RECYCLING THE TIME

A man in a church where I served an interim pastorate was a retired police officer who had worked the evening shift. He said that one of his jobs was to make sure the police department clocks were all in sync with one another and with the clocks at City Hall.  Each evening he called City Hall to get the time from their clock. It was years before he learned that each morning City Hall called the Police Department to get the time from their clock. They just kept recycling the same time, right or not.

Children of God, be careful where you check for the time, redeeming the time, because the days are evil. Ephesians 5:15-16. [Okay, the Greek is a little fuzzy there.]

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

JOYS & CONCERNS, ROOTS & WINGS

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith for the Years of Winter… ©

We spent Easter in Tiffin, OH, of all places. Not that there is anything wrong with Tiffin. In fact, it is a very nice town. But there would normally be no reason for us to be in Tiffin. This Easter was different.

Our grandchildren, Brigid and Joe, have no cousins, and only one aunt, on the McFarland side. They depend on their father’s family for cousins and aunts and uncles and god parents. Those folks are in Tiffin.

Brigid had only the 2 day weekend for Easter, Michigan State University’s spring break being earlier, and it’s a day’s drive to her home in Iron Mountain and another day to get back, so there would be no time at home even if she tried to get there. She was feeling lonely, being by herself on Easter, and she wanted to go to Tiffin to see her father’s family, since they have suffered a lot in the past year, two of her cousins dying violently, [suicide and car crash], but she does not have a car and any public transportation she could get would take the whole weekend, too, so we drove up to East Lansing and then took her to Tiffin and on Sunday afternoon drove her back to MSU. It was good for us to get to spend time with her, and good for her and her Grandma Kennedy and the rest of her father’s family to see her. As we drove out of Tiffin, she said, “I really needed that.”

Roots and wings. Children need both. As we drove home from East Lansing, Helen noted that since our family has been so itinerant, we have given wings to Brigid and Joe, and helped them to see that wings are good. [I’m not talking about Buffalo Wild Wings. They might be good, too, but where I come from, buffalo don’t have wings.] Their father’s family, though, has been in Tiffin for many generations, and so they have roots there, and roots are also necessary and good.

The Kennedys are Roman Catholic, so while they were at St. Mary’s, we went to Easter worship at Faith UMC. It was a pleasant place to worship. The building is nice. The service was meaningful. The music was good. Most of all, though, I enjoyed the Joys and Concerns.

One woman thanked folks for their prayers for her sister-in-law, whose heart surgery took longer than expected. Another asked for prayers for her husband, who is not doing well. There were several others. The pastor stood at the head of the aisle, and called on each raised hand by name and responded to each in a personal way. Finally a very old and decrepit woman asked for the floor. Most folks had spoken while sitting, but she wanted to stand. It took her a long time to struggle up. Her voice was weak and she was in front of us so I could not hear what she said. As she spoke, though, and the pastor smiled and nodded, I wondered at how much I cared about that sister-in-law and that husband and whatever the old lady was sharing.

These are my people. I did not know them, and will never see them again, but what happens to them is important to me. We are in this life together, in prayer together, and in resurrection hope together. I’m still praying for that sister-in-law and that husband and that old lady. Wherever and whenever we share joys and concerns, we are given roots and wings.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

I tweet as yooper1721.

My youthful ambition was to be a journalist, and write a column for a newspaper. So I think of this blog as an online column. I started it several years ago, when we followed the grandchildren to the “place of winter,” Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula [The UP]. I put that in the sub-title, ”Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter, where life is defined by winter even in the summer!” [This phrase is explained in the post for March 20, 2014.] We no longer live in “the place of winter.” The grandchildren grew up, so in May, 2015 we moved “home,” to Bloomington, IN, where we met and married. It’s not a “place of winter,” but we are still in winter years of the life cycle, so I continue to work at understanding what it means to be a follower of Christ in winter…

MY LIFE AS A NEWYORKER MAGAZINE

My life is a New Yorker magazine.

When my NYer arrives in the mail, usually on Thursday, I open first to the back page. There is a cartoon, without caption. Readers are invited to submit a caption. It is always a ridiculous picture. My first inclination is to say, “There’s no way anyone could caption that.” But then I begin to think about it. If I don’t allow myself to be constrained by the obvious, captions begin to present themselves.

Also on the back page is the cartoon from the week before, with the three best captions, according to the editors, that readers have sent in. If the NYer web site will accept your password, you get to vote on those to determine the best. 

Also on that back page is the cartoon from two weeks ago, with the winning caption, elected from the previous three best.

Recently, for instance, there was a cartoon of a man walking through an office carrying a huge hot dog under his arm. If you think the obvious, you come up with something not funny, like “I’m going to a picnic,” or “It’s a souvenir from the ball park.” But in the winning caption, he says to a man he is passing, “My other two wishes were also ironically misinterpreted.” That is funny at several different levels.

