Good Sharer

After I got married and before we had children, I used to joke that I hoped to have boys. My reason for this is that I wanted boys like their father. I used to say "I want to contribute to the supply of emotionally well adjusted men- there's a shortage."

Of course, once I became pregnant, I didn't care either way. Our first child is a girl (Shannon) and our second a boy (Jacob). They are both sweet, precious children, as I regularly tell them. They each have their own gifts and personality. And my son is so very much like his father. In his five years on this earth, I have never seen him refuse to share, especially with his sister. He is also thoughtful. If Jacob goes to the bank or anywhere there is free candy and Shannon is not there, he always asks if he can have one for his sister too. Then he takes it home to her. No matter who he is playing with or what he is eating, of someone asks for it, he shares it. Conversely, little else upsets him as much as when he feels denied a turn or if someone refuses to share with him.

Several weeks ago, he came home from school hungry. This is a regular occurrence because, he says, he is too busy talking to his friends to eat. He packs up what remains, brings it home, and finishes it here. So when he asked for a granola bar, I said "didn't you eat one in your lunch?" I could have sworn I packed him one. He replied "no." Then he modified his answer and said "well, actually, there was some confusion at lunch. Lee and I weren't sure if the bar came out of my lunch bag or hers, so Lee ate it."

I smiled. Of course Lee ate it. Because if Lee wanted it, then he would give it to her. That's his first instinct.

I feel like Jacob's generous heart is a gift from God. He regularly reminds me that it is truly more blessed to give than to receive. Sometimes I am simply awed by how God's grace is shown to me in the faces of my children.

Accidental Gardening

It has been an interesting season of gardening. As is typical for any garden we cultivate, it is currently composed of about 3/4 weeds with a few plants bearing produce mixed in. This is the natural result of avoiding the task of weeding.

This past autumn, we had also saved all of the leaves from our yard to use in our compost pile. It is working out well. We are just about through the leaves of last autumn in time for this autumn.

Because of the giant leaf pile that has lived in our yard this year, the area around the compost pile became even more overgrown that usual. Several weeks ago, I went out to dump kitchen scraps into the compost pile- a job my husband is far more faithful about doing often, God bless him. Imagine my surprise and delight to find acorn squash, butternut squash, and white gourds growing out of the pile!

I guess there is something to be said for letting nature take its course. Our compost pile may not be the most efficient, but it certainly does the job of recycling. And now it would seem that it also does a good job of planting an additional garden for us!

It feels like being surprised by grace, a physical manifestation of the truth that I see repeated over and over and over again in life: God is able to bring good out of piles of refuse.

Random Reflections on the week...

Well, I finally slogged through my back email. I have been struggling to get below the 150 mark for weeks. I finally got down to the bottom of the pile so to speak. I figured I would go for a final catch up move and write a blog entry! Joy!

I was honestly surprised to see that some of my back email went to DECEMBER. Yikes. Naturally, it was e-news stuff that is out of date now. Even more frightening: there are now 13 email floating somewhere in the distant past (before August 08) that are unread and I cannot find. Good grief. I love the gmail function of storing my email so that I can search for things later, but this is definitely the down side.

On a different note....
The leadership retreat on Saturday was truly a blessing. Twenty of us gathered with Anita Wood and used "Spiritual Exercises for Church Leaders" as a guide for the day. It is always a blessing to come together to draw closer to God and to each other at least annually with our fabulous leadership. I am so grateful to God for this community of faith.

More gratitude...
I am also grateful for the flexible scheduling that is my life. I overslept this morning (rather significantly! guess I am not 100% recovered from sinus infection yet) and I can work until 11p.m. to make it up.

It has been a week full of warmer weather, sunshine, and lots of grace. And I am grateful.

Bud: See you on the other side

I have been putting this off. Perhaps for me, blogging about Bud's service of death and resurrection is an act of finality, of reluctantly acknowledging that he has really gone on. (You may remember my post about Bud that I wrote shortly after he was diagnosed with cancer. To read it, click here.)

I say this because leading this service is much different from attending such a service. Crying profusely was not really one of my choices on Monday. I was deeply honored to be a leader in the worship service, and I would not have wanted it any other way. Yet, in order to do so, I had to be somewhat detached emotionally.

So, it's Saturday... and I have not blogged in quite some time. I have had other thoughts of things to blog about, but somehow, it doesn't feel right to write about anything else until I have written about Bud.

