Several years during Christmas holidays, my parents set up a card table and chairs in their den, and all our gathered family members worked a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle. That is, we worked toward completing the puzzle.
I can still picture my maternal granddaddy hunched over that table, puzzle piece in hand, searching, trying, and searching some more. The TV might blare, the conversation sparkle – or the room stand otherwise empty and silent – but Granddaddy had a mission: place the next piece.
The rest of us contributed, too. Working together or individually, pondering for hours or pausing at the table to say, “That piece goes there,” we inched toward the goal.
Rarely did we complete the puzzle during the holidays. At the allotted times, we returned to our respective homes, leaving Mama and Daddy to mull the mystery into the early days of the new year. Later, popping in for a visit, we’d find the last piece fitted into place.
One thing enabled our family to finish each puzzle in anything short of a lifetime: the box with picture on it. Studying that picture and comparing it to the confusing pile of miscellany in front of us, we eventually conquered the chaos.
Short of completing the puzzle, the most satisfying moments happened when a large section came together almost at once. One piece opened the way to place a whole series of pieces, and a key element of the previously hidden picture became clear. Whether a hedgerow or patch of sky, person or animal, structure or flower, random shapes with capricious colors suddenly fell together into a recognizable pattern. What we could not previously distinguish now made sense.
We haven’t worked a family jigsaw in years, but I’ve recently sensed that a section of puzzle pieces is falling into place – not only in my life, but also in the world. I could be wrong here, so I’m scrambling to check what’s before me with the picture on the box.
Some scoff at the notion of a “picture.” Life is a jumble of pieces, they say, but these pieces form no pattern. Chance created them. Force the puzzling together any way you choose, they urge, because your puzzle means only what you read into it. For sure, don’t expect your puzzle to fit into any sort of larger one.
Others take a different tack. Quite certain they know where each piece fits, they boldly forecast what will go where, and scoff at anyone still puzzling over the puzzle.
Isaiah 46:9-10 quotes one who proclaims himself the ultimate expert here: “I am God, and there is none like me. I make known the end from the beginning …. I say: My purpose will stand.”
Aha. This God insists that He prepared all the puzzle pieces so they will fit together to accomplish what he intends. The same God claims to “make known the end from the beginning.”
Yet, paradoxically, Isaiah 48:6-7 reports this God as saying to his people, “From now on I will tell you of new things, of hidden things unknown to you. . . you have not heard of them before today. So you cannot say, 'Yes, I knew of them.'”
Understanding what the world is coming to and where my life fits into it requires that I neither dismiss the box – er, Bible – nor arrogantly assume I can see it all clearly. Knowing that God reveals what he will, when and to whom he chooses, I study the picture, ponder the bewildering and listen when he whispers, “That piece goes there.”
© 2002, 2007 Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Thursday, January 17, 2008
Present
Long ago in the land of School, the teacher called roll. As the names sounded, students answered, “Present!” or, “Here.”
Silence meant, “Absent.”
This fall, our daughter Amanda spent four months absent from Oklahoma, studying abroad in Egypt. We loved hearing by e-mail and computer phone about her adventures. We enjoyed perusing her web pictures of fascinating people and places. But we missed having her present.
How we looked forward to Thursday, December 13! That day, Amanda would depart Egypt at 5:15 a.m. Cairo time, fly to Frankfurt, New York City, Dallas and arrive in Oklahoma City at 11:10 p.m.
Wednesday, December 12, at 9:20 p.m., OKC time (eight hours behind Cairo), my husband and I went online to see if our daughter’s plane had taken off. It had not. Boarding an hour late, then sitting on the tarmac for two-and-a-half hours, the flight left Cairo four hours late and arrived in Frankfurt well after the connecting flight to New York had departed.
About 6 a.m., OKC time, Amanda called, using a borrowed cell phone, to tell me that she and 19 of her fellow students had been rebooked together on a different flight, different airline. They would fly to Amsterdam, then to New York, where they would spend the night of December 13.
Immediately after talking with her, I received an automated call from the airline on which her New York to Dallas to Oklahoma City flights were booked. Due to bad weather in New York, those flights (which she would not have made) had been cancelled. The airline had rescheduled her to fly through Chicago to Oklahoma City the next day, Friday, December 14.