I used to try to send in my captions for the cartoons, but the NYer web site says I am using the wrong password. So I try to reset. The site tells me I already have a password and to use it. I say they don’t accept it. The site says, Try it again. I do. The site says, Nope, still wrong. I say, Give me a new password. The site says, Nope, you’ve already got one. It’s just as well. My captions are never as funny as the winners.

After I read the back page cartoons, I leaf through the magazine from back to front, reading only the cartoons. Then as I have time I go from front to back reading the articles that interest me, on politics or religion or medicine or science or the history of water-witching in Moldavia. 

I’m old now. I start at the back page, trying to put a caption on whatever ridiculous thing is happening now. Then I leaf back through the years, seeing the scenes that bring a smile. Then, if I have time, I get serious and try to understand religion and medicine and science and… That’s the caption and the work of old age, to understand it all from the back page.

I’m sure Eugen Rosenstock-Heussey was not the first to point it out, but it was from him that I learned that we understand life from back to front, because with the Christ story, we start at the end, with resurrection. It’s only as we go from back to front that we understand that story and what it means. The Christ story begins not with Christmas but with Easter.

So, Happy Easter!

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

Thanks to my late friend, The Rev. George W. Loveland, for introducing me to The New Yorker. He gave me a subscription for Christmas the first year we worked together, in 1979.

I’ll be taking a few days off from Christ In Winter as we celebrate Easter with our granddaughter. The Lord is risen; the Lord is risen, indeed!

ACTIVE IMPROVEMENT

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith for the Years of Winter… ©

“Juwan is taking an active part in his improvement,” Robert Johnson said. What an interesting phrase, what an insightful comment.

It was said by a sophomore on the Indiana University basketball team, about frosh player Juwan Morgan.

Isn’t it obvious? Doesn’t one always have to take an active part in improvement? Well, no.

Many of us want to improve, but we don’t take an active part in our improvement. We want someone else to force us to improve, or to somehow do it for us.

At this national championship basketball tournament time, March Madness, I suspect the teams that will do best are ones where the players are taking an active part in their improvement.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

My youthful ambition was to be a journalist, and write a column for a newspaper. So I think of this blog as an online column. I started it several years ago, when we followed the grandchildren to the “place of winter,” Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula [The UP]. I put that in the sub-title, ”Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter, where life is defined by winter even in the summer!” [This phrase is explained in the post for March 20, 2014.] We no longer live in “the place of winter.” The grandchildren grew up, so in May, 2015 we moved “home,” to Bloomington, IN, where we met and married. It’s not a “place of winter,” but we are still in winter years of the life cycle, so I continue to work at understanding what it means to be a follower of Christ in winter…

I tweet as yooper1721.

Bottoms Up-a poem

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith for the Years of Winter… ©

Whenever I design to lift

my bottom from a chair

or bench or patch of grass

or some other apt locale

where bottoms take their rest.

with exhortations loud

and warnings dire,

I try to do so without hands.

No fists balled hard and pushed

along beside my solid

but reluctant thighs,

trusting in the middle

of this mass of flesh

to make the bottom rise

without assist.

It never works.

Apparently all the clever lines

and memories and hopes of ages

past have settled to the bottom,

as the laws of Newton

and of gravity insist they must.

Alas, their length and breadth

are great, too great

for that now spreading middle,

however expansive it may be,

by itself alone to cause to rise

the weight of so much thought…

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

I tweet as yooper1721.

A PALM SUNDAY PRAYER

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith for the Years of Winter… ©

I was asked to give the pastoral prayer at St. Mark’s UMC yesterday, where we were wed 56 years ago. I knew people would be unfocused after a Palm Sunday parade by three dozen children, and about that many adults, led by a sousaphone, and after IU’s victory over KY in basketball the night before, so I thought I should acknowledge that it was hard to focus, and then try to get people to relax and let the Spirit take over. Too much for one prayer, I’m afraid, but here is the prayer. It was followed by a period of silent prayer and then praying the Lord’s Prayer together. You’ll be able to get the idea, even if you don’t understand the local references:

Merciful and almighty God, bless those of us assembled here, because here we are again, some assembly required, some of us with happy hearts, some with heavy hearts, some of us because we want to share the joy, some because we need help with the pain. But we’re here mostly out of habit. Or because someone else made us come. Or we just didn’t want to make breakfast ourselves.

Some of us are already dozing, because the announcements were so boring. Some of us are making grocery lists. Some of us are wondering if the Tudor Room is serving today.

But be patient. You really owe us that much. It wasn’t easy to get here, you know. Why can’t you at least make them get into the car so we can be on time?

