HOPE IN DARKNESS [poem]

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

In the darkness of this morning hour

my vision of the day

is filled with hope.

Yet I know that with the dawn

comes worry,

aches of body, mind, and soul,

concerns for others,

and for my own slowly slipping

footing in this world.

Evil hides in night time, true,

but it brazens forth in daylight,

swinging the sword of power

with lies and swagger,

chanting holy verses as it strides.

Do not despair because of darkness.

In the darkness before daylight

there is hope.  

John Robert McFarland

jmcfarland1721@charter.net

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! [This phrase is explained in the post for March 20, 2014.]

You don’t have to bookmark or favorite the CIW URL to return here. Just Google Christ In Winter and it will show up at the top of the page.

I have also started an author blog, about writing, in preparation for the publication, by Black Opal Books, of my novel, VETS, in late 2014 or early 2015. http://johnrobertmcfarland-author.blogspot.com/

I tweet as yooper1721.

COUNT DOWN-a poem

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

Life is not lived forward

Not really. It is lived backward

counting down

The most famous count-down

was from your mother

who gave you to the count of three

or else

We shared a whole new world

by counting down

with the astronauts

to blast off

We count down to children

and grand-children

I counted down to retirement’

for four and one-half years

Of all the species

only humans

have brains that can imagine

the future, counting down

I have one more count-down

to blast off

It started the day I was born

But I do not know the number

from which it began…

John Robert McFarland

jmcfarland1721@charter.net

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! [This phrase is explained in the post for March 20, 2014.]

You don’t have to bookmark or favorite the CIW URL to return here. Just Google Christ In Winter and it will show up at the top of the page.

I have also started an author blog, about writing, in preparation for the publication, by Black Opal Books, of my novel, VETS, in early 2015. http://johnrobertmcfarland-author.blogspot.com/

I tweet as yooper1721.

FOOTBALL PERFECTION

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

As I watched the Florida State-Notre Dame football game last night, I thought of all the problems FSU has had with star quarterback, Jamies Winston [charges of shoplifting, rape, and public obscenity] and of FSU’s history of such players. That sort of thing didn’t happen under Coach Darrel Mudra.

He had been fired at Florida State after only two years, for not winning enough games fast enough, even though he won more his second year than his first. Eastern Illinois University was glad to pick him up.

The year before, the EIU panthers had won only one game. In Mudra’s first year, they won the national championship.

His career record was 200-81-4, 70.9 %. He’s in the national football hall of fame. His nickname is “Dr. Victory.” His expertise and reputation were in taking long-time losing programs and turning them into winners. That’s why FSU hired him. Despite all that, FSU gave Mudra only two years to turn their floundering program around.

Bobby Bowden, who succeeded Mudra at FSU, has said that it was Mudra who really turned FSU football around and made it possible for him to win.

Mark Dantonio, the hugely successful coach at Michigan State U, says that there is no secret to football success. “You recruit one good young man at a time. You help them become better persons, academically, socially, relationally. As they become better persons, they become better players.”

It takes more than two years to turn good young men into better young men. It takes even longer to take young men who have never been expected to be good and get them to see that being a good football player is not as important as being a good person.

It takes a long time to turn anyone into a good person.

Darrel Mudra attended worship services at my church when he coached at EIU. I was a long distance runner in those days and often used the mile-long woodchip trail around the university athletic fields, including the football practice field. Sometimes Coach Mudra would be standing under a tree, watching practice from a distance, as I ran. I’d stop and chat and give him tips, the way people who know just a little about something like to advise folks who know a lot about it.

A number of the football players came to church, too. I asked them about Coach Mudra, who was famous for always coaching from the press box, not on the field. “He hardly ever talks to us about football,” they said. “He asks us what we want to do with our lives, what our goals are, who we want to be.”

One of the questions Methodist preachers are asked as they apply for ordination is: Do you expect to be made perfect in this life? It’s from John Wesley’s “Doctrine of Christian Perfection.” We are not expected to be perfect in knowledge or ability, but we are expected become perfect in love, to be good people.

Wesley said that perfection in love is the work of a lifetime, but it is what God expects of us, not just to be good players, but to be good persons.

On this Sunday morning, I give thanks for the coaches who help us become better persons, and trust that in the process we shall become better players.

John Robert McFarland

jmcfarland1721@charter.net

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! [This phrase is explained in the post for March 20, 2014.]

