Praying for the Impossible

Most movies have them --  those one or two epiphany-sized lines that grab us, triggering some reaction within that we can’t control and that we don’t forget. In Gravity, it was George Clooney’s character saying to Sandra Bullock’s, “You have to learn to let go.”  

When I can’t sleep but need to rest, I watch movies. Tonight, it was the 2012 TV movie Christmas Angel starring Della Reese and Kevin Sorbo. And in it was buried an epiphany-sized reminder that “with God all things are possible” (Matthew 19:26b NIV).  

“I think if we start by thanking Him for dying to forgive our sins,

 compared to that,

none of this will seem so impossible.”

Plumb Bob, Psalms-style!

On Day Two of my antique adventure through Warrenton and Round Top, I had been asked by my husband to look for three specific items:  (1) a two-ft tall tree stump with parallel ends, (2) an old surveyor’s tripod, and (3) a Plumb Bob.

I wasn’t entirely sure what I was looking for and I doubted I’d find all three, but at Round Top, there’s always a slightly-bored man eager to talk tools and help three not quite 60-year-old women; ultimately I had some success, finding one out of three. Items listed, that is, not men. My one wonderful man is quite enough, thank you very much.

And to make sure he knew I was thinking about him during our girls-only weekend (he didn’t understand why he wasn’t invited to hang out with three women who had known each other for over 40 years, and we couldn’t understand why he would want to!), I found him a few more man-toys not on his list.  

Made of brass and with a pointy tip, the Plumb Bob was pretty cool.

All it needed was a string to be complete.

When suspended from on high, the Plumb Bob’s weight is what pulls the string straight into a perfect vertical alignment.

Yes, I had to look that up. But while I was doing so, I realized the Plumb Bob was God’s way of showing me my prayer life. I’d been happily thanking God for the easy things in my life -- maybe because that’s all I was praying for -- and now it was time to ask, “How are my prayers lining up to your Kingdom purposes, God?”

And the answer came quite quickly -- Plumb Bob, Psalms-style.

Swinging from the heavens, the psalms weigh heavily with praise and worship and petitions. People shout and scream and whine and gripe and beg. They celebrate and dance and sing. They confess and repent. And through all the cries and commotion and sometimes chaos, they look up and see God.  

The psalms “track a path through the vastness of human emotion, its tundras and its jungles, and direct all of it Godward.” Pastor Mark Buchanan writes in Your God is Too Safe. “What do you do with your hatred, bitterness, ecstasy, weariness, heaviness, longings, disappointments, despair, and desires? To whom can you entrust all that?” The psalms “help us to bring all we are – our holy, disheveled, desperate selves – to all of God.”

And they line us up with His perfect will for our lives and for His kingdom.

For me, today’s the day I go back to the discipline of praying a psalm a day. A while back, I’d read one psalm each day and then discuss it with a very good friend. We’d sometimes read from C. H. Spurgeon’s Treasury of David and discuss that, too. More important, however, we'd mediate all day long on that one psalm. 

The old-fashioned Plumb Bob, what a treasure.

The even older Psalms, what treasures they hold.

I’m so glad God speaks in the wonder of the everyday! I wonder what he would have said had I found a tree stump!

Blessed is the man whose “delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law he meditates day and night” (Psalm 1:2 NIV).

“He delights, moreover, to meditate in it, to read it by day, and think upon it by night. He takes a text and carries it with him all day long; and in the night-watches, when sleep forsakes his eyelids, he museth upon the Word of God. In the day of his prosperity, he sings psalms out of the Word of God, and in the night of his affliction, he comforts himself with promises out of the same book” (Spurgeon on Psalm 1:2).

Buchanan, Mark.  Your God is Too Safe:  Rediscovering the Wonder of a God You Can’t Control.  Sisters, Oregon:  Multnomah, 2001. 233.

Spurgeon, Charles H. The Treasury of David: Classic Reflections on the Wisdom of the Psalms. Vol. 1. Peabody, MA:  Hendrickson. 2.

Because I Can

“How’s retirement?” -- A question heard often these days and one I love answering, for retirement rocks! “There’s a season for every activity under the heavens,” Solomon reflected, and I’m happy that I’ve lived long enough to enjoy this one. So when the question is followed by -- “How are you?”-- I can only say that I’m grateful.   

While eating Thanksgiving dinner many years ago, we knew there was something not quite right about the cornbread dressing that Ian’s mom was famous for making. Normally, we stuffed ourselves with the dressing; that year, however, we didn’t. The recipe handed down from Ian’s grandmother was traditional and salivated over and anticipated for many days, but that year it fell flat. Not bad, just different, and certainly not what we looked forward to every year. The excitement, after taking that first bite, fizzled.

We finally figured out that she had used the same can of sage every year for 35 years, and she had bought a new one. And the dressing? Well, it was good, but the seasoning wasn’t the same.  

Shortly after that she turned the dressing-making over to Ian. She helped, but it was now his baby, and if there were any complaints, he inherited those, too.

When I was a little girl, I taught my dolls and gave them homework. I’ve always been a teacher. But “there’s a time for everything,” and my time had come. The season had changed.    

Now, I’m happily doing everyday things that I was too exhausted to do before -- folding the laundry and making the bed and cleaning the refrigerator – and I’m doing them because I can.