That reminds us that we aren’t all that happy with you. Some of us are downright mad. Yes, we addressed you as almighty and merciful when we started, but that’s just out of tradition, and a little bit of fear, that you might strike us with a lightning bolt if we don’t bow and scrape. If you were really almighty and merciful, you’d do a lot better job of running this world. You’ve taken from us people we love, and it’s so hard to get along without them. And you let all sorts of bad things happen. What’s with making the world so the big animals have to eat the little ones? And a world where little children get sick? And here we are, shouting hosannas and waving palms, and we know it won’t even take half a week before that goes south.

But it’s not all bad, being here in your church, God, even if you’re not all that almighty and merciful. At least Aaron will have to watch them for an hour. That’s a relief. And we are basking in the sure knowledge that you cheer for the same specific sports team we favor. So we ask you to replace our schadenfreude at the expense of those who cheer for lesser teams with mitgeful, that ability to sympathize with those who suffer, even though we prefer to enjoy their misery. Yes, it’s okay to be here.

It’s real nice to have folks back from spring break, and have our mission trip team home safe from Guatemala. Thank you for that. The sweet bread at breakfast was good. Pam is over there at the organ. We ignore her most of the time, but she makes us think we can sing, even all those hymns nobody’s ever heard of, and that’s good. Maybe Mary Beth will tell a funny story.

And maybe you’ll keep that promise that you made in Jesus, that wherever we gather in his name, that he’ll be here, too. Even now there’s sort of a rustling, like the rush of angel wings, no, more like a kind of tapping as we relax back into our chairs, silent tapping, like Jesus is going down the rows and tapping, on the head, on the hand, in our hearts, getting our attention, you, yes, you, you’re the one. I’m glad you’re here, we’ve got work to do, together, in here, in this worship place.

And work to do together out there. Let’s go to the highways and byways right now in our hearts and tap every lost soul, and say, you, yes you, you’re the one. I’m glad you’re here. All those folks on the list in the bulletin. The old person all alone, the abused child, the homeless refugee, the slave, the prisoner, the addict. In Guatemala, in Syria, in Bloomington. Right now, tap them in your heart, the Spirit is saying, and bring them in.

Is that Jesus, or is that the Holy Spirit saying that to us? We get confused about that stuff, but we know it’s You, God, one way or another, Okay, we’ve got more answers than questions. We’re chewing more than we’ve bitten off, but we’re ready now, pretty much. Be with us, please, as we go up and down the rows of our lives and our world now in our hearts, as we walk along in the Spirit, with Jesus, in prayer, as he taps all those we know, and as he taps, and we pray, especially for all those no one knows, who have no one else to pray for them…

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

My youthful ambition was to be a journalist, and write a column for a newspaper. So I think of this blog as an online column. I started it several years ago, when we followed the grandchildren to the “place of winter,” Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula [The UP]. I put that in the sub-title, ”Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter, where life is defined by winter even in the summer!” [This phrase is explained in the post for March 20, 2014.] We no longer live in “the place of winter.” The grandchildren grew up, so in May, 2015 we moved “home,” to Bloomington, IN, where we met and married. It’s not a “place of winter,” but we are still in winter years of the life cycle, so I continue to work at understanding what it means to be a follower of Christ in winter…

I tweet as yooper1721.

My new novel is VETS, about four homeless Iraqistan veterans accused of murdering a VA doctor, is available from your local independent book store, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, BOKO, Books-A-Million, Black Opal Books, and almost any place else that sells books. $12.99 for paperback, and $3.99 for ebook. Free if you can get your library to buy one.

FAITHFULNESS IS NOT JUST STUBBORNESS

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith for the Years of Winter… ©

Yesterday I told the story of Bob and Lois Teague, our next-door neighbors when our children were little, and how Bob wanted to be remembered as one who was faithful. When I did his funeral, faithfulness, of course, was the theme, the faithfulness of Bob, and the faithfulness of God.

I knew Bob well enough to know that his faithfulness often took the form of stubbornness. Sometimes we mistake stubbornness for faithfulness. They are not really the same thing. But Bob and I had been through the wars together, at least the battle about the Viet Nam war. We were both too old to soldier in Viet Nam, but we had strong opinions about the justice of that war. Both of us had started out supporting American intervention in Southeast Asia. I was a campus minister, so I knew a lot of young men who went to that war. I knew some who returned, much the worse for the experience. I knew some who did not return, leaving those who loved them much the worse for the experience. I began to question the war. Bob did not. He stubbornly dug into his position. As I grew more and more aware of how wrong that war was, Bob and I grew further apart on that issue, which strained out neighborly relations. Then there came a day when he said, simply, “You’re right. This war makes no sense.”