I tweet, occasionally, as yooper1721.

Running Away to Home

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

The knock on the back door of the parsonage. Helen answered. An awkward and somewhat embarrassed couple stood there. They wanted to see the preacher. I got up off the sofa, reluctantly, shoeless, and went to the door. As soon as Helen was out of ear-shot, they announced that they wanted to get married, and needed to do it quickly.

Great. Another run-away couple wanting to get married. They weren’t the first, and they wouldn’t be the last. I told them to walk over to the side door of the church building while I got my shoes on. They said they would rather wait behind the house, where they could not be seen from the street.

After I got my shoes on, they almost ran from parsonage to church building. I was hard-pressed to keep up with them. Once in my office, they explained that they had just that morning decided to get married and needed to do it before their families found out.

I said I could not marry them without a marriage license. The woman produced one out of her purse. I asked why they had a license if they had just decided that day to get married, since our state had a three day waiting period. They did not hesitate to say that had given the clerk an extra twenty dollars to backdate the license by three days. I wasn’t surprised. That was the way business was done in our county.

“Why are your families opposed to your marriage?” I asked.

“Our kids are just selfish,” they replied. “All they think about is money. They are worried about inheritance. But we’re in love.”

I was only twenty-five, and anyone over forty looked about the same to me, so I probably overestimated their age at sixty. They may well have been only fifty or so. They were nicely dressed, polite, well-spoken… and scared.

“They’re out looking for us right now, the kids are,” they said. “We’ve got to get married before they find us. If you can’t do it, we’ve got to get out of here quick and find somebody who will.”

I didn’t have much time to decide how to handle this. I’d had similar requests before, but they came from teen-agers. I felt comfortable dealing with them. But these were people the age of my parents. Surely they were old enough to know what they were doing and to have the right to marry. Didn’t love come ahead of inheritance? What right did their selfish children have to keep them apart?

Also, I’ve always had trouble saying “no,” especially to people on the run. I would have been great as an underground railroad operator.

So I got Helen to come over to witness, along with the part-time janitor, who just happened to be in the building, and stood them up in the chancel and married them. They hurried off, and I never saw them again.

I won’t detail all the problems with this event, and the way I handled it. You can figure those out easily enough. Remember, though, that you are not twenty-five and dealing with people the age of your parents. So I make no apologies. I’m sure I’d do it again, even though I’m older and wiser now.

I’m pro-marriage. Not everyone should marry, not everyone can marry, not everyone should stay married, but if you want to marry, love should come before law. Laws, and in-laws, should help people marry the one they love, not keep them from doing so.

If you want to get married, just go knock on the back door of the parsonage. Thankfully, though, I don’t live there anymore.

John Robert McFarland

jmcfarland1721@charter.net

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! [This phrase is explained in the post for March 20, 2014.]

I tweet as yooper1721.

The End of the Stories

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

Today I threw three thousand 4x6 note cards into the recycling box, and another thousand 3x5 cards I used for indexing the 4x6s.

I made them, one by one, over 50 years of preaching. On each was an “illustration,” a story, for use in preaching or writing, about the time “the Lord called the rat home,” and Will McLaughlin at the great Iroquois Theater Fire, and grandson Joe learning to tie his shoes during a worship service.

For years I have known this day would come. I was sure it would be one of the hardest things I ever did. It wasn’t. The time had come to let go.

I assumed it would be hard because the stories on those cards are, at least in some ways, the story of my life. But my life is no longer preaching and writing.

I thought about giving the cards to some young preacher, but young people don’t use things that are written by hand on cardboard. They certainly don’t tell stories about one-horse farms, and World War II, and going into the stacks at the library to look up a reference, and my children and grandchildren. Those are the stories told by a man who preached in a different way, in a different time.

I remember well the first of those cards. It was just before my junior year at IU. I attended “The School of the Prophets” at Depauw U, in Greencastle, IN, lectures and workshops for Methodist ministers in Indiana, long before seminaries provided continuing education for ministers. For me, though, it was not continuing education, it was first education. I had been preaching for a year, at three little hamlet churches, Solsberry, Koleen, and Mineral. I was out of material. I needed all the help I could get.

