GOD STAYS AND PLAYS [R, 12-21-17]

{I post this every year, and it seems a good way to end 2017, so I’m taking a Christmas break. See you back here next year, “the Lord willin’ and the creek don’t rise.”}

As Christmas approached when our granddaughter was four, she said to her mother, “You know, Santa and Grandpa are a lot alike. Santa has a bald head, and Grandpa has a bald head. Santa has a white beard, and Grandpa has a white beard. Santa brings toys, and Grandpa brings toys. But Grandpa is better, because he stays and plays.”

That is the message of Christmas, I think, that God is not just some Santa, making a fleeting stop on the roof to throw a few goodies down the chimney. In Jesus, the Christ, God stays and plays.

JRMcF

I HEARD THE TRUTH ON CHRISTMAS DAY [W, 12-20-17]

Christ In Winter: Reflections On Faith From A Place Of Winter For Years Of Winter…  

           

{A repost. I first posted this in 2010}

It’s Christmas, almost, and I miss my friend, Phyllis, for it was at Christmas time that I first met her, when we were both ten years old. I miss her especially when I hear “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.”

My family had moved from the working-class near-east side of Indianapolis to the country near Oakland City in March. Phyllis and I were both in fifth grade, but I didn’t meet her until Christmas time. I was in 5-A, kids who started school in January, and she was 5-B, kids who started in Sept. She lived in town and I rode a school bus. And we went to different churches.

I went to Forsythe, an open-country Methodist church. Phyllis’ father, Jimmy Graham, was the pastor at Oak Grove General Baptist Church, a mile down the gravel road from Forsythe. Those churches held different theologies, but we shared a common culture, and so we also shared a common VBS and Christmas program. It was at that shared Christmas program in 1947 that I met Phyllis.

After the little children had “said their pieces,” and the older ones had sung a carol in a rag-tag choir, there was an excited stirring, especially among the Methodists, who were not used to excitement in church, at least not of the Baptist kind. Everyone looked to the back of the church. Striding confidently forward, holding an accordion almost as large as she, came this skinny little girl. She stepped up onto the platform, worked the bellows, and began to sing, with the deepest, fullest voice I had ever heard. Her song was “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day,” Longfellow’s 1863 poem, written in the midst of the Civil War, later set to John Calkin’s music.

I had never before heard a song like that, or a voice like that. It seemed like I was in the presence of royalty, or perhaps twelve-year old Elizabeth Taylor in “National Velvet,” or Margaret O’Brien in “Meet Me in St. Louis.” [1]

I say that I met Phyllis then, but she didn’t meet me. Because of different grades and buses and churches, we didn’t really meet until we were freshmen in high school. We met then because I was in the girls’ biology class.

I was a mid-year student, and worked on the school newspaper and sang in the choir. In a small school, with limited class offerings, that meant a confused class schedule. As a freshman, I had the second semester of “Commercial Arithmetic,” without benefit of the first semester, with mostly junior girls, and since I was otherwise scheduled during the boys’ biology class, I was placed in the girls’ class, taught by Iva Jane McCrary, the “old maid” home ec teacher. [2] Phyllis and I sat across a big sewing table from each other. Phyllis was quite pretty and very smart, which meant that I could look at her or her test paper and expect erudition in either case.

The high point of freshman biology was learning about “human reproduction,” which took two whole days. When those two days came, though, Sammy Kell and I, Sammy being the only other boy with a class schedule as eccentric as mine, were sent off to sit in the principal’s outer office during biology class, since we did not have the right mind-set, or equipment, presumably, to learn about human reproduction with the girls.

When I returned to class, I asked Phyllis about what I had missed. “I think you’ll still be able to have children,” she said.

In our sophomore year, Phyllis’ father took a church in Tennessee. I did not see her again until I was the new Methodist campus minister at Indiana State University and Rose Polytechnic in Terre Haute, just graduated from Garrett Theological Seminary, and she was a new professor of mathematics at Indiana State, having just received a PhD from Indiana University. Typically of Phyllis, she had done graduate work in math because she felt it was her weakest subject, thus the one in which she needed extra work to be a truly educated person.

Phyllis was pleased that I had indeed been able to have children, two darling little girls. She became a member of our family, a special aunt to Mary Beth and Katie, sharing meals and picnics and friends. 

The Wesley Foundation did not have its own worship services, and as the new campus minister, I got to preach only once a semester at Centenary Church. By the time those rare Sundays came around, I had a lot of ideas and passion stored up. Those were Sundays when Phyllis became a Methodist. After one of those sermons, she waited until everyone else had filed past me at the door, then reached up and grabbed me by the top of my robe and pulled me down to her face and said, “You don’t know it yet, but when you’re in that pulpit, you’re something special. People will believe what you say just because of the way you say it. So you make damn sure you say the truth.”

So, in memory of my friend, whom I miss especially at Christmas time, I will say the truth, in the words of William Wadsworth Longfellow:

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:

‘God is not dead nor doth he sleep.’

The wrong shall fail, the right prevail

With peace on earth good will to men.’

May the peace of God be with you,

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

I said “place of winter” when I first posted this because we lived in Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where winter is 13 months long…

[1] I had a special crush on Margaret O’Brien because I had seen a photo of her holding the same fifth-grader reader I used at Lucretia Mott Public School # 3 in Indianapolis before we moved to our little farm near Oakland City. Interestingly, at least to me, Margaret shares a birthday with the late Joe Frazier, the baritone of the Chad Mitchell Trio and Episcopal vicar in Big Bear Lake, CA

[2] I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but I think her actual title was Old Maid Home Ec Teacher. I don’t think they put that under her picture in the yearbook, but that’s the way she was always known.

DEATH BEFORE CHRISTMAS-a poem [T, 12-19-17]

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

DEATH BEFORE CHRISTMAS-a poem     [T, 12-19-17]

The lady down the street

has died, two weeks before

Christmas. Her children

are clearing out her house.

They have thrown her Christmas

tree along the curb,

still green, but on its side,

in dirty snow, stripped

of its festive trimmings, ‘cept

for straggly tinsel, and one

small, missed ornament,

a smiling angel, peeking

low, through branches that will soon

turn brown.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

This is a repeat from 12-14-14.

I tweet as yooper1721.

