did once long ago. He may be sleeping better right now. 

“Don’t quit the church,” my dad told me back then. "Quit the consistory but give the church the opportunity to heal itself—stay with it for a year.”

We did, then we left.

It was the right thing for me to do way back when, and I’d guess it was the right thing for Shiao Chong to do earlier this month. He may have sidestepped editorial issues, but he hasn’t sidestepped a commitment to peace; he's just lost a battle, a big battle. There's more than one definition of peace. 

He deserves our thanks and needs our prayers.

Sunday Morning Meds from the 57th psalm

“He sends from heaven and saves me, 

rebuking those who hotly pursue me. . .”

 John Gardner, in The Art of Fiction, calls the error “frigidity,” and then suggests that writers who show frigidity have something wrong with them. That may be pushing things a little.

 The first stories I gathered from my students in any semester contained more than their share of icy frigidity. I don’t think there was anything wrong with the students; they were always a sweet, wonderful bunch, and they worked hard.  They just had to learn.

The problem Gardner refers to comes in spades in their first stories because young writers tend to think too much about craft and not enough about the psyches of their own characters.  I remember a cute little error in frigidity, but I’m not sure if they caught the chill or not. It normally takes a while. It was a Twilight Zone-ish story of a man who picked up a tattered young woman hitchhiking in a national forest, only to have his passenger mysteriously disappear a few moments later from his motorcycle.  It’s an old urban myth. When the guy stops to report what so strangely happened, the ranger tells him such an event occurs annually, on the anniversary of a murder which took place in the park. That kind of story.

The student did a great job of keeping us within the man’s mind.  We felt what he felt and heard what he heard. We were well into the story until she wrote something like this.  “The ranger spoke with a Southern drawl.”  No one in the story or out was thinking about the biker’s drawl at that point, no one but the author.  As Gardner might have said, with that line she “broke the dream,” pulled us right out of the scene. He calls that error “frigidity” because it seems to refuse to touch the character. 

Psalm 57, I think, has a species of frigidity in it, although not exactly the same thing.  We hear an intense cry for help, something from the depths of David’s soul:  “have mercy, have mercy.” The passion is obvious, begun even before the song begins by the story of the psalm’s biographical roots. David is in a cave, the insanely jealous King Saul determined to kill him.  Have mercy, David says, twice.

And then he says, “I will take refuge,” which David’s closest readers might well understand to be the kind of “let’s make a deal, God” the poet/King does quite often, as do we:  “save me, Lord and I’ll change.” I think it’s a bad reading, but let’s go on.

Verse three shuts the door on the potential for suspense: “He sends from heaven and saves me, rebuking those who hotly pursue me. . .”  End of story.  Before it even gets good, it ends. The rescue is here in 2 ½ verses. David the writer seems frigid--there’s something wrong with him, Gardner might say.  He jumps out of the dilemma way, way, way too fast, taking us with him, and that’s it. The END. We can hardly feel anything but cold.  Couldn’t have been all that bad.  Are you kidding?  No big deal. 

Sometimes I think the Psalms discriminate because I’m just not sure this one communicates to those who don’t believe in God.  Maybe it’s not meant to. 

Only believers can feel the absence of a God we know is there. 

 I know: that makes no sense.  But I know. 

And truth is, of course, we’re not just talking about any old ordinary story. No sir, and no ma’am.