I got it especially from Webb Garrison, who led a workshop on preaching, and told about how he wrote down on 4x6 cards each thing he heard or came across that might be a sermon illustration, and put them in a shoe box, since it was the right size and didn’t cost anything. He said that if you cut something from a magazine, you should put it onto a card with rubber cement instead of tape or library paste. I had a shoe box. I bought rubber cement and 4x6 cards. On the way to Depauw I had seen a road sign for a combination service station-café that proclaimed, “Eat At Salty’s and Get Gas.” I thought that would be a marvelous illustration. I wrote it down on a 4x6 card and put it in the shoe box. I was in business. I was a preacher with a box of stories.

Sooner or later you have to let go of even the most important of your artifacts. But that card was the last one that went into the recycling box this morning.

John Robert McFarland

jmcfarland1721@charter.net

The “place of winter” mentioned in the title line is Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where people are Yoopers, a word in the new Merriam-Webster dictionary, and life is defined by winter even in the summer! [This phrase is explained in the post for March 20, 2014.]

I tweet as yooper1721.

Everybody Say Amen Tonight [song]

I haven’t written anything for Christ In Winter for a long time. I realized I was writing out of a sense of obligation rather than joy, and that writing for others was keeping me from doing the soul work of old age that must be done within, silently, rather than externally, in broadcast style.

But I came across this song I wrote some time ago, and I thought you might enjoy it…

It starts with a prayer

And goes on from there

Right away you have something to share

Will anybody say Amen tonight?

This is the day

That the lord has made

Get out of the heat and into the shade

Let’s everybody say Amen tonight

Everybody sing

And everybody shout

We’ll drive that gloomy devil out

Everybody say Amen tonight

The road is narrow

The road is straight

There’s no room on that way for hate

Everybody say Amen tonight

The lord will provide

for us somehow

All we need we’ve got right now

Everybody say Amen tonight

Stay right here

With a prayer and a grin’

You must be present if you want to win

Everybody say Amen tonight

I’m a sinner’

You are, too

God’s still got some work to do

Everybody say Amen tonight

I’m a fright

And you’re a mess

We’ve got some sins we’d better confess

Everybody say Amen tonight

It’s sure fun

to have some gold

But it won’t hug you when you’re old

Everybody say Amen tonight

Praise is good

Praise is fine

But you also better walk God’s line

Everybody say Amen tonight.

When they lay me

Beneath the sod

I’ll still be in the hands of god

Everybody say Amen tonight

Leading a Romance Life

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

Black Opal Books has a sharing group for its authors. Since BOB will publish my novel VETS in 6 to 8 months, I’m in the group. BOB has up to now published only romance novels, but they are expanding into other genres, hence authors like me [or I, according to which sounds better to you.] Many of the most active contributors and tweeters in the group write paranormal romances.

I am acquainted with some romance writers, including Merline Lovelace --her real name, but one a romance writer should choose if it were not her real name. [She was a colonel in the Air Force before retiring to write romance.] I don’t, however, read romance novels because I don’t need to; I live a romantic life.

Twitter doesn’t understand that, though, and since I “follow” the other authors in the BOB group, Twitter is constantly suggesting non-BOB paranormal romance authors, and romance writers in general, for me to follow.

“Following” sounds a bit too much like stalking, although young people use “stalking” as any attempt to gather information about someone, such as I’m “stalking” Thomas Jefferson if I Google Monticello.

In many ways, it makes sense for Twitter to suggest that I follow paranormal romance writers, but not for the reasons Twitter assumes. I am a Christian, a follower of Jesus, a communer with God, a mystic experiencer, absorbed in the Holy Spirit, a child of the world for which God provides and continues to create, a follower of one who has risen from the dead but is still among us in Spirit. That is surely a paranormal romance.

So I guess the first writers of paranormal romances were Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. In “following” them I am “stalking” Jesus. I’m sure he’s cool with it.

John Robert McFarland

jmcfarland1721@charter.net

The “place of winter” mentioned in the title line is Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where people are Yoopers, a word in the new Merriam-Webster dictionary, and life is defined by winter even in the summer! [This phrase is explained in the post for March 20, 2014.]

You don’t have to bookmark or favorite the CIW URL to return here. Just Google Christ In Winter and it will show up at the top of the page.

I have also started an author blog, about writing, in preparation for the publication, by Black Opal Books, of my novel, VETS, in late 2014 or early 2015. http://johnrobertmcfarland-author.blogspot.com/

I tweet as yooper1721.