WARMED BY MEMORIES [M, 12-18-17]

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

[I wrote this reflection one December, when we still lived in Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. As we always said, it’s a few miles north of the end of the world. Thus staying warm was a problem and a preoccupation for most of the year. I don’t know why I didn’t get around to posting this until after we moved away.]

WARMED BY MEMORIES       [M, 12-18-17]

I washed up last night’s dishes while the coffee perked. Now the sofa, fireplace flames dancing, first daylight dappling through the pines. First reading is a Psalm, then a Gospel pericope, [1] then a chapter or so from one of the OT prophets and from one of the other NT books. After I have read from the scriptures, I read some Marcus Borg or Anne Lamott or Philip Yancy.

I plugged in the light bar for Helen’s snow-covered village on the mantle. Why do people put little snow-covered buildings inside when all we have to do to see a snow village is look out the window? I think it’s so we have some control. That big white world outside the windows does whatever it wants. We can’t unplug it when we go to bed. In winter, it’s nice to have some control of the snow and cold.

The real way we get control of winter, get warm in winter, is with people and memories.

We’ve been going through stuff to get rid of as much as possible so our children won’t have to. I rediscovered my copy of The Wesley Orders of Common Prayer, 1957 Methodist Student Movement edition. Each of us who attended the Quadrennial MSM conference in Lawrence, KS at Christmas break of 1957 was given a copy. We used them in worship at the conference.

John Wesley, in bobblehead form, nods in rhythm when I tell him that I have not yet gone on to perfection, as he requires, but that I’m working on it. He doesn’t look convinced.

There were about forty IU undergrads who went to that conference in Lawrence, some of around two thousand students from all over the world, who converged on the University of Kansas campus. Loyd Bates, our Wesley Foundation [Methodist Campus Ministry] director at IU, rented a bus to take us. It was an old passenger bus, a step up from a school bus, but not a long step. He had to drive it since he was the only one of us with a proper license.

Problem was-and we didn’t know it until we got started-the bus heater did not work. It was really cold outside, and inside, too. The windshield kept frosting over. We boys [Yes, we discriminated by gender back then.] took turns standing beside Loyd as he drove and using a scraper on the windshield ice so that he could see.

We didn’t have time to find a place that might know how to repair a bus heating system, so we stopped at the Red Cross in St. Louis and got blankets. They had only twenty blankets, enough for one to a seat. When I wasn’t scraping the windshield, I shared a seat and a blanket with a cute blond that I barely knew. Her name was Helen Karr. We weren’t the only blanket-sharing couple from that trip to get married.

I know Jim Brown and Jan Rossow did, too, because after we had returned to Bloomington, and Helen and Jim got into a car with some other kids to go north to their homes for the rest of the Christmas break, Jan and I, the ones going south, stood in the middle of 4^th Street and hugged each other and cried because we were going to miss the warmth of those seatmates so much. That is the way springtime love is, even if it’s in winter. [2]

It is good in the years of winter to remember the years of spring. They are not gone, not even over.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

1] MS Word is not comfortable with theological language. It tells me that pericope [a set of sentences or verses that form a natural unit] is a misspelling and suggests I change it to periscope.

2] Helen took almost all her savings, $100, to pay for her trip to the Lawrence conference. Her little sister told people that it cost Helen $100 to get me to marry her.

I tweet occasionally as yooper1721.

I used to keep a careful index of topics and stories so that I would not bore readers with repeats. But that became cumbersome, and since this blog is primarily for folks in the winter of their years, I figure they won’t be able to remember if they’ve heard it before, anyway.

REMARKABLY INTERESTING UNREMARKABLES [Sun, 12-17-17]

Lyman Beecher and his wives, Roxana, Harriet, and Lydia [not all at the same time] begat thirteen remarkable children.

To a preacher on a Sunday morning, Arthur Beecher is more intriguing than his better known siblings, Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

He pastored the Presbyterian congregation in Elmira, NY for 37 years, on one-month calls. That is, the congregation voted EVERY month on whether to retain him as pastor. For 37 years!

The first month he was in Elmira, he was thrown out of the ministerial association for heresy. In the subsequent 37 years, he never missed a meeting of that association, but was never readmitted to membership. That strikes me as quite smart. He never had to furnish the donuts or serve as an officer.

One Sunday he was called down to Brooklyn when his famous brother, Henry, had to be out of the pulpit for some reason, maybe one of his infidelity trials. When it was announced in the service that Arthur would preach that day instead of Henry, many people got up to leave. Arthur jumped up and yelled, “Those who have come to hear Henry Ward Beecher may leave. Those who have come to hear the Word of God may stay!” Everybody sat back down.

There is no point to this story, except it’s Sunday morning, when I pray for preachers, and those who hear them, so Arthur comes to mind. I surely do wish I could have known him. Come to think of it, though, I have known some truly remarkable people, some of them preachers, even, who were remarkable because they were so unremarkable. They did nothing out of the ordinary, but day by day, in little ways, treated people with kindness and honesty. They met good times and bad times with faith and hope.

I think maybe our lives are not only better in quality but, yes, even more interesting, because of the lives of unremarkable people. And also Arthur.

JRMcF

John Robert McFarland

I especially like the name Arthur. I had a cousin named Arthur, after our grandfather, Arthur Harrison McFarland. Grandpa went by Harry, though, but I still like the Arthur name, in part, also, because of Bang the Drum Slowly [Mark Harris is the author] By any name, I love my grandpa, because we lived with Grandma and Grandpa in the Great Depression years, when I was little, and if my mother spanked me for some imagined infraction, Grandpa would go out into the back yard and cry.

LITTLE FISH WITH A BIG STORY [Sat, 12-16-17]

Dick Piscatelli was a “heart of my heart” sort of man. “We were rough and ready guys, but oh, how we could harmonize.” Dick liked to sing, but he was definitely rough and ready. A third generation Portuguese man in Boston, a construction worker.

When he met Carol at the shop where she worked, he was impressed. She was classy. She had graduated high school. She didn’t cuss. She wore skirts.

He asked her for a date, for Sunday night. She said, “No, I go to church on Sunday nights because I have to work on Sunday mornings.”

“Then I’ll go with you,” Dick said.

He was sort of Catholic, and assumed it was a Catholic church, not knowing enough about his “own” church, where he went only on special occasions, that they didn’t have Sunday night services.