My husband and I spent that Thursday tracking our absent daughter from Frankfurt to Amsterdam to New York. In spite of the winter storm in the Northeast, her overseas flight landed safely. Shortly afterward, Amanda called on another borrowed phone to tell us she had gone through customs, minus one suitcase, last seen in Amsterdam.
After spending a short night in a New York hotel, the 20 students returned to JFK airport to set out once again for their respective homes across the US. Amanda and two fellow students boarded a flight to Chicago, arriving there on time.
Ah, but thick fog now blanketed central Oklahoma. With her OKC flight cancelled, Amanda had to decide whether to reschedule on a later flight through Dallas or St. Louis. Not knowing those flights would also be cancelled, Amanda chose a direct flight to Oklahoma City the next morning, Saturday, December 15.
A school friend, Brittany, who had arrived in Chicago on the same flight, had told Amanda, “You’re welcome to stay at my house if you can’t get home tonight.” Amanda called Brittany, to find that she and her mom and sister had just reached their house, about an hour-and-a-half from the airport. The family drove back to the airport, retrieved Amanda and took her in for the night.
December 15, back at the Chicago airport with bad weather moving in, Amanda once again waited aboard an airplane supposed to leave at 9:40 a.m. First overweight, then without pilot (who was flying in on another delayed flight), the plane sat.
At 11:40 the online flight status report showed – liftoff! At 1:40 p.m., we stood in the Oklahoma City airport, hugging our daughter.
God says in Psalm 91:15, “When they call on me, I will answer.” Throughout Amanda’s 70-hour trip, we called out his name. We might have construed each delay as silence, absence. Yet with every provision, every connection, God shouted, “Present!”
© 2007, Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.
Silence meant, “Absent.”
This fall, our daughter Amanda spent four months absent from Oklahoma, studying abroad in Egypt. We loved hearing by e-mail and computer phone about her adventures. We enjoyed perusing her web pictures of fascinating people and places. But we missed having her present.
How we looked forward to Thursday, December 13! That day, Amanda would depart Egypt at 5:15 a.m. Cairo time, fly to Frankfurt, New York City, Dallas and arrive in Oklahoma City at 11:10 p.m.
Wednesday, December 12, at 9:20 p.m., OKC time (eight hours behind Cairo), my husband and I went online to see if our daughter’s plane had taken off. It had not. Boarding an hour late, then sitting on the tarmac for two-and-a-half hours, the flight left Cairo four hours late and arrived in Frankfurt well after the connecting flight to New York had departed.
About 6 a.m., OKC time, Amanda called, using a borrowed cell phone, to tell me that she and 19 of her fellow students had been rebooked together on a different flight, different airline. They would fly to Amsterdam, then to New York, where they would spend the night of December 13.
Immediately after talking with her, I received an automated call from the airline on which her New York to Dallas to Oklahoma City flights were booked. Due to bad weather in New York, those flights (which she would not have made) had been cancelled. The airline had rescheduled her to fly through Chicago to Oklahoma City the next day, Friday, December 14.
My husband and I spent that Thursday tracking our absent daughter from Frankfurt to Amsterdam to New York. In spite of the winter storm in the Northeast, her overseas flight landed safely. Shortly afterward, Amanda called on another borrowed phone to tell us she had gone through customs, minus one suitcase, last seen in Amsterdam.
After spending a short night in a New York hotel, the 20 students returned to JFK airport to set out once again for their respective homes across the US. Amanda and two fellow students boarded a flight to Chicago, arriving there on time.
Ah, but thick fog now blanketed central Oklahoma. With her OKC flight cancelled, Amanda had to decide whether to reschedule on a later flight through Dallas or St. Louis. Not knowing those flights would also be cancelled, Amanda chose a direct flight to Oklahoma City the next morning, Saturday, December 15.
A school friend, Brittany, who had arrived in Chicago on the same flight, had told Amanda, “You’re welcome to stay at my house if you can’t get home tonight.” Amanda called Brittany, to find that she and her mom and sister had just reached their house, about an hour-and-a-half from the airport. The family drove back to the airport, retrieved Amanda and took her in for the night.
