Patience, Peggy, Patience...

I graduated from the Pick Up Thy Bed and Walk School of Nursing. After two days or so, my well of compassion runs dry. When the children were small, they had to be bleeding badly or on serious drugs if they expected to stay in bed more than one day. This lack of patience I attribute to my gene pool… an impatient father and a brusque German grandmother. Lowliness, meekness and patience are not my strengths. With old age approaching, I need to develop my patient empathetic self. If Michael doesn’t need it, I will.
Daddy was diagnosed with myelofibrosis , a disease of the red blood cells, in his seventies. Initially, monthly blood transfusions restored his energy and he continued to live and work on his farm. Gradually the transfusions came more frequently and his world began to shrink until he lived primarily indoors. A daily ride in the pickup truck to the back of the farm, sitting in his chair reading the Wall Street Journal, keeping up with the Stock Market, going to church on Sunday… this was his life.
My father was not a patient man. My sister and I dreaded him “helping” us with our homework. As a driver’s ed teacher, he loomed over the hapless student (my mom, my sister and me) like a gargoyle ready to pounce on the slightest infraction. Putting out the hay for the cows had to be done just so or a bellow would rumble in your direction from the tractor. But during his last illness, I never heard him complain or whine. There was grief for life coming to an end, sorrow over unrealized dreams and patience. My mother says he grew sweeter, softer as his illness imposed limits.
I looked up “patience” in the concordance of my Bible. There was a small list of references, not as many as I expected. One phrase caught my attention from Colossians 1:12… endurance and patience with joy. Therein lies the challenge. Not only must I endure and be patient, I must do so with joy! Joy? Dear Lord… I have and can endure. I can be patient for a season. But to do so with joy seems impossible. I read on. Paul is doing his theological exposition with verve and vigor, instructing the faithful. Rejoicing while suffering seems to have been Paul’s strong suit , so he regularly exhorts his readers to join in.
So here we are… suffering saints and grumps… called to joy in the midst of struggle, patience with joy, endurance with joy. Perhaps the daily practice of joy will provide a minor miracle for me, a transformation of impatience and grumpiness to an active patient acceptance of whatever comes my way. Dear Lord, teach me the art of joy in small things… buzzing busy bees in the new bee hive, the sound of Junie B’s voice, the smell of new mown hay… so that I might have joy when life is difficult. And if you could help me learn patience in all things bright and beautiful as well as all things dark and ugly, I would be grateful.

Outward signs of an inner grace...

Growing up in the Deep South on a farm before the advent of sunscreen, I always had a sunburned nose (at least) during the summertime. My fair skin came with a dose of small freckles that increased in number and size with exposure to the sun and age. The sun was courted for the gift of an even tan, a sign of elegance and beauty for our generation. We slathered our bodies in a mixture of baby oil and iodine to deepen our tans as we laid out in our backyards, by pools, lakes, ponds and beaches. Coppertone was a tanning aid not a sunscreen.
Trips to the beach were rare for our family. We were baling hay or putting up food from the garden during prime beach time. When my college Baptist Student Union took a retreat to a nearby beach, I went and spent the whole day in the water. Somewhere along the way I must have felt my sunburn setting in because I remember borrowing a tee shirt to wear as we played in the waves. By the end of the weekend, I had an ugly case of sun poisoning. My skin swelled, blistered lobster red, and I was nauseous. As the red faded, sheets of my skin began to peel off much like the shell of a boiled egg. It was not a pretty sight.
Fifty years later, I am reaping what I unknowingly sowed… pre-cancerous spots and basal cell cancer. Looking at my face, I can see the faces of a long line of farmers in my family, worn and weathered with brown spots from a lifetime of exposure to the sun. All those hours spent working and playing outdoors are written on my face and dermatologists read it like a book. Even though I have been wearing hats outdoors for years with sunscreen applied, my early love affair with the sun left marks that have not faded. My latest visit with my friendly dermatologist left me with four frozen spots on my face. Ironically they blister.
A phrase I heard frequently at baptisms in my church life… an outward sign of an inner grace… comes to mind now for some strange reason. These blisters, the scar on my nose from surgery serve as outward reminders of the inner grace that has come in the gift of my body. My body has been my teacher, my guide from childhood until now. To be incarnated in a body is an unimaginable gift even though most of us are not altogether pleased with our packaging. We see ourselves as too fat, too skinny, too tall, too short, big thighs, round faces, imperfect when measured against other bodies we see around us. And as we age, the free flowing fluidity of youth gives way to hitches in our get along. We long for the good old days when most of our body worked easily and without struggle or pain.
What if I could see these aches and pains, these scars, the gradual fading of strength and beauty as outward signs of the inner grace of being? Being a child of God, mortal, finite and limited but grounded in grace leads me to the Immortal, the Infinite, the Unlimited Loving One who called my body into existence. As my body changes and ages, gifts of the Spirit become ever more necessary. “ Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control…against such there is no law.” Thanks be to God for my body, the miracle of being and the reminders of my mortality. I pray my soul will be made whole even as my body begins to gently fall apart.