It was a Methodist church. On the way home, Dick said to Carol, “I think God just called me to be a preacher.”

So they married, and went to college and seminary, and somehow from Boston got into the Central IL Conference of the United Methodist Church. [New England Methodism is very limited in number of congregations and many ordinands from there have to go elsewhere.] {1}

He was a good friend and fellow pastor. Even though I’m retired, Dick is still at it, pastoring in Williamsville, IL. Because of his pastoral concerns, he was a great supporter of my cancer book. I’m glad that the Lord work in mysterious ways, and that the Lord equips those he calls.

No point. I just think it’s a fascinating story. Oh, piscatelli means “little fish.” Dick Piscatelli may have done his work in small ponds [towns], but his is a big story, to live and to tell.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

1} Sphelczhek doesn’t deal with ecclesiastical words very well at all. It always changes pastor to pasture and doesn’t even have a clue about words like ordinands.

I tweet occasionally as yooper1721.

SLOW WORDS IN A FAST WORLD [F, 12-15-17]

REFLECTIONS ON FAITH AND LIFE FOR THE YEARS OF WINTER

I don’t like to talk on the telephone. I think it’s genetic. My brother is the same way. We communicate through our wives. They don’t mind talking on the phone. In fact, they seem to enjoy it.

It’s not exactly the talking that bothers me. I do fine if someone calls me, especially a grandchild. It’s the dialing, or punching, or saying the #, or thinking it, that gives me trouble.

I assume that just thinking the number is the next step in wireless technology. In fact, that “thinking” stuff to get it to happen is already here, especially for paralyzed folks. They look at a glass of water, concentrate, say without words, “I want a drink,” and the robot arm brings the glass and its straw to their lips. That is a marvelous thing for them to be able to do.

I’ve done some “thinking” action stuff along the way. When I was a long-distance runner, someone told me that when you get a side stitch, concentrate on it real hard and try to make it as bad as pain as possible and it will go away. Counterintuitive, but it worked every time.

I went for quite a while to Bjorg Holte, a deep-muscle therapist, the Pfrimmer kind, for stuck shoulders, always the problem part of my body [2^nd to the brain]. [1] That woman could get her fingers so deep into me that I thought she was coming out the other side! She taught me to move my blood around so that it would heat a body part so it would be more pliable to work on. I got pretty good at it. One day she jumped up and dashed to the sink and ran cold water on her fingers. “You burned me,” she said. I was sorry for Bjorg’s fingers, but I was also rather proud of myself. I had no idea that I had super powers.

However, as I was saying, when I so rudely interrupted myself, my telephone problem is initiating the call. There are a lot of obvious reasons why that might be, but I avoid thinking about the obvious. The problem with being a writer is that you want a reason that is esoteric and different.

My father did not talk on the phone, except in February, when we lived 750 miles north of him. Then he enjoyed calling Helen and telling her about how he had crocuses and daffodils coming up. Then he would laugh and laugh. Helen was always his favorite child, at least from the time I married her, and she was the one who did the most to care for him, by far, but he, too, did not initiate the call. He would wait until Helen called to see how he and Mother were doing, then tease her in his Hoosier farmer way.

So I’m a fan of new technology, if email and texting can be considered new. They keep me from having to “dial” the phone.

 I’m also a fan of old technology, like letters. I have two long-time close friends who have trouble talking on the phone because their brains have been subjected to strokes and now they can’t find words. Neither of them even knows what a computer is. So each week I write to them, say the things I would say if we talked on the phone, except with much better sentence structure and grammar. Whatever words I find, they can read those very well.

So what’s the point of this reflection? I’m not sure. I just like to tell stories. I’m not sure there needs to be a point, but I’m willing to let you find it if there is one. But I will say this: in a world where everybody is in touch with everybody else all the time, it’s good just to step aside once in a while, out of the flow of words.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

1] Bjorg came to the US from Norway when she was 20. She was a sculptor, a very good one. But, she said, “I realized I spent all my time by myself, in my studio. I needed something to keep me in touch with people. So I decided to become a sculptor of bodies. I was already a student of anatomy, for the sculpting, so the two go together quite well.”

ELI WHITNEY’S TERRIBLE INVENTION [R, 12-14-17]

I don’t know if kids learn about Eli Whitney’s terrible, slave-producing, child-laboring, family-breaking, war-causing invention anymore. I learned about the cotton gin [short for engine] in grade school, but that was right after WWII. We studied that sort of agricultural thing in school then, because the US still thought of itself as an agricultural nation. That had changed drastically during the war, when so many people were needed in city factories to make bombs and airplanes. We were no longer a nation of farmers, but our identity had not yet caught up with reality.

We didn’t learn about how nasty Whitney’s invention was, of course. Indeed, it was the exact opposite. It was a wonderful invention, we were told, this cotton gin, because it made cotton processing so much easier for laborers, and was a major motivator of “the industrial revolution.”

It was in 1794 that Whitney patented his gin. Not that it did him much good. He died impoverished, having spent what little he made off the gin, plus all the rest of his money, trying to get folks to honor his patent.

It was an easy patent to bypass, because it was so simple for anyone to make one of the gins. It was essentially just nails in a rotating drum. Run the raw cotton through and it takes out the seeds. It was easy for anyone, including folks who owned other factories, to say, “Well, it’s so simple I certainly would have come up with it on my own. It’s not like inventing the light bulb.” [It’s unlikely they would have said that, since Edison did not patent the light bulb until 1879, but they probably said something like it.]

Whitney’s invention was one of the major causes of the Civil War. Because of it, cotton fabric became much more plentiful and less expensive. Thus there was need for more cotton production. That was possible only in southern states, because of the weather. That required more slaves for the production. The African slave trade was winding down. The easiest place for cotton plantations to get more slaves was northern states. Previously, it was reasonable for a slave owner to buy whole families. You could use women and children in the house and men in the field. But now they needed only field workers, so that’s how long-established slave families got broken up, with only the men sold south to work in cotton. The anguish of broken slave families, as portrayed in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was a major motivator for the abolitionist movement.

When Lincoln met Stowe, he said, “So you are the little woman who started this great war.” [1] No, she was just a final step in the stairs to that great war. Eli Whitney started it.

One of the few things sociologist Garret Hardin has said that I agree with is, “You can’t do one thing.”

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

Much of the info above comes from Bill Bryson’s book, AT HOME

1] Most historians quote it as: “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.”