December 15, back at the Chicago airport with bad weather moving in, Amanda once again waited aboard an airplane supposed to leave at 9:40 a.m. First overweight, then without pilot (who was flying in on another delayed flight), the plane sat.
At 11:40 the online flight status report showed – liftoff! At 1:40 p.m., we stood in the Oklahoma City airport, hugging our daughter.
God says in Psalm 91:15, “When they call on me, I will answer.” Throughout Amanda’s 70-hour trip, we called out his name. We might have construed each delay as silence, absence. Yet with every provision, every connection, God shouted, “Present!”
© 2007, Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
Into the storm
I survived the ice storm of 2007. More correctly, with power now restored in our house but not in half a million other homes and businesses across Oklahoma and with more frozen precipitation predicted this weekend, I’m still surviving it.
To date, I’ve weathered three ice storms, including the 2002 storm in Oklahoma and the 1994 storm in Mississippi.
My husband missed all three. That indicates a phenomenal sense of timing on one of our parts. Maybe mine. I flew into the most recent storm.
Saturday night, December 8, I sat in the DFW airport, waiting for my connecting flight to Oklahoma City. The appointed time for boarding came and went, with no airplane in sight. When the incoming plane did arrive, we continued waiting while a maintenance crew resolved a “minor issue.”
Thus, we found ourselves lifting off from Dallas one hour after the scheduled departure time. Not a huge delay – but with huge implications.
Just as we reached cruising altitude in the 31-minute flight, the pilot came on the intercom, saying, “The weather in Oklahoma City is 36 degrees and foggy. Conditions continue to deteriorate.” Almost immediately, we would start our descent through clouds, using the latest radar equipment to guide us to the runway. The pilot continued, “We do have to make visual contact with the runway to land. So if we get down there and still cannot see, we’ll go back up and return to Dallas.”
Everyone groaned. Maybe we should have applauded.
Staying a few days in Dallas would have meant missing the freezing rain that fell Sunday and Monday across most of Oklahoma. We would not have experienced downed power lines, splintered trees, icy sidewalks, treacherous roads.
We would not have had to seek ways to stay warm and fed in cold, dark houses, where accomplishing everything from washing clothes to checking the weather forecast to brewing coffee depended on electricity we didn’t have. We wouldn’t have faced choices that could quickly become life-or-death ones resulting, say, in a fall, an accident, a house fire, or carbon monoxide poisoning.
I could have spent those days visiting a good friend in the Dallas area, watching coverage of the ice storm on TV.
The large jet began its descent into Oklahoma City. Sitting in a window seat, I stared out into darkness. The city remained lit – hundreds of thousands soon to be powerless still enjoyed electricity – but we saw no hint of a metropolis below.
I’ve flown numerous times with my pilot husband in instrument conditions. I know how it feels to fly blind through the clouds. I also know about what point in the descent you should break out below the clouds, seeing city lights sprawling in every direction and runway lights directly ahead.
We passed that point and continued to descend toward the invisible city. Straining to glimpse anything beyond the swirling clouds, I prayed, but did not beg God to get us down. Rather, I agreed he would accomplish whatever he intended.
Job 37:1 says, “The storm makes my heart beat wildly.” Yes indeed. But notice Job 38:1: “Then out of the storm the LORD spoke to Job.” Note Job 40:6: “Then out of the storm the LORD spoke to Job once again.” What God spoke from the storm radically changed Job’s perspective and his life.
Roughly two seconds after city lights appeared – not below me, but even with the airplane window – our wheels touched the runway. Everyone applauded. Maybe we should have groaned.
Sometimes, God takes us into a storm. Ah but then, he will speak to us out of it.
© 2007, Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.
To date, I’ve weathered three ice storms, including the 2002 storm in Oklahoma and the 1994 storm in Mississippi.
My husband missed all three. That indicates a phenomenal sense of timing on one of our parts. Maybe mine. I flew into the most recent storm.
Saturday night, December 8, I sat in the DFW airport, waiting for my connecting flight to Oklahoma City. The appointed time for boarding came and went, with no airplane in sight. When the incoming plane did arrive, we continued waiting while a maintenance crew resolved a “minor issue.”