Bob’s faithfulness was to what is right. He was stubborn in that faithfulness, but when he learned that the correct position had left him, he was able to change and follow it.

Faithfulness for its own sake is merely stubbornness.

Because he was himself a wealthy patrician, President Franklin Roosevelt was often referred to by other wealth patricians as “a traitor to his class,” because he championed the interests of the lower economic classes. They expected him to be faithful to ways that were wrong.

So often we see people criticized for being “unfaithful” or “disloyal” because they refuse to support their friends or team-mates or coaches or colleagues in wrong-doing, because they refuse to accept sinfulness just because it is considered part of their class or race or gender or nation.

Faithfulness, loyalty, are perverse if they are pursued in the practice of injustice, of cheating, of wronging others. People who expect loyalty when they cheat and do wrong do not deserve loyalty.

Like all of us, they need prayer, and they need kindness, but to be loyal to them in wrong-doing is the worst kind of friendship.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

I tweet as yooper1721.

My new novel is VETS, about four homeless Iraqistan veterans accused of murdering a VA doctor, is available from your local independent book store, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, BOKO, Books-A-Million, Black Opal Books, and almost any place else that sells books. $12.99 for paperback, and $3.99 for ebook. Free if you can get your library to buy one.

HOW WILL WE BE REMEMBERED?

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith for the Years of Winter… ©

The story is told of the little boy who was taken, quite reluctantly, to kindergarten. Later in the day, he was upset. His teacher thought it would help him if he could talk to his mother, so she called her. When the mother answered, the teacher handed the phone to the boy. “Who is this?” the mother asked. “This is your son; have you forgotten me already?” he wailed.

No one is remembered for long, unless you are a shaker or mover. We understand that, but we want to be remembered by those who know us, in whose lives we have played a part. In winter, we look at the snow that covers up the reminders of spring and summer and autumn, and we wonder. Who will remember me? Especially, how will they remember me?

Bob and Lois Teague were our neighbors when our girls and theirs were little. We moved onto Fairchild Avenue, next door to each other, at the same time, the first houses either of us had ever bought. We lived side by side for six years. Bob and I did not have a lot in common, except we were both trying to raise little girls, and provide for our families, and fight dandelions, but we were good neighbors.

Years later, when we were in our mid-fifties, he called up and said something that shocked me. “I always admired you and wanted to be like you,” he said. I had no idea that he had ever felt that way.

Then he said, “But I have taken it too far. I’ve gotten cancer, too, just like you.”

Months later, when Bob was dying, he and Lois asked me to officiate at his funeral service. I made a trip back to Normal, IL to spend some last time with him. I asked him how he wanted to be remembered. “I was faithful,” he said.

Now it was my turn to admire and emulate. At that point, I wanted to be like Bob. I still do.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

I tweet as yooper1721.

My book, NOW THAT I HAVE CANCER I AM WHOLE: Reflections on Life and Healing for Cancer Patients and Those Who Love Them, is published in two editions by AndrewsMcMeel, in audio by HarperAudio, and in Czech and Japanese translations. It’s incredibly inexpensive at many sites on the web.

MORNING ANGER

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith for the Years of Winter… ©

I don’t wake up angry and frustrated. That takes about ten minutes.

I’m usually up before daybreak. It’s cozy in the kitchen as I start the coffee and wash up the dishes from the night before, quietly, so as not to wake Helen. I muddle around, not quite awake enough to think. I hum some old hymn tunes, or popular songs from my youth, something about not having a date for the prom, not really thinking about the words, just enjoy the feel.

Then I think about some idiotic post I saw on Facebook, or remember an item from the newspaper or the TV news from the night before, or recall some long-dead politician who dug such a deep hole for the rest of us that we’re still trying to dig out… or what was said by some current politician who is too stupid to know that the first thing you do when you find yourself in a hole is to stop digging…

Those of us who don’t like violence, not the type we have to participate in—and make no mistake, there are plenty who do love violence, do love hurting others in person—still enjoy seeing our foes vanquished in logic and rhetoric. Or on the basketball floor.

Jesus had a lot to say about not worrying over things we can’t control. “Consider the lilies of the field…” “How many of you can add even a cubit…”

Jesus’ point wasn’t to drop out of life. When we really understand how to stop worrying about stuff we can’t control, we are freed up to work on stuff where we can have some influence. So stop worrying, be happy, and get to work.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

My youthful ambition was to be a journalist, and write a column for a newspaper. So I think of this blog as an online column. I started it several years ago, when we followed the grandchildren to the “place of winter,” Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula [The UP]. I put that in the sub-title, ”Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter, where life is defined by winter even in the summer!” [This phrase is explained in the post for March 20, 2014.] We no longer live in “the place of winter.” The grandchildren grew up, so in May, 2015 we moved “home,” to Bloomington, IN, where we met and married. It’s not a “place of winter,” but we are still in winter years of the life cycle, so I continue to work at understanding what it means to be a follower of Christ in winter…

I tweet as yooper1721.