Pest plants, pesky people and pesky prayer

The perfume of honeysuckle and rose slides through the air as I walk down to the stable in the early morning. It is so sweet you can taste it as you breathe. As a child, I loved to sip the nectar from the base of the honeysuckle blossom. The hills are punctuated with multiflora rose bushes and along the fence lines, rose and honeysuckle grow wrapped around each other forming an impenetrable barrier. It is sometimes difficult to celebrate the sweetness of these two plants because along with bittersweet, they are the worst pest plants on the farm. Left to their own devices, and with the help of birds, they spread rapidly and grow like kudzu, another pest plant.
Plants are not alone in being pests. People, young and old, can be obnoxious in their peskiness. Aidan, one of our grandsons, wanted us to visit his favorite gelato shop. As soon as we entered, his pesky streak swung into action. “Mama, can I have…Mama, can I have…Mama, can I have…” Remonstrances from his mother to calm down went unheard and unheeded. She yanked him up, went outside and had a “Come to Jesus Meeting’ with him. He re-entered the store a part of polite society once again.
Our young bull, Bully, is being a pest. He is breaking through fences and gates to go to our neighbor’s herd where another young bull resides. So far he has destroyed two gates, knocked down one section of a newly constructed woven wire fence, gone through barbed wire, and jumped flatfooted over a chain link fence like a deer. The young bulls pester each other, butting heads, mounting each other and bawling. Leisa and I suspect they may be in love since we saw Bully licking the other bull’s face. Gay bulls are not unheard of. Bully, however, may be bisexual since he has fathered a full complement of calves this winter. Or, it may just be the scent of one of the cows in Gary’s herd that is in heat. Who knows?
Jesus saw peskiness as a virtue sometimes. The Canaanite women was healed because she talked back to Jesus. Ask, knock, seek…pray without ceasing…make a pest of yourself until God listens. The answers to our prayers may not be what we expect or what we asked for. It may take awhile for the answers to come or we may not be able to see and hear the answers until time has passed. Prayers are always answered by change whether it is the change we asked for or a change we did not know we needed. It might be an inner transformation or an outward sign. Nature’s laws tell us that for every action there is an equal reaction. Prayer, its energy, its peskiness, circles back around and we get a Come to Jesus Meeting with God. Be careful what you pray for. You may get it.

A Mother's Prayer...

Mama wore a white rose to church Sunday to honor her mother. This old custom, a red rose for a living mother and a white rose for a mother who has died, is rarely observed except by our older generation. As a child, I remember going to the red rose bush in our front yard early on Mother’s Day Sunday to clip four red roses, one for each of us with Daddy included, to wear to worship. We pinned them to our Sunday finery and joined all the other folks in our little church honoring those who gave us birth. The pastor always honored the oldest mother, the same one every year, the mother with the most children, also the same each year, and the newest mother, that changed from year to year. We sang hymns from the section labeled “Mother’s Songs”… Memories of Mother, The Sweetest Story Ever Told, Tell Mother I’ll Be There, Faith of Our Mothers, Mother Knows, O Blessed Day of Motherhood, My Mother’s Prayer, My Mother’s Bible. Schmaltzy? Yes. Sentimental? Yes. Fun? Yes. True? Yes.
I know some who love theology scoff at these “secular cultural observances” in worship but I miss them. Our faith does not exist in a cultural vacuum. It never has. Christians have always appropriated the culture and transformed it. Our most sacred holy days correspond in many ways with holy days from earlier faith traditions and we sing Christmas carols to tunes not written for worship. Mother ‘s and Father’s Days seem to me to be a wonderful opportunity to teach and honor parents who lay down their lives for their children. Even those who have struggled with the pain of being childless or for those who have had children die, there is or was a mother. For those who suffered at the hands of their mothers, there is the possibility of redemption and resurrection.
God, our mother and father, the birth parent of us all, holds us close to his breast (how is that for a mixed metaphor?) and sets us free to find other mothers and fathers in our world. I am grateful for all the other mothers in my children’s lives. I couldn’t have done it without you. You took them to church and Sunday School, let them come over to your house to play, hosted the church youth group, were their friends on mission trips, listened to them gripe about me and never snitched, were their friends when life got messy, showed up for their weddings and keep up with them now that they are all grown up. Thanks for being the Mother Face of God for my children. And I need to thank all the women who have been my mothers over the years. You taught me how to cook for crowds, to wear beautiful hats, think for myself, pray without knowing exactly how prayer works, play the piano in church, patted me on the back and kicked me into action, challenged and supported me as I struggled to find my voice.
Mark reminded us in worship Sunday that Jesus’ first recorded words in the Bible are when he sassed his mother. She had the nerve to take him to task for staying behind at the temple instead of coming home. Mary’s anguished on my last nerve question…What were you thinking? Didn’t you know your father and I would be worried about you?...was answered with all the assurance a young boy could muster…You should have known where I was. I have begun my career as God’s Son. Makes you wonder if Mary yanked him up by the scruff of his neck to haul him home. Whatever she did, it worked because we read that he went back to Nazareth , lived with his parents and was obedient. And at the end of his life, his last task was to speak to his mother, giving her a son to take his place, his beloved disciple, John. His ministry at its beginning and its ending was bookmarked with words to his mother.
So for all my mothers out there, imperfect as we all are, I tip my Sunday hat to you and give thanks for your persistent love, the persons of Mother God in my world. I think I will wear a red rose this Sunday to worship in your honor and hold your names in my heart as I pray.