Thus, we found ourselves lifting off from Dallas one hour after the scheduled departure time. Not a huge delay – but with huge implications.
Just as we reached cruising altitude in the 31-minute flight, the pilot came on the intercom, saying, “The weather in Oklahoma City is 36 degrees and foggy. Conditions continue to deteriorate.” Almost immediately, we would start our descent through clouds, using the latest radar equipment to guide us to the runway. The pilot continued, “We do have to make visual contact with the runway to land. So if we get down there and still cannot see, we’ll go back up and return to Dallas.”
Everyone groaned. Maybe we should have applauded.
Staying a few days in Dallas would have meant missing the freezing rain that fell Sunday and Monday across most of Oklahoma. We would not have experienced downed power lines, splintered trees, icy sidewalks, treacherous roads.
We would not have had to seek ways to stay warm and fed in cold, dark houses, where accomplishing everything from washing clothes to checking the weather forecast to brewing coffee depended on electricity we didn’t have. We wouldn’t have faced choices that could quickly become life-or-death ones resulting, say, in a fall, an accident, a house fire, or carbon monoxide poisoning.
I could have spent those days visiting a good friend in the Dallas area, watching coverage of the ice storm on TV.
The large jet began its descent into Oklahoma City. Sitting in a window seat, I stared out into darkness. The city remained lit – hundreds of thousands soon to be powerless still enjoyed electricity – but we saw no hint of a metropolis below.
I’ve flown numerous times with my pilot husband in instrument conditions. I know how it feels to fly blind through the clouds. I also know about what point in the descent you should break out below the clouds, seeing city lights sprawling in every direction and runway lights directly ahead.
We passed that point and continued to descend toward the invisible city. Straining to glimpse anything beyond the swirling clouds, I prayed, but did not beg God to get us down. Rather, I agreed he would accomplish whatever he intended.
Job 37:1 says, “The storm makes my heart beat wildly.” Yes indeed. But notice Job 38:1: “Then out of the storm the LORD spoke to Job.” Note Job 40:6: “Then out of the storm the LORD spoke to Job once again.” What God spoke from the storm radically changed Job’s perspective and his life.
Roughly two seconds after city lights appeared – not below me, but even with the airplane window – our wheels touched the runway. Everyone applauded. Maybe we should have groaned.
Sometimes, God takes us into a storm. Ah but then, he will speak to us out of it.
© 2007, Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
Going in circles
Circles.
We wear them every time we slip on a ring or bracelet. We ride them every time we get into or onto something with wheels.
Circles.
Children play inside one whenever they swing in a tire or jump into a pool clutching an inflated plastic ring.
Sometimes, we philosophize about circles. (Italics in quotations below are mine.)
“Conversation is a game of circles,” wrote essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson.
“Little-minded people’s thoughts move in such small circles that five minutes’ conversation gives you an arc long enough to determine their whole curve,” said another U.S. writer, Oliver Wendell Holmes.
“In universities and intellectual circles, academics can guarantee themselves popularity – or, which is just as satisfying, unpopularity – by being opinionated rather than by being learned,” said British author, A.N. Wilson.
“Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hall-mark of true science,” said another Brit, Aldous Huxley.
In 1623, Galileo Galilei, the Italian physicist, mathematician and astronomer sometimes called the “Father of Modern Science,” said, “Philosophy is written in this grand book – I mean the universe – which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures . . .”
Thirteen years earlier, peering through the telescope he created, Galileo had discovered four moons circling Jupiter. “This observation upset the notion that all celestial bodies must revolve around the Earth,” says Wikipedia.
Ah, yes, when the Pilgrims landed in Plymouth, most people still believed what Aristotle had taught more than 1200 years earlier. They insisted: Everything in the universe circles the earth. Galileo decided: Everything in the universe circles the sun. Little did Galileo know how much universe lay beyond the solar system. Little did he know how much trouble circles could cause him.