He had become like family to me. Over the past five years, Bud was my confidant, my mentor, and my friend. Bud thought of me like a daughter and I cannot imagine any higher compliment; the feeling was mutual. Over the years, he would hint that he hoped I would be the pastor here when he crossed from this life to the next. And each time, I would pray that Bud would live to be at least 95. Bud was 83 when he died.

Bud was one of the greatest visionaries I have had the privilege of knowing. Jack Shitama, who also led the service, aptly called Bud "president of everything." He was also one of the most faithful, righteous, fruitful disciples Jesus had. Bud knew what it was to love, to forgive, and to dream God's dreams.

I can hear his voice saying so many treasured pieces of wisdom. Whenever someone would upset me, he would say "now Amy, you just have to brush it off and move on. You cannot dwell on such things. It's not worth it." He knew how to walk that talk. As someone said at his funeral, very few people got mad at Bud, but if they did, he just kept loving them until they got over it.

I was overwhelmed by the thought of writing the sermon for that day. As usual, God sorted it out for me, and it just flowed out of my fingers in onto my screen. Bud's final witness was a powerful one: Bud had a good death. Through Bud, God showed us what it is like to face death unafraid. Bud kept hearing the Lord say "just trust me." That is what Bud did. He had no regrets, no fears...he trusted. (He did appeal to the Lord for several months for more energy, but even in the face of that unanswered prayer, he received it with grace.)

Bud did not even have any pain. The cancer that started in his esophagus and spread to his liver before it was diagnosed as end stage cancer did not wrack him with pain. He and Marilyn attributed that to the power of prayer.

One of the key concepts of Christian faith in the Wesleyan tradition is the understanding of sanctifying grace. This is the grace that we receive after coming to faith; it is the grace that allows us to become more like Christ, to become more holy. We believe that it as at least possible for a person to be entirely sanctified. That is to say, it is possible to be made perfect in love, to love as Christ loves.

It is not mine to judge whether Bud was entirely sanctified. Bud I can certainly say that if I were asked to name one person who I thought might fit the bill, Bud would be the one. He knew how to love, he knew how to forgive, and he followed Christ with complete devotion.

Bud passed peacefully from this side of the Jordan to the other. Even as I grieve the loss of his presence here, I am trying to hold onto the comfort of knowing that in Christ, Bud lives on.

See you on the other side.

God helps those...

...who help themselves. I expect that is what you thought of when you read the title, right?

I read an article a few years ago about this phrase. It made two interesting points. First, it is impossible to find the "saint" in Christian history who supposedly coined the phrase. Second, that this appears no place in Scripture.

The author of the article literally tracked through dozens of books and publications, tracing their footnotes, looking for the original source of this phrase. It had been credited to everyone from St. Augustine of the 5th Century, to John Wesley, the 18th Century founder of Methodism, to John Wesley's mother. All told, the writer found more than 20 different citations citing as many sources for this phrase, none of which turned out to be true!

The author went on to note that a survey of the average American walking down the street would probably be nearly certain that this phrase appears somewhere in the Bible. It does not.

He went on to make an excellent point: if anything, the opposite truth is found in Scripture. God helps those who rely on God. God helps those who cry out for help. God helps those who need grace. I think this is why the writer could not find "God helps those who help themselves" in any writings of saints. They all know that the opposite is true.

I was sharing this in a sermon two weeks ago. There is a family in our community of faith who have been doing amazing things with their elementary school age kids. They are teaching them how to get into worship in a traditional setting. They have begun reading and singing the hymns, and saying the prayers, and listening to the sermon, and even talking about the sermon later. (As you can imagine, this warms my heart and gives me great hope.)

So imagine my joy today when the mother emailed me to say that her daughter came home flustered from having a substitute teacher that day in school. Apparently, her regular teacher encourages students to help one another. (I think this is fabulous. What a great way to encourage team work, shared learning, and generally looking out for one another.) The substitute was not accustomed to this type of goings on in the classroom, and was fussing at one of the students for being helpful. The substitute used the phrase"God helps those who help themselves" in her admonishment.

The daughter came home and said "but Mommy, Pastor Amy said that is not true, didn't she?" And it opened the way for another conversation on the topic.

I visited with a grieving family today. I shared my thoughts on the importance of feeling emotions, and of teaching our children (especially our boys) that it is OK to cry, to feel bad and sad and angry and guilty and all of the things that accompany things like an untimely death. How much better would the world be if we stopped pretending that we humans have no vulnerabilities, that "God helps those who help themselves" and instead live in the truth that God helps those who cry out for help?