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Admitting When You Are Lost
Have you ever believed you had headed in the right direction and it turns out you went wrong? What then? How long before you stop and change directions? When I was pregnant with my third child, our young family went camping with another family. Two dads, two moms, two 4-year-old girls and two 7-year-old boys. Our friends had borrowed a large RV so that both families could travel together. Behind this monstrous bus, the driver dragged a Jeep for transportation once we got to Red River, NM. My family slept outside in a tent, beside their more substantial housing. Next day, piled into the Jeep, we headed up the mountain…
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“Do You Still Have Your Faith?”
In Jerusalem, an Englishman tracked me down inside a shop to ask, “Do you still have your faith?” This man had been standing in line next to my husband, somewhere else on a street in the Old City, waiting to exchange currency. When my husband told him that his wife was a seminary student, traveling with a group from the seminary, the man came looking for me. While I stood at a counter in a small, cramped shop with myriad items for sale, where a path wound through, just wide enough for a few shoppers at a time, his appearance startled me. This stranger somehow identified me from among others…
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How Memory Can Help You Heal
In Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park, the character Fanny Price plays the role of observer. Unpretentious, sensitive, and circumspect, Fanny has adapted herself to her subservient situation. Fanny gets treated as inferior by those around her. The author reveals through Fanny’s character her own commentary about other people in the story, composing a scene––a snapshot––of the characters, their interaction, prejudices, and indulgences. “This is very pretty,” said Fanny, looking around her as they were thus sitting together one day: “every time I come into this shrubbery I am more struck with its growth and beauty. Three years ago, this was nothing but a rough hedgerow along the upper side of…
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Hebrews 11: A Footnote to Stories
When asked what one book he would want if he were stranded on a deserted island, humorist, theologian, philosopher G. K. Chesterton said, “Why, a book on ship-building, of course.” Quick wit and clever answer, he answered a hypothetical question the way all questions based on conjecture should be answered. Only, I would want to be stranded with the book of Hebrews. If not the entire book, then at least chapter 11. This one chapter consolidates, illuminates, and reflects the entire Bible message. It’s actually a footnote to stories in the Old Testament. Beginning in Genesis, in chronological order, the writer of Hebrews starts thinking through the historical books, ending…
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Did Noah build the first door?
The first door mentioned in the Bible is metaphorical. “Sin is crouching at your door; and its desire is for you, but you must master it,” said God to Cain, the firstborn son of Adam and Eve. Sin revealed itself a dark and ominous evil when Cain murdered his brother Abel. Reference to the door of Cain’s heart, Cain had a choice. The rest of human history gets squeezed into three brief chapters in Genesis, a succinct commentary on the human race before the flood: God had had enough. [1] Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence. And God saw the earth, and behold, it…
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Be Yourself. Nobody Does It Better.
How did I get to be me when I used to think I wanted to be somebody else? When people told me I looked like Sally Field, I was thrilled by the comparison. When people told me I looked like my mother, I started to worry. Well, it’s easy to project onto someone you don’t know characteristics you wish you had. Also, it’s just as easy to see in someone you do know characteristics you don’t want. This explains my wishful thinking on the one hand and underlying anxiety on the other. When I ran into Sally Field in a hardware store in Encino, California, I asked her to sign…
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When the Unseen Becomes Visible
Once upon a time, when I did cross-stitch, I made 2 bell pulls––one for my mom and one for my mother-in-law. They both grew gardens of vegetables, plants, and flowers. They both had the proverbial green thumb. They both loved roses, my mother insisting that roses are not hard to grow. Right. The saying I stitched: “Who plants a seed beneath the sod and waits to see believes in God.” If people didn’t know that tiny seeds yield big plants, it would seem ridiculous to hope, much less conceive of the cycle of seeds to plants, all the phases of growth, and how something that looks dead yields life. Now…