2] Until recently, school text books in South Carolina said that the plantation owners “imported agricultural workers from Africa” to work the fields. Slavery? What slavery?

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

I tweet occasionally as yooper1721.

THE FORGOTTEN WEDDING [W, 12-13-17]

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

[A repeat from 12-12-12]

           

It was the Sunday before Christmas. We’d had two good morning worship services. I was tired. I was sitting at the table in the kitchen, sans shoes and tie, gratefully full of lunch, sipping a second cup of tea, when the phone on the wall beside me blared more forcefully than necessary. I picked it up. A rather thin, small voice…

“Rev. McFarland, aren’t you coming to our wedding?”

A minister should not schedule anything on a Sunday afternoon. A Sunday morning is intense. It empties your brain out. By the time it is over, there is no room to remember anything that is coming up.

In over 50 years in ministry, I forgot two events. The first time I was supposed to be part of a panel discussion for an evening program at a church on the other side of town. It’s not too bad if one member of a panel doesn’t show. It’s definitely not good if the only minister doesn’t show up for a wedding.

It’s even worse if the bride is a scared teen-ager whose family threw her out when she told them she was pregnant.

I hadn’t known her or her boyfriend, but they came to me when her pastor refused to marry them. “People say, when there’s no place else to go, they come to you,” they told me. Now the pastor of last resort had forgotten about them, too. You can’t get much more forgotten than that.

I set a record for retrieving shoes and tying tie, and I flew out the back door. Helen was right behind me. Mary Beth and Katie, who were teenagers, were right behind her. Fortunately, we lived next door to the church building, and there was already a path shoveled through the big snow drift that always swept in and up between the back doors of the parsonage and the church building.

They were in the kitchen, the bulging bride, and her skinny husband-to-be, and the nervous teen couple they had brought along as witnesses. This was well before cell phones. When I had not showed up at 1:00 o’clock, they had wandered through the building and found the phone in the kitchen.

I led them back to the sanctuary. Oops. I had forgotten something else. After the morning services, we had prepared for the Christmas program that evening. The pulpit and lectern and altar table had been removed, turning the chancel into a large Akron-plan wrap-around stage. The chancel was bare.

But we were decorated for Christmas. Wreaths and candles and red ribbons, and a crèche set. They took their vows standing in front of the manger, part of a scene that said, “Love came down at Christmas.”

Every Christmas, the wedding I forgot is the one that I remember.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

***

The “place of winter” mentioned in the title line is Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where life is defined by winter even in the summer!

I tweet, occasionally, as yooper1721.

THE TRIAGE NURSE [T, 12-12-17]

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

Dr. Vucescu’s triage nurse called yesterday. Twice. Once for me and once for Helen. I’m diabetic, and I have a cold. Cold meds can affect blood sugar, so Helen had called the doctor’s office to see what I should take. It was the triage nurse who returned the call with the necessary information. Later, she called with information about what Helen should do about her dry throat. The triage nurse! I felt like I was living in an episode of M*A*S*H.

We sort of live in the 4077 M*A*S*H unit anyway. Each night at supper time we watch two or three episodes of that epic TV show, where the triage nurse, with a lot of help from Hawkeye and Trapper John and BJ, would dash from patient to patient, just in from the battlefront on a helicopter or truck, to see who needed help first and most.

Triage is the first level of care. If the triage nurse can take care of it, she does. If it is more than she is prepared to handle, she asks the doctor and gets back to you. The next step after that is the doctor herself.

I had no idea our doctor has a triage nurse. I know she has other nurses, the kind who stick you with needles. She also has a pharmacist and a phlebotomist and an x-ray technician right there in her office. It’s very efficient.

My doctor when I was a kid, Old Doc Ropp, as distinct from his son, Young Doc Ropp, had none of that stuff. He sat in an old swivel chair in his office, which was the room off his parlor, and asked you what was wrong with you. You told him that your nose was running or you had female troubles or your back hurt, and he would reach into a drawer of his desk and shake some pills into a little white envelope and hand it to you and charge you fifty cents, less if you looked like you didn’t have that much. Old Doc Ropp’s system was even more efficient than Dr. Vucescu’s. No need for a triage nurse. Old Doc Ropp was the whole shebang, from triage to coffin.

M*A*S*H was a very Christian show, despite Hawkeye’s, and most everybody else’s, lustfulness, and despite Father Mulcahy’s genial ineptitude. It was about inclusion, getting everybody well. The point of triage was not to decide who got left out, but who needed help the most. Even if the wounded patient was one of the enemy, he would go to the OR first, if that’s what the triage nurse saw as necessary. Even if they had to work all night, though, they would eventually get around to everyone.

I think of the church as the triage nurse of society, because Jesus says we are to help first those who need it most. In our society, though, those who need the help least get to go first, because Congress is the reverse-triage nurse. The church needs to do triage a whole lot better.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

Reader Alert: Old news ahead:

I tweet occasionally as yooper1721.

I stopped writing this column for a while, for several reasons. It wasn’t until I had quit, though, that I knew this reason: I did not want to be responsible for wasting your time. If I write for others, I have to think about whether it’s worthwhile for you to read. If I write only for myself, it’s caveat emptor. If you choose to read something I have written, but I have not advertised it, not asked you to read it, and it’s poorly constructed navel-gazing drivel, well, it’s your own fault. Still, I apologize if you have to ask yourself, “Why did I waste time reading

FLOWERS IN WINTER [M, 12-11-17]

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

Spring and summer are times of planting and of growth. Autumn is a time of harvest. Winter is the fulfillment of all the seasons past, a time to pull all the scattered pieces of seasons past into a final wholeness. In winter we still plant and cultivate and harvest, but in new ways.

When you live in a place of winter, where you dare not plant anything outside until after Memorial Day-or your new plants will be only memorials themselves after the freeze that haunts spring like a zombie craving the brains of vegetarians-you push the season forward any way you can, so a place of winter is a place of hanging baskets, that can be brought inside when a night is too cold.

The freezes are not the only pillagers of springtime. There are four-legged predators, too, that want to eat the fruits of your work. Rabbits and deer will munch anything you plant, no matter how much you paid for it. So a place of winter is a place of flower boxes, high on railings on porches and decks, too high for rabbits, and where deer will not venture.