STEALING DONKEYS FOR JESUS

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith from a place of winter For the Years of Winter…

It’s Palm Sunday time again, so time for a repost, from an era when Oldsmobile was a real car.

As they approached Jerusalem, Jesus sent two of his disciples to get a colt that had never been ridden. “If anybody sees you taking it,” he told them, “tell them I need it.” They found the colt and brought it to Jesus and put their coats on it for a saddle and Jesus rode on it into Jerusalem. Many people spread their own clothes on the road, or leafy branches they cut from the trees, and they shouted “Hosanna” as he rode into town. (Matthew 21:1-11; Mark 11:1-11; Luke 19:28-40; John 12:12-19, VSR)

***

“It’s Palm Sunday, so I want you to go into town and steal me a donkey,” Jesus told his disciples. “If anybody catches you, tell them I need it.”

Reminds me of the time “Gunner Bob” Reinhart, one of my colleagues in the “Willing Workers” Sunday School class, happened to notice the keys dangling from the ignition in Mr. Bothwell’s new Olds Rocket 88. It was Palm Sunday afternoon, and Gunner decided to take the car for a Holy Week spin. Mr. Bothwell noticed his car taking off from in front of his house and ran down his driveway after it, house slippers on feet and Sunday funnies in hand.

“Why are you taking my car?” he cried.

Gunner, apparently remembering our lesson on the morning, yelled back, “I need it.”

One of Jesus’ disciples nudged the other as they walked into town. “And if they go for that, I’ve got some nice recreational lots along the Dead Sea I can sell them.”

Both capitalists and communists claim Jesus, but he was neither. His approach was entirely different; he just borrowed everything. He borrowed the water he turned into wine, and he borrowed the stone jars from which that wine was poured. He borrowed a boat from which to teach or by which to cross a lake. He borrowed houses in which to eat, teach, and heal. (Some of them did not fare very well, either–one lost its roof so a paralytic could be lowered in to be healed.) He borrowed sons, brothers and husbands to be his disciples. He borrowed the upper room in which he ate his last supper with his borrowed friends. Borrowed was the manger in which he was born, borrowed his cross, and borrowed his tomb.

We think of Jesus as a giver, not a taker. He was the giver of health, love, truth and even the ultimate, his own life. Yet Jesus throughout his entire career borrowed things.

This was not just his lifestyle as an itinerant preacher. He was teaching us that all we have is borrowed from God. He ignored all strictures against lending and borrowing , be it a cloak or a second mile or even one’s other cheek, because none of us really has any possessions. Bigger barns, Swiss bank accounts, even gaining the whole world–none of that is enough for us to establish a claim upon ourselves. You yourself, your very life, is borrowed, so how can you claim anything you have as your own?

Gunner and I learned in Sunday school the “accounting theory” of faith. You get what you have coming to you. Indeed, Gunner got it when he returned Mr. Bothwell’s car. One doesn’t steal donkeys–or Oldsmobiles–and get away with it in my hometown.

Over against the accounting theory stands the unexpected Jesus, the one who says, “If you would follow me, take up your cross, and steal me a donkey.” Jesus lived the reality of grace, of God being good to us not because we are good but because God is good; not because we have been true to some legalistic plumb line of stewardship but because God is true to the divine identity. To see ourselves as borrowers is to recognize ourselves as those who live by grace, who have no claim upon God except the one that God give in Christ.

Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia launched the New York City Center of Music and Drama, but he never attended the ballet there. Someone asked him why, since he otherwise seemed to be such a supporter of art. He replied, “I’m a guy who likes to keep score. With ballet, I never know who’s ahead.” There is some kind of relationship calculator built into most of us that causes us to keep score.

Relationships, however, have a way of refusing to go by the numbers. That is why so many of us end up forsaking relationships altogether–relationships to other people, to God and even to ourselves. Unless we can keep score and know who is ahead, we do not even want to attend the performance. We may support the idea, and say that it is beautiful, just as LaGuardia did with ballet, but we do not go.

The unexpected Jesus says to us, “Give to him who begs from you, and do not refuse the one who would borrow from you.” (Matthew 5:421). “And if you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But…lend, expecting nothing in return…” (Luke 6:34035a). “And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive every one who is indebted to us…” (Luke 11:4a).

That’s a clue. The last sentence comes from a prayer; it is a plea to God. “God, you forgive us our sins, for sins–­those attitudes and actions that keep us so far from you–are our debts, and there is no way we can pay off those debts. The only way we can make right our relationship with you is if you forgive those debts." Each one of us is a Third World nation.

