Of morning songs and evening prayers

Dan, Wendy and their three daughters, Lily, Chloe and Em are back in the states looking for a home and jobs. For the past four years Dan has been pastor of an English speaking church in Beijing, China. It has been a grand adventure and an opportunity for the whole family to become a part of another culture. Dan loves being a pastor and hopes to find a church where he can exercise his gifts. Wendy, fluent in Japanese, with experience in the corporate world, would love to find work, too. Dan has been our friend since his days as a student at the seminary where Michael was a professor. Now he and his family are here at Montreat doing camp for the girls and themselves as they seek to find their new home.
Sitting on the deck last night, we were watching the sunset and the moonrise. Venus shone brightly as the stars began to appear. The moon was wreathed in a mist and the air was cool and damp. As we sat, my heart settled down and my soft evening prayers began to fly upwards toward the brilliant gilt edged clouds. It had been a hectic day full of work and traffic jams of many kinds. I felt frayed and tattered but the evening sounds and sights worked their magic and I began to see and hear the world around me uncluttered by a need to do anything or go anywhere. Swifts were flying through the air gathering their evening meal and they were soon joined by the bats dining on mosquitoes.
I gave the girls wide mouthed Mason jars so they could catch fireflies. Dan and Wendy spoke of the pollution, the brown hazy air that surrounds Beijing and the ambient light that blocks out the starlight. The saddest thing to me, however, was not pollution (we have our share) or the lack of starlight (go to any large city here) but the loss of songbirds. Mao ordered all the songbirds in the city killed during his tenure as ruler of China. There are no songbirds in Beijing.
Every morning during spring, summer and fall, we wake to the sound of birdsong. The rooster is not the only one with a morning composition to sing. Cardinals, bluebirds, indigo buntings, wrens, finches, even the brash caw of crows give us a sweet transition from sleep to waking. I cannot imagine a world without songbirds... morning sounds that do not include songs that are sung for pure joy by creatures other than us.
From our beginning times, when God said, “...let birds fly above the earth... and let birds multiply upon the earth...” we have had winged song slip sliding through the air that surrounds us, often unheard and unnoticed, but there nonetheless. I am reminded that the voice of God can be heard singing in these multicolored creations that exist as pure pleasure in a world of utility and multi-tasking. Give me ears to hear today, Lord, the songs you send me. Let me lift my voice in song to join birds in praise to the One who gave me life and breath and joy in living. Grant me a heartsong that is as pure and joyful as the morning hymns sung by the birds, Lord. The old hymn is right, Abba...How can I keep from singing?

Of rifles and romance...

Daddy gave me my first lesson in shooting the rifle when I was nine or so. I learned how to load the gun, clean it, hit a target and basic safety rules. The Sunday afternoon practice sessions were utilitarian as well as fun. A gun on the farm was a tool just like other tools in many ways. The tractor and pick up truck I learned to drive were also tools that helped with farm work. The rifle was a necessity sometimes, not pleasant but required. A rabid raccoon, a dying cow, a rattlesnake, butchering animals for meat... the rifle was used to end life and we knew it. There was no romance attached to the firing of the rifle.
Daddy kept the rifle in the back corner of his bedroom closet, unloaded. The bullets were in the top drawer of the chest. If he needed to shoot coyotes threatening the baby calves, he had to load the single shot rifle on the run. I don’t know that he ever hit a one of them but he surely scared them off.
As our agrarian roots have disappeared from the life experience of the majority of us, the fascination and unreal romance with guns seems to be exploding (pun intended). Television shows, movies, and video games show a no muss-no fuss approach to the life and death power of real guns. Albert Schweitzer’s reverence for life has been replaced with a reverence for firepower. Everyone has the constitutional right to own an AK47, it seems, even if it defies common sense. The bigger the gun, the faster it fires, the safer we are. I beg to differ.
Guns have never ensured one’s personal safety. Occasionally they protect from personal attack or home invasion or robbery. But, more often than not children die from accidental shootings because Daddy has guns and the children are playing with them. Or an “unloaded” gun goes off and a friend dies. No one living in a three bedroom suburban home with children “needs” an assault rifle. And if you are not a hunter or a farmer or in law enforcement, the gun is not a tool but an indulgence, a dangerous toy that needs supervision and training.
How is it, I wonder, that we need to take a driving test and get a license to drive a car but any fool can buy a gun as long as he passes the background check? A gun safety and training course should be required of anyone who wishes to purchase this instrument of death for that is what a gun does. It kills. If you skeet shoot or if you hunt... if you belong to a gun club and target practice at a safe location... if you collect guns like others collect china dolls...you use a gun that can kill. There is no inherent sin in owning a gun or in using a gun, but there is cowardice in ignoring the truth about guns.
Pretend guns, pretend violence, pretend blood, pretend death, pretend life... there is no safety in gun numbers. My help comes from God who made heaven and earth, my shade by day and the one who keeps me all the days of my life. Naive? Perhaps. But then I serve the one who urged his followers to turn the other cheek and forgive seventy times seven. No mention of guns or spears in Jesus’s plan of salvation. We’ll keep Daddy’s old single shot rifle for the true life and death crises on the farm. We will not depend on the illusion of safety to be found in gun ownership but we will depend instead on the One who in life and in death is never separated from us. Thanks be to God for life beyond life and death that is not the final answer.