Driving to Ian’s office with his lunch of turkey and avocado and strawberry yogurt on my lap, I was stopped by a friend who asked me what I was doing. When I told her that I was taking my husband his lunch, she asked me, “Why?” The only answer? Because I can!

There’s really no other reason besides I’m crazy about him. He didn’t ask me to do it (although he sure looks forward to it now) and he certainly didn’t expect me to do it (even though maybe now he does a little), but I do it because I can. Well, maybe part of me hopes he’ll see how great it is that his wife has retired and he’ll not want me to go back to work outside the home!  

But for now, I move plants around in the garden and browse through the library shelves and go with Ian to put up real estate signs, and I do these things with as much joy as I had when, a season ago, I moved the desks around my classroom and drove to the high school each day and went with teachers to AP conferences.

To do all we can do in each season of our lives is a good way to live, I think.  

Help us, Lord,

 to do the things we are able to do

 in the season you give us to do them

and to do them with a grateful heart. 

Amen.  

Hummingbird Friends

This past weekend, I linked arms with two fun friends as we joined the throngs of browsing shoppers and antique dealers who migrate to Warrenton and Round Top, Texas each year.

My backyard garden already overflows with rustic treasures, so I didn’t expect to return home with any more, but I did.

Though not an antique, these three cast-iron hummingbird hooks hooked my attention. Soon they’ll provide a perch for the nectar-filled feeders on my back porch, but to me, they’ll always remind me of the weekend the three of us spent together, buzzing through fields filled with rusted Coca-Cola signs and chubby concrete angels and antique surveying instruments, laughing as we circumvented the porta potties and discovered a bathroom we had to use in the dark, and playing like girlfriends do, regardless of how much older we are now than when we donned our gold Tigerette uniforms and red lipstick and high-kicked our way across Tully Stadium 40 years ago. Now, I look at my weekend purchase and smile, thanking God for the treasure of sweet friends.  

A few weeks ago, a lone hummingbird, unintentionally lured by the red garage handle hanging from the ceiling, flew into my sister’s garage where it seemed unable to go back to the yellow roses and the purple lantana beckoning it to return. Disoriented and confused, the tiny bird, whose wings flapped faster than I could blink, hovered and twittered and swished from one side of the garage to the other, but could not escape from its prison.

Hummingbirds spend the winter in Central America or Mexico, and this bird’s migration was in peril. He was one stuck bird.  

I tried everything I could think of – swooshing him with a straw broom, scooping him in the swimming pool net, luring him with sugar water on top of the truck, talking to him in that syrupy, high-pitched voice that works with many animals, and even calling friends for other suggestions; but nothing worked.  

Unable to help, I finally went to sleep.

But the next morning, the bird was still there, valiantly flapping and fluttering from side to side, although much more slowly than before.

I was amazed at his resiliency and saddened at his inability to escape the accidental confinement.

I found out later that garage doors must have the red emergency release handle, which, unfortunately, looks like a red trumpet flower, a favorite hummingbird attraction. And when the whimsical birds dart in to check it out, they get disoriented and frightened, so they instinctively fly up and stay there, trapped in the garage where many die.   

I was exhausted watching the tiny bird’s efforts, and I kept hoping and praying he would escape.  

And then it got worse! Another hummingbird had joined him in his plight!  

I think I felt as helpless although not as exhausted as the two of them did.  

Retreating inside and googling for a solution, I pondered the possibility of using a leaf blower, but as I stepped outside yet one more time, the birds were gone! Both of them! I’ve never closed a garage door so fast in my life! Not again, not on my watch anyway!

But then I got it -- that epiphany that comes from God who is always watching and teaching and helping us become more Christ-like each day.

The bird had been stuck for 18 miserable hours; it took a friend less than an hour to help him get out of his rut.

One seemingly insignificant bird helped his tiny buddy out of a big ole’ jam.

Just one friend.

With our words somersaulting over each other’s, the three of us had chattered and laughed and visited as we flitted from one side of Round Top to the other. Lurking in darkened bathrooms, haggling with dealers over brass potty plungers, and swooping in when we saw a particular rustic treasure, we enjoyed each other's company. We once shared a life of dance and boys and school, and one day we will share a future beyond our imagination, but for now God has given us a present -- the Godly gift of friendship.  

God sends us into the lives of others. We matter.

Thank you, Lord, for the help you send us through the gift of friendships.  Help us never to take our friends for granted and to be a friend who “loveth at all times” (Proverbs 17:17a KJV). Amen.

A Toast to Teachers!

Rocking on my back porch, I’ve been drenched this summer with my garden’s fragrance even as it fights valiantly to keep at bay the Texas humidity. Sipping my dark-roasted coffee and inhaling its aroma, I glance occasionally at the backside of a plump naked woman with wild grey hair who is happily skipping on a white sandy beach. Arms outstretched to the sun rising over the sparking blue ocean water, she epitomizes the caption on my coffee cup -- “Free at last!”

A retirement gift from a thoughtful friend, the grey-haired woman gone wild mug symbolizes the change in my life from the teaching occupation that I once loved to a different season that I also love.  I’m grateful for this season; I was also grateful for the other. Both have been full, spilling over with purpose and friends and joy.

So today, as my former fellow-teachers begin the first day of a new year, I’m toasting them with my wild coffee mug, praying for a fabulous year, not only for them but also for my fellow retirees, and looking forward to seeing God at work in both.