Gardeners in winter years fret with the work but cannot give it up. They get down onto their knees and cannot get back up. That’s okay. If you have to stay on your knees, you can feel a lot of humility and do a lot of praying. But baskets and boxes give you room to plant and dig even if your knees won’t bend.

There is a growing season, even in winter, but it is for flower boxes and hanging baskets. There are predators in winter, freezes and deer and rabbits, that will devour your blooms if you put them out too far. Winter is a time to keep your flowers close, and to be sure they are not vulnerable to those that devour buds and blooms.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

The “place of winter” mentioned in the title line is Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where life is defined by winter even in the summer! I wrote this when we lived there 2007-2015.

GETTING OUT OF CHURCH TO GET INTO CHURCH [Sunday, 12-10-17]

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

Each time we have moved in retirement, I had to jettison some books. Usually a lot of books. Books weigh a lot, and movers charge by the pound. No point in paying to move a book you’ll never read or need again.

Books are precious to me, beyond their looks or contents. They represent a way of life and a way of getting into a wider world. So each time I let a book go, it was like losing a friend.

As the years and moves went on, that constant winnowing meant my library was smaller with each move. We were always moving into a standard house, though, so if I could not decide to part with a book, well, 75 cents per pound is a small price to pay for a good book.

This last time we moved was from a standard house to a small condo. In the house we had eight floor to ceiling book cases, which I thought was far too few. In the condo we would have room for only three. I could keep only the very most important of all those books.

So now I am reading those I kept, again, because the ones I kept were the ones I knew had been especially meaningful to me when I first read them. If they were good reading the first time, surely they would be helpful as I prepare for final exams.

Some of them, I wonder why I kept them. They are so mundane. Why would I ever have thought they were worthwhile? Others, though, open up the world again this time just as they did the first time. Such a book is Gunther Bornkamm’s simply titled, Jesus of Nazareth.

Published in English in 1956, Bornkamm was the gateway for later New Testament scholar-believers like Marcus Borg and Dom Crossan and N.T. Wright.

It was from Bornkamm that I first learned, and am learning again, that the Gospels were never intended as an historical account, a factual account, of the life of Jesus of Nazareth. The Gospel writers were not so much telling as experiencing, participating in Jesus’ interaction with the church.

That very word, “church,” misleads us now, because when we hear it, we think of what we know as “church” today. But in Gospel terms, church was simply a collection of people who were radically engaged with the earthly and risen Jesus. It was a spiritual reality. The Gospels are the written account of spiritual engagement, the record not just of the earthly Jesus but of the collision of these saints, as early Christians were called, with the incarnate God, the Christ.

In the culture at large and in almost all denominations, we decry the lack of unity in the church. But unity is a matter of spirit, not organization. As John Wesley said, “If your heart is with my heart, then give me your hand.”

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

Spoiler Alert: If you have read this column in the last 3 months, all that follows is old news:

I tweet occasionally as yooper1721.

In case you need to buy another Christmas present: Katie Kennedy is the rising star in YA lit. [She is also our daughter.] She is published by Bloomsbury, which also publishes lesser authors, like JK Rowling. Her latest book is, What Goes Up. It’s published in hardback, paperback, audio, and electronic, from B&N, Amazon, etc.

Speaking of writing, my most recent book, VETS, about four homeless and handicapped Iraqistan veterans, is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, BOKO, Powell’s, etc. It’s published by Black Opal Books.

LEGACY-a poem [Sat 12-8-17]

Now my only hope

my one desire

is to leave a legacy

of love

The ramparts stormed

the flags waved high

the confetti and parades

the big brass band

no one remembers

no one cares

including me

But the baby’s laugh

the lover’s touch

the friend’s smile

these I take with me

and these I leave behind

JRMcF

BAD COFFEE AND BAD PRAISE [F, 12-8-17]

Yesterday I wrote about bad coffee, and blamed it on the people who made the coffee machine. I had an encounter with the inventor of that machine about 25 years ago.

It’s a really good invention. It’s the machine where you put water in a reservoir and coffee in a basket. The machine pumps the water up from the reservoir and runs it through the coffee and it drips down into the pot, provided the pot is centered correctly. It even has a hold mechanism so if you need coffee really bad and pull the pot out to pour yourself an early cup, it won’t let the coffee drip out until you put the pot back in place, if you do it quickly enough. Makes really good coffee.

I was on the Board of Ministry of our conference. Candidates for ministry came before us, and it was our responsibility to decide if their call to ministry was genuine. The inventor of the machine came before us. We wondered why. He was sixty years old and looked tired. Why start working at a new job when you had made millions by inventing a coffee machine that was universally used?

Well, it turned out that he had made nothing off that invention. He worked for the company. They owned all his inventions and innovations. All he made was his salary. Except the company had decided it was making enough money it no longer needed him and so they praised him for his past work but said they had to “let him go.”

That’s such a nice euphemism, isn’t it, letting someone go. It sounds like you’re just giving them freedom… the freedom to starve.

So he now wanted to be a preacher, so he and his family would have a place to live-parsonage-and a way to buy food, even though a pastoral salary would be minimal, and not have to work very hard, since he really was old and worn out.

That’s not the reason he gave us, of course. He tried to create a story of “call,” but his heart wasn’t really in it.

After all the questions and answers and discussion, we sat there in awkward silence. We all felt sorry for him. No one wanted to turn him down. But it was clear that he did not have “the gifts and graces” for ministry, nor did he have the right motivation. He was a good coffee machine inventor; he would not be a good pastor.

As usual, or at least often, it fell to me to be the one with bad news. I started by thanking him for his work on behalf of all of us, pointing out that even the coffee we were drinking at that meeting came through his invention. Before I had gotten very far, with a sigh, he stood, heavily, and, without a word, walked out. He knew what praise for past work meant.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

I tweet occasionally as yooper1721. A “yooper” is a citizen of the upper peninsula of MI, where we lived for 8 years, and where I started this blog, as reflections on faith not only for the years of winter but “from a place of winter,” because the UP is north of WI and quite a bit of Canada, and winter is 13 months long every year. This morning, in southern Indiana, it is 16 degrees. I feel like a yooper again.

HOW TO GET GOOD COFFEE [R, 12-7-17]

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

 I’m drinking really bad coffee this morning. I’d complain about it, but I have no right to. I’m the one who made it. I like to blame others for my mistakes, but the best I can do in this instance is blaming the people who made the coffee machine.