Grace has no contract requirement, nor can it be attained through manipulation. Grace is what we borrow, knowing we can never repay, and knowing that the Lender understands we can never repay

Jesus frees us to be borrowers from God. Perhaps it is too much to expect us to borrow easily from one another. We are not ready to be fellow borrowers until we have borrowed life from God. That is what Jesus teaches. “Look at me,” he says. “I’m a borrower. If I can be a borrower, you can be one, too. Borrow what you need from me.”

Jesus comes to us in a borrowed manger, on a borrowed cross, up from a borrowed tomb, breaking to us the borrowed bread of life, lending us life, forgiveness and hope. “Borrow from me,” he says. “Borrow the things that make for life. Let others borrow as well, and do not hinder them. Hell is a life that is earned. Heaven is a life that is borrowed. Borrowed is best. Go steal me a donkey…:”

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

I tweet as yooper1721.

FIXING THE WORLD

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith for the Years of Winter

Uncle Johnny, my mother’s youngest brother, was a marine in WWII. When the war was over, he returned to the home town of Francisco, IN, to start a hardware and lumber business. He built it himself, from the ground up, the lumber shed and the store building, with his own hands. The store building shared a wall with the general store of Uncle Ted, my mother’s oldest brother. Indeed, there was even a door between the two, so that if one of them had to be gone for a while, the other one could cover for him.

Although he was 25 and I was only 10 then, Uncle Johnny was my best friend. We did a lot of things together. He was my Best Man. One day, he complained about how Uncle Ted, who was 40 and had been in business a long time, kept telling him how to build and run his business. “He says he wants to help me avoid the mistakes he made, but I want to make my own mistakes.”

When our older daughter, Mary Beth, was two, she stomped her little foot, in a little red sneaker, and said, “When can I make my own decissons.” She couldn’t even pronounce it, but she wanted to make her own.

Most of us want to make our own mistakes, in our own way, we want to make our own “decissons,” which is why we can’t “fix” other people. They want to make their own mistakes.

That same little girl is grown up now. For a long time, she was an excellent crafter, but she doesn’t do crafts anymore. “I realized,” she says, “that my approach to the world was to fix it. I tried to repair other people, tried to take their bits and scraps and put them together into a whole that was pretty and useful. Since I could not do that, I took the scraps and bits and pieces of things and crafted them together into a whole that was pretty and useful. But now I know that we can’t put other people together. I have given up trying to fix the world, so I don’t need to do it with crafts, either.”

The problem is: when you realize you can’t repair other people, when you can’t fix the world, what do you do then?

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

I tweet as yooper1721.

HEARING THE STORY FOR THE FIRST TIME

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith for the Years of Winter… ©

We were taking a water break, standing in the shade beside the moving truck. The bishop was moving me to another church, and the local “transfer” company was moving our stuff there. The leader of the moving crew was Jeff, a rock singer and guitarist by night, who looked like a Mexican bandit in “Viva Zapata.” The rest of his crew were guys he had picked up that morning at a Main Street tavern. When Jeff learned I was a minister, he was delighted, for he had just started going to church, in his late 20s, and everything about Jesus was new to him, and he wanted to talk about it.

“Have you ever heard that story he told, about the kid who took all the father’s money and ran away from home and spent it on drugs and booze,” he asked. I allowed as how I had, but the guys from the tavern looked slightly alarmed. Jeff launched into the story, as it had been told in his church the Sunday before, as it will be told in countless churches this morning for it is the Gospel lectionary reading for today. He told it with wide-eyed wonder and a catch in his voice. He just couldn’t believe the father would take his son back after the way he had treated him.

The tavern guys weren’t as impressed with the story as Jeff and I were. When he told the part about how the son was so poor he had to sleep in the barn with the pigs, one of them snorted and said, “I’ve slept with lots of pigs.” The others thought that was a hoot. Jeff didn’t care. He was so enthralled, he just kept on telling the story.

Every time I hear this story, as I will this morning, I think about Jeff and his co-workers. I never saw them again, of course. They moved us to our new home and then went back to their old home. I just hope that each time they return with their truck empty, the way the one we call the prodigal son returned with his pockets and his heart empty, someone is watching and waiting, read to fill the emptiness with that open love that impressed Jeff so much the first time he heard about it.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

I started this blog several years ago, when we followed the grandchildren to the “place of winter,” Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula [The UP]. I put that in the sub-title, “Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter, where life is defined by winter even in the summer!” [This phrase is explained in the post for March 20, 2014.] The grandchildren, though, are grown up, so in May, 2015 we moved “home,” to Bloomington, IN, where we met and married. It’s not a “place of winter,” but we are still in winter years of the life cycle, so I am still trying to understand what it means to be a follower of Christ in winter…

I tweet as yooper1721.