His teaching that planets and their moons make circles, but not around the earth, so upset church leaders they called Galileo a heretic, declaring his notions “contrary to the true sense and authority of Holy Scripture.” Actually, Galileo’s teachings contradicted those of a Greek philosopher whose profound influence on Christian thought continues to this day. The highly opinionated leaders of the Inquisition forced Galileo to recant his teaching. He spent his last years under house arrest.
Circles.
We don’t know when we’re going in them until we find ourselves back at an all-too-familiar place. Long ago (but not as long ago as Galileo lived), my parents, siblings and I took a vacation trip to Texas. Trying to leave Houston, we traveled many miles, only to find ourselves repeatedly passing the same landmark.
What if we hadn’t broken out of that circle? What if, decades later, we still traveled the same circuitous route? You’d think that ridiculous? I’d think it hellish. Yet, how recently have I found myself at an all-too-familiar place I first passed decades ago? How often have little-minded thoughts kept succeeding generations going in circles for centuries – even generations adamantly affirming Scripture?
Three hundred years before Aristotle lived, a man named Paul wrote what did become Holy Scripture: “For the power of the life-giving Spirit – and this power is mine through Christ Jesus – has freed me from the vicious circle of sin and death.”
Yes! Desperate to escape hellish circles, to leave behind “specialized meaninglessness,” I cry to experience more of what I too possess – the power of the life-giving Spirit.
© 2007, Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.
We wear them every time we slip on a ring or bracelet. We ride them every time we get into or onto something with wheels.
Circles.
Children play inside one whenever they swing in a tire or jump into a pool clutching an inflated plastic ring.
Sometimes, we philosophize about circles. (Italics in quotations below are mine.)
“Conversation is a game of circles,” wrote essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson.
“Little-minded people’s thoughts move in such small circles that five minutes’ conversation gives you an arc long enough to determine their whole curve,” said another U.S. writer, Oliver Wendell Holmes.
“In universities and intellectual circles, academics can guarantee themselves popularity – or, which is just as satisfying, unpopularity – by being opinionated rather than by being learned,” said British author, A.N. Wilson.
“Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hall-mark of true science,” said another Brit, Aldous Huxley.
In 1623, Galileo Galilei, the Italian physicist, mathematician and astronomer sometimes called the “Father of Modern Science,” said, “Philosophy is written in this grand book – I mean the universe – which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures . . .”
Thirteen years earlier, peering through the telescope he created, Galileo had discovered four moons circling Jupiter. “This observation upset the notion that all celestial bodies must revolve around the Earth,” says Wikipedia.
Ah, yes, when the Pilgrims landed in Plymouth, most people still believed what Aristotle had taught more than 1200 years earlier. They insisted: Everything in the universe circles the earth. Galileo decided: Everything in the universe circles the sun. Little did Galileo know how much universe lay beyond the solar system. Little did he know how much trouble circles could cause him.
His teaching that planets and their moons make circles, but not around the earth, so upset church leaders they called Galileo a heretic, declaring his notions “contrary to the true sense and authority of Holy Scripture.” Actually, Galileo’s teachings contradicted those of a Greek philosopher whose profound influence on Christian thought continues to this day. The highly opinionated leaders of the Inquisition forced Galileo to recant his teaching. He spent his last years under house arrest.
Circles.
We don’t know when we’re going in them until we find ourselves back at an all-too-familiar place. Long ago (but not as long ago as Galileo lived), my parents, siblings and I took a vacation trip to Texas. Trying to leave Houston, we traveled many miles, only to find ourselves repeatedly passing the same landmark.
What if we hadn’t broken out of that circle? What if, decades later, we still traveled the same circuitous route? You’d think that ridiculous? I’d think it hellish. Yet, how recently have I found myself at an all-too-familiar place I first passed decades ago? How often have little-minded thoughts kept succeeding generations going in circles for centuries – even generations adamantly affirming Scripture?
Three hundred years before Aristotle lived, a man named Paul wrote what did become Holy Scripture: “For the power of the life-giving Spirit – and this power is mine through Christ Jesus – has freed me from the vicious circle of sin and death.”
Yes! Desperate to escape hellish circles, to leave behind “specialized meaninglessness,” I cry to experience more of what I too possess – the power of the life-giving Spirit.
© 2007, Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.
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