I did not get the pot centered correctly. Thus all the flavorful parts of the coffee leaked out onto the kitchen counter as it “perked.” I was left with dark water to drink. I’m too parsimonious to perk another batch. Besides, I also believe in punishment for mistakes. Maybe I’ll learn via my punishment and get the durn pot centered correctly next time. So I drink this awful stuff and feel sorry for myself and self-righteous at the same time.

Still, the coffee machine manufacturers should have made the machine in such a way that it would not even try until the pot was centered correctly. They should have anticipated that old men-dazed by sleep and December darkness and dirty dishes they didn’t get done the night before-would not get the pot centered. So I’m going to blame them. The only alternative is to threaten to kill my roommate, and I don’t want to do that.

For one thing, if I did threaten to kill my roommate, it might give her too many ideas. Also, it doesn’t make much sense, since she was not involved in the coffee fiasco. That did not keep my father from threatening to kill his roommate in the nursing home, though.

That was not directly over coffee, although my father was always out of sorts over the nursing home coffee. He loved coffee, and that stuff they served there was truly awful.

For whatever reason, he told the nurse he was going to kill the roommate. She, of course, was required to tell the social worker. She, of course, was required to tell the administrator. He, of course, was required to send Daddy to the psychiatrist, and to call me to say he was doing it and why.

So, that night, I called my father to see how it had gone. “Oh, it was great,” he said. “Afterward, the social worker and I went out to Bob Evans for biscuits and gravy. And the shrink was great. We had a good time. I told him stories, and he told me stories. He said to come back any time I wanted. The best thing, though, was the coffee. The shrink had really good coffee. I think maybe I’ll kill the bastard again next week.”

At least, when I’m in “the home,” I’ll know how to get a good cup of coffee.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

I tweet occasionally as yooper1721.

I used to keep a careful index of topics and stories so that I would not bore readers with repeats. But that became cumbersome, and since this blog is primarily for folks in the winter of their years, I figure they won’t be able to remember if they’ve heard it before, anyway.

BORED TO SIN [W, 11-6-17]

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

For forty years, from when I started preaching until I retired, I tried to get out of the ministry. Not every day, but every once in a while. I probably thought about it every day, but didn’t actually try to do it except once in a while.

One such time was when Glen Bothwell was one of my church members. He was the CEO of a large industrial supply business in Chicago. I asked him for a job. He said he had an opening for a salesman and was willing to hire me, but he thought I should come to a sales meeting before we sealed the deal. The meeting was about selling a new insecticide. I have never been more bored in my life! I decided I could stick it out in ministry a while longer.

Glen admitted later that he chose that meeting because he thought it would change my mind, but that it was even more boring than he had anticipated. He said it made him think about going into the ministry himself.

I don’t think he was serious about that, but he would probably have been good in the ministry. I’m sure I would have been a disaster as a salesman of any kind, especially pesticides. I’ve always appreciated Glen’s thoughtfulness in exposing me to the boredom of his particular world.

Truth is, though, most of the church meetings I have attended were as boring as that sales meeting. I think the reason politicians are so nasty, hypocritical, greedy, egotistical, arrogant, unfeeling, small-minded, and self-serving is because they have to spend so much time in meetings. Committee meetings are a gateway drug to sin.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

I rarely agree with George Will, but I do think he was right on when he said that football combines the two worst tendencies of American life, violence and committee meetings.

THE DALLAS BIBLE [T, 12-5-17]

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

 When we lived in Dallas, while I was a student at Perkins School of Theology at SMU, and we ran a settlement house in a barrio neighborhood with no paved streets and no street lights, we visited a different church each Sunday morning. One day we went to Highland Park Presbyterian.

It was a huge church. Not as large as Highland Park Methodist, which had nine thousand members, but close enough to be intimidating to a boy who grew up in a church of 60 members. William Elliott was the preacher. He was called “Wild Bill,” not because he was wild—indeed, he was rather staid—but because every man in Texas with the name of William is called “Wild Bill.”

His sermon that morning was, supposedly, on the saying of Jesus in Mark 10:44-45: “Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

“Wild Bill” interpreted this, at some length, to mean that every man [1] in the church should aspire to be on the Session, to be a Ruling Elder. [2] That was how you were to be a servant of all, by ruling over all. Of course, it was “the same old same old” in terms of power and leadership-the first shall be first-but baptized to make it look Christian. If he were really preaching Jesus, he would have implored the Ruling Elders to go work at our settlement house.

Or, better yet, to go out to their limousines parked in front, usher their black chauffeur into the back seat, and ask him where they could take him for lunch.

Not everyone in that church had a limo with a black chauffeur, of course. But there was a reserved area along the curb in front, closest to the doors, where there were about six limos parked. Beside each stood a liveried black chauffeur, at attention, in the hot Dallas sun. The chauffeurs, of course, were not allowed to worship there, not allowed to come inside the building at all. I’m sure that the owners of those limos were Ruling Elders, or could be if they wanted to be.

That was how Jesus was preached in Dallas in 1960, and that’s how Jesus is preached increasingly in our nation today, twisted to put an imprimatur on “The Christian way is, those who have too much already should have more. That is how they are able to be servants of all.”

After all, “the poor we have with us always.” We have with us always also those who will twist Jesus, even on his cross, to justify keeping them poor.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

1] If women were to aspire, it would be to leadership in the Women’s Society, certainly not on the Session, where they would have power over men.

2] Presbyterian terms. The Session is the church board. A Ruling Elder is a lay member of that board, distinct from the pastor, who is a Teaching Elder.

THE POWERS OF ESTHER [M, 12-4-17]

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

 When we moved from Indianapolis to our little five-acre hardscrabble farm near Oakland City, IN, when I was ten, our closest neighbors were Hazel and Homer Heathman, and Ray and Esther Powers. They were about the same age then that I am now.

We had lived first at 230 N. Oakland Avenue in Indianapolis and then at 234. My classmates thought it was somewhere between strange and momentous that we had moved from Oakland Avenue to Oakland City.

The Heathmans lived up a little hill from us, the only other house on our gravel road. At our house the gravel gave out and narrowed into a dirt road that was more a wagon path than a road. This was long before roads had names like 43SW, or some such, Our road didn’t have a name, but people referred to it as the Heathman road. They had lived on it a long time.