THE HEALING SEASON

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith for the Years of Winter… ©

Knowing that I loved baseball, and the Cincinnati Reds especially, and with spring training scheduled to begin, people thought they should talk baseball to me as I lay there in my bare hospital room. Any other February I would have been happy to talk baseball. But I had just found out that I was going to die. Baseball simply didn’t seem very important.

On top of that, a bunch of greedy billionaires [owners] was trying to keep a bunch of greedy millionaires [players] from playing ball at all if they kept insisting on getting a bigger share of the profit from $12 beers, or something like that. A lock-out was looming. Maybe there would be no spring training. Maybe there would be no baseball season at all.

That got my attention. Baseball was not so irrelevant after all. Baseball and I were in the same deserted dugout. We might die together. I suddenly cared. I did not want a lock-out, for baseball or for myself. I wanted a winning season. I wanted a healing season.  

I got the idea that if the season could go on, and if my team, the Reds, won, against all odds and history, since their last World Series title was in 1976, the era of The Big Red Machine of Johnny Bench and Joe Morgan and Pete Rose and Tony Perez, that I would get well.

It happened. They won their first game on opening day, and were in first place all the way through the World Series. Game by game, week by week, month by month, we went through the season together, the Reds on the field, me in the chemo room. We didn’t win every game. We had injuries and had to play through them. We sometimes missed bunt signals, sometimes failed to advance the runner. It was not a perfect season, but what a winning season! What a healing season!

When the season was over, I knew I was healed. I might not be cured, but I was healed, made whole. I did not know how long I would live, but that now was irrelevant. What mattered was the healing, and the Reds and I had played and won our healing season.

So I started to write a book, The Healing Season. It’s a good title, isn’t it, with its double meaning? I used the winning season of the Reds as the outline, week by week, month by month, noting the wins and losses and drama in Riverfront Stadium, but using those episodes to share what I had gone through in the chemo room and in my mind, and what I had learned about healing of the soul. It was a pretty good book, but it stalled. I had talked of many of the same episodes and insights in NOW THAT I HAVE CANCER I AM WHOLE: Reflections on Life and Healing for Cancer Patients and Those Who Love Them. That book was appropriate for any cancer patient or “those who love them,” not just those who appreciated baseball, not just those who followed the Reds. In fact, it might even be insulting and injurious to hopeful patients who did not get winning seasons from their teams. I mean, if you could not get healed if you team did not win, Cubs fans would be extinct.

The Healing Season will never get finished, for it was lost in the great computer crash of ’03, but every spring training presents another opportunity for hope for all of us who need healing. Maybe our team will win. And if not, “take me out to the ballgame,” anyway. That’s where the action is.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

I tweet as yooper1721.

NOW THAT I HAVE CANCER I AM WHOLE: Reflections on Life and Healing for Cancer Patients and Those Who Love Them, is published in two editions by AndrewsMcMeel, in audio by HarperAudio, and in Czech and Japanese translations. It’s incredibly inexpensive at many sites on the web.

Opening Scene-a poem

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith for the Years of Winter

It is the eternal opening

scene, a black umbrella

against the rain, a man

reading from a book.

[In the movies, it’s always

a man.] The camera pans

to show the black-

shrouded group, a little

boy in suit and tie,

a little girl in an open

slicker, a woman veiled

not enough to hide

the pain. When the man

stops reading, they trudge

to long black cars

and leave the coffin there.

Inside is what we call

the remains, and yet

nothing remains there.

The remains are in

the long black cars

going to their homes

to tell stories against

the rain…

JRMcF

johrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

I tweet as yooper1721.

DADDY ALL BROKE

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith for the Years of Winter… ©

We bought our first house, more correctly, we incurred our first mortgage, when our daughters were little girls. Being a young and low-paid home-owner means you need to do a lot of house maintenance yourself; you can’t afford to hire experts. I was never Mr. Fix-It, certainly not like my father and brother. They could do anything around a house, and do it well. I could do mindless things, like mowing grass and shoveling snow, but the things that require knowledge and logic are beyond me. Things like plumbing and electricity. And how storm windows work.

I think our windows were called “triple-hung,” meaning there were 3 tracks for screens and storm panels to slide up and down. I was trying to get the screen out of one of the windows, and apparently I had not pushed the heavy glass storm panel up out of the way far enough so that it would “catch.” My index fingers were hooked into little loops at the edges of the screen at the bottom of the window when the storm panel decided to become a guillotine. It happened so fast. I didn’t even know it was on its way down until I felt the scorching pain in the ends of my fingers.