They were wonderfully good neighbors. I would walk up the hill and ride to church with then in their light blue Desoto. When our well would run dry in the summer, as it almost always did, I would walk up the hill with a bucket, often two, and pump water at their deeper well. And Mr. Heathman saved a scholarship for me.

I did not know about that until 50 years after, when their grandson told me about it. Some years before, Oakland City College had gotten into more dire financial straits than usual. It’s always hard for a small liberal arts college sponsored by a small religious denomination [General Baptist] to make a go of it, but that time it was worse. Mr. Heathman gave them money to keep them open. In return, they set aside two scholarships for him to give to future students, especially his own family. He never mentioned it to me, but Jimmy told me all those years later that his grandfather had held onto one for a long time. “John Robert ought to go to college,” he said, “and he might need it.” I wonder if he were disappointed or relieved when I went to IU without ever knowing I had an OCC scholarship if I wanted it. [1]

The Heathmans were good neighbors, but I never felt close to them, never stopped to chat with them when I was there for water, to tell them stories of how school was going or what I was hoping for. Mrs. Heathman in particular was judgmental. I did not want to expose my stories and hopes to reality.

Ray and Esther Powers lived a mile away, over on “the hard road,” Indiana Highway 57. I had to walk a city block’s worth of dirt road to another dirt road, nameless, at the corner of the Heathman Road and Punch Knowles’ woods, and walk it over a mile to the highway.

There I turned north to go to play basketball with Darrel Guimond or Donald Gene Taylor, or I turned south to go to the little mom and pop grocery alongside the highway, which was about half a mile farther on, past the Powers’ farm.

We didn’t have any money for grocery stores. We raised what we ate on the farm. But there are things, like sugar, you have to buy, so sometimes, when we had a little cash, I was sent to the store on the highway. On the way, I passed by the Powers’ house. There I would stop and chat and get a cold drink from the ladle at their well on a hot summer day.

Mrs. Powers occasionally sent simple cookies home with me for my little brother and sister. Mostly they sat on straight chairs in their primitive wood-stove kitchen and listened to me tell stories. Sometimes I would give them play by play descriptions of some pickup basketball game I had played with Darrel. I told them about how I was going to be a newspaper reporter. They listened like it was important.

A year after Helen and I married, I went down home for a visit. While there I stopped to see the Heathmans and Powers, driving my new 1959 mint green Plymouth Savoy this time instead of walking. I had gained 30 pounds that first year of marriage. Helen had lost ten. She says that tells who was doing the work.

Mrs. Heathman took one look at me and said, “You’re fat!”

Mrs. Powers took one look at me and said, “You look so mature.”

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

1] Oakland City College survived very well. It is now Oakland City University.

Spoiler Alert: If you have read this column in the last 3 months, all that follows is old news:

I tweet occasionally as yooper1721.

I stopped writing this column for a while, for several reasons. It wasn’t until I had quit, though, that I knew this reason: I did not want to be responsible for wasting your time. If I write for others, I have to think about whether it’s worthwhile for you to read. If I write only for myself, it’s caveat emptor. If you choose to read something I have written, but I have not advertised it, not asked you to read it, and it’s poorly constructed navel-gazing drivel, well, it’s your own fault. Still, I apologize if you have to ask yourself, “Why did I waste time reading this?”

ADVENT ANGST [Sunday 12-3-17]

Today marks the advent of the season of Advent-anxiety for preachers and choir directors and seminary professors, as they fight their annual losing battle about when the Christmas season starts.

My mother-in-law, Georgia Karr, along about one o’clock on Christmas day--when all the flurry of Christmas shopping and wrapping and opening and cooking and eating was over—would sink onto the sofa and say, “There’s nothing as over as Christmas.”

“Not so,” her son-in-law preacher son would shout, although not loud enough for her to hear. “It’s only the beginning of Christmas. That’s why we sing about The Twelve Days of Christmas. Those twelve days start now. They end at Epiphany, what the Greek Orthodox Christians call Little Christmas, which is really smart because they can do all their shopping at the after-Christmas sales and often pick up used Christmas trees on a curb for nothing, maybe even with tinsel still on.” [1]

The Advent season, those four weeks before Christmas, is an occasion for much tension between preachers and church members. Preachers want to spend four Sundays singing preparation hymns, like “Come Thou Long-Expected Jesus.” Church members want to sing traditional Christmas hymns, like “Rudolph” and “Hark the Herald Angels” starting on Black Friday, which they acknowledge a good bit more than Good Friday. They don’t at all understand the idea of singing Christmas hymns after Christmas day. What’s the point of singing “Joy to the World” when we are already immersed in the joyless world of taking back gifts we can’t use?

But preachers persist, trying for some little glimpse of preparation for the birth of Christ that does not involve shopping for ties and sweaters and apps. Like Advent calendars.

I have always liked those Advent calendars that have a little door to open for each day of the season. Behind the door is a saying or scene that reminds us of what Christmas is supposed to mean.

There is a new reverse Advent calendar approach I like, too. Each day the person or family puts into a box some gift for those in need. That is perhaps an even better reminder of what Christmas is supposed to mean.

And we’ll still have an Advent wreath at worship, with a different candle for each week. People like that, as long as we sing “Silent Night” afterward instead of “Hail to the Lord’s Anointed.”

But now I am retired. I can just smirk as our preacher tries to explain to the little tots during the Children’s Sermon why we can’t sing Jingle Bells as the gradual hymn [2] until after they’ve had their Christmas day meltdown. When you’re old, you don’t worry much about singing the right stuff; you just want to enjoy the singing, whatever it is.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

1] One of my best Christmas memories is getting a really nice tree for nothing. I was walking home at noon on the day all the EIU students were going home for Christmas break. On the curb in front of one of the dorms was a perfect tree, placed there by some dorm director who did not want to deal with a dry tree when she got back from break. I ran home, got our pickup truck—the only one I ever owned, a GMC Royal Sierra 15, used but still classy, necessary in those years to transport our own daughters and their stuff back and forth to colleges—and dashed back to get that tree before any other Christmas miser could. Nicest tree we ever had.

2] So called because we are “gradually” working up to the high point of the worship, the reading from the Gospel. That’s the Methodist understanding, anyway. Catholics and Episcopalians are much more complicated about what a gradual hymn is and where it fits in the worship service

THE GENIE DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE [12-2-17; 1-13-16]

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

Helen and I are going to see The Nutcracker this afternoon. Anticipating it, I got to thinking back to other musical events we have attended. Since I am still trying to figure out what the message in the bottle really means, I decided to repeat this CIW from 1-13-16.

Bob Butts and Kathy Roberts [married to each other, despite the different last names] took us to a concert by Carrie Newcomer, the delightful Quaker folk singer. During one of her songs, I suddenly got an image of a gravel road I walked as a boy. In the image, I saw a blue glass bottle under some sumac in the ditch beside the road. I went down into the ditch and picked up the bottle, to look inside it, for bottles often contain messages. Indeed, there was a message inside, on a crumpled and dirty scrap of paper. It said, “The genie doesn’t live here anymore.”

So I wrote this song…

The genie doesn’t live here anymore

No, the genie doesn’t live here anymore

You can ask a hundred times

You can rhyme a hundred rhymes

But the genie doesn’t live here anymore

I was going down the road, on my back, a heavy load

I was wishing for a friend to lend a hand

I sent my wish up to the sky, and there came a quick reply

The genie doesn’t live here anymore

My feet were blocks of lead, sun was hot upon my head

I was wishing for a way to turn around

My life was feeling tragic, all I needed was some magic

But the genie doesn’t live here anymore

Wishes are like breezes, they have no hands to help along

As soon as you can make them they are gone

I’ll have to put my faith in God, and put my hand in yours

For the genie doesn’t live here anymore

           

The genie doesn’t live here anymore

No, the genie doesn’t live here anymore

You can make a hundred wishes

You can make them all delicious   [1]

But the genie doesn’t live here anymore

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

1] Do this line in a Burl Ives voice so that it doesn’t sound like I couldn’t find my rhyming dictionary. [2]

2] As Bruce Springsteen said about his early songs, “A young man with a rhyming dictionary is very dangerous.”]

I tweet occasionally as yooper1721.

I have told only two people that I am writing CIW again. Two others have told me they have found it on their own. Obviously, from the reader count that BlogSpot keeps, many others have discovered it, too. I’m not trying to keep it secret. I’m glad you are reading this. But if I announce that I am writing, I have to write interestingly enough that at the least I am not wasting your time. If I don’t “invite” readers, I can publish stuff like insipid song lyrics.

GETTING BACK TO MAMA’S HOUSE [F, 12-1-17]

I saw a video on Facebook of a black bus driver named Tiffany who saw a lost little five-year-old white girl wandering on the street. [The bus had a security surveillance camera.] Tiffany stopped the bus, invited the little girl on, sat with her until the police arrived. They took her home.

I had an experience like that, in Charleston, IL. I guess it was about a mile between my house and the Wesley United Methodist Church building. I was a long-distance runner in those days, and I often ran between the two if I were just doing something like picking up the mail and it didn’t matter how I looked.

Normally Jeanne Piercy, our office secretary, went out to the rural mail box on the street to pick up the mail, as one of the last things she did each day, since the mail was delivered late. But it was Thanksgiving vacation and the church office was closed. I didn’t like to let the mail sit all night in the box. It was a busy street and there was too much danger of vandalism and theft. So I had run over to get the mail and take it to the office.

Usually I cut across the Eastern IL U athletic fields to get to the church building, but it was dark already, and they were not lighted. I did not want to step in a hole or on a badger, so I had run on the sidewalks. As I started home, on 4^th Street, I came across two little black children, maybe two and three years old, holding hands, and carrying sand buckets.

I looked around for adults. There weren’t any. I approached the children slowly. A tall white man in a hoodie could be scary. I squatted down and said hello and told them that my name was John. I asked where they lived. They said, “At Mama’s.” That wasn’t helping much.

I figured the best thing to do was take them back in the direction from which they had come and hope that whoever must surely be looking for them by then would come across us. But there weren’t any houses down that way, just our church and campus ministry buildings, which took up a lot of space, and Arnold and Mary Hoffman’s house. I knew they didn’t have any little black children. [1]

I was herding the kids along the sidewalk when a car pulled up beside us. “What are you doing with those children?” A white woman I did not know, with a nasty voice. “Looking for their parents,” I said. “I’ll help,” she said, in an officious and suspicious way.

I was grateful for the help but not her attitude. Turned out she was a social worker and was quite sure I was kidnapping the children for perverted purposes. At least, that’s the way she acted.

I explained that I was the pastor of the church that was right there in front of us and that we should go into the building to call the cops. She was suspicious even when I pulled out my keys, ushered us all into the building and down the hall to my office, and got in with another key. There I used the phone to call the cops. She still eyed me with suspicion and stood between me and the children, which seemed rather frightening to them. 

Then I got an idea. Married student housing apartments were back a ways beyond our building. I left the children in the social worker’s care. I tried to give her a dirty look, like I expected the worst from her, but I don’t think I pulled it off. I went out the back of our building, onto our rather expansive parking lot. Sure enough, I heard a frantic-sounding woman shouting the names of children. I ran to her and told her I had found her children. She ran with me to the church building to get them. The social worker turned them over to her without a word but gave me the evil eye as she backed out of the building.

Yes, I was a little miffed at the social worker, but I understood her concern. I was a little less miffed at the mother for not saying a word of thanks to anyone, but I understood that even better. When you have gotten a lost child back, you don’t think about anything; you just sink deeply into joy and relief.

As the social worker drove away with her husband, I said, “You know, some day I’m going to tell this story, and I’m going to be the hero and you’re not going to look very good.” I’d like to leave it at that, but it’s not right to end a story about a family reunited with a smirk.

Even if you get more help than you need or want, it’s a good day when you can get children back to “Mama’s house.”

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

1] Arnold had played football at Eureka College with Ronald Reagan. When Reagan came back to Eureka while he was President, Arnold went up to the college for the celebration. He was sitting on the steps of the library when the president and his entourage went by. President Reagan looked up, saw Arnold, and said, “Hi, Hoffie.” “Hi, Dutch,” Arnold replied. That was the extent of their meeting that day, but I thought it spoke well for the president that after fifty or so years he recognized a fellow team member and automatically called him by his nickname.

May this be a happy month of Advent anticipation and Christmas gifts-given and accepted.