I thought of all the bad words I had ever heard. I thought of all sorts of new combinations in which they might be uttered. None sufficed. There were no words to tell the pain.

It is hard to do anything when you can’t use your index fingers, when the ends of those digits are squashed flat, when they have turned purple with broken vessels and pooled blood. I could do nothing but sit on the sofa, in misery, with my fingers stuck into the air, signaling, apparently, “We’re # 11,” so that the blood could drain down.

Our three and five year old daughters crawled up onto the sofa on either side of my and one of them said, mournfully, “Daddy all broke.”

Well, it wasn’t “all.” In fact, the ends of my index fingers are a tiny fraction of my total body mass. But she was right. I was “all” broke. When one part of the body is hurting, it affects every other part. That is true with the Body of Christ, the church, and it is true with the body politic.

We don’t get better, in our pain and unhappiness, by damaging other parts of the body, too, by getting mad because we hurt and kicking out and breaking a toe, or swigging down self-medication and damaging our liver. We get better by healing the part that is broken, that makes us ALL broke, even if it is just a tiny part.

When I began to stroke the smooth little cheeks of the tiny girls who sat beside me on that sofa, when I turned my attention from my own pain to the reality of those I love and who love me, I got all well.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

I tweet as yooper1721.

My book, NOW THAT I HAVE CANCER I AM WHOLE: Reflections on Life and Healing for Cancer Patients and Those Who Love Them, is published in two editions by AndrewsMcMeel, in audio by HarperAudio, and in Czech and Japanese translations. It’s incredibly inexpensive at many sites on the web.

OFFENSIVE DISCOMFORT

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith for the Years of Winter… ©

Each Monday evening during basketball season, Helen and I eat supper with Terri Moren and Tom Crean, the women’s and men’s basketball coaches at Indiana University. There are 40 to 60 others folks there, too. It is the occasion of their radio show, hosted by Greg Murray, for Moren, and Don Fischer, for Crean.

Moren was hired only in August last year, just before the season started, with the abrupt departure of her predecessor. After just two years at IU’s helm, she is Coach of the Year in the B1G [Big 10]. Crean took a group that “couldn’t guard a chair,” in Dan Dakich’s phrase, to the number 11 team in the country as I write this, and an unshared and undisputed B1G championship. Those are good credentials. They know what they are talking about.

One of the things they talk about, often, is making the opposing offense “uncomfortable.” You don’t have to knock them down, throw an elbow, talk trash, but you have to “disrupt” them, which means making it hard for them to do what they want. If they want to “pass into the paint,” you get into the passing lanes. If they want to get rebounds, you block out. If they want to run a weave, you “hedge and recover.”

There are offensive people in our society. They say and do offensive things. If we let them get comfortable, they will carry the day. So we need to make them uncomfortable, disrupt their plays, get into their talking lanes, block them out. We don’t have to knock them down or talk trash, but we do have to disrupt them, make them uncomfortable, not let anyone think it is okay to be offensive.

There are offensive people inside of me. They say and do offensive things. If I let them get comfortable, they make me into someone who is not me. I have to disrupt them, block them out, not let them get comfortable in there.

I’m ready, Coach. Put me in.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

I started this blog several years ago, when we followed the grandchildren to the “place of winter,” Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula [The UP]. I put that in the sub-title, Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter, where life is defined by winter even in the summer! [This phrase is explained in the post for March 20, 2014.] The grandchildren, though, are grown up, so in May, 2015 we moved “home,” to Bloomington, IN, where we met and married. It’s not a “place of winter,” but we are still in winter years of the life cycle, so I am still trying to understand what it means to be a follower of Christ in winter…

I tweet as yooper1721.

My new novel is VETS, about four homeless Iraqistan veterans accused of murdering a VA doctor, is available from your local independent book store, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, BOKO, Books-A-Million, Black Opal Books, and almost any place else that sells books. $12.99 for paperback, and $3.99 for ebook. Free if you can get your library to buy one.

The Point of No Return-a poem

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith for the Years of Winter

The venerable Earl “Tank” Karr, Helen’s father, always declared that March 1 was the first day of spring, and so in his honor…

There is a place upon the map

Not really worthy

To be called a place

Just a dot, a point

Like the point of a needle

Where angels dance

If they become confused

And forget that should dance

Upon the needle’s head

It is called the point of no return

For when a silver plane

High above the waves

Is closer to its destination

Than the place from whence

It sprang to air

There is no reason

To try turning back

Even if your engine sounds

Like some silly goose

That ate a rancid fish

There is no point in turning back

If you are closer to the end

Than the beginning

So why do we keep yearning

For returning

When we are past

The point of no return?

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

I tweet